GI's Will Come Home To A Slow Death

http://www.coastalpost.com/04/08/01.htm
By Carol Sterritt

"There are only two things worth knowing in life, but I forget what they are."

John Hiatt, American songwriter

Now I remember what the two important things are. One is that the situation is
dire. (And thus we need the artist and musician, the soul healer and the clown,
more than ever.)

The other is that despite the horror of the day, there are people who are so
brave and beautiful in both thought and action that one is moved to tears.

Look at the mindfulness of actions here in this county. For years, certain
people in Marin have devoted a large portion of their lives to an outfit called
the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition. Inside that group, some members are
beginning a major work that could affect military service today and in the
future when a draft might be instituted.

One such Peace and Justice member is Yvette Wakefield. For over eighteen months,
she has examined the Depleted Uranium issue. A county employee, she has often
read the inscription on the 20 North San Pedro Building. This inscription reads:
"The mission of health and human services is to promote and protect the health,
well-being, self-sufficiency and safety of all people in Marin."

Yvette could not reconcile what she learned about depleted uranium (DU) with the
idea of health and human safety. For one thing, she had befriended Leuren Moret,
a geoscientist who is now a world renowned authority on DU. Moret, who comes
from a Quaker background, once worked at Livermore Labs. She now travels the
world speaking out against the "omnicide" destructiveness of this material.

The Creation of A World Class Activist

How could someone like Moret, who once worked for the war industry, become a
friend of a "peacenik," like Wakefield. Or for that matter, how could she
herself become a peace activist? Well, back in 1991, Moret had a major
realization. According to Moret, "In 1991 I became a whistleblower at the
Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory near San Francisco, CA. Richard Berta, the
Western Regional Inspector for the Department of Energy, told me, "The Pentagon
exists for the oil companies and the nuclear weapons labs exist for the
Pentagon."

The more Moret learned, the more she became convinced that research and work
involving depleted uranium was immoral. Beginning in 1991, depleted uranium was
used to support three policies: One, to test the radiobiological effects of 4th
generation nuclear weapons (still under development); Two, to blur and break
down the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons; Three, to make it
easier to reintroduce nuclear weapons into the US military arsenal.

While at her job at Livermore, Moret watched America wage a short and apparently
victorious Gulf War. In just a few short weeks, and after only 110 American
casualties, we routed Iraq from Kuwait. But the true toll of this war upon our
young servicemen and women occurred over the next decade. Of the 700,000 troops
who served in the region, 267,000 suffered from some form of disability. Not
only that, but some soldiers "infected" their spouses with disabilities similar
to their own. Or they suffered the tragedy of having a child born with birth
defects. Some victory, huh?

At first, in its usual fashion, the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Pentagon
simply denied that this was happening. Those men and women, who had been hale
and hearty before their military service, were now branded "malingerers."

But internationally, other researchers spoke on record that these illnesses had
nothing to do with malingering. Testimony from Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, Former
Chief of the Naval Staff, India reads, "DU weapons emit Alpha particle dose
impacting a single cell from U-238 some 50 times the annual dose level. Cancer
is initiated with one alpha particle, its daughter isotopes effect generations
as the isotopes bio-concentrate in plants and animals. They then travel up the
food chain. It is a nuclear weapon because the energy is derived from the
nucleus of the atom. The particles enter the body through the lungs, the
digestive system or breaks in the skin.

"One gram of DU releases more than 12,000 particles per second. The radiation
slowly kills the cells that make life possible. The Gulf War syndrome of 1991
did just that (reported by Dr. Asaf Durakovic, Prof. of Medicine, Georgetown
University, and discoverer of the Gulf War Syndrome.)"

Our military has lobbed more than 500 tons of DU munitions on Afghanistan.
Professor Yagasaki has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the "atomicity
equivalent to 83,000 Nagasaki bombs." This fact he presented to the World
Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg in October 2003. The amount of DU used in
Iraq in 2003 equals nearly 250,000 Nagasaki bombs. Just as the Gulf War vets and
their families have been imperiled by their service in Gulf War I, those
veterans about to return from the Iraq war will undoubtedly face similar
consequences.

The Local FallOut

This is why Yvette Wakefield is concerned. Should Marin County expend the energy
and funding to nurture its children with healthy baby clinics, education
Kindergarten to twelfth grade, sports programs and parks and recreation, only to
then hand our kids at age eighteen over to the military? And not just any
military, but one that plans on dispatching its personnel to a killing field
where they will, even if surviving the "normal" activities of the battlefield,
come home to a life of infirmity, sickness and hospitalization? Wakefield has
problems with this idea.

A trained paralegal, she began work on a County wide resolution that would
proclaim the unacceptability of any Marin citizen serving in any area of the
world where their health might forever be destroyed by DU.

Her working draft of this resolution reads: Therefore in view of those dangers
posed by exposure to depleted uranium, Marin County requires that all Marin
residents serving in the United States Armed Forces and its Reserves be
prohibited from serving in those areas where depleted uranium weaponry is used.
This is because we acknowledge that our residents should not be required to face
the life-threatening and lifelong health problems of radiation poisoning. Their
having faced the normal dangers of combat should be enough. Soldiers who survive
their military service are entitled to return home to a normal life of working,
having families and friends and engaging in normal activities.

