‘Depleted uranium is the trojan horse of nuclear war.’

[Guest guest]

http://lonestaricon.com/2006/Archives/09/news06.htm

 

February 28, 2006 7:35 PM

HAVE DU WILL TRAVEL

 

`Depleted uranium is the trojan horse of nuclear war.'

Iconoclast Interview With Leuren Moret

By W. Leon Smith

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

 

ICONOCLAST: What do you think of the Busby report? Do you think it's

pretty accurate?

 

MORET: Oh, I think it's totally accurate. Those numbers are from the

British government. There is absolutely no doubt at all that those

numbers are completely accurate. That facility has been there for

years. It was established out of concern for the public to monitor the

nuclear powerplant emissions and the nuclear weapons facility

emissions in Britain. They have the best equipment. They have the best

technicians. They have the best scientists doing all of that

monitoring, whose numbers have to be completely correct. If anything,

they would be lower than the actual amounts that they were measuring.

They would never make them higher.

 

ICONOCLAST: How would you describe what happened?

 

MORET: What happened is Dr. Busby is on a British government committee

and he is an official scientific advisor on low level radiation to the

British government. He also works with the European Parliament and

they asked him to produce an independent report on low level radiation

for the European Parliament. He produced something with 45 other

scientists called the ECRR Report. It came out in January of 2003. I

took it all over the Eastern U.S. and was introducing it and talking

to it before they even had a press conference and released it in

Britain. He went to Bosnia and Kosovo and collected depleted uranium

samples and we've all been very concerned about the transport of these

tiny particles all over the world. I am really the one who brought

this issue out into the open. It was perfectly reasonable and

justified for him to ask the Aldermaston facility for those numbers.

 

They'd always given them to him before, but when he asked them two

years ago, out of concern about the transport of these materials, they

refused to give them to him. I asked him why and he said that. Three

years ago, Halliburton took over that facility. I asked, did

Halliburton take over a British government air monitoring facility and

he said yes. That's very interesting and they're the ones who wouldn't

give you the numbers and he said yes. Last Jan.1, in 2005, the Freedom

of Information Act went into law and was effective on that day and

that's the day he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get

the numbers. They still refused to give them to him and so there was a

long delay. Finally, Halliburton gave him the numbers, but they

wouldn't give him any of the 2003 numbers for the Iraq war. When I saw

how high that number was, 1,700, I understood exactly why they had

taken the facility over three years before. It was too high.

 

ICONOCLAST: What should the numbers be?

 

MORET: Less than 30. We should only be measuring natural uranium in

the air that is coming out of mineral sources and natural sources.

There already is contanimation from nuclear weapons testing and even

lower orbital space is contaminated with uranium and uranium decay

products. I discovered a paper on it in the Journal of Environmental

Radioactivity, which was written in 2002. That is a very, very small

amount. What they're measuring now are these horrendous peaks that

exactly correlate with the battlefield events in Iraq and Kosovo and

Bosnia and Afganastan. And there is even a piece during a Chechnya

conflict in `98 and `99, which indicates the Russians are using it,

too, in Chechnya.

 

ICONOCLAST: If you have shock and awe going on in Iraq and the

readings are being monitored in the UK, is it like a sweep of these

going through there and then you have your spikes and then it goes

back down, is that in the air?

 

MORET: Yes. This is just pollution to have a point source, a

battlefield or whatever that is releasing this into the air. On those

filters in Britain, there were also sand and dust particles that were

1 to 5 microns that also came from the Middle East. These are well

known all over Europe because sand and dust storms that originate in

the Middle East and Central Asia and especially North Africa have been

identified for centuries in Europe.

 

They were called blood rains because in the hot desert conditions,

iron oxide coats the grains of sand and dust and when they're

transported North over Europe and they're rained out, those iron

oxides stain the rain kind of the color of a weak wine and they were a

bad omen. Boy, they sure are a bad omen now, because they're also

transporting radioactive isotopes. Now, that sand and dust, we already

know where that's coming from, were on the filters with the much

smaller particles of depleted uranium, which the average particle size

for atmospheric test is a tenth of a micron. These DU particles form

at really high temperatures under battlefield conditions and they're

very tiny. They're called nanoparticles.

 

ICONOCLAST: Do they land on the ground?

 

MORET: No. These are so small that the movement in the air currents

and the big convection cells which are weather fronts and stuff, keep

them suspended. They don't settle out. They have to be rained out or

snowed out or permanently suspended.

