THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

THE POSTS MOSTLY BY GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION

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Boston artist Steve Mills - realistic painting

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

The Magellanic Clouds

The Magellanic Clouds


Our galaxy's brightest satellite systems are the Magellanic Clouds, obvious naked-eye objects deep in the southern skies. They are shown together here in a 45-minute exposure on Ektachrome 400 taken from Cerro Tololo, Chile (and scanned at fairly high density), using a Canon 50mm lens wide open at f/1.8 . This view spans an area about 27 by 40 degrees. It reproduces the visual extent of the Clouds well, and shows some of the texture due to star-forming regions. This film has a very strong response to the red light of H-alpha from emission nebulae, so that a few of the brightest H II regions (such as 30 Doradus in the LMC, the Tarantula Nebula) show up well.
Near the Small Cloud, what looks like a bright star is in fact the brilliant nearby globular cluster 47 Tucanae . There are, of course, many wonderful features to be found within the Clouds. For example, they have a population of very blue and very populous star clusters, sometimes called "Blue Globulars" to honor the suspicion that they might, in fact, be progenitors of what will one day resemble galactic globular clusters. Similar star clusters are found to be numerous in starburst galaxis, especially interacting and merging systems. One particularly striking example is NGC 1978 in the LMC. There are several regions for which HST images are available as pretty pictures on the Web, aside from vast number in the archive. This includes the three-ring circus of ejecta around SN 1987A (with the rings clearly distinguished and the evolution of the expanding fireball followed with WFPC2, and the blast wave dynamics and remnant chemistry explored with STIS). In addition, one can see data on other supernova remnants, such as the oxygen-rich N132D , on the immense central star cluster R136 of 30 Doradus, and the contrasting star clusters of NGC 1850 and its unnamed neighbor.
This image has been fairly popular, showing up in textbooks and even the occasional childrens' book. Unfortunately for me, NOAO at the time had a policy of taking employees' images into their files and not keeping a name associated with them... It is also available for download in a 1600x2300-pixel TIFF file (11 Mbytes).
The Magellanic Clouds continue to play a very important role in our understanding of the Universe. The fact that they are well observable only from southern latitudes was an important driver in the eastablishment of southern stations of such facilities as the Harvard College Observatory, and made looking at them a major part of the overall programs of the later, larger southern-hemisphere telescopes. They might as well have been tailor-made laboratories to test our ideas about the evolution of stars - huge collections of stars of all ages and luminosity, all at just about the same distance from us so that we can compare them to each other free of the uncertainties due to distance which enter so easily when we study various populations in our own galaxy.
It was from observations in the Magellanic Clouds that Henrietta Leavitt discovered (1912) the relation between pulsation period and average luminosity for Cepheid variable stars. These stars are intrinsically very bright so we can see them in distant galaxies; in fact, it was by identifying these in small dwarf galaxies and eventually the great spiral in Andromeda that Edwin Hubble (in a series or projects in the 1920s) went on to demonstrate the existence of other galaxies well beyond the Milky Way. The telescope bearing his name has been used to extend this technique beyond 70 million light-years distance, and the Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds are still the zero point for these distance measurements.
As irregular systems much smaller and less massive than our own Milky Way, the Clouds provide us with environments to see how their makeup and surroundings can change the life cycles of stars. Each of these has had less starbirth over time than our galaxy, and has retained a smaller mass of heavy elements produced in preceding generations of stars. This makes their stars more like those in our galaxy were early in its history, and more like what we see by looking deep into the Universe at early epochs. For example, the most massive stars blow away large amounts of gas in winds, driven as their radiation pushes on the outer gas layers - most efficiently on atoms of heavier elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, so that these winds are much less pronounced for stars in the Clouds.
The Large Cloud provided us with an unexpected boon in 1987, when the light from the explosion of a star 150,000 years earlier finally reached us. This was the nearest supernova explosion since the 18th century (and it't not completely clear that anyone actually saw that one). For the first time, we knew what star had blown up (now observing a moment of silence in honor of Sanduleak -69 202) and what kind it had been. Experiments around the world detected the fleeting neutrinos produced as a neutron star was formed in the heart of the explosion, a spectacular confirmation of what had been a purely theoretical notion. Further observations of the explosion remnant have allowed astronomers to map the three-dimensional distribution of gas and dust in its vicinity (and incidentally, find the reflected light from supernovae in the Large Cloud which would have been seen on Earth only prior to Magellan's voyage). As the blast remnant develops, the Hubble and Chandra observatories are now watching gas once expelled by the star being heated and evaporating as the explosion's cooling fireball reaches it.
The list goes on. The Large Cloud was one of the favored locations to watch for gravitational lensing by dark stellar objects in the halo of our galaxy, by the MACHO collaboration (using the Great Melbourne Telecope, since destroyed by a bush fire). These results have sharpened and deepened the mystery of dark matter in galaxies.
Finally, radio telescopes have shown that our own galaxy is bad for the health of the Magellanic Clouds. They both lie in a stream of hydrogen and fugitive stars pulled out of them by the tidal forces from the Milky Way's gravity. We see signs that some even smaller former satellite galaxies have not survived even that well, but the Clouds' epochs are numbered.
Some old books used the terms Nebecula Major and Minor to refer to them, but in contemporary usage, in all the langages I know well enough to read, they now bear Magellan's name. Naturally his crew discovered them only in the same sense that European explorers of that era discovered the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, or Hawaii, but for astronomers that was enough. Their recognition became knit into the globally-connected community of understanding and they became, in astronomers' odd way, part of our world.

