Audience packs New York meeting
'Depleted uranium: Pentagon poison'
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
New York
Deadly radioactivity is drifting in the sands
and fertile fields of Iraq, in rain falling in Europe, in
breezes that toss palm trees in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in the
water of South Korea--the toxic debris of exploded U.S.
depleted uranium (DU) shells.
The International Action Center continued its historic
exposé of this terrible danger with a forum in New York
City on May 25, "Poison Dust--Another U.S. War Crime: the Use
of Radioactive Weapons in the Gulf."
DU is a byproduct of the process used to make nuclear bombs
and reactor fuel. Because this metal is 1.8 times denser than
lead and burns on impact with steel, bullets and shells made of
DU can cut through tank armor like butter.
U.S. tanks, Bradley fighting machines, A-10 attack jets and
"Apache" helicopters routinely fire DU rounds. When a DU shell
hits a target, as much as 70 percent burns on impact, releasing
invisible and insoluble uranium oxide, a radioactive dust that
people inhale and ingest.
'Metal of Dishonor'
To the political hip-hop of Movement in Motion arts
collective chanting "Drop beats, not bombs," 200 people crowded
the United Nations Church Center for the meeting on "Poison
Dust." The meeting was co-chaired by Naomi Santos of Move ment
in Motion and IAC co-director Sara Flounders.
Flounders alerted the gathering that over half of the
700,000 veterans of the first U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991
have the chronic illness dubbed "Gulf War Syndrome."
Millions of Iraqis died of preventable diseases from the
obliteration of water and health systems by bombing and 12
years of sanctions starting in 1990. More recently, Iraqi
doctors began to note an ominous increase in cancer and
diseases of the immune systems.
Sharon Eolis, a health care worker who traveled to Iraq in
1998 and 2000, confirmed that both U.S. documents and
independent scientists strongly link this pattern of sickness
and death to DU.
IAC founder and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark
first raised the issue of DU shortly after the 1991 Gulf War.
The IAC has continued to inform the public through its DU
Education Project with such publications as "Metal of Dishonor:
How the Pentagon Radiates Soldiers and Civilians with DU
Weapons."
The project also challenged U.S. government denials of DU's
impact in a video, also called "Metal of Dishonor," produced by
the People's Video Network. At the meeting Sue Harris of PVN
announced development of a new video, "Poison Dust," which will
go on tour to military bases and communities. The film is
necessary, she said, "because the situation is getting
worse."
The U.S. dropped 375 tons of DU on Iraq during the first
Gulf War, and 2,200 tons during the current invasion. The U.S.
has also used DU weapons during its assaults on Afghanistan and
the former Yugoslavia, in training exercises in Vieques,
Okinawa and South Korea, and doubtless in numerous U.S.
military testing grounds. Other countries also use DU
weapons.
Clark: 'DU is war against the poor'
Ramsey Clark traced his journey toward understanding the
murderous impact of DU on the people of Iraq. He noted that the
first signs came two years after heavy U.S. bombing of the
desert near Kuwait in 1991. Nomadic Bedouin people, seeking
help, began to bring newly born deformed babies into urban
hospitals.
In March 2001, Dr. Aws Albait, an Iraqi physician who worked
in Baghdad from 1990-1999, said that leukemia and lymphomas in
Iraqi children had increased 12-fold, and in adults,
six-fold.
Illness and genetic damage is also occurring in the children
of U.S. soldiers. Children of male Gulf War veterans are born
with twice the usual rate of birth defects. In female veterans,
the rate is three times normal, with double the rate of
miscarriages.
A study in the April 2003 New Scientist magazine suggests DU
toxicity combines synergistically with its radioactivity to
produce much more serious effects than either poison alone.
Clark stressed that the impact of DU unfolds over many
years, and that the movement must be committed to an equally
long struggle: "We have to reach out, be unified, with every
ounce of energy. This is a war against the poor with the U.S.
military there only to protect and increase the wealth of the
few."