 

ICONOCLAST: If this is in the air in the UK and it rains, do they

become part of the soil?

 

MORET: Yes. They rain on buildings and rooftops and on trees and

leaves and on people. Because they're wet, they stick to whatever they

land on and it is almost impossible to remove it.

 

ICONOCLAST: They radiate when they're there?

 

MORET: Yes. So, it's causing an epidemic of melanoma, globally. That

means skin cancer, especially in children. There are increases in

infant mortality now being reported in the New York Times a couple of

years ago. I saw an article in January of 2003, Mysterious Increases

in Infant Mortality in 20 Regions of Europe. It's a global disaster.

There's a frog die-off going on. Frogs are dying off all over the

world. The worst thing is the global increases in diabetes. Diabetes

is an immediate response just within months to these depleted uranium

battles. We can see especially huge increases in the Gulf states which

are Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and then on up the east coast.

 

ICONOCLAST: How do you know they're attributed to DU?

 

MORET: Because the increases correlate each year with the battles.

When there aren't battles or that stuff isn't transported sufficiently

across the Atlantic, then there is not much of an increase. It drops

off or stabilizes.

 

ICONOCLAST: The reason the Gulf states are affected more is because of

the Trade Winds?

 

MORET: Yes. These are not hurricanes. These are huge sand and dust

storms that are a million square miles in size.

 

ICONOCLAST: Are the affects permanent or if they quit using this type

of ammunition, would it reverse.

 

MORET: Well, it's like atmospheric testing contamination of

radioactive pollution of the atmosphere. As it's rained out and snowed

out, it's deposited in the environment and it sticks to any surface

where it lands. It's removed from the atmosphere. The most harmful

pathway of exposure is inhalation. If it is sticking to things, at

least it's not in the air and eventually it's going to end up in the

ocean. But that will be a long, long time.

 

ICONOCLAST: One thing that the Times article suggested was that

radiation experts also said that other environmental sources were more

likely to blame. What would they be referring to?

 

MORET: This is typical spin. They've been saying this for years and

they say, well, it's in your backyard. It's in the soil. That's true,

but the concentration of uranium that occurs throughout the earth is

like one part per two and a half million. So, it's a very low

concentration and a lot of it is in the ocean. It's not getting these

huge concentrations in Britain on air filters at atomic monitoring

facilities because it's from a natural source. This is airborne. The

air monitoring station isn't just measuring at one site. They had over

five sites where they were measuring these numbers and they were

actually higher away from the actual facility where the emissions are

coming out. If it was from that facility, the numbers would have been

the highest at the facility because it would have been the point

source. The fact that you're finding Middle Eastern dust and sand on

the filters with the DU indicates that it is coming from the Middle East.

 

ICONOCLAST: You can tell what kind of sand it is by some kind of test?

 

MORET: Oh sure. All the nuclear facilities in every country in Europe

— Greece and Romania and Italy — they monitor every single day, those

sand and dust storms from whatever is coming from whatever direction.

They've always done that. During the battle of Kosovo and Bosnia, the

European Parliament requested that all those countries do air

monitoring of radioactive pollution and of chemical pollution coming

from the NATO invasion of Yugoslavia. These were very extensive

reports and are available from the EU. I don't think there is any

place it's more monitored than Europe because they just have the

infrastructure and the facilities and they know everything.

 

ICONOCLAST: The spikes that occurred, when they occurred, were an

oddity? You wouldn't have spikes normally.

 

MORET: There has to be a point first, to have such high levels. The

highs and lows from the weather conditions and the direction of the

wind currents is consistent with these high levels in Britain.

 

ICONOCLAST: It says in this article that on two occasions, levels

exceeded this ratio in which the Environmental Agency must be informed

so within safety limits.

 

MORET: They say that, but none of it is safe. A report issued by the

National Academy of Sciences came out in July. It's the seventh report

over the last 30 or 40 years, which is an official scientific academy

report in the United States and it stated very clearly there is no

safe level of radiation exposure.

 

ICONOCLAST: They also say in this article that other experts says

local environmental sources, such as a power station, were more likely

at fault. What would a power station be?

 

MORET: A nuclear power plant.

 

ICONOCLAST: Wouldn't they have had some kind of major. . .

 

MORET: It would have had to be a Chernobyl event in Britain, which

they couldn't hide because of their country's, you know, I told you

they are all monitoring, they would have been alarmed. It would have

had to been a huge accident.

 

ICONOCLAST: So, that doesn't hold any water.

