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but, .....I repeat myself.
Suppose you were a heartless bastard, and suppose you were a Republican, but, .....I repeat myself. Mark Twain
Thursday, March 18, 2004
 
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Tacitus.org - Devotion

I would comment on their idiocy, if I had not been banned from their site. Having been banned I will only observe that these fine people at tacitus are congratulating themselves for putting a bandaid on an open infected wound that they have caused.

If it was'nt for all the DU that the US has dumped upon that poor benighted country, that child would probably not have cancer, & would be outside running around and playing with his/her friends assuming that we had not dumped a few tons of cluster bombs (many of which are still unexploded and will wound and kill people for the next few decades) all over the country side.

Seattle Post Intellicencer - Iraqi cancers, birth defects blamed on U.S. depleted uranium
DU shell holes in the vehicles along the Highway of Death are 1,000 times more radioactive than background radiation, according to Geiger counter readings done for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Dr. Khajak Vartaanian, a nuclear medicine expert from the Iraq Department of Radiation Protection in Basra, and Col. Amal Kassim of the Iraqi navy.
The desert around the vehicles was 100 times more radioactive than background radiation; Basra, a city of 1 million people, some 125 miles away, registered only slightly above background radiation level.
But the radioactivity is only one concern about DU munitions.
A second, potentially more serious hazard is created when a DU round hits its target. As much as 70 percent of the projectile can burn up on impact, creating a firestorm of ceramic DU oxide particles. The residue of this firestorm is an extremely fine ceramic uranium dust that can be spread by the wind, inhaled and absorbed into the human body and absorbed by plants and animals, becoming part of the food chain.
Once lodged in the soil, the munitions can pollute the environment and create up to a hundredfold increase in uranium levels in ground water, according to the U.N. Environmental Program.
Studies show it can remain in human organs for years.


Sunday Herald - WHO ‘suppressed’ scientific study into depleted uranium cancer fears in Iraq
An expert report warning that the long-term health of Iraq’s civilian population would be endangered by British and US depleted uranium (DU) weapons has been kept secret.
The study by three leading radiation scientists cautioned that children and adults could contract cancer after breathing in dust containing DU, which is radioactive and chemically toxic. But it was blocked from publication by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which employed the main author, Dr Keith Baverstock, as a senior radiation advisor. He alleges that it was deliberately suppressed, though this is denied by WHO.
Baverstock also believes that if the study had been published when it was completed in 2001, there would have been more pressure on the US and UK to limit their use of DU weapons in last year’s war, and to clean up afterwards.


BBC - Depleted uranium 'threatens Balkan cancer epidemic'
Mr Coghill says the maximum effect will be reached about six months after the war, and he thinks the first cancers - probably leukaemias - will start to show up about a year after that.
"Throughout the Balkan region, I calculate that there will be an extra 10,150 deaths from cancer because of the use of DU. That will include local people, K-FOR personnel, aid workers, everyone."
He accepts that doubts remain over the effects of DU, and says it is vital to listen to critics who suggest that the higher cancer rates seen in parts of Iraq may have been caused by chemical weapons instead.
However, Mr Coghill notes that Bosnia, where DU weapons were used in 1995, was not attacked with chemical munitions, unlike Iraq.
"No epidemiological study can ever prove causality - all it can do is show an association. For proof, you need human, animal and cellular studies. All of those have been carried out on DU, and they support the association," says Mr Coghill.
"The total evidence is strong that DU is behind Gulf War Syndrome, and the increased rates of disease in Iraq - and in Bosnia.
"The birth deformities seen in the Gulf are identical to those seen in Bosnia, and in the children of some US service personnel who were exposed to DU."
He says there is telling confirmation of his distrust of DU. It comes in the form of evidence submitted by radiation physicists at the University of Maryland to the US Department of Energy in April on the long-term use of DU.
"They concluded that DU should never be used in a battlefield scenario, because of its hazards to health."



It's to bad the chickenhawks who could not help but attempt to prove their machismo by sending other people children to war will not suffer the consequences of their cowardice. After all the vietnamese are still suffering the consequence of agent orange, thirty years after that war has ended.

The Age - With faith on her side
Ten-year-old Khanh came to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) with his mother when he was three. "His mum went off to sell papers and never came back," says Sister Trish Franklin, the founder and program coordinator of the Loreto Vietnam-Australia Project (LVAP) .
"He was living on the streets for years, begging and stealing. He's been in our boys' shelter for 12 months now, and is up to grade one."
Trish points to a photo of a grinning boy in one of her brochures. "This little boy came to our school for the blind six months ago. He's 11, and he has no eyeballs. But, do you know, he's the best singer in the school."


In this case the consequences are being borne by a child that was not even born when the war ended.




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