It's Not Democracy We're Spreading in Iraq, It's Radiation Disease

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Wed, 5 Jul 2006 20:44:10 -0700 (PDT)

It's Not Democracy We're Spreading in Iraq, It's Radiation

Disease

 

 

 

 

It's Not Democracy We're Spreading in Iraq, It's Radiation Disease

In a blistering column, Tribune Media Services' Robert Koehler rips

President Bush for his platitudes about democracy while Iraqis die of

double -- even triple -- cancer from depleted uranium. " We weren't

spreading democracy, " he writes, " we were altering the human genome. "

Submitter

 

 

 

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/9/2006/2049

 

 

 

Thu Jul 06 2006

 

 

Spreading cancer

by Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services

June 29, 2006

 

The unending game of " pretend " that the U.S. media allow George Bush

to play on the global stage, so often letting his lying utterances

hang suspended, unchallenged, in the middle of the story, as though

they were plausible - as though a class of third-graders couldn't

demolish them with a few innocent questions - feels like the

journalistic equivalent of waterboarding. Gasp! Some truth, please!

 

I suggest the prez has forfeited the right to command a headline, or

half a story, or an uninterrupted quote: " . . . we'll defend

ourselves, but at the same time we're actively working with our

partners to spread peace and democracy, " he said last week in Austria.

 

Surely " spreading democracy " should no longer be allowed to appear in

print, between now and 2008, unless accompanied by a parenthetical

clarification ( " not true, " stated as profanely as local standards

allow). And that, of course, would only be the media's first step back

into integrity with the public.

 

The occupation of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, the entire war

(to promote) terror . . . please, please, can these no longer be

trotted out in consequence-free abstraction, but as the high-tech

malevolence they are, actively continuing the incalculable devastation

of countries and their populations?

 

The bodies keep piling up, the toxic horrors spread. Hasn't anyone in

this place ever heard of depleted uranium? Is the health crisis in

Iraq and, indeed, throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, not to

mention Kosovo and among returning vets for the last four American

wars, somehow irrelevant to " the course " we're asked to stay?

 

" Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never

seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient.

For example, leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient

with two cancers - one in his stomach and kidney. Months later,

primary cancer was developing in his other kidney - he had three

different cancer types. The second is the clustering of cancer in

families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected

by cancer. . . . My wife has nine members of her family with cancer. "

 

This is Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, director of the oncology center at the

largest hospital in Basra, speaking in 2003 at a peace conference in

Japan. Why is it that only peace activists are able to hear people

like this? Why hasn't he been asked to testify before Congress as its

members debate the future of this war and the next?

 

" Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning, " he went on.

" They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used

to build and nourish their bones and they have a lot of soft tissues.

Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most.

However, cancer of the lymph system, which can develop anywhere on the

body and has rarely been seen before the age of 12, is now also common. "

 

Depleted uranium - DU - is the Defense Establishment euphemism for

U-238, a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process and the ultimate

dirty weapon material. It's almost twice as dense as lead, catches

fire when launched and explodes on impact into microscopically fine

particles, or " nano-particles, " which are easily inhaled or absorbed

through the skin; it's also radioactive, with a half-life of 4.468

billion years.

 

And we make bombs and bullets out of it - it's the ultimate

penetrating weapon. We dropped at least 300 tons of it on Iraq during

Gulf War I (the first time it was used in combat) and created Gulf War

Syndrome. This time around, the estimated DU use on defenseless Iraq

is 1,700 tons, far more of it in major population centers. Remember

shock and awe? We were pounding Baghdad, in those triumphant early

days, with low-grade nuclear weapons, raining down cancer,

neurological disorders, birth defects and much, much more on the

people we claimed to be liberating. We weren't spreading democracy, we

were altering the human genome.

 

As we " protected ourselves, " in the words of the president, from

Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, we opened our own

arsenal of WMD on them, contaminating the country's soil and polluting

its air - indeed, unleashing a nuclear dust into the troposphere and

contaminating the whole world.

 

" We used to think (DU) traveled up to a hundred miles, " Chris Busby

told me. Busby, a chemical physicist and member of the British

government's radiation risk committee, as well as the founder of the

European Committee of Radiation Risk, has monitored the air quality in

Great Britain. Based on his findings, " It looks like it goes quite

around the planet, " he said.

 

While Bush mouths ironic whoppers - " We will be standing with the

people of Afghanistan and Iraq until their hopes for freedom and

liberty are fulfilled, " he told the U.N. General Assembly a while back

- his actions pass, in the words of former Livermore Labs scientist

Leuren Moret, " a death sentence on the Middle East and Central Asia. "

 

A war crime of unprecedented dimension is unfolding as we avert our

eyes. Perhaps it's simply too big to see, or to grasp, so we lull

ourselves into the half-belief that the powers that be know what

they're doing and it will all turn out for the best. Meanwhile, the

contagion spreads, the children die, the planet becomes uninhabitable.

 

---

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an

editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You

can respond to this column at bkoehler or visit his Web

site at commonwonders.com. © 2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.