Chemtrails - Shocking Phoenix Air Quality Test Results


rense.com
Chemtrails - Shocking Phoenix
Air Quality Test Results
By Ted Twietmeyer

 
 

Recently, a reader sent me data on air tests performed in the Phoenix area. These charts show a number heavy metals are present in the environment at levels far exceeding the safe toxic level standards for human health. The person who performed the air sampling had it analyzed by a professional laboratory, and has asked for confidentiality. Exact location in Phoenix of the samples collected and names involved will not be disclosed in this report.
 
I have personally seen the actual report with the name of the person who and location where air was sampled and the name of the testing laboratory, and certify that the report appears authentic.
 
Scans of the report provided to me of laboratory results were sent as files of more than 1MB in size each. Each chart has been reduced in size here to fit on your screen by this author. One chart was rotated for proper orientation but has not been altered in any other way.
 
DATA COLLECTION METHOD
 
a. Air was sampled through an air filter which operated approximately 4 hours during the day and 4 hours after sunset for 28 days.
 
b. Method used by the test laboratory was defined as "ICP scan, inorganic analysis."
 
c. Short columns in the charts indicate the maximum safe level for a given metal.
Tall columns are the measured amounts found in the filter for a given metal.
 
d. MCL = Maximum Containment Level
 
e. Chart values are shown in parts per billion. To convert any reading to parts per million (which is often more convenient for a mental comparison) simply drop three zeroes from any value shown on any chart.
 
f. I have provided the calculations on how many times each metal is over each toxic health limit. For example, in Fig. 1 barium is 278 times (or 278x) higher than the toxic health limits set by federal standards.
 
 
 
Fig 1 ­ In this chart we see that barium is 278x the toxic limit, copper is 98x the toxic limit, manganese is a staggering 5,820x the toxic limit and zinc is 593x the toxic limit
 
Noteworthy here is that manganese is an element commonly found in the environment and soil in small quantities. However, manganese is also a toxic element. This element is the black electrolyte material found in batteries (dry cell types) before the advent of alkaline batteries took over the battery market. Manganese is still used in cheap batteries and commonly provided with remote controls.
 
Barium, copper and zinc are also heavy metals. Copper and zinc are used by the human body's metabolism but only in very small amounts. Barium is a common contrast agent used for X-ray diagnostic imaging, but it is not used in powder form. It is suspended in a liquid form for contrast enhancement of X-rays to outline digestive tract soft tissue.
 
Barium and aluminum (more on aluminum later) are commonly found in chemtrail fallout. These two compounds were also described by Dr. Teller in his weather modification paper as two possible agents that could be spread by aircraft into the upper atmosphere. His intention was to use them as reflective agents for sunlight in an effort to reduce global heating.
 
However, anyone who has ever been inside a tent an hour or more after the sun comes up on a cool day knows it will get hot inside quite fast. It could be that Teller's theory is flawed, and that instead of reflecting the sunlight barium and aluminum are accelerating global warming. After several decades of chemtrail spraying weather records clearly show our planet is not cooling off. In the spring of 2008, the US army announced the problem is with the Sun and that global warming is not directly caused by civilization.
 
 
 
Fig 2 ­ Here we see that cadmium is 126x the toxic limit, chromium is 282x the toxic limit and nickel is 169x the toxic limit. Note that the permissible amount of Cadmium in the environment is equivalent to a tiny ten parts per billion.
 
These metals are commonly used for steel manufacturing and electro- plating. All are toxic in significant amounts.
 
 
 
 
Fig. 3 ­ Here aluminum is a staggering 6,400x the toxic limit, iron is 28,000x the toxic limit, magnesium is 5.3x the toxic limit, potassium is 793x the toxic limit and sodium is 15.9x the toxic limit.
 
SPECIAL TEST RESULTS FOR ALUMINUM
 
According to the reader providing the data, for unknown reasons aluminum results are commonly provided by an "out of state test lab." It's also interesting that of all the contaminants, aluminum had the highest reading of all metals over the safe toxic limit by 6,400x. I will not comment here on my opinion as to who may run that lab or the data source, but will leave that to the reader's imagination. As bad as aluminum being 6,400 times the toxic limit it may also be that the actual level of aluminum is far higher than what we see here.
 
Although physically lighter in weight than steel or other metals, aluminum is still considered a heavy metal. Like Teflon®, aluminum is very difficult to remove from the human body.
 
