U.S. VETERANS FINAL BATTLE : DEPLETED URANIUM

THE ABOVE ASKS THE QUESTION:

"HOW MANY NAGASAKI BOMBS EQUAL THE RADIATION IN THE 2003 IRAQ WAR?"
ANSWER: 250,000 NAGASAKI BOMBS.

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: LET ME DIRECT THE ATTENTION OF ALL WHO READ HERE TO THE COMMENTS LEFT BELOW THIS BLOG ENTRY BY A MAN WHO WAS THERE, WHO WITNESSED IT FIRST-HAND, AND WHO NOW SUFFERS THE CONSEQUENCE OF "D.U."

WE OWE THAT  MAN AND ALL WHO WERE SIMILARLY AFFECTED THE CHANCE TO TELL US WHAT REALLY HAPPENED, WHAT SO MANY ARE STILL GOING THROUGH.
WE OWE THEM ALL EVERY FIGHTING CHANCE WE CAN GIVE THEM TO LIVE, AND TO MAKE SURE NO MORE GO THROUGH WHAT THEY HAVE.  ~ Waninahi, The Hemlock Tea Room]




"Any soldier now in Iraq who has not inhaled lethal radioactive dust is not breathing."

Most Americans have no idea that depleted uranium munitions used by the U.S. military are causing one of the greatest environmental nightmares in the history of the world. In fact, most Americans have no idea what depleted uranium even is.

So what exactly are depleted uranium munitions?
They are essentially "dirty bombs" made from nuclear waste.

Depleted Uranium is a waste product of the nuclear enrichment process.
Despite claims that depleted uranium is much less radioactive than natural uranium, the truth is that it actually emits about 75% as much radioactivity as natural uranium.

Depleted uranium is both chemically toxic and highly radioactive.
In laboratory tests it severely damages human cells, causes DNA mutations and has other carcinogenic effects..

Depleted uranium poisoning has been linked to a vast array of illnesses and diseases including severe skin rashes, intense muscle and joint pain, major birth defects, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, brain tumors and just about every type of cancer. Depleted uranium also replaces calcium in the body, thus destroying both teeth and bones.

Award-winning journalist Will Thomas wrote:

“As the last Gulf conflict so savagely demonstrated, GI immune systems reeling from multiple doses of experimental vaccines offer little defense against further exposure to chemical weapons, industrial toxins, stress, insect repellent and radiation left over from the last war. This is a war even the victors will lose.”
A single particle of DU lodged in a lymph node can devastate the entire immune system according to British radiation expert Roger Coghill.

THE DISCOVERY OF DU IN IRAQ...
Army health physicist Dr. Doug Rokke was dispatched to the Middle East to salvage DU-contaminated tanks after Gulf War I.

His Geiger counters revealed that the war zones of Iraq and Kuwait were contaminated with up to 300 millirems an hour in beta and gamma radiation plus thousands to millions of counts per minute in alpha radiation. Rokke recently told the media:
“The whole area is still trashed. It is hotter than heck over there still.
This stuff doesn't go away.” 

Rokke and his clean-up team were issued only flimsy dust masks for their dangerous work.
Of the 100 people on Rokke's decontamination team, 30 have already “dropped dead.”

Rokke himself is ill with radiation damage to lungs and kidneys.
He has brain lesions, skin pustules, chronic fatigue, continual wheezing and painful fibromyalgia.

Rokke warns that anyone exposed to DU should have adequate respiratory protection and special coveralls to protect their clothing because, he says, you can't get uranium particles off your clothing.

Dr. Rokke confirms that the Pentagon lies about DU dangers and is criminally negligent for neglecting medical attention needed by DU- contaminated vets.

He predicts that the numbers of American troops to be sickened by DU from Gulf War II will be staggering.

As they gradually sicken and suffer a slow burn to their graves, the Pentagon will -- as it did after Gulf War I -- deny that their misery and death is a result of their tour in Iraq.

Dr. Rokke's candor has cost him his career.

Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a professor of nuclear medicine at Georgetown University, is a former army medical expert.

He told nuclear scientists in Paris last year that tens of thousands of sick British and American soldiers are now dying from radiation they encountered during Gulf War I.

He found that 62 percent of sick vets tested have uranium isotopes in their organs, bones, brains and urine.

Laboratories in Switzerland and Finland corroborated his findings.

As with Dr. Rokke, Dr. Durakovic's radiation studies on Gulf War I vets were not popular with U.S. officials.

