- 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.
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- The International Action Center continued its historic
exposÈ 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 'Metal of Dishonor'
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- Clark: 'DU is war against the poor'
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 'A huge catastrophe'
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- Gonzalez was emphatic: "These weapons have to be
eliminated or the whole planet will be contaminated."
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- Resisting war crimes
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The solution? "A global mass movement--a multinational,
multi-gendered anti-war movement that will shock and awe the war-makers
in Washington."
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- 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!"
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- - Reprinted from the June 3, 2004, issue of Workers World
newspaper
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- Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted
to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it
is not allowed. http://www.workers.org/ww/2004/dumtg0603.php
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