Horror of US Depleted Uranium In Iraq Threatens World

You claim to have read extensively on the subject, however you fail to appreciate that your starting premise is not only flawed by reason of faulty comparison of geographic conditions and concentration levels of DU ammunition use in both conflict arenas, but also by the testimony of the UN report you cited (note page 19 and following pages).

Bosnia Herzegovina is a temperate and lush vegeative climate zone in which the concetrated presence of DU was paltry by comparison to that used in the arid and windswept desert climate of Iraq where the very "airborn" particles have indeed cause widespread radiological and biochemical-related illness, birth defects and death. Note also that the amount of DU ammunititon used in Desert Storm was 100 times more than that used in the Balkans or some 300-350 metric tons. This remains littered and heavily concentrated across Iraq and is not mitigated as one may argue in the case of Bosnia/Kosovo by annual precipitation and absorption into the ground.

Your need to dismiss reality remains as ardent as ever since you clearly have neither read your claimed 300 page proof for your position nor considered its own quite serious risk assessments of prolonged DU exposure.

Countering an argument of the well recognised impact of our MIC's vile weaponry on innocent Iraqis requires you to concentrate on assessments within THAT context, any other context is spurious.

 

I guess you think the word "indeed" magically makes it true? Because you forgot the part about actually proving that any of these were caused by DU. That's the whole point, there has never been any meaningful scientific study linking those illnesses with DU, the premise is entirely based on unverified claims made by Saddam Hussein's medical establishment, which was of course controlled entirely by the Baath party. Do you think Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Information is a reliable source of information?

And "littered and heavily concentrated across Iraq"? Is it littered across Iraq or is it heavily concentrated? You can't have both.

DU would mostly have been used in Kuwait and in the desert areas near the Kuwaiti and Saudi borders with Iraq, because that is where Saddam had his armoured units in 1991. These areas of Iraq have the lowest population density in the country - a country which on the whole has a lower population density than Bosnia, a point you presumably missed.

As my other report pointed out, "the surface layer of soil in Kosovo contains about 300 times more natural uranium than was dispersed there by NATO weaponry." and even that assumes that all DU was somehow turned to dust, which is obviously a gross exaggeration. Plus, as I noted before, natural uranium is MORE radioactive than depleted uranium.

You ignore the report's finding that only concentrated exposure to DU dust would pose a hazard - yet once something has formed a dust cloud and dispersed across the landscape, it is no longer concentrated, and cannot present more of a risk than natural uranium, which is also dispersed across the landscape and in the groundwater. Nothing about Iraq's terrain or climate changes that basic logic. In fact, if any of this were true we would expect to see the same epidemics in Kuwait, yet there was no such epidemic and studies found no dangerous levels of DU there either: http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1164_web.pdf

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What's interesting about your premise that different vegetation explains why there is no DU caused cancer in Bosnia (other than its obvious logical errors), is that it seems to accept that the UNEP report could be valid - which raises the question of why hysterical fearmongering and accusations of "genocide" have surrounded NATO's use of DU in Bosnia and Kosovo. Could it be that these allegations were false and are based on bad science and anti-NATO political agendas? And if so, they why shouldn't we suspect the same things in Iraq, where we relied on Saddam Hussein for information about DU's impact?

 

playing word games again eh? Unsurprising. Littered and heavily concentrated are not mutually exclusively concepts dear boy. And There have been medical reviews conducted despite your wishful fantasy that its all from Saddam's official archives. Fact of the matter is, you presented a faulty comparison between Iraq and Bosnia and thus your entire argument falls apart.

The scope of DU usage between the two is orders of magnitude apart and so too are the climatic conditions. In Iraq the radioactive dust warned of in your UN report as a very real threat linked to the range of illnesses suffered by Iraqis and US veterans alike is ever present unlike the findings in the Balkans.

Add to that prior 350 metric tons the five times greater amount used again (and left again to be inhaled regularly) in Gulf War II and you have more than enough concentrated inahled particles to legitimise all claims coming from that theatre of of war.

Try again lad, or bury your head back in the sand and continue to delude yourself.

Better yet, do us all a favour and move to your supposed oasis of "democracy" and "liberation" and become a helpful guinea pig to prove your ignorant claims.

