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Countercurrents.org

Bomb After Bomb Recommended
By Howard Zinn, 18 December, 2007
Counterpunch

This essay serves as the introduction to Bomb After Bomb: a Violent Cartography, a collection of drawings illustrating the history of bombing by elin o'Hara slavick. o'Hara slavick is a professor of art at the University of North Carolina. More of her visionary work can be viewed on her website

... We have had enough experience, with the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders, with the bombings carried out by the Allies, with the torture stories coming out of Iraq, to know that ordinary people with ordinary consciences will allow their instincts for decency to be overcome by the compulsion to obey authority. It is time therefore, to educate the coming generation in disobedience to authority, to help them understand that institutions like governments and corporations are cold to anything but self-interest, that the interests of powerful entities run counter to the interests of most people.

WP Arkin

No End for 'Gulf War Syndrome'   December 14, 2007

Here is good example of the "DU is soooooo safe you could sprinkle it on your toast" viewpoint from a Washington Post brainiac.

"What is needed in the depleted uranium "debate" isn't more study, but brutal honesty. Depleted uranium isn't the cause of any syndrome -- except a highly political and imaginary one. What is more, it has become part of an ugly bill of particulars against the United States. That is all the more reason to end the speculation about the health effects of depleted uranium, both to U.S. service members and veterans, and to civilians abroad."

Do you think he's really believing what he says? I don't. Check out my comment under his post!

Signs of the Times

recommended!

Signs Editorial:
The Threat of Depleted Uranium Exposure - It's Real, Deadly and Covered up by the Pentagon and VA
by Stephen Lendman

The Pentagon must surely believe the old but very foolish saying that what you don't know won't hurt you. To prove it they nearly always go to great lengths to conceal what they do know so we won't find out. That's especially true when what they know is bad news or hazardous to our health or that of our troops. That's certainly the case regarding the real and deadly threat from exposure to the toxic effects of depleted uranium (DU) poisoning. The public has precious little information about this crucial issue because it's been willfully and deliberately suppressed to conceal just how potentially great and irreversible a threat it is.

A Hard Rain's Already Falling

by Don Williams
06/01/2007

Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist, blogger, short story writer, and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of literary writings. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Michigan Journalism Fellowship, a Golden Presscard Award, the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize, Six Writer of the Month Awards in the Scripps Howard Chain and twice Runner-up for Writer of the Year.

Excerpts: If ever a man's been 10,000 miles in the mouth of graveyard, Dr. Doug Rokke has, for when you really look into Depleted Uranium, as he has, time and space open wide to reveal tombstones of future generations. To hear Rokke (Rocky) tell it, he's lost friends, colleagues and portions of his own corpus to Depleted Uranium (DU to those in the field). He's been shot at, run off the road, and had his good name smeared in the press. As an Army expert on DU deployment during and following the first Gulf War, he stopped cooperating with Army DU policy when he realized not all its victims were designated enemies, and that his own government was in denial about this horrific reality. Rokke says most American casualties in the First Gulf War were the result of friendly fire involving DU weapons.
...
Yes, it's so low-level that DU is being sold as a boon to humankind. According to DU mongers, it could never cause cancer. It's so benign it comes recommended as counterweights in domestic aircraft and to make super duper golf clubs, car bumpers and more. But that's before it's atomized and churned up again and again in test ranges and battlefields, to blow about the planet and be inhaled, exhaled.

DU technology is hard to grasp, because it's both rocket science and nuclear science, and most of what you hear about its effects amounts to circumstantial evidence. For example, one hears from a variety of sources that cancer deaths are up in Baghdad 500 to 600 percent since 1991. And that birth defects and miscarriages are on the rise in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. That Americans who served in the first Gulf War have a higher incidence of cancer, neurological disorders, deformed children and other ailments than veterans of any other American war.

 

Doing the Wrong Thing in Afghanistan: Depleted Uranium: The Definitive Moral Paradox

By Michael Clarke July 2006
Posted on Marc Parent's blog ( new | old )
Recommended to DUBBS by Lauren Moret

 

This article is a good read if you want to see what the strongest critics of DU are saying. Here are a few keywords you will find within: aerosols, ,atomicity, genocide, omnicide, insoluble ceramic uranium oxide nanoparticles, mythology, Leuren Moret

Quotes:

Of course, there will always be wags who insist that DU is harmless so there really is no problem. Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at UT Austin, recently delivered a speech at the Brisbane (Australia) Social Forum titled “The Threats to Sustainable Democracy” in which he said, “…there is no power so convinced of its own benevolence as the United States. The culture is delusional in its commitment to this mythology, which is why today one can find on the other side of the world peasant farmers with no formal education who understand better the nature of U.S. power than many faculty members at elite U.S. universities.”

An estimated 900 tons of DU was released in the initial 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. The approximately 2,000 air strikes this spring could easily have released another 250 tons of DU into the air and onto the ground, water and crops. According to the White House website a total of 24,000 bombs were used in the first year of operations in Afghanistan, which would suggest a minimum of 3,000 tons of DU was aerosolized in only the first 12 months of conflict. There is a lot of deadly radioactive DU around there.

This article has generated a lively comment pool, with accusations flying. :-)

Middle East Times

Commentary: Pentagon may be own deadliest enemy
Sherwood Ross Middle East Times August 16, 2006

This essay asks why the denials of the US military are awarded so much credibility in the face of a long history of bad behavior. This webmaster concurs.

Depleted Uranium is WMD
by Leuren Moret, August 23, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca

Click here for a list of DU stories on CounterCurrents.

The U.S. Military Is In DU Denial
By Susu Jeffrey 13 April, 2006
PulseTC.com (Reprinted on CounterCurrents)
(This article is partly based on an interview with an Iraq vet.)

"My name is John Marshall. I was exposed to DU (depleted uranium). I am 100 percent disabled and I am pissed-off. In fact, I was advised by a couple of my counselors not to do this [interview] because I’m so angry with the government—at the VA system, at the way I’m treated and other veterans are treated. It’s very impersonal. They don’t give you any time. They ask us to go fight their wars, do the dirty work and then they can’t take care of you."
...
"I started walking and all of a sudden we started taking heavy fire. Two sabot rounds hit our Bradley within 6 feet of me. It’s a dart of depleted uranium. I’m breathing radioactive dust and the toxins from the Bradley. I got sparks flying all over me.
...
"I’m just tired. I just feel tired of fighting these bastards in the hospital. They don’t believe in prevention. My tumor wasn’t sent to pathology. The government waits. They wait for the veterans to die.

There are many more stories and commentaries on DU found at CounterCurrents, a great site from India. Click here for a list. You may want to sign up for the excellent CounterCurrents email newsletter.

Twin Cities Pulse News

Vets plus DU plus the Law
Thursday 16 March @ 23:43:29 News
by Susu Jeffrey

In 1944 the U.S. Congress passed the G.I. Bill of Rights, providing help to World War II veterans for medical care, ...
...My dad, Harry Jeffrey (R-Ohio), was a co-author of that bill and spent his only congressional term writing, and then selling the G.I. Bill of Rights to the American people. Since then, the social experiment in support of ex-military personnel has slowly been gutted, especially since the Vietnam War. “That damn G.I. Bill,” a veteran told me recently. “[Now] after four years you don’t even get enough to go to junior college.” Veterans’ benefits are supposed to do just that—benefit veterans. But, in fact, the fallout from Iraq Wars One and Two will be never-ending since the poison from American depleted uranium (DU) weapons is dangerous to all life for 4.5 billion years.

A comment on this and Another


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