Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan are No Joke

USA, War Crimes and Criminals

Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and
is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your
own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely
enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor
have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that
way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of
a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for
granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that
they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of
the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective
government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who
hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them
possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow
their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And
they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the
Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or
sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you
rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where
every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you
bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in
practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen
with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay
tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has
almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions. What it
has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have
passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been
scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out
of the consciousness of men.
--- Randolph Bourne

Dead Babies in Iraq and Afghanistan are No Joke
USA, War Crimes and Criminals
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
By DAVE LINDORFF

The horrors of the US Agent Orange campaign in Vietnam, about which I
wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors of the
depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War
(300 tons), and which it used much more extensively, and in more
urban, populated areas, in the Iraq War and the now intensifying
Afghanistan War.

Depleted uranium, despite it’s rather benign sounding name, is not
depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term depleted refers to its
being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission reactions in
nuclear reactors. The nuclear waster material from nuclear power
plants, DU as it is known, is essentially composed of the uranium
isotope U-238 as well as U-236 (a product of nuclear reactor fission,
not found in nature), as well as other trace radioactive elements. It
turns out to be an ideal metal for a number of weapons uses, and has
been capitalized on by the Pentagon. 1.7 times heavier than lead, and
much harder than steel, and with the added property of burning at a
super-hot temperature, DU has proven to be an ideal penetrator for
warheads that need to pierce thick armor or dense concrete bunkers
made of reinforced concrete and steel. Accordingly it has found its
way into 30 mm machine gun ammunition, especially that used by the
A-10 Warthog ground-attack fighter planes used extensively in Iraq and
Afghanistan (as well as Kosovo). It is also the warhead of choice for
Abrams tanks and is also reportedly used in GBU-28 and the later
GBU-37 bunker buster bombs. DU is also used as ballast in cruise
missiles, and thus burns up when they detonate their conventional
explosives. Some cruise missiles are also designed to hit hardened
targets and reportedly feature DU warheads, as does the AGM-130 air-to-
ground missile, which carries a one-ton penetrating warhead.

While the Pentagon has continued to claim, against all scientific
evidence, there is no hazard posed by depleted uranium, US troops in
Iraq have reportedly been instructed to avoid any sites where these
weapons have been used—destroyed Iraqi tanks, exploded bunkers, etc.
Suspiciously, international health officials have been prevented from
doing medical studies of DU sites. A series of articles several years
ago by the Christian Science Monitor (http://www.csmonitor.com/
2003/0515/p01s02-woiq.html) described how reporters from that
newspaper had visited such sites with Geiger-counters and had found
them to be extremely “hot” with radioactivity. The big danger with DU
is not as a metal, but after it has exploded and burned, when the
particles of uranium oxide, which are just as radioactive as the pure
isotopes, can be inhaled or injested. Even the smallest particle of
uranium is both deadly poisonous as a chemical, and can cause cancer.

There are reports of a dramatic increase in the incidence of deformed
babies being born in the city of Fallujah, where DU weapons were in
wide use during the November 2004 assault on that city by US Marines.

But the real impact of the first heavy use of depleted uranium
weaponry in populous urban environments will come over the years, as
the toxic legacy of this latest American war crime begins to show up
in rising numbers of cancers, birth defects and other genetic
disorders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His
latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006
and now available in paperback). He can be reached at
dlindorff@mindspring.com

Source
http://counterpunch.org/lindorff10202009.html
Posted by JNOUBIYEH at 9:04 PM

Labels: Afghanistan, Deformed Babies, Depleted Uranium Weapons, Iraq
Posted by uprooted Palestinian at 3:11:00 AM
Labels: Afghanistan, IRAQ, USA, War Crimes and Criminals
[ Auf dieses Posting antworten ]