Dr. Durakovic was reportedly told his life was in danger if he continued his research.
He left the U.S. to continue his research abroad.

In other studies, some sick vets were found to be expressing uranium in even their semen.
Their sexual partners often complained of a burning sensation during intercourse, followed by their own debilitating illnesses.


AND THEN DEFORMED BABIES WERE BORN TO SOME OF THESE VETS.
BABIES WITH BIRTH DEFECTS ARE STILL BEING BORN TO RETURNING TROOPS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST, BOSNIA, AND ANYWHERE DEPLETED URANIUM MUNITIONS WERE USED.

BUT THE U.S. GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY STILL DENY THESE BABIES ARE VICTIMS OF DU.

ABOVE, Army National Guard Specialist Gerard Darren Matthew tested positive for uranium contamination after he returned from Iraq.
He suffered constant migraine headaches, blurred vision, blackouts and a burning sensation whenever he urinated. Shortly after he returned home, his wife became pregnant.
When his daughter, Victoria Claudette, was born on June 29 she was missing three fingers and most of her right hand.
The family believes the deformities are a result of the depleted uranium contamination.

The Daily News headlined the story "The War’s Littlest Victim."

THESE STORIES ARE REPEATED BY THOUSANDS, FAR MORE THAN THE VA REPORTS.

"MYSTERY ILLNESS" MAY BE WHAT THE VA CALLS IT, BUT WHEN DEFORMED BABIES ARE BORN TO MEN EXPOSED TO DU, THINGS CHANGE.

EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT CAUSES THE BIRTH DEFECTS SEEN IN NEWBORNS OF VETERANS RETURNING FROM THE MIDDLE EAST....
RADIATION!  

THEIR DNA WAS DAMAGED BY DEPLETED URANIUM.
THE DAMAGE IS BEING PASSED ON TO THEIR OFFSPRING.

TINY INNOCENT VICTIMS OF THE GULF WAR
[IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, PLEASE READ THE ARTICLE AT THE LINK ABOVE]

"When our soldiers risked their lives in the Gulf, they never imagined that their children might suffer the consequences--or that their country would turn its back on them.

Hundreds of families with children born with birth defects face official stonewalling--and a frightening future.

There's no guarantee that Gulf War babies will get government help. As it stands, a soldier's children receive free medical care only as long as a parent remains in the service."

MEET JAYCE HANSON (pictured above) , BORN TO  GULF WAR VETERAN PAUL HANSON,  WHO WAS EXPOSED TO DEPLETED URANIUM.

"Jayce is very bright," says Paul.
"He doesn't realize his limitations. But when he grows up and says, 'Why am I not like everybody else?' we'd like to be able to explain it to him."

"He's a problem solver," says his father, Paul.
Jayce suffers from a syndrome similar to that of the thalidomide babies of the 1950s. But his mother, Connie, took no drugs.

Now three years old, Jayce was born with hands and feet attached to short, twisted stumps.
He also had a hole in his heart, a hemophilia-like blood condition and underdeveloped ear canals.

Doctors recently amputated his legs at the knees to make it easier to fit him with prosthetics.

"He'll say once in a while, 'My feet are gone,'" says his mother, Connie, "but he's been a real trouper."

Clustering is the term epidemiologists use when an ailment strikes one group of people more than others--and the phenomenon can be a key indicator that something more than chance is causing birth defects.

The Association of Birth Defect Children (ABDC) says it has found the first cluster of defects in the offspring of U.S. Gulf veterans: 10 babies with severe Goldenhar's syndrome, a condition that usually strikes one in 26,000, according to ABDC executive director Betty Mekdeci.

(Another case has surfaced in Britain, where 600 vets complain of Gulf-related illness.)

The ABDC, which has gathered data on 163 ailing Gulf War babies so far, is tracking four more possible clusters--of victims of hypoplastic left heart syndrome, of atrial-septal heart defect, of microcephaly and of immune-system deficiencies.

Significantly, not one of the parents in the ABDC survey has a family history of these types of birth defects. Or as Mekdeci puts it, "There have been no relatives with funny ears."

The difficulty in proving conclusively whether clusters are occurring is that no one--not Mekdeci, not the Pentagon--knows how many babies have been born to Gulf vets.

The Defense Department's own survey of 40,000 birth outcomes, initial results of which are due in late October, is the largest study yet, but far from complete since it relies on data only from military hospitals.