It is also well known that for unknown reasons, aluminum has been found in higher than normal concentrations in the brains of deceased Alzheimer's patients. It is also known that Alzheimer's disease is on the rise. Perhaps finally a connection can be made here as to the source of the illness, but more science would need to be done to confirm this. A correlation between aluminum levels in the air for various cities and Alzheimer's statistics needs to be made. This is outside the scope of this report.
 
Clearly, there must be a source for these very high levels of heavy metals in the Phoenix environment. It could very well be a direct result of chemtrail spraying, since the trails have been commonly seen in the sky over Phoenix and other cities. If these levels are elevated in Phoenix's air, it may stand to reason that the same problem is happening all over the country elsewhere. It's quite possible that these various metals are elevated in different amounts in the air over other cities. More tests like this are needed for other cities, with air sampling and analysis performed in the exact same way to allow proper correlation.
 
FUTURE TEST RESULTS
 
I strongly suspect that once this report is public and those behind the chemtrail spraying see this, obtaining similar laboratory tests in the future may become more difficult. A cover-up may even take place if certain corporate or government interests are threatened by this revelation.
 
Anyone having similar air tests performed by a laboratory in the future should stay at the test lab for as long as it takes, and watch the test results as they are obtained from start to finish. If they will not permit this then find another reputable laboratory. Leaving the laboratory and returning for the report, or accepting an email of the test results is not wise. It may result in altered or lost test results
 
These lab tests could serve as a rough guide as what to expect from air tests in other cities. For example, if aluminum or barium levels are stated as near normal for lab tests of air in other large cities, those results should be suspect. I would not recommend that an entire air filter be given to any one test lab, but rather carefully collected samples that have not touched by human hands from the filter. Laboratories only need very small samples to complete an analysis. This will allow the tests to be performed by other laboratories in the event of suspect results.
 
If anyone is interested in air collection details such as flow rate in cubic feet per minute, air filter size or other details to duplicate this test, I will try to provide them.
 
Ted Twietmeyer
www.data4science.net
tedtw@frontiernet.net
 
 
Comment
From Kimberly Dawley
 
National Institute of Health / PubMed indexed for Medline
 
Mark Purdey
 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez? cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=15082100&query_hl=2
 
1: Med Hypotheses. 2004;62(5):746-54. Links
 
 
Chronic barium intoxication disrupts sulphated proteoglycan
synthesis: a hypothesis for the origins of multiple sclerosis.
 
High level contamination by natural and industrial sources of the alkali earth metal, barium (Ba) has been identified in the ecosystems/workplaces that are associated with high incidence clustering of multiple sclerosis (MS) and other neurodegenerative diseases such as the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Analyses of ecosystems supporting the most renowned MS clusters in Saskatchewan, Sardinia, Massachusetts, Colorado, Guam, NE Scotland demonstrated consistently elevated levels of Ba in soils (mean: 1428 ppm) and vegetation (mean: 74 ppm) in relation to mean levels of 345 and 19 ppm recorded in MS-free regions adjoining. The high levels of Ba stemmed from local quarrying for Ba ores and/or use of Ba in paper/foundry/welding/textile/oil and gas well related industries, as well as from the use of Barium as an atmospheric aerosol spray for enhancing/refracting the signaling of radio/radar waves along military jet flight paths, missile test ranges, etc.
 
 
"an atmospheric aerosol spray for enhancing/refracting the signaling of radio/radar waves along military jet flight paths, missile test ranges, etc. "
 
Comment:
 
This National Institute of Health document just described the U.S. Navy barium chemtrail aerosol program called:
 
"Variable Terrain Radio Parabolic Equation"
VTRPE
sub program,
 
within the
 
"Radio Frequency Mission Planner"
 
RFMP
 
U.S. Navy warfare system
 
(The chemtrail aerosol spraying program began with the top secret U.S. Navy RFMP/VTRPE aerosol program, spraying a mixture of barium into our atmosphere from aircraft. The chemtrail program is associated with
Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.)
 
 
 
"atmospheric aerosol spray for enhancing/refracting the signalling of radio/radar waves along military jet flight paths, missile test ranges, etc."
 
(RFMP/VTRPE Barium Chemtrail aerosol was first reported in the Washington,D.C., Spotlight Newspaper / American Free Press by senior reporter Mike Blair.)
 
 
The NIH article continues:
 
It is proposed that chronic contamination of the biosystem with the reactive types of Ba salts can initiate the pathogenesis of MS; due to the conjugation of Ba with free sulphate, which subsequently deprives the endogenous sulphated proteoglycan molecules (heparan sulfates) of their sulphate co partner, thereby disrupting synthesis of S-proteoglycans and their crucial role in the fibroblast growth factor (FGF) signalling which induces oligodendrocyte progenitors to maintain the growth and structural integrity of the myelin sheath. Loss of S-proteoglycan activity explains other key facets of MS pathogenesis; such as the aggregation of platelets and the proliferation of superoxide generated oxidative stress. Ba intoxications disturb the sodium- potassium ion pump--another key feature of the MS profile. The co- clustering of various neurodegenerative diseases in these Ba- contaminated ecosystems suggests that the pathogenesis of all of these diseases could pivot upon a common disruption of the sulphated proteoglycan-growth factor mediated signalling systems. Individual genetics dictates which specific disease emerges at the end of the day.
 
