Dangerous Weapons Unsafely Used Iraq
By Kavin Paulraj
Staff Writer

The United States and Britain are using radioactive depleted uranium with their weapons in Gulf War II, just like they did in Gulf War I. The problem is, the constant reminders that Saddam breaks international law by using chemical weapons are in bad taste given the recent findings on the health effects of depleted uranium or DU.

In World War I, France used deadly gas as a weapon on the battlefield for the first time, and Germany and Britain quickly followed suit. Possibly the worst of these gasses, mustard gas, caused terrible damage but this didn't deter Italy from continuing to use gases in Ethiopia. In World War II, Winston Churchill was itching to use chemical weapons on Germany, while Adolf Hitler himself notoriously used gas to kill civilians. In Vietnam the United States was guilty of spraying the deadly Agent Orange and Napalm. There is a lesson here. The world's major military powers have always tried to use the latest technology including chemical weaponry despite its horrible effects, and the United States today is no exception.

During Gulf War I, as covered by the movie Hidden Wars of Desert Storm (a movie y'all should watch), the United States dropped an estimated 1,000 tons of depleted uranium on Iraq. The NATO bombers of Kosovo also utilized this substance, and the U.S. and British military are unabashedly using it again in Gulf War II (most noticeably when an American plane killed several British soldiers by mistake last week). Depleted uranium is a waste product from the production of Uranium 235, which is used in nuclear reactors, which means it is also mixed with plutonium and other radioactive elements. It is alloyed with titanium by the military to harden shells and rockets and render them more effective, but on impact bits of the radioactive uranium get sprayed around as oxides. This uranium gets mixed with the air, water table, plants and ultimately gets dispersed into human food cycles. Uranium has a half-life of over four billion years, so it won't be disappearing anytime soon.

Ex-director of the Pentagon's DU project Doug Rokke, who oversaw the half-hearted, under-funded DU clean-up effort after Gulf War I, has called the use of DU a "War Crime." According to Neil Mackay of the Scottish Sunday Times, "DU contaminates land, causes ill-health and cancers among the soldiers using the weapons, the armies they target and civilians, leading to birth defects in children." One Baghdad hospital recently reported that 8 babies had been born without eyes in 2 years, although this deformity, called anopthalmos, is supposed to normally occur to only 1 in 50 million babies. Annual leukemia rates have reportedly increased greatly in Iraq when compared to the years before Gulf War I, and the Iraqi Health ministry said that from 1989 to 1997 the overall cancer cases had risen 67%.

But when Iraq asked the United Nations General Assembly in 2001 to conduct an official study on the health effects of the uranium embedded in its soil, the United States embarked on a heavy lobbying campaign to defeat the study. If the study only represented scientific research, and as NATO officials claim DU does not cause cancer, then what was the U.S. afraid of? With their financial clout the United States managed to secure a narrow vote defeating the study, instead authorizing the Department of Defense to perform its own study.

The United States definitely had something to hide, and that was the damage DU has wreaked on its own soldiers, veterans of Gulf War I. Over half still have DU traces in their urine. Over 200,000 of the 696,778 U.S.Gulf War soldiers have filed for veterans benefits because of muscle pain, joint pains, fatigue and memory loss, the so-called Gulf War Syndrome which happens to also be the expected symptoms from DU contamination. Worst of all, Mackay reports that "a study of Gulf war veterans [including Britons, Canadians and other Allied soldiers] showed that 67% had children with severe illnesses, missing eyes, blood infections, respiratory problems and fused fingers." These devastating effects are comparable to the chemical weapons that the U.S. loathes.

Does the United States really care about its own soldiers, mostly working-class people including disproportionally high numbers of Latinos, Blacks and especially Native Americans, or are these soldiers just expendable pawns? According to Sadat X of Brand Nubian, in a song called "Time is Running Out" from the soundtrack of Slam (another great movie y'all should rent and watch):

"My old uncle Sam fought in the war of Vietnam
Got caught with napalm and burned off half his fuckin' arm
The government knew then about the lasting effects
So they cut off his checks, and if he wild out he'll be murdered
Or possibly herded to the VA hospital
Where they got 'em under one roof
Where they can conceal the proof"

As for other chemicals, napalm, banned by the United Nations in 1980, States was last used by the US in Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 1993. But on March 22, 2003, during the first day of US bombings, a CNN reporter 'embedded' with the military reported the following news: "It is now estimated the hill was hit so badly by missiles, artillery and by the Air Force, that they shaved a couple of feet off it. And anything that was up there that was left after all the explosions was then hit with napalm. And that pretty much put an end to any Iraqi operations up on that hill." The Pentagon later denied using napalm, but of course they would.

The U.S. has systematically tried to hide the other nerve gases it has been producing and supplying in recent years. In October 1992, an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv Israel crashed into an Amsterdam residential area. Dutch journalists who began to investigate local health complaints discovered that the plane was carrying a secret cargo of ingredients to make Sarin gas (one of the same gases Bush says Saddam has) as well as, possibly, weapons-grade plutonium. According to investigative reporter Yoichi Clark Shimatsu, "The Israeli government has claimed that the chemicals were intended for testing gas masks. But most military services use only a few grams for such purposes. The chemicals aboard the El Al jet were enough to produce 270 kilograms of sarin nerve gas - enough to annihilate the populations of many major cities."

The United States and the Bush administration are in violation of international law for producing and using illegal weapons, and to rap Iraq for using chemical weapons is hypocrtical. Rumsfeld and Co. are also guilty of a double standard, emphasizing Iraq's violations of international law but simultaneously hiding their own.