The Pentagon's Dr. Joseph says the forthcoming report will include "by far the best and most comprehensive information available."

Maybe it will, but many still question whether Defense Department scientists are really seeking the hard answers.

Earlier this year Dr. Joseph told LIFE that, although trained as a pediatrician, he was entirely unfamiliar with "Goldhavers or Gold Heart--whatever."

"WHATEVER"?
IT'S GOLDENHAR'S SYNDOME, YOU PUTZ!

It's precisely that kind of response that enrages veterans with afflicted babies.
WE MAY NEVER KNOW HOW MANY BABIES BORN WITH DEFORMITIES TO RETURNING GULF WAR VETS HAVE BEEN DAMAGED BY DEPLETED URANIUM.
SOME VETERANS MAY NOT YET BE AWARE OF WHAT THEY WERE EXPOSED TO, OR THAT IT CAN CAUSE SUCH BIRTH DEFECTS.

HOW MANY VETERANS MIGHT CHOOSE NOT TO TAKE THE RISK OF HAVING CHILDREN IF THEY HAD ACCESS TO TESTS FOR DU AND WERE INFORMED?

THEY SHOULD AT LEAST BE GIVEN THAT OPTION, THAT CONSIDERATION BY OUR GOVERNMENT.

U.S. air attacks against Iraq since 1993 have undoubtedly employed nuclear munitions.

 Videos and photos of grotesquely deformed Iraqi infants born since 1991, hospital records of birth defects before 1991 and afterward, even the UN's  W.H.O. statistics  are overwhelming proof of radiation in utero, and show an increase so high as to have shocked all who compared the two eras.

Like those born to Gulf War I vets, many babies born to troops deployed to Iraq more recently are being born, and will be born, also afflicted with hideous deformities, neurological damage and/or blood and respiratory disorders.

But, on every turn, our veterans are having to literally fight for their lives, battle the VA and the federal government to get the medical help they and their spouses and children need.

Those with whom they are engaged in this final battle are the very same ones who sent them into that 'hot zone' of nuclear contamination KNOWINGLY, who now DENY that depleted uranium is the cause of their suffering and death.

IT'S AGENT ORANGE ALL OVER AGAIN.
GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY DENIAL.

IT'S THE SAME DENIAL BY GOVERNMENT AGENCIES AND THE MILITARY THAT OUR VETERANS FACED AFTER THEY WERE USED AS GUINEA PIGS FOR ATOMIC BOMB TESTS AND DEADLY EXPERIMENTAL VACCINES BEFORE AND DURING WORLD WAR II.

MANY OF THOSE VETERANS ALSO DIED FIGHTING THAT FINAL BATTLE WITH DEPLETED URANIUM AFTER LIVING THROUGH WARS THEY SERVED IN.

THEY ANSWERED THEIR NATION'S CALL TO SERVE, FOUGHT BRAVELY, BUT THEN WERE ABANDONED WHEN THEY NEEDED HELP IN RETURN...HELP TO LIVE. 

FROM NBC NEWS:

 Veterans of Iraq wars battle Pentagon over depleted uranium

"A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno.
Added to tank armor, it repels artillery assaults.

It also leaves behind a fine radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Depleted uranium (DU) is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and energy plants.

The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it, sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country, meaning it is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective."

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL!

"The Navy uses prime fishing grounds off the coast of Washington state to test fire DU ammunition.

 In January, 2003, Washington State Rep. Jim McDermott chastised the Navy:

"On one hand you have required soldiers to have DU safety training and to wear protective gear when handling DU...and submarines must stay clear of DU-contaminated waters.
These policies indicate there is cause for concern....

On the other hand the Department of Defense has repeatedly denied that DU poses any danger whatsoever.
There has been no remorse about leaving tons of DU equipment in the soil in foreign countries, and there appears to be no remorse about leaving it in the waters of your own country."
The Department of Defense (DOD) is a runaway pollution monster.

The General Accounting Office (GAO) found 9,181 dangerous military sites INSIDE the  USA that will require billions to rehabilitate.

The GAO reports that DOD has been both slothful and deceitful in its clean-up obligations.

The Pentagon is now pressing Congress to exempt it from all environmental laws so that it may pollute and poison free from liability.

BUT THEY ARE LIBEL!

The Royal Society of England published data showing that battlefield soldiers who inhale or swallow high levels of DU can suffer kidney failure within days.

