Dick Cheney's Time-Release Poison
By Irving Wesley Hall
09 March, 2006
Countercurrents.orgDid you read the story about 1st Lt. William “Eddie” Rebrook IV whose arm was shattered and artery severed by a roadside bomb in Iraq? The Army discharged him because of his injuries. But the Pentagon refused to allow him to go home until he paid $700 for his blood-soaked body armor discarded on the battlefield by the evacuating medics.
The Charleston Gazette quoted his mother as saying, “It’s outrageous, ridiculous and unconscionable. I wanted to stand on a street corner and yell through a megaphone about this.”
That's how I feel after researching this series about Dick Cheney, deadly depleted uranium, and its effects on our troops. In 1991, then Secretary of Defense Cheney authorized the first massive use of depleted uranium munitions by our forces. As a consequence the lives of almost 2/3rds of the men and women who served in the Gulf War have been destroyed. Their families have been ripped apart, and their children are being born with tragic deformities. Does the same fate await most of the one million troops who served in Afghanistan and Iraq? Read on and judge for yourself.
This series was inspired by National Guard Major Matt Tully, a local attorney, whom I've never met but deeply respect. On 9/11, he was working as a brokerage firm paralegal in the World Trade Center and was almost killed. He changed into uniform and served for three days as the No. 2 National Guardsman providing security for the crash site. He subsequently returned to law school and set up practice in our area of central New York.
Despite the post 9/11 anti-Arab hysteria, Tully defended Joe Mansour, a Lebanese American working in a federal prison. Mansour began receiving derogatory e-mails and death threats after 9/11. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee awarded Matt Tully its 2005 Pro-Bono Attorney of the Year. Tully also spoke out against the looming war in Iraq that the Bush Administration was hyping on a false connection between 9/11 and the government of Iraq.
Matt Tully is an active member of the American Bar Association, Fraternal Order of Police, Knights of Columbus, National Rifle Association, Reserve Officers Association, American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Given Tully's 9/11 experience, pro bono work, and earlier opposition to the war, I was troubled to read last year that Tully had been called to duty in Iraq. Tully was quoted as saying, "I was very vocal in my opposition to the war in Iraq," and adding that he believed President Bush's policy of pre-emptive strikes to be un-American and that the United States should not invade another country unless it commits an act of war upon America.
Unlike the young draftees of the Vietnam War era, 40% of those serving in Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's war are National Guard, and Army Reserves. They’re our neighbors. They leave behind families, mortgage payments, and vital jobs serving our community.
As a former professor of political science I completely agreed with Tully on the illegality of a war of aggression against a country that posed no threat to the United States. I cannot imagine a lawyer and member of the American Bar Association taking any other position. After all, American jurists played a key role in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals that began in October 1945. The German defendants were charged not only with the systematic murder of millions of people, but also with planning and carrying out the war in Europe. The court sentenced twelve Nazi officials to be hanged, three to life in prison, and four to serve prison sentences of 10-20 years.The Nuremberg Tribunal prompted subsequent expansion of international law that condemns the waging of aggressive war as the "supreme" war crime that inevitably leads to crimes such as the slaughter of civilians and mistreatment and torture of prisoners.
Mr. Tully's opposition to the war also struck a personal chord. I was a draft counselor during the Vietnam War. Like Mr. Tully's legal position against the Iraq War, my opposition to the Vietnam War was not only moral. It was political. As a high school teacher at the time, I had studied the disastrous Japanese and later French colonial wars against the Vietnamese.
I knew that the American war against a popular guerrilla resistance was not winnable. It would turn out to be a meat grinder for America's youth and all Vietnamese. And it would waste billions of dollars needed at home for education, health care, and eradicating poverty.
For years after the war ended, men would approach me on the street to thank me for saving their lives, and, equally important, for empowering them to refuse to serve in a war of aggression against a people who posed to no threat to the United States.
I agonized over Major Tully's particular dilemma when his National Guard division was called. Unlike the individual civilians I counseled in the 1960s, Tully was a commissioned officer with loyalty to his unit, the famous Rainbow Division of the New York State National Guard.