 

All you are doing is suggesting that DU levels in Iraq are higher than in Bosnia. This does does nothing to prove that DU caused a nuclear disaster and mass amounts of cancer. It only proves that DU levels were higher.

Except that would require us all to pretend that Kuwait is a faulty comparison too, which it obviously isn't. I have already provided an in depth study on Kuwait.

You are just speculating. That's why you say things like this:

Again, presenting a conclusion as fact. There is no proven linkage, and although I'm sure you will keep repeating it over and over, your saying so does not make it true and more than a photo with the caption "this baby was mutated by DU" is scientific proof that DU causes mutations in babies.

All the allegations of cancer nightmares which are being made in Iraq were made in Bosnia and Kosovo. If you are acknowledging that these were politically motivated lies in Bosnia and Kosovo, you are only acknowledging that there are people who try to create apocalyptic horror stories about DU in order to slander NATO countries, except that conveniently these same people are somehow more reliable when they make identical unsubstantiated accusations about Iraq.

You are presuming that all DU is vaporised into dust and dispersed into the air. That is false, because most rounds miss and even those that strike an armoured target are only partially vaporised. You are ignoring all of this to exaggerate the figures. Furthermore, studies show that only someone in the immediate vicinity of a vaporising DU round is likely to inhale enough to pose a health risk, and afterwards it would disperse into concentrations too low to be hazardous. That's why it can't be dispersed across the country and concentrated at the same time.

"the surface layer of soil in Kosovo contains about 300 times more natural uranium than was dispersed there by NATO weaponry."

I quoted this before. If NATO dispersed 10 tonnes of DU in Kosovo, that means there are 3,000 tonnes of more dangerous natural uranium in the surface soil of Kosovo, a country far smaller than Iraq. Why aren't all the Kosovars dead?

 

I hate to do this.

But I think you guys are a little too reactionary. Pictures of severely deformed babies = KILL EVIL ASSHOLES. I think PB's arguments have been fairly logical, while everyone else seems to be denying anything he says on gut instinct. Now, I'm not claiming that depleted uranium is or is not a threat. But look at the wide variety of birth defects on that site. . . Pitch back babies, white mummy babies, two-headed babies, babies with holes. . . wouldn't you think there would be a few characteristic defects persistant in DU poisoning? I noticed a baby with no arms, just hands connected to his torso. I know thats a common result of some other type of poisoning (to be honest, I don't remember what. I'm pretty sure it wasn't DU, correct me if I'm wrong). And while those other sites about bigfoot had articals from an unbiased third-party perspective, the one with the deformed babies sounded like a tabloid article claiming that bigfoot was finally found.

Once again, I don't KNOW if DU is a threat or not, but I think that website was a concatenation of the most appalling deformed baby pictures the author could find through a google image search. In other words, don't refer to is as evidence of Uranium's terrible properties, because, for all you know, it could easily be random deformed baby pictures found around the web. It's really not unlikely; that kind of shit happens all the time.

I admit now that I cannot verify this story firsthand, so take it for what it's worth. My grandma apparantly met a woman who was in desert storm, who was born with brown hair, and after iraq, had bright blonde hair, supposedly from the radiation. True? I dunno, but I've not known my grandma to make up shit just for the hell of it.

 

If you were aware of the effects of DU, you would understand there are no set characteristics for DU deformities. Rather, it covers a wide range of various physical deformities and/or abnormalities. It all depends on which stage of development the fetus is exposed and to what degree it is exposed.

 

I don't think it's been conclusively established what exactly the adverse reactions of DU exposure are at this point due to lack of funded government research. It has however been proven that a sudden increase of DU concentration is correlated to a decrease in enviornmental health. I think Afghanistan will prove to be sufficient grounds for case studies in the next 30 years or so, after the sudden 'mysterious' increase of DU in Afghan soil after 9/11.

 

Please provide some actual science backing this up.

 

Before we all get banned I thought I'd resurrect this DU thread.

Uranium is in the environment in the quantities created by DU. Where do you think DU comes from? From naturally occurring uranium. We are, essentially, putting it back where it came from in a less toxic form.

This article shows that natural uranium levels in Kosovo were 300 times the level of DU.

http://www.junkscience.com/jan01/uranium.htm

And the alternative to DU is explosive rounds, which cause more collateral damage, leave unexploded duds, and require more firepower to achieve the same objective. There is a cost to not using DU.