'A huge catastrophe'
Juan Gonzalez, president of the Nation al Association of
Hispanic Journ alists and a co-producer of the "Democracy Now!"
radio show, is currently running a series of columns on DU in
the New York Daily News. He acknowledged that he was standing
on the shoulders of the IAC and other activists, saying: "A
huge, huge catastrophe has been visited upon the planet by use
of these weapons and the spread of low-level radiation."
Gonzalez broke the story on DU after the mother of a U.S.
soldier on leave from Iraq came to him for help. Her son,
serving with a New York State National Guard unit, was
suffering from serious respiratory problems--and being forced
to return to combat. The mother added that many other members
of his unit in Iraq were also so sick with high temperatures,
kidney ailments and respiratory problems that they'd been sent
home to Fort Dix.
Gonzalez saw a connection to the effects of DU, and arranged
for independent testing of the soldiers. Of nine tested, four
were absolutely positive for DU contamination, and three were
probable.
Denied testing at Walter Reed Military Hospital, they were
examined in a German clinic under the supervision of Dr. Asaf
Durakovic, professor of radiology and nuclear medicine at
Georgetown Univer sity in Washington, D.C., and a colonel in
the U.S. Army Reserves. Dr. Durakovic, who is the Veterans
Administration's nuclear-medicine expert, has characterized DU
as a "threat to humanity."
DU is the latest manifestation of the dangerous low-level
radiation that is a byproduct of U.S. military use of nuclear
weapons. Gonzalez cited a January 2000 federal report on
occupational sickness of Department of Energy personnel that
documented 50 years of deliberate government exposure of
military and civilian personnel to radiation.
A 1990 report on the effects of DU, from the U.S. Army
Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command, was clear: "[L]ong
term effects of low doses [of DU] have been implicated in
cancer ... There is no dose so low that the probability of
effect is zero."
Gonzalez was emphatic: "These weapons have to be eliminated
or the whole planet will be contaminated."
Resisting war crimes
Navy veteran Dustin Langley of SNAFU (Support Network for an
Armed Forces Union) stated that DU was just one more crime of
the U.S. against its own soldiers, in a line stretching back to
exposing troops to atomic testing during the Cold War and Agent
Orange in Vietnam.
He described how soldiers--working people forced to enlist
by the "poverty draft"--come home with contaminated equipment,
store it in the garage or laundry room, and sicken their own
families. "DU doesn't wash off with Tide," he said.
Langley urged the crowd to join the IAC and SNAFU in turning
out for the June 5 March on Washington to end the U.S. occu
pation of Iraq, Palestine, Haiti, the Philippines, Korea and
everywhere. He indicted the Bush administration as a regime
that is "stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, using them
against its own people, and funding a worldwide network of
terrorism" through U.S. military aggression. But by "regime
change," he said, he didn't mean the Democrats or Ralph Nader's
campaign.
The solution? "A global mass movement--a multinational,
multi-gendered anti-war movement that will shock and awe the
war-makers in Washington."
For inspiration, he pointed to the heroic resistance in
Falluja and to the growing number of U.S. soldiers who refuse
to com mit war crimes, like Marine Corps resister Stephen Funk
and Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, a Nicaraguan immigrant sentenced
on May 21 to a year's imprisonment. Mejia would not return to
his unit in Iraq, saying, "This is an oil-driven war."
More inspiration for resistance came from Frank Velgara of
the Vieques Sup port Campaign, who told how on May 3, 2003, a
decades-long struggle by determined Puerto Rican activists shut
down the U.S. Navy bombing range in Vieques, a "victory against
the most powerful military in the world."
Kadouri al-Kaysi, an International Action Center member from
Basra, Iraq, seconded that determination, focusing the evening
on action: "Iraqis want the U.S. out of Iraq. The fight is
still going on, and they will never give up. Most important is
to come to Washington on June 5 to say to the Iraqis: We are
with you, not with the U.S. government!"
Reprinted from the June 3, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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