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Depleted Uranium And The American War

By Jay Janson

24 March, 2011
Countercurrents.org

No public interest in grotesquely malformed Vietnamese babies born generations after US planes sprayed Agent Orange. Equal disinterest in the increase in cancer and babies born horribly deformed as if from an alien planet where US soldiers have massively used radioactive depleted uranium-tipped bombs, bullets, shells and missiles. Only thing important is that CNN has again "proven' a new war "good'. As in Iraq, Vietnam et al.

The American public never show much interest in Vietnamese grotesquely malformed babies born generations after U.S. helicopters sprayed 2378-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, a extremely toxic dioxin compound, all over Vietnam's forests for years as a defoliant.

Even less interest it seems do Americans have in the increase in cancer and babies born horribly deformed as if from an alien planet wherever their brave soldiers have used radioactive depleted uranium-tipped bombs, bullets, shells and missiles.

"Young women in Fallujah in Iraq are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukaemias. These deformities are now well documented, for example in television documentaries on SKY UK on September 1 2009, and on SKY UK June 2008. Our direct contact with doctors in Fallujah report that:

In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 new born babies, 24% of whom were dead within the first seven days, a staggering 75% of the dead babies were classified as deformed.

This can be compared with data from the month of August in 2002 where there were 530 new born babies of whom six were dead within the first seven days and only one birth defect was reported." H.E. Dr. Ali Abdussalam Treki, President of the Sixty-fourth Session of the United Nations General Assembly

There have been increases in the incidence of cancers and birth defects in all countries dosed with American radioactive depleted uranium.

But Americans seem not worried about in this massive amount of radioactive depleted uranium its fine armed forces have put into the air and ground in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Bosnia, Kosovo, North Pakistan, and now an eighth Muslin nation, Libya - actually the tenth Muslin nation, if we count depleted American radioactive depleted uranium-tipped munitions Israelis have fired into Lebanon and Gaza.

Just "during a three week period of conflict in 2003 in Iraq, 1,000 to 2,000 tonnes of DU munitions were used." Gulf troops face tests for cancer, guardian.co.uk 4/25/03

DU (depleted uranium) is a radioactive waste product obtained from producing fuel for nuclear reactors and atomic bombs. Even technical reports issued by the American Army indicate that if depleted uranium enters the body, it has the potentiality of causing serious medical consequences. "The associated risk being both chemical and radiological".

Deposited in the lungs or kidneys, uranium 238 and products from its decay (thorium 234, protactinium and other uranium isotopes) give off alpha and beta radiations which cause cell death and genetic mutations causing cancer in exposed individuals and genetic abnormalities in their descendants over the years.
Study finds "transmission of genetic damage to offspring upon preconceptional paternal exposure to depleted uranium."
Role of the olfactory receptor neurons in the direct transport of inhaled uranium to the rat brain
[Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire, Laboratoire de Radiotoxicologie Expérimentale, France]

Normal functioning of the kidney, brain, liver, heart, and numerous other systems can be affected by uranium exposure, because uranium is a toxic metal. It is weakly radioactive and remains so because of its long physical half-life (4.468 billion years for uranium-238). The biological half-life (the average time it takes for the human body to eliminate half the amount in the body) for uranium is about 15 days. The aerosol produced during impact and combustion of depleted uranium munitions can potentially contaminate wide areas around the impact sites leading to possible inhalation by human beings. ["Depleted and natural uranium: chemistry and toxicological effects". Journal of Toxicology and Environmental HealthInstitute of Nuclear Technology-Radiation Protection, Greece]

But, I mean, who wants to look at or think about future grotesque deformed babies with internal organs malfunctioning? CNN, Human Rights Watch of Fifth Ave, NYC and the U.S. government says that old enemy Gadhafi attacked first. That should be enough to know.

It was enough to know that Iraq had WMDs.

It was enough to know Vietnamese fighting the French were communists.

It is enough to know that Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan when his Saudi Arabians flew our planes into the World Trade Center buildings.

If was enough to know Dominicans were about to restore to office a president who wouldn't denounce Castro.

It was enough to know a renegade CIA drug runner we had to arrest was in Panama.

It was enough that the Koreans we divided away attacked our part of Korea first. (After sixty years, and no more generals dictating in S. Korea, our ally published documentation of its massacres in S. Korea of more than 100,000 men, women and children "communist sympathizers' years before the Korean Army of the North invaded the and quickly unified Korea. [South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission]

It was enough to believe the lies by the networks and NY Times that backed all these war.

Never much from the Central Intelligence Agency, CNN or the NY Times on the consequences of these wars for the locals, so don't expect to hear much about the effects of depleted uranium on the Libyans now and in the years to come.

"War is war,' and "we were right to fight' will always be claimed by those who supported war (the most profitable of investments.)

postscript

After the Gulf War, Iraqi and international epidemiological investigations have enabled the environmental pollution due to using this kind of weapon to be associated with the appearance of new, very difficult to diagnose diseases (serious immunodeficiencies, for instance) and the spectacular increase in congenital malformations and cancer, both in the Iraqi population and amongst several thousands of American and British veterans and in their children, a clinical condition known as Gulf War Syndrome. Similar symptoms to those of the Gulf War have been described amongst a thousand children residing in areas of the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia) where American aviation also used radioactive depleted uranium bombs in 1996, the same as in the NATO intervention against the Yugoslavia in 1999. Wings of Death + second event theory by Chris Busby

Yours truly has Albanian friends from Kosovo whose home towns have seen a dramatic rise in cancers, an strange ugly never before seen birth defects in children born within a few years after the bombings. Knowing all this makes living in America less carefree.

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England, India and the US, and now resides in New York City.

 


 




 


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