 

MORET: No. By the way, the abundance of uranium in the earth's crust

is 2.4 parts per million. Sea water is actually smaller. It has a very

low concentration. What they always say is that it's in the soil all

over your yard and you can dig around and its there. Or, it's coming

from another source. It's coming from a nuclear power plant nearby. It

just can't be true because the air currents were coming directly from

the Middle East and they weren't being transported from other power

plants or sources in Britain.

 

Dr. Busby, because he's an expert on radiation and this kind of stuff,

because of how I told you this is transported all over the world, it's

completely mixed in the global atmosphere in one year, no matter where

they used it. It's just mixed that quickly. It's amazing. In the

report that was produced after the first Gulf War, it was from all the

oil well fires and all the munitions and all the battlefields. That

was a thick, black cloud that covered the area for a whole year after

Gulf War I. That city had material that was deposited globally in the

ice record in tropical glaciers, on the Antarctic Ice Sheet, in

Hawaii, in the Himalayas, in the Alps, and a year later, it was

deposited in the ice record all over the world. What happens is that

the equator is very warm and the poles are very cold and this

temperature gradient caused a mixing in the atmosphere of hot and cold

air. They need to all be the same temperature. That causes of this

violent mixing and the new particles are part of all of that. They are

just globally mixed in one year.

 

ICONOCLAST: What happens if the levels get real high in the waters and

fish end up with . . .

 

MORET: They don't need to be high. Low level radiation is devestating.

It's a thousand times more harmful, according to Busby's European

Committee on radiation risk report.

 

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies only considered cancer and birth

defects as legitimate diseases caused by radiation exposure. They only

considered the exposure of the victims to neutrons and gamma rays,

which were external. They said there was no internal contamination. We

know that that's not true. Everybody in Japan was contaminated by the

bombs. It wasn't until Cherynobyl when they could actually measure the

radiation and fields and dose. Then they looked at each chromosome and

determined that the gamuts were 1,000 times higher than what that ICRP

model would have predicted. Then they also counted the genetic

mutation in wheat and in mice. They knew what the exact dose was and

they saturated from the ICRP model how many defects there should be in

the DNA and they counted a dozen times higher or a dozen times more

than had been predicted.

 

We know the ICRP model is faulty. It can't be used at all for internal

exposure. It wasn't done correctly, anyway. It was perfectly

reasonable and legitimate for Dr. Busby to request those air

monitoring numbers from Aldermaston, because we know that that's the

dust from the Middle East. We know it ends up in Europe and Britain.

I've been to England in the morning and in the evening. I went out in

the street, and there was this red sand all over cars and all over

windshields and in the streets. That was from North Africa.

 

ICONOCLAST: Should the people in Britain be alarmed?

 

MORET: Yes! But there is nothing they can do. We have to stop these

weapons. They're altering atmospheric testing. The equilavent of 40

thousand Hiroshima bombs have been released into the atmosphere. The

amount of radiation included with the emissions from the nuclear power

plants have created, according to Dr. Roseleaf herself, the death and

mutilation and diseases in 1.3 billion people. It's had a global

effect. What they've released since 1991 is the equalivent of at least

400,000 Nagasaki bombs. That's 10 times more than during atmospheric

testing. We are having a very serious public health threat globally.

You can see it in the infant mortality increases. They started down as

soon as they stopped testing in 1963. They kept going down until these

darn unanium wars started in 1991. We're having a global frog die-out.

They're living in the fresh water, rain waters that is washing out.

We're having a decline in fisheries globally. We're just stripping

this beautiful planet of all these diverse forms of life.

 

ICONOCLAST: This absorption into the atmosphere globally, there is no

safe place?

 

MORET: There is no safe place. There is no possible way to escape from it.

 

ICONOCLAST: Are there uranium detectors that people can buy?

 

MORET: Yes. You're going to have much higher readings along the Gulf

Coast region, right where you are. I looked at the diabetes rates in

those states and Texas really got slammed. It goes up the East Coast.

All of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. are on the East Coast.

People are being exposed to various products from the nuclear power

plants emission, but they're getting exposed to DU, too, the decay

products. What is the most harmful effect from both exposures,

surprisingly enough, is particulate from the nanoparticle. That is a

nonspecific catalyst. Each one of them has an enzyme effect. Catalytic

or enzyme poisons are biologically the most damaging of all. That's

why the soldiers and people who were exposed are sick within 24 to 48

hours. It's that catalytical effect.