Any soldier now in Iraq who has not inhaled lethal radioactive dust is not breathing.

In the first two weeks of combat, 700 Tomahawks, at a cost of $1.3 million each, blasted Iraqi real estate into radioactive mushroom clouds.

Millions of DU tank rounds litter the terrain.

Cleanup is impossible because there is no place on the planet to put so much contaminated debris.

 A SOLDIER'S FATE...

Herbert Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in Samawah, Iraq.

He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine.

Then began a strange series of symptoms he'd never experienced in his previously healthy life.

Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed.
There is more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool.
Bright light hurts his eyes.
A tumor has been removed from his thyroid.
Rashes erupt everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin.
Migraines cleave his skull.
His joints ache, grating like door hinges in need of oil.

There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is sure what it is.
He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince anyone caring for him that the military's new favorite weapon has made him terrifyingly sick.

In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has many caretakers: an internist, a neurologist, a pain-management specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist.

He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but they exact a high price.

"I'm just a zombie walking around," he says.

It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange juice to wash down all the pills, and, four hours later, he will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to cut the pain clenching every part of his body.
He will do that twice more before the day is done.  

Back in Iraq, he walked point near thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the radioactive, chemically toxic metal that is nearly twice as dense as lead.

‘We all felt sick’
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a buddy from his unit.

And another, and another, and in the tedium of hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they began to talk.

"We all had migraines. We all felt sick," Reed says.
"The doctors said, 'It's all in your head.' "

Then the medic from their unit showed up.
He too, was suffering.
That made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police.

But the medic knew something the others didn't.

Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and shell casings.

They'd brought radiation-detection devices.
The readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather than live in the station ruins.

"We got on the Internet," Reed said, "and we started researching depleted uranium."

Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.

TEST RESULTS

Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos, Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey's Fort Dix medical center, seeking relief that never came.

The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.

"When we first asked to be tested, they told us there wasn't one," Reed said.
"They've lied to us all along."   The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but concealed the risks.

The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe, and not that worrisome.

The VA's testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says.
More than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8 had DU in their urine, the VA said.

"The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for breakfast and it poses no threat at all," said Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care.

"Then you have far-left groups that ... declare it a crime against humanity."

Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it during the 2003 Iraq invasion.

An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991.
An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.

Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most dangerous route; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so would be more dangerous than leaving it.

Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with embedded shrapnel, this is doubly dangerous -- not only are the particles themselves physically destructive, they emit radiation.

Animal research shows side-effects.

There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans.

Military research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes.

Other research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in birth defects.

Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.  

Iraqi authorities "found that uranium, which affected the blood cells, had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities," the U.N. reported.

Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings with radioactive dust, which can be carried by wind and sandstorms.

In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in Iraq.

Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years, the agency said.
Nothing can start until the fighting stops.

NO long-term human studies
Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S. government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium.

Number of soldiers in the survey: 32.
Number of soldiers in both Iraq wars: more than 900,000.

The study group's size is controversial, far too small, say experts.

32 OUT OF 900,000 AND THAT WAS WRITTEN IN 2003.
THERE ARE MANY MORE EXPOSED TO DU TODAY!

Critics also say the VA has downplayed participants' health problems, including not reporting soldiers who developed cancer, and others who developed brain or bone tumors.

So for now, depleted uranium falls into the quagmire of "Gulf War Syndrome", from which no treatment has emerged despite the government's spending of at least $300 million.
OR SO THEY SAY.  

About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first Gulf War still suffer a baffling array of symptoms very similar to those reported by Reed's unit.

Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor to Gulf War Syndrome, and in the mid-90s, veterans helped push the military into tracking soldiers exposed to it.

But for all their efforts, what they got in the end was a questionnaire dispensed to homeward-bound soldiers asking about mental health, nightmares, losing control, exposure to dangerous and radioactive chemicals.

But, the veterans asked, how would soldiers know they'd been exposed?

 Radiation is invisible, tasteless, and has no smell.

And what exhausted, homesick, war-addled soldier would check a box that would only send him or her to a military medical center to be poked and prodded and questioned and tested for months?

It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers from this war.


"DEPLETED URANIUM IS JUST LIKE AGENT ORANGE AND ATOMIC TESTING ON SOLDIERS...DENIED"

After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces, migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some developed cancers.

It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent Orange — a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and flush out the enemy — was linked to those sufferings.