PMID: 15082100 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
 
SOURCE:
 
http://www.markpurdey.com/mark_purdey.htm
 
 
 
Italian Chemtrails Lab Report
6-15-8
 
BABELFISH / ENGLISH: Chemtrails: Inquiry in Molise
 
Chemtrails: Inchiesta in Molise
Chemical analysis of the snow. 20 December 2007
Article published in the daily paper of Molise. 8 February 2008
Interview of independent investigators in the course of the television news of Telemolise
 
BABELFISH / ENGLISH: Public studies were carried out from Gianni relative to environmental conditions in the Molise region of Italy. A laboratory analysis was made and repeated private surveyings in support of the campaign against the (Chemtrails) Wakes Chemistries. The precious contribution of the independent city investigators worried for the health of their own beloveds and the entire ecosystem would fill up the first pages of national journalistic heads. A job that rewards, the will to tell the truth in spite of institutional accomplices and corruption.
I ministeri della salute e dell'ambiente utilizzano armi ambientali per ledere la salute dei propri connazionali, inconsapevoli vittime di questi crimini contro l'umanità. Vorrei ringraziare Gianni e Nicola per aver intrapreso questa battaglia locale, sperando che possa suscitare interesse fra voi lettori e fra coloro che vorranno dare risalto alla notizia. Sarebbe bello che questa indagine fosse citata nei maggiori blog relativi al problema, essa rappresenta la partecipazione attiva del cittadino contro uno Stato che ignora i diritti fondamentali dell'uomo.
BABELFISH / ENGLISH: The Ministries of Health and Atmosphere offend the health of their own compatriots, unconscious victims of these crimes against humanity. I would want Gianni and Nicholas to have undertaken this local battle, hoping that it can provoke interest between you readers and those who will want to give prominence to the news. It would be beautiful if this survey was cited in greater blogs relative to the problem. It represents the active participation of the citizen against a State that ignores the fundamental rights of all man.
I ministeri della salute e dell'ambiente utilizzano armi ambientali per ledere la salute dei propri connazionali, inconsapevoli vittime di questi crimini contro l'umanità. Vorrei ringraziare Gianni e Nicola per aver intrapreso questa battaglia locale, sperando che possa suscitare interesse fra voi lettori e fra coloro che vorranno dare risalto alla notizia. Sarebbe bello che questa indagine fosse citata nei maggiori blog relativi al problema, essa rappresenta la partecipazione attiva del cittadino contro uno Stato che ignora i diritti fondamentali dell'uomo.
http://www.ecplanet.com/canale/ecologia-6/ scie_chimiche-144/1/0/40050/it/ecplanet.rxdf
 
Lab report (see below) :
 
Alluminio = Aluminum
Bario = Barium
Silice = Silica
 

THE 'SPILL' WILL DEVASTATE AMERICA?

http://thedrcoldwellreport.blogspot.com/2010/07/biblical-catastrophe-that-will-affect.html

Friday, July 2, 2010

A 'BIBLICAL' CATASTROPHE THAT WILL AFFECT US ALL

THE 'SPILL' (UNCONTROLLED GUSH) WILL DEVASTATE AMERICA?

YES, BUT THAT'S THE IDEA
Written by a friend of mine- Larry Comstock

Hello all ... 

The potential magnitude of what is unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico simply cannot be overstated. It is far, far worse than is being admitted and what we are allowed to see is catastrophic enough.

When a major event happens we should watch and wait to see what information comes to light before jumping in with 'it's this' or 'it's that'. What appears to be one thing at the start can become something quite different a few days or weeks later.

But we now have had enough time to shake our heads at claims that this was just an 'accident' or 'incompetence'.

Beware cover stories of 'incompetence', as with 'incompetent bureaucrats', because they are so often a veil for cold calculation. The Gulf of Mexico disaster didn't just happen, it was made to happen.

Mother Jones magazine reported:
'Tony Buzbee, a lawyer representing 15 rig workers and dozens of shrimpers, seafood restaurants, and dock workers, says he has obtained a three-page signed statement from a crew member on the boat that rescued the burning rig's workers.
The sailor, who Buzbee refuses to name for fear of costing him his job, was on the ship's bridge when Deepwater Horizon installation manager Jimmy Harrell, a top employee of rig owner Transocean, was speaking with someone in Houston via satellite phone.
Buzbee told Mother Jones that, according to this witness's account, Harrell was screaming, "Are you fucking happy? Are you fucking happy? The rig's on fire! I told you this was gonna happen.'
Yes, and nothing was done because it was meant to happen.

We are well aware of Halliburton, the company headed by a key player behind the war on Iraq has since been awarded a stream of no bid government contracts in the country that has transferred staggering amounts of taxpayer money into the pig trough infested by Halliburton executives and shareholders.
Lawsuits claim that the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, 52 miles south-east of the Louisiana port of Venice on April 20th, was caused because Halliburton workers improperly capped the well - a process known as cementing. 