The heroic life of a man I didn't know prompted me to set aside a few days a week from the comic novel, We're Not In Kansas Anymore! I've almost finished about Pat Robertson-type Christianity. I wanted to learn about the men and women of the Rainbow Division stationed in Forward Operating Base Camp Danger in Saddam Hussein's former palace in Tikrit on the desert banks of the Tigris River.I was in the middle of drafting my first piece on the Rainbow Division when I watched George W. Bush's October 13, 2005 choreographed teleconference on the eve of Iraq's constitutional referendum. The Camp Danger base commander had ordered ten of his soldiers to feed the president and the American citizens a fairy tale scripted by chickenhawk Republican operatives in Washington.
I knew that the words the troops had been ordered to mouth on camera were misleading, false, and designed to present a rosy picture of the rapidly deteriorating military and political situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
As an informed citizen I was outraged. So I changed the focus of my piece to contrast the fictional script concocted by Bush's stateside propagandists with the facts on the ground, including quotations on the growing resistance to the occupation by the base commander Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Taluto.
The Rainbow Division Guardsmen have now served the first of three possible six-month tours of duty. Most, including Matt Tully, have arrived home safely. When the local paper reported his return last month, I was in for a second shock. On his way home, Tully had been co-opted into a meeting with Vice-President Dick Cheney.
I had been researching Gulf War Illness for a decade so I knew about Cheney's responsibility for the greatest tragedy to strike the United States military since the Civil War. I knew that depleted uranium contamination was the wild card in every returning vet's deck, one that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Pentagon don’t want them or us to know about.
Dick Cheney and Matt Tully!
Here was the man who helped destroy one generation of American citizen soldiers enlisting a local hero to help take down the next!
Depleted uranium is deadly. 697,00 men and women served in the 1991 Operation Desert Storm. The Gulf War on the ground lasted only 100 hours. Few troops spent more than three months near the battle zone during and after the war.Nevertheless 518,000 Gulf War era vets are now receiving medical disability according government figures. That's more than 70% of all Army, Navy and Air Force veterans, even though not all the disabled served in the Middle East. For purposes of comparison, many more years after the wars in which they served, the disabled from World War II total 8.6%; 5% from the Korean War, and 9.6% from the Vietnam War.
More than 320 tons of depleted uranium munitions were used in the Gulf War. Ten times that tonnage has so far been used in Afghanistan and Iraq. Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Some of the radioactive particles are as small as bacteria. They cannot be filtered so they permeate the air, water, soil, vegetation, and animal life. Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are inhaling and ingesting them every day. They accumulate throughout the body like time-release poison, so the symptoms often develop years later.
The substance is so deadly that, before the war, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Erik K. Shenseki ordered the posting of elaborate regulations for handling contaminated clothing, munitions, and equipment. But how many active duty soldiers or vets reading this have even heard of those regulations?
320 tons in a 100-day war in 1991 produced almost a 2/3rds casualty rate. Since 2003, more than 3000 tons have been used in this current war without end. The typical tour of duty in the present conflict is six months. Many regular, National Guard and Reserve troops are serving second and third tours.
What percentage of the million troops who've served will eventually be stricken? You do the math. Iraq War vets are already getting sick, dying, and producing children with horrible birth deformities.
The Iraq War is Cheney's war. He was the point man fabricating the string of lies that persuaded Congress and the American people to support the unprovoked war on Iraq. Even though he knew all his "intelligence" was phony, he created and perpetuated the lie that linked Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attack in order to manipulate our patriotism and mislead our troops.
Cheney is also the driving force behind an unprovoked nuclear attack against Iran that, according to all intelligence estimates, is years away from developing a nuclear weapon and is abiding by international law. We now face the frightening prospect of a nuclear attack on Iran that will send a radioactive cloud over the Middle East.
This will doubly contaminate the 136,000 American serving in the area as well as those who will have to be deployed when all hell breaks loose after the attack on a third Muslim country.
Depleted uranium contaminates the air, soil, and water so that the men and women of the Rainbow Division took radioactive showers during their six months in Camp Forward Danger, but never knew it. D.U. attacks the body and the symptoms are diverse. There is no treatment and no cure. However, there are practical tips that troops can take in the field to avoid some of the exposure, and there are some do's and don't's to lessen contaminating their homes when they return.
This is an abridged version of the first in a comprehensive series on depleted uranium to appear on the website "We're Not in Kansas Anymore." www.notinkansas.us.
Copyright 2006 Irving Wesley Hall.