It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World War II vets exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb.
The Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, comprised of scientists, physicians and veterans advocates, has a single standard to judge all research and all efforts to treat Gulf War Syndrome patients :
Have sick soldiers been made better?

The answer, according to the committee, is no.

"Regrettably, after four years of operation neither the Committee nor (the) VA can report progress toward this goal," stated its December 2005 report.

"Research has not produced effective treatments for these conditions nor shown that existing treatments are significantly effective."

And so time marches on, as do soldiers going to, and returning from, the deserts of Iraq.

At 54, Herbert Reed is a veteran of two wars and a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, where he last served as an assistant warden at the Riker's Island prison.
He was in perfect health, he says, before being deployed to Iraq.  

According to military guidelines, he should have heard the words 'depleted uranium' long before he ended up at Walter Reed.

He should have been trained about its dangers, and how to avoid prolonged exposure to its toxicity and radioactivity.

He says he didn't get anything of the kind.
Neither did other reservists and National Guard soldiers called up for the current war, according to veterans' groups.

Reed and the seven others from his unit hate what has happened to them. It is something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves them feeling like so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of battle.

But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are MORE silent veterans like Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the northern Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.

Now 29, he's had growths removed from his brain.
He has suffered a 'light' stroke.

He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers from a series of "non-related conditions."
He knows he was exposed to DU.

"A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My guys were rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the vehicles."

No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said. His knowledge, like Reed's, is self-taught from the Internet.

Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it.

He doesn't feel up to the fight.
There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible victory in battle.

He'd really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who feel the same.

"I was an artillery scout,which are folks who are in pretty good shape.
Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they're in as good as shape as a professional athlete.

"Then we come back and we're all sick."

They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name."
Along with the ABDC and Defense Department surveys, more than 30 other studies of Gulf vets and their children are underway.

One that is no longer ongoing, by the Senate Banking Committee, folded last year when committee chair Don Riegle retired.

Of the 400 sick vets who had already answered committee inquiries, a startling
65 percent reported birth defects or immune-system problems in children conceived after the war.

DU doublespeak

The U.S. military insists that DU on the battlefield is not a problem.

Colonel James Naughton of the U.S. Army Material Command recently told the BBC that complaints about DU “had no medical basis.”

The military's own documents belie this.

A 1993 Pentagon document warned that “when soldiers inhale or ingest DU dust they incur a potential increase in cancer risk.”

A U.S. Army training manual requires anyone who comes within 25 meters of DU-contaminated equipment to wear respiratory and skin protection.

The U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute admitted: “If DU enters the body, it has the potential to generate significant medical consequences.” 

The Institute also stated that, if the troops were to realize what they had been exposed to, “the financial implications of long-term disability payments and healthcare costs would be excessive.”

For pragmatic reasons, DOD chooses to lie and deny.


IT ISN'T JUST IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN...
Between 1995-2000, the U.S. and NATO fired DU missiles, bullets and shells across the Balkans, nuking the peoples of Serbia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

As DU munitions were slammed into chemical plants, the environment became hideously toxic, also endangering the peoples of Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, Austria and Hungary.

By 1999, UN investigators reported that an estimated 12 tons of DU had caused irreparable damage to the Yugoslavian environment, with agriculture, livestock and air water, and public health all profoundly damaged.

Scientists confirm that citizens of the Balkans are excreting uranium in their urine.

 In 2001, a Yugoslavian pathologist reported that hundreds of Bosnians have died of cancer from NATO's DU bombardment.
Many NATO peacekeepers in the Balkans now suffer ill health.

Their leukemia, cancers and other maladies are dubbed the "Balkans Syndrome."
Coghill predicts that DU weapons used in Balkans campaign will result in at least 10,000 cases of fatal cancer.

WHAT ABOUT OUR TROOPS?
HOW MANY OF THEM AND/OR THEIR SPOUSES, THEIR CHILDREN WILL SUCCUMB TO DU?

WHY SHOULD THEY, AFTER SURVIVING DEPLOYMENT, HAVE THIS FINAL ENEMY TO FACE AND ALSO HAVE TO FIGHT FOR MEDICAL HELP FROM THE VERY GOVERNMENT THAT CAUSED THIS?

"SUPPORT OUR TROOPS"?
DO WE?