Just eight days before the Gulf blow-out, Halliburton also announced that it had agreed to buy Boots & Coots for $240.4 million. Who are Boots & Coots? 

The world's largest oil-spill clean-up company which also deals with oil and gas well fires and blowouts. 

What an incredibly fortunate coincidence. What a slice of luck.
Goldman Sachs sold 44 per cent of its holdings in BP, a total of 4,680,822 shares worth the best part of $300 million, in the weeks before the Gulf disaster that sent BP shares plummeting, and Tony Hayward, BP's disgraceful chief executive, is reported to have sold  his £1.4 million shares in BP a month before the explosion. The profit allowed him to pay off the mortgage on his mansion. How nice. 

As with the pre-9/11 'put options' (bets) on the stocks of American airlines falling, so we have gathering evidence that some people knew what was coming in the Gulf of Mexico from an oil rig operated by one of the biggest companies on the planet - British Petroleum. 

Merely drilling where BP did, with the known pressures from within the earth, was asking for trouble.
But what's the deal? How does an oil-poisoned ocean and devastated coastal communities (and potentially others far inland and around the world) benefit an agenda for total global control?

Oh, in so many ways.
Firstly, we need to appreciate the almost unimaginable scale of what is happening - facts that BP and the Obama-fronted American government are desperate to keep from us. 

Recent reports have claimed to quote the opinions of scientists who are too fearful to be publicly named because of the consequences for their lives and careers. 

They estimate the release of oil from under the Earth's crust at between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels a day. That is 4.2 million gallons or 15.9 million litres a daypotentially pouring into the Gulf. 

This aligns with a leaked internal BP document that says that in a 'worst-case scenario' up to 100,000 barrels a day could be released into the ocean. 

The scientists were quoted as saying that the 'sandblasting' of the oil, toxic gases, rocks and sand will be continually making a bigger hole for the oil and gas to escape. In other words, the situation is getting worse not better and it is already a catastrophe of immense proportions for those immediately affected - a number growing rapidly by the day. 

The scientists predicted that the drill hole will expand beneath the wellhead and so weaken the area on which the wellhead stands until it is pushed off the hole to allow the oil to flow with no restrictions at all.

Should that happen the consequences are unthinkable.
The scientists said that billions of barrels of oil will be released before the pressure in the enormous cavity five miles below the seabed calms and finds balance and then water would pour into the cavity to replace the oil. 

They said that the temperature at that depth, some 400 degrees, will turn the water to steam creating a pressure that will lift the ocean floor. They estimate that this will create a tsunami of between 20 to 80 feet, or even higher, that will bring the poisoned ocean ashore to leave great tracts of land uninhabitable and without life. 

American investigative journalist, Wayne Madsen, writes that satellite imagery withheld by the Obama administration shows that 'under the gaping chasm spewing oil at an ever-alarming rate is a cavern estimated to be around the size of Mount Everest'. This information, he says, has been given an almost national security-level classification to keep it from the public.

Now, we have heard many doomsday scenarios before in many circumstances that have not manifested, but even if such shocking predictions do not happen on that staggering scale there is no question that the world changed on April 20th 2010 when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded.
Just a look at the map of the Gulf region reveals the potential effect on enormous numbers of people in Mexico, the Caribbean and the southern states of America with so many living on or close to the coastline ...
But the scale and potential of what we are seeing goes way beyond even the Gulf. The scientists mentioned earlier say that the oil has now reached the Gulf Stream, with a current at least four times stronger than in the Gulf of Mexico itself, and this could help to direct the oil all over the world in the next 18 months. 

It is the Gulf Stream that keeps the United Kingdom and parts of Europe much warmer than they would otherwise be at their latitude, but it will also act as a oceanic conveyor belt delivering the oil from the Gulf Mexico across the Atlantic.
The toxic oil and gas are being added to by the lethal 'dispersant' used by BP to (theoretically, for public consumption only), 'disperse the oil'. They are using Corexit 9500 and Corexit 9527A which are so toxic they have been banned in Europe, although Europe is likely to get them anyway via the Gulf Stream.