She is now building a case for her resolution. She has set up a public forum on
August 12, at 7:30 PM at the First United Methodist Church 9 Ross Valley Drive,
San Rafael. Both Leuren Moret and Dennis Kyne will be speaking at the event.
Their talk is titled "Depleted Uranium - The Trojan Horse of A Nuclear War."
Once people in Marin hear the truth of the DU deployment, and they realize the
horrific consequences born by the populations in the Middle East and our
soldiers, they can be counted on to be supporters of this County wide
resolution.

Where DU Policies Came from, And Why They Continue

The use of depleted uranium can be traced back to certain Nixon-Kissinger era
decisions. When our country was stymied by the 1973 oil embargo, Nixon remarked
that we have to make sure that an oil embargo will never happen again. Perhaps
he would have been stopped by the test ban treaty of 1963, signed by Russia and
the United States, both super powers at that time. According to the treaty,
nuclear war was outlawed. But one way for a nation to achieve sovereignty over
another nation was and is to utilize depleted uranium weaponry. Although such
weaponry will not necessarily offer up a mushroom cloud, the wake of its
devastation can be as deadly. Thus a policy of using depleted uranium in weapons
began. It first surfaced in the Arab-Israeli war, Fall 1973, when Israel
received and used such weapons from the United States. It used these weapons
under our country's supervision. (Never think for a moment that the Muslim
nations hate us for our shopping centers and our democracy, our backyard
swimming pools and our skyscrapers. They hate us for what we have done, and are
doing, to them.)

The population-devastation politics of DU continues to this day. It is an
effective policy. Witness what is occurring to the civilian population in Iraq.
Following the Gulf War, birth defects and cancer cases rose exponentially. In
one Baghdad hospital, which in pre-war days saw a single birth defect a week,
there soon occurred three and four birth defective babies in a single day.
(According to Moret, these defects are a deliberate contamination of the
population.) For the past thirteen years, rare leukemias and bone cancers have
been on the rise there. And of course, in the days of sanctions, the hospital
supplies and equipment to help those affected were unavailable. Now, after the
devastation of the "shock and awe" campaign of Spring, 2003, supplies are
equally non-existent. Also, hospitals are now faced with the consequences of
having only sporadic electricity and a lack of clean water. (The Bagdad
population has survived the past winter by utilizing rainwater, collected in
pots and pans put out on their roofs.)

The stories related to birth defects are heart-breaking. Some Iraqi babies are
born with eyeballs the size of lemons protruding from their eye sockets. Some
babies have no brains. Some babies are born without any skin. Some pregnancies,
although carried close to full term, result in a birth of only a lump of flesh,
with no discernable torso, limbs or head or facial features.

Our soldiers are coming home from our Middle East "adventures" with bodies
pushed to the breaking point. On KPFA radio in June, it was revealed that of
nine returning servicemen to New York City, six tested positive for unusually
high levels of radioactivity in their bodies. Those with the highest levels
already feel its effects. They are mind-numbingly tired; they have rashes,
muscle aches and pains, and their nervous systems are impaired.

The Horrific Working of Pernicious Materials

These men were average soldiers in terms of their war experiences. But for
certain soldiers, especially those who have survived the destruction of their
tanks, the radiation diseases hit hard and heavy.

By its nature, DU is aerosolized when impacted by explosion. Also the metal
components of DU-hardened tanks become a deadly, inhale-able radiation upon
explosion. The men and women experiencing this first hand are unaware that every
breath they take during these events is impacting their lungs and blood streams
with nano-sized charged particles that begin the ruin of their health
immediately.

Unlike the Japanese survivors of atomic blasts, who first felt radiation
sickness within three days to a week, our soldiers can experience symptoms
almost immediately. This is the result of the aerosol effects of the materials.
The radioactive dust can be pulverized to the point that it is one hundred times
smaller than bacteria. The particles go from the air to the lungs to the blood
stream. They then end up attacking the body's mitochondria. The results range
from multiple sclerosis type illnesses, to Parkinson's, to chemical
sensitivities, and of course, at a somewhat later date, various cancers.

Our nation's youth will sacrifice their prime years to this devastation, wearing
adult diapers, shuffling along with walkers, using oxygen tanks, and trying to
live with blindness and hearing loss.

Meanwhile, our nation's policy shapers have big plans inside our country as
well. In both Ohio and Kentucky, DU processing plants are underway. Both these
areas have high unemployment rates. The local populace, desperate for work and a
steady income, will have few qualms about what they are doing or why they are
doing it. They will be told that the work is safe, and indeed it will seem so.
There is no stench to uranium processing; the tiles and linoleum in the plants
will no doubt be spotless. Those who recruit them will seem friendly and kind.
The fact that the DU workers may have health problems five or ten years down the
road is not a big matter for concern. After all, if you don't consider reality,
how can it bother you?

I ask that if you are moved by this account of Depleted Uranium devastation, you
make a commitment. Red circle the date of the public forum, August 12th, on your
calendars. For further information, call 415 721 2844. The lives you save are
your own. After all, the air a Baghdad housewife breathed in this morning can be
in your lungs by tomorrow afternoon.

Public Forum "Depleted Uranium - The Trojan Horse of A Nuclear War." 7:30 PM at
the First United Methodist Church 9 Ross Valley Drive, San Rafael

Alan

"Can't you see we're still here,
Can't you see we're still here,
Singing loud; Singing clear,
We shall not go under,
We're still here."

Nemesis Peace Centre

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.

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