For Indymedia readers, friends and comrades in struggle worldwide against war, militarism, colonialism and nuclear industry:
Depleted-Uranium global radioactive holocaust: Review for action NOW
A brief review about “Depleted” Uranium and radioactive genocide-ecocide
1. Global Nuclear Cover Up -PART 3 - Leuren Moret
Video-presentation of the “Global Nuclear Cover” series by Leuren Moret, international radiation specialist, U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, She is environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley, California.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7mcne8SIOg&feature=related 2. Leuren Moret Speaking on Depleted Uranium: Nuclear Holocaust and The Politics of Radiation
Sponsored by the Women's Solidarity Movement held at the Spangenberg Theatre, Gunn High School, Los Altos, California.
This event featured three speakers: Doug Rokke, a Vietnam and Gulf War I Veteran and the Army's expert on depleted uranium; Leuren Moret, a whistle-blower from Livermore National Laboratory, expert lecturer on the health effects of depleted uranium; and Veteran Staff Sergeant Dennis Kyne who served as an Army medic during Gulf War I. Because they speak out about depleted uranium (DU), all three of these people are constantly harassed by the US government and its agents. Both Rokke and Kyne are in extremely serious medical condition because of their exposure to depleted uranium and other toxicants that the military tells our valiant warriors are safe. Recorded and transcribed by Paul Goettlich.
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/DU-Leuren-Moret21apr03.htm 3. From Hiroshima to Iraq, 61 years of uranium wars: A suicidal, genocidal, omnicidal course
This major paper by world renowned geoscientist Leuren Moret, based on the premise that uranium, such as depleted uranium weaponry, is used today for the purpose of depopulation, was published in parts in the printed Bay View from Dec. 27, 2006, through Feb. 14, 2007, and in full here at www.sfbayview.com. Once again, Moret has graciously allowed Bay View readers to be among the first to read her groundbreaking work. She can be reached at
leurenmoret@yahoo.com.
http://www.sfbayview.com/20061226198/News/Front_Page/From_Hiroshima_to_Iraq_61_years_of_uranium_wars_A_suicidal_genocidal_omnicidal_course.html 4. Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War
LEUREN MORET / World Affairs – The Journal of International Issues 1 jul 04
The use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States, defying all international treaties, will slowly annihilate all species on earth including the human species, and yet this country continues to do so with full knowledge of its destructive potential.
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm 5. Depleted Uranium is WMD by Leuren Moret
Published on Tuesday, August 9, 2005 by the Battle Creek Enquirer (Michigan)
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0809-33.htm 6. Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets
by Leuren Moret
“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” - Henry Kissinger, quoted in “Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW’s in Vietnam”
Vietnam was a chemical war for oil, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four nuclear wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia have been permanently contaminated with radiation.
And what about our soldiers? Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported this week to the American Free Press that “Gulf-era veterans” now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.
Read more:
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=9993 7. World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg
http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers.htm 8. General information about Nuclear Radiation and its Biological Effects:
By Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D., G.N.S.H
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/NRBE/index.html Some publications by Dr. Rosalie Bertell:
Occupational Hazards of War. Depleted uranium: All the questions about DU and Gulf War syndrome are not yet answered. International Journal of Health Services, Volume 36, Number 3, Pages 503–520. Baywood Publishing Co., Inc., 2006. Download (pdf)
Globalization: Incorporating Environmental and Human Rights. Presented at the Barcelona Forum. Towards a world without violence. 26 June 2004. Download (pdf)
Health & environmental costs of militarism. Presented at the Barcelona Forum. Towards a world without violence. 24 June 2004. Download (pdf)
Planet earth - The latest weapon of war. Women's Press, London 2000.
9. Depleted Uranium -- a Way Out? by Felicity Arbuthnot
Center for Research on Globalization, november 19, 2007
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7371 10. Radioactive Ammunition Fired in Middle East May Claim More Lives Than Hiroshima and Nagasaki
by Sherwood Ross
Global Research, November 22, 2007
opednews.com
By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.
So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, "The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed."
"More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991," Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine.
Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of California.
Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, "The long- term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq is a toxic wasteland. Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and leukemia. In Iraq, the birth rate of mutations is totally out of control."
Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, "For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed."
She adds, "the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive."
Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: "Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned- out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground."
"Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults," Caldicott wrote. "My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities," she wrote in her book, "Nuclear Power is not the Answer"(The New Press).
Caldicott goes on to say the two Gulf wars "have been nuclear wars because they have scattered nuclear material across the land, and people---particularly children--- are condemned to die of malignancy and congenital disease essentially for eternity."
Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the radioactive elements in the shells fired, "the food, the air, and the water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated," Caldicott explained.
Uranium is a heavy metal that enters the body via inhalation into the lung or via ingestion into the GI tract. It is excreted by the kidney, where, if the dose is high enough, it can induce renal failure or kidney cancer. It also lodges in the bones where it causes bone cancer and leukemia, and it is excreted in the semen, where it mutates genes in the sperm, leading to birth deformities.
Nuclear contamination is spreading around the world, Caldicott adds, with heaviest concentrations in regions within a 1,000-mile radius of Baghdad and Afghanistan.
These are, notably, northern India, southern Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Gulf emirates, and Jordan.
"Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood diabetes," Moret asserts.
Doug Rokke, formerly the top U.S. Army DU clean-up officer and now anti-DU crusader, says Israeli tankers fired radioactive shells during the invasion of Lebanon last year. U.S. and NATO forces also used DU ammunition in Kosovo. Rokke says he is quite ill from the effects of DU and that members of his clean-up crew have died from it.
As a result of DU bombardments, Caldicott writes, "Severe birth defects have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is increasing over time."
Like symptoms have been reported among infants born to U.S. service personnel that fought in the Gulf Wars. One survey of 251 returned Gulf War veterans from Mississippi made by the Veterans Administration found 67% of children born to them suffered from "severe illnesses and deformities."
Some were born without brains or vital organs or with no arms, hands, or arms, or with hands attached to their shoulders.
While U.S. officials deny DU ammunition is dangerous, it is a fact Gulf War veterans were the first Americans ever to fight on a radioactive battlefield, and their children apparently are the first known to display these ghastly deformities.
Soldiers who survived being hit by radioactive ammunition, as well as those who fired it, are falling ill, often showing signs of radiation sickness. Of the 700,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War, more than 240,000 are on permanent medical disability and 11,000 are dead, published reports indicate.
This is an astonishing toll from such a short conflict in which fewer than 400 U.S. soldiers were killed on the battlefield.
Of course, "depleted uranium munitions were and remain another causative factor behind Gulf War Syndrome(GWS)," writes Francis Boyle, a leading American authority on international law in his book "Biowarfare and Terrorism," from Clarity Press Inc.
"The Pentagon continues to deny that there is such a medical phenomenon categorized as GWS---even beyond the point where everyone knows that denial is pure propaganda and disinformation," Boyle writes.
Boyle contends, "The Pentagon will never own up to the legal, economic, tortious, political, and criminal consequences of admitting the existence of GWS. So U.S. and U.K. veterans of Gulf War I as well as their afterborn children will continue to suffer and die. The same will prove true for U.S. and U.S. veterans of Bush Jr.'s Gulf War II as well as their afterborn children."
READ THE FULL REPORT:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7410