Corexit is manufactured by a corporation called Nalco, once part of ExxonMobil, and the current leadership includes executives from Exxon and BP. TheEuropean Union Times said of Corexit:
'A dire report prepared for President Medvedev by Russia's Ministry of Natural Resources is warning today that the British Petroleum (BP) oil and gas leak in the Gulf of Mexico is about to become the worst environmental catastrophe in all of human history threatening the entire eastern half of the North American continent with "total destruction" ...
... Russian scientists are basing their apocalyptic destruction assessment due to BP's use of millions of gallons of the chemical dispersal agent known as Corexit 9500 which is being pumped directly into the leak of this wellhead over a mile under the Gulf of Mexico waters and designed, this report says, to keep hidden from the American public the full, and tragic, extent of this leak that is now estimated to be over 2.9 million gallons a day.'
You might think at first hearing that it is blatantly crazy to use Corexit when there are some 12 other less toxic and more effective dispersants approved by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Two of those on the EPA list 'were found to be 100 percent effective on Gulf of Mexico crude, while the two Corexit products rated 56 percent and 63 percent effective'.
Well, yes, it is crazy, these people are crazy, but there is method in their madness, as we will see.
Killing the sea to 'save' the sea.
Corexit also causes the oil to drop below the surface so giving a false impression of how much oil is in the water.
Environmental engineer Joe Taylor has publicly warned BP to stop using Corexit immediately or everything in the sea is going to die. It is worth watching this short report on his findings before we move on, because we are getting to the prime question - why is BP doing everything it can to cause maximum destruction.  (If the picture did not transfer the link is still here.) 
The key words spoken by Joe Taylor were when he said that if he knew the information about the effect of Corexit then so did BP - 'They have a lot of chemists who are a lot smarter than I am, and they know this.'
Why would BP be knowingly causing as much environmental devastation as possible? The answer to this question is the same as the answer to these:
Why was the booming operation supposed to protect the beaches from the oil so pathetic and 'inept', as exposed here by an expert ... BP Fails Booming School 101? (link included below)
Why is the BP 'clean-up' operation so disorganised, unmotivated and basically non-existent that BP employees are working for little more than two hours a day on beach cleaning, as exposed here in The Short Film BP Doesn't Want You To See ...?
The answer to all those questions and so many more is this: we are looking at an environmental 9/11 that was made to happen and those behind this carnage want it to be as extreme as possible to get maximum impact in terms of their goals of control and chaos.
A vacuous, ludicrous and mendacious man called Bob Dudley, the BP managing director, said from the comfort and distance of Washington DC that 'for BP, our intent is to restore the Gulf the way it was before it happened.'
Meanwhile, back here on Planet Earth, life as they have known it is already over for the coastal communities of the Gulf region with the tourist and fishing industries devastated or destroyed. People are now being forced to earn a livelihood working on 'clean-ups' for the same BP that has wreaked this havoc on their lives and families.

What's more, they are told by this merciless corporation that they must work amid shocking levels of toxicity without respirators because they don't want to 'alarm the public' by seeing such pictures - the same reason why BP has basically introduced its own martial law in the region to stop the full and horrific extent of the disaster and its global potential coming to light. 

The health consequences for those 'clean-up' workers already exposed to this deeply toxic environment without protection will already be horrific, as we shall see. But BP couldn't shiv a git - just as the US government and the New York authorities couldn't give a shit about the rescue workers on the toxic World Trade Center site after 9/11. 

Already, even the (pathetic) mainstream media has reported that 70 people in Louisiana have been admitted to hospital with symptoms of toxin poisoning. Many beaches have been closed because of toxins in the air and water and people are reporting breathing problems and skin rashes and lesions.

One report said that crops as far north as North Carolina have been damaged by toxic rain, while oil has been falling in the rain near the Louisiana coast.
This is only the beginning, too, as the oil continues to gush in ever-greater amounts to be met by the lethal Corexit in ever-greater amounts, and that whole deadly toxic cocktail is going to fall as rain on communities far from the coast. 

Add to that the hurricanes, tidal surges and other weather phenomena and you can understand why those nameless scientists are writing off land up to 200 miles from the shore as becoming too toxic to support life, let alone a human society. See the story about Nigeria at the end of this article for some of the consequences that oil pollution can bring.

Two other effects of so much oil in the Gulf of Mexico could be to heat up the sea, so causing more hurricanes and super-storms, and making the process of producing rain from seawater less efficient, so affecting rainfall on the land. 

The major target of this engineered horror is America and its economy - the powers that be are seeking to destroy the United States militarily and financially to bring this 'superpower' to its knees so it can be absorbed into a world government dictatorship via a North American Union.
BP has said that massive quantities of methane are leaking with the oil, along with large mounts of lethally toxic hydrogen sulfide, benzene and methylene chloride. This has the potential to trigger mass evacuations.
John Kessler, oceanography professor at Texas A&M University, discovered on a ten-day research expedition what he called 'astonishingly high' levels of methane within five miles of the stricken rig - 'an incredible amount' - and maybe as much as a million times greater than normal.
It is very sobering to look again at the towns and cities of the Gulf coast given a report by investigative journalist, Wayne Madson, that quotes 'sources' inside the US government, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the US Army Corps of Engineers as predicting a 'dead zone' within 200 miles of the rig caused by a combination of methane and toxic rain containing Corexit.
Madsen says:
'Plans are being put in place for the mandatory evacuation of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Mandeville, Hammond, Houma, Belle Chase, Chalmette, Slidell, Biloxi, Gulfport, Pensacola, Hattiesburg, Mobile, Bay Minette, Fort Walton Beach, Panama City, Crestview, and Pascagoula.'
Imagine evacuating that many people and maybe more of the tens of millions of people who live on or within 200 miles of the Gulf coast, but then that would be just the scale of disaster and compulsion that would allow FEMA, a major asset of the Control System to impose its long-planned martial law on enormous numbers of people.
FEMA and the military have been preparing for this for years with exercises for just such a situation involving oil pollution, but all records of this were expunged from FEMA-related websites in the weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion.
Anything that affects America on such a scale would have a knock-on effect economically across the world - another bonus for the cabal which is seeking to create maximum chaos on every front to instigate the global problems to which it will offer its global solutions - a world political and military dictatorship.