 

ICONOCLAST: If you live close to a power plant there's a chance . . .

 

MORET: You're absolutely being internally exposed 24 hours a day.

Every breath that you take. A 100 mile radius is where you get the

highest exposure. We collected chicken eggshells and baby teeth from

people living around the Indian Point Reactor and the levels in the

chicken eggshells was the same as in the baby teeth. It's just

completely poisioning the air, the soil, the food, the water, and

blood. These tiny particles go right through your skin. They go

through everything and a really good example of the horrible effect is

the World Trade Center disaster. All of the huge numbers of metal and

tiny particles, the highest ever measured in the United States, in

fact, I think around the world, were measured in the month after the

Trade Center disaster.

 

ICONOCLAST: Is that because of fires or explosions.

 

MORET: The fire. That building came down and all this kinetic energy,

you know all the energy that it takes to build a building and carry

all those materials up, when that building collapses, that is kinetic

energy which is released and it created a very hot pile which

continued to burn for months.

 

ICONOCLAST: Did the EPA take action?

 

MORET: Well, the EPA scientists were very alarmed about it and about

the nanoparticle pollution in the air, but they weren't allowed to say

anything, because of the administrator who was a coverup artist. She

and her husband had very strong ties, including personal investments

in companies that were related to the insurance companies in the World

Trade Center. The EPA scientists were not allowed to say anything.

 

ICONOCLAST: So people breathed all these particulates.

 

MORET: Yes.

 

ICONOCLAST: What do you think is the significance of Busby's report,

overall.

 

MORET: It concerns everything that I've been saying for five years.

That this pollution of depleted uranium particles are traveling.

They're being carried on air currents and they're being transported

all over the world.

 

ICONOCLAST: The reports by the military and the U.S. and Britain are

wrong?

 

MORET: Well, the military job is to kill people and to destroy things.

Depleted uranium is a very effective weapon. They are not responsible

for anything that happens after that point. So they're going to cover

it up so that they can continue to use weapons that kill lots of

people and destroy things. The U.S. government, the British

government, the Australian government and countries that have used DU

are violating international treaties. They are violating the Geneva

and the Hague conventions. They're violating the Geneva 1925 gas

protocal that prohibits gas weapons that kill indiscriminately. We are

violating our own federal laws. It meets the definition under U.S.

federal code in two of three categories. It's a weapon of mass

destruction under our own federal law. It violates U.S. military law.

What they're really worried about is that they would be financially

responsible for these terrible weapons and it would totally bankrupt

any country. We can never clean up the Middle East or Central Asia. We

can't clean up the atmosphere. They poisioned our world.

 

ICONOCLAST: What is the long-term prognosis for Iraq?

 

MORET: Oh, Iraq, the former Yugoslovia, and Afghanastan are completely

uninhabitable now. No one should be living there.

 

ICONOCLAST: Where do these people go?

 

MORET: Well, they're just going to slowly die. Their DNA is already

destroyed.

 

ICONOCLAST: How long does a soldier have to be in Iraq before he has

health problems.

 

MORET: What Major Doug Rokke told me, he was in charge of the

depleated uranium cleanup team in Iraq, he said we were sick within 24

to 48 hours. Many soldiers have described that . . .

 

ICONOCLAST: What kind of sickness is it? What are the symptoms?

 

MORET: The symptoms are all of a sudden they started feeling sick and

muscle and joint pain and rashes. Just a general malaise and losing

control of their body functions. Some of them came back in adult

diapers after Gulf War I. The men have burning semen and they

internally contaminate their wives. Vanity Fair magazine's David Rose

did a wonderful article. A very indepth, very hard-hitting article, in

the December 2004 issue. I've been to panels. Some of them are so sick

that their heads are down on their arms all of the time except when

they are talking. They have chronic fatigue. Any surgery or wounds

that they have will not heal because their immune system is completely

damaged by the DU particles. One breath of air can give you a fatal dose.

 

ICONOCLAST: If this is happening through the Trade Winds coming up

along the Texas coast, how would people tell if they've had exposure?

 

MORET: They can't tell. Suddenly, people are getting diabetes. Infant

mortality is increasing. These are ways that they can tell or they can

notice, for instance, the frog die-off in the environment. These are

environmental indicators. There is no way to clean it up and there is

no way to avoid exposure.

 

ICONOCLAST: There is no test you can do?