======================

SOURCES:

[PLEASE NOTE: AS I WAS MAKING THIS LIST FROM THIS BLOG WHICH I BEGAN ALMOST A YEAR AGO, I NOTICED SOME BROKEN LINKS, DEAD-ENDS, SO I HAVE FOUND OTHER SITES THAT CARRIED THE SAME STORY AND YOU MAY FIND PERHAPS A HALF-DOZEN LINKS THAT TAKE YOU ELSEWHERE THAN IS STATED, BUT SAME ARTICLES.]

~ DEATH BY SLOW BURN: AMERICA NUKES ITS OWN TROOPS


~ Depleted Uranium And The Iraq War’s Legacy Of Cancer

Depleted uranium was used in Iraq warzone weaponry, and now kids are playing in contaminated fields and the spent weapons are being sold as scrap metal.


~”Depleted Uranium Symptoms Match US Report As Fears Spread,” Peter Beaumont, The Observer (UK) 1-14-01, www.guardianlimited.co.uk .
~“Gulf War Illnesses Affect 300,000 Vets,” Ellen Tomson, Pioneer Press, www.pioneerplanet.com .
See also American Gulf War Veterans Association at www.gulfwarvets.com .


~“Research on Sick Gulf Vets Revisited, “New York Times, 1-29-01;


~“Tests Show Gulf War Victims Have Uranium Poisoning,” Jonathon Carr- Brown and Martin Meissonnier, The Sunday Times (UK) 9-3-02.


~“The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm, Has Our Country Abandoned Them?,” Life Magazine, November 1995;


~ “Birth Defects Killing Gulf War Babies,” Los Angeles Times, 11-14-94;


~“Depleted Uranium -- The Lingering Poison,” Alex Kirby, BBC News Online, 6-7-99.


~US Army Environmental Policy Institute: Health and Environmental Consequences of Depleted Uranium in the U.S. Army, Technical Report, June 1995.


~“Dying of Thirst,” Fred Pearce, New Scientist, 11-17-2001.


~ “Hundreds Died of Cancer After DU Bombing -- Doctor,” Reuters, 1-13- 01.


 ~”Depleted Uranium Threatens Balkan Cancer Epidemic,” BBC News, 7- 30-99.


 ~”Cancer Rates Soar From US Military Use of DU On 'Enchanted Island,'” www.telegraph.co.uk , 2-5-01;


~“Navy Shells With Depleted Uranium Fired in Puerto Rico,” Fox News Online, 5-28-99.


~“The Fallon, NV Cancer Cluster And a US Navy Bombing,” Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch.org , 8-10-02.


~ “DU Shells Are Made of A Potentially Lethal Cocktail of Nuclear Waste,” Jonathon Carr-Brown, www.sunday-times.co.uk , 1-22-01.

 ----------------------------


RELATED ARTICLES, BUT NOT ALL ABOUT DEPLETED URANIUM....SOME ARE ABOUT WHY WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE EAST IN THE FIRST PLACE:

 ~Wall Street Journal, 8-16-90: The CIA supported the Baath Party and installed Hussein as Iraqi dictator in 1968.
~“United States Dual-Use Exports to Iraq and Their Impact on the Health of Persian Gulf War Veterans,” Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, 1992, 1994;


~“US Government, 24 US Corps Illegally Helped Iraq Build Its WMD,” Hugh Williamson in Berlin, Financial Times, 12-19-02;


~“Full List of US Weapons Suppliers To Iraq,” Anu de Monterice, coachanu@earthlink.net,
12- 19-02.

~Report on effects of "low-level" radiation.
http://www.pilgrimwatch.org/health1.html

~ “The Bush-Cheney Drug Empire,” Michael C. Ruppert, Nexus Magazine, February-March 2000;

~The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Alfred W. McCoy, Lawrence Hill & Co., revised edition due May 2003;


~Drugging of America, Rodney Stich, Diablo Western Press, 1999;

~“Blood for Oil, Drugs for Arms,” Bob Djurdjevic, Truth In Media, April 2000, www.truthinmedia.org


~ Compromised, Clinton Bush and the CIA, Terry Reed and John Cummings, S.P.I. Books, 1994;


~“The Crimes of Mena, Gray Money,” Ozark Gazette, 1995, www.copvcia.com .)


 ~ “Bush Sr.'s Carlyle Group Gets Fat on War and Conflict,” Jamie Doward, The Observer (UK), 3-25-03;

 ~“Remember: Bush Planed Iraq War Before Taking Office,” Neil Mackay, The Sunday Herald (UK) 3-27-03