INCREDIBLE! Spill cover-up goes Orwellian

First Amendment suspended in the Gulf of Mexico as spill cover-up goes Orwellian


(NaturalNews - http://www.naturalnews.com/029130_Gulf_of_Mexico_censorship.html)
As CNN is now reporting, the U.S. government has issued a new rule that would make it a felony crime for any journalist, reporter, blogger or photographer to approach any oil cleanup operation, equipment or vessel in the Gulf of Mexico. Anyone caught is subject to arrest, a $40,000 fine and prosecution for a federal felony crime.

CNN reporter Anderson Cooper says, "A new law passed today, and back by the force of law and the threat of fines and felony charges, ... will prevent reporters and photographers from getting anywhere close to booms and oil-soaked wildlife just about any place we need to be. By now you're probably familiar with cleanup crews stiff-arming the media, private security blocking cameras, ordinary workers clamming up, some not even saying who they're working for because they're afraid of losing their jobs."

Watch the video clip yourself at NaturalNews.TV: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=203

The rule, of course, is designed to restrict the media's access to cleanup operations in order to keep images of oil-covered seabirds off the nation's televisions. With this, the Gulf Coast cleanup operation has now entered a weird Orwellian reality where the news is shaped, censored and controlled by the government in order to prevent the public from learning the truth about what's really happening in the Gulf.

The war is on to control your mind

If all this sounds familiar, it's because the U.S. government uses this same tactic during every war. The first casualty of war, as they say, is the truth. There are lots of war images the government doesn't want you to see (like military helicopter pilots shooting up Reuters photographers while screaming "Yee-Haw!" over the comm radios), and there are other images they do want you to see ("surgical strike" explosions from "smart" bombs, which makes it seem like the military is doing something useful). So war reporting is carefully monopolized by the government to deliver precisely the images they want you to see while censoring everything else.

Now the same Big Brother approach is being used in the Gulf of Mexico: Criminalize journalists, censor the story and try to keep the American people ignorant of what's really happening. It's just the latest tactic from a government that no longer even recognizes the U.S. Constitution or its Bill of Rights. Because the very first right is Freedom of Speech, which absolutely includes the right to walk onto a public beach and take photographs of something happening out in the open, on public waters. It is one of the most basic rights of our citizens and our press.

But now the Obama administration has stripped away those rights, transforming journalists into criminals. Now, we might expect something like this from Chavez, or Castro or even the communist leaders of China, but here in the United States, we've all been promised we lived in "the land of the free." Obama apparently does not subscribe to that philosophy anymore (if he ever did).

So how does criminalizing journalists equate to "land of the free?" It doesn't, obviously. Forget freedom. (Your government already has.) This is about controlling your mind to make sure you don't visually see the truth of what the oil industry has done to your oceans, your shorelines and your beaches. This is all about keeping you ignorant with a total media blackout of the real story of what's happening in the Gulf.

The real story, you see, is just too ugly. And the government has fracked up the cleanup effort to such a ridiculous extent that instead of the "transparency" they once promised, they're now resorting to the threat of arrest for all journalists who try to get close enough to cover the story.

Yes, this is happening right now in America. This isn't a hoax. I know, it sounds more like something you might hear about in Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela or some other nation run by dictators. But now it's happening right here in the USA.

As Anderson Cooper reported on CNN:

"Now the government is getting in on the act. Despite what Admiral Thad Allen promised about transparency just nearly a month ago.

Thad Allen: "The media will have uninhibited access anywhere we're doing operations..."

Anderson Cooper: The Coast Guard today announced new rules keeping photographers, reporters and anyone else from coming with 65 feet of any response vessel or booms out on the water or on beaches. What this means is that oil-soaked birds on an island surrounded by a boom, you can't get close enough to take that picture. Shot of oil on beaches with booms? Stay 65 feet away. Pictures of oil-soaked booms uselessly laying in the water because they haven't been collected like they should? You can't get close enough to see that. Believe me, that is out there. But you only know that if you get close to it, and now you can't without permission. Violators could face a fine of $40,000 and Class D felony charges."


See the video yourself at: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=203

Welcome to the (censored) club

All I can say to CNN is: Welcome to the club! This kind of censorship, intimidation and tyranny has been going on for decades in the field of health, where the Orwellian FDA has treated the entire U.S. public to a nationwide blackout on truthful health information about healing foods and nutritional supplements. CNN has never covered that story, by the way. Most of the mainstream media has, in fact, gone right along with censorship of truthful health information by the FDA and FTC.