 

MORET: Yes. You can get a urine test, but you should have a geology

lab measure the uranium in the urine and then look at the isotopic

ratio to see if it has the signature of depleted uranium. It won't be

the same as on natural uranium. I don't know of any uranium mines in

Texas. It wouldn't be coming from the environment.

 

ICONOCLAST: Is there anything else you want to add?

 

MORET: We've got over 12 or 14 depleted uranium bills in the state

legislatures and we did that because we couldn't get anywhere with the

Federal government. It's been a presidential coverup under President

George Herbert Walker Bush, under Clinton who used it in Yugoslovia.

It was under George Herbert Walker Bush when it was used for the first

time on the battle field by the U.S. government in 1991 in the Iraq

war. George W. Bush is responsible for using it in Afghanastan and

Iraq. These three presidents are the three biggest war criminals in

the history of the entire world. They've gotten away with it because

they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the coverup. As

long as they can keep people studying it and there is no definitive

proof and stuff like that, statements like that are coming out from

established scientists in the Pentagon, then the big lie continues. We

know by this horrific information published by Dr. Busby that, indeed,

this is an environmental issue. It is a global issue and its all being

transported all over the world. The Aldermasten Report is the most

important one that has come out so far.

 

ICONOCLAST: What are the hopes of the bills before the Legislature.

 

MORET: What I did was take the Connecticut bill that got bogged down

in the Conneticut Legislature, requiring mandatory testing by the

state of returning soldiers who want it, to Louisiana in April of

2005. They had voted unanimously in the House and in their Assembly

and the governor signed it into law within eight weeks of me giving it

to them on April 19. That was just astounding. I was really shocked. A

week later, it was attached to Congressman McDermott's depleted

uranium bill before Congress and, in fact, it was your interview with

Doug and me and Melissa Sterry in that whole issue of the paper. I

mean you're President Bush's hometown newspaper in Crawford, and your

paper was attached as a supporting document to that bill. So everybody

in the Pentagon and in Congress read that, not to mention the VA and

probably the state department. Your paper went all over the

government. That's very important.

 

ICONOCLAST: But there are other states that are following suit?

 

MORET: Yes. And now we have, actually, the states have legal

jurisdiction over the National Guard so they're able to pass laws like

specifically covering the National Guard. They can't do it for the

regular soldiers, they don't have legal jurisdiction. What we're doing

is forcing the Pentagon and the Federal Government to follow their own

laws and directives and orders to test soldiers; to train them before

they're sent over there, soldiers who'll be handling it, and then to

give them medical treatment when they come back and they're sick.

We're forcing them to do that for National Guard and then the states

are making the government pay for it, the federal government, because

they're violating their own laws and mandates. It's getting a lot of

local media attention. It's getting activsts and citizens all riled up

about this issue and then it's making the other soldiers and veterans

who are not getting this treatment angry because they're entitled to

it too. So we're pushing states against Federal law.

 

ICONOCLAST: So about a third of the states have moved forward on this.

 

MORET: We have it in the New York, Vermont, Massachusetts,

Legislature. It's going into California and Oregon. It's in

Washington, Hawaii and I think Michigan or Minnesota. Louisiana has

already passed it. Connecticut has passed it into law. We're really

started a snowball thing.

 

ICONOCLAST: Where do you start the ball rolling. Does someone contact

the governor?

 

MORET: I think the most effective thing is to find two Vietnam

veterans. They've already been through the Agent Orange poision and

all the lies of the government. They've all been thrown in the trash

can and filed lawsuits that were dismissed. The Vietnam veterans are

really the most dangerous group to the federal government. They've

been the most effective. I gave it to two veterans in Louisiana and

they went into the Legislature and looked them in the eye and said

now, you're not going to turn down two Vietnam veterans. It's

impossible to do that. What happened just last week in the Hawaii

legislature is that Rep. Ito, who was the chair of the Veterans

Committee, refused to introduce the depleted uranium bill into the

Legislature so Doug and I and other experts started writing to the

Legislaters and encouraging the citizens to put more pressure on Ito.

A veteran wrote a letter to Ito that said we're a group of 3,500

veterans that have agreed to vote as a block and if you don't put that

into the Legislature, we're going to vote you out. That's effective.

You have to do something and you feel better already. The hardest

thing is to take that first step and to do an action.

 

We need to remind people what Ghandi said . . . " Even a small lamp

dispells the darkness. "

 

Depleted uranium is the trojan horse of nuclear war. It keeps killing

and there is no way to turn it off and there is no way to clean it up.

After we're all dead and wipe out our own species, the earth will heal

itself.