Now they're suddenly crying wolf. But where was the media when the FDA was raiding nutritional supplement companies and arresting people who dared to sell healing foods with honest descriptions about how they might help protect your health? The media went right along with the cover-up and never bothered to even tell its viewers a cover-up was taking place.

You see, even CNN is willing to tolerate some Orwellian censorship, as long as its advertisers are okay with it. The only reason they're talking about censorship in the Gulf of Mexico right now is because oil companies don't influence enough of their advertising budget to yank the story.

Censorship is not okay in a free society

I like the fact that CNN is finding the courage to speak up now about this censorship in the Gulf, but I wish they wouldn't stay silent on the other media blackouts in which they have long participated. Media censorship is bad for any nation, and it should be challenged regardless of the topic at hand. When the media is not allowed to report the truth on a subject -- any subject! -- the nation suffers some loss as a result.

Without the light of media scrutiny, corporations and government will get away with unimaginable crimes against both humanity and nature. That's what's happening right now in the Gulf of Mexico: A crime against nature.

Obama doesn't want you to see that crime. He's covering it up to the benefit of BP. He's keeping you in the dark by threatening reporters and photographers with arrest. How's that for "total transparency?"

The only thing transparent here is that President Barack Obama has violated his own oath of office by refusing to defend the Constitution. By any honest measure, in fact, these actions, which are endorsed by the White House, stand in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution. And that means this new censorship rule in the Gulf, which suspends the First Amendment, is unconstitutional. It also means those who decided on this rule are enemies of freedom.

They are the ones who should be arrested and hauled off to federal prison, not the CNN reporters who are trying to cover this story.

The seeds of tyranny

The loss of life in the Gulf of Mexico isn't the only catastrophe taking place here, you see: Now we're losing our freedoms while our government tries to intentionally blind us all from the truth of what's happening on our own public beaches.

When those who seek truth are branded criminals by the government, it is only a matter of time before that government expands its criminalization labeling to include anyone who disagrees with it. These are the seeds of tyranny, and Obama is planting them at your doorstep right now.

What BP did to the Gulf Coast, Obama is now doing to your freedom.

DEPLETED URANIUM

DEPLETED URANIUM
http://www.bollyn.com/depleted-uranium

How Depleted Uranium Kills U.S. Soldiers - The Tragedy of Dustin Brim


January 26, 2006
The widespread use of depleted uranium weapons in Iraq has led to a much higher death rate among U.S. military personnel than the Pentagon is willing to admit. The tragedy of Dustin Brim is the untold story of one such casualty.
ORMOND BEACH, Florida - An alarmingly high percentage of U.S. military personnel who have served in Iraq have been afflicted by a variety of health problems commonly known as Gulf War Syndrome. Exposure to uranium spread through the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons is thought to be the primary cause of the high rate of chronic ailments and mortality among Gulf War vets.
One of the first published researchers of Gulf War Syndrome, Dr. András Korényi-Both told me in 2004 that nearly 30 percent of Gulf War veterans from the first invasion of Iraq were afflicted with chronic health problems, a disability rate 5 times that of the Viet Nam War.
While initial casualties from the first U.S. invasion of Iraq were light, long-term casualties from the 1991 war ultimately exceeded 30 percent, according to Terrell E. Arnold, former Chairman of the Department of International Studies at the National War College. The long-term casualty rate from the current war in Iraq, Arnold says, is likely to be much higher.
"Gulf War II is and has been a far more hairy experience," Arnold wrote. "Fighting has been heavier and much more prolonged. Many tons more of depleted uranium weapons have been used, along with other toxic devices. Thus, a long term casualty rate for American forces of 40 to 50 percent appears realistic."
Indeed, as I discovered in 2004, 40 percent of the soldiers in one unit were found to have malignant cancerous growths when they returned from a tour of a year and a few months in Iraq.
András Korényi-Both said the unit, which his son belonged to, had recently returned from Iraq, where it had taken part in the initial assault on Baghdad. In the unit of 20 soldiers, 8 men were found to have "malignant growths" when they returned to the U.S., he said.
Official statistics of killed and wounded from the 15-year long war against Iraq do not reflect the veterans whose service related injuries only become apparent after they return from Iraq. The official death rate of those killed and wounded in Iraq does not include these vets, many of whom suffer slow and painful deaths as a direct result of their service. Dustin Brim was one of them.
"In the end, will we be able to say that the outcome was worth 60-70,000 damaged, distorted or destroyed American lives, to say nothing of the effects on their families and communities?" Arnold asks in his article "Seeing Our Way Out of Iraq."
As I listened to Lori Brim, a single mother who lost her 22-year-old son in the war in Iraq, where he served as an U.S. Army mechanic, to ask whether she thought the outcome was worth her sacrifice never even entered my mind. The depth of her tragedy made such a question seem cruel and absurd.
Lori lost Dustin, her only child, when he died at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. on September 24, 2004, after 6 months of fighting what was eventually diagnosed as Non-Hodgkins Diffuse Large Cell B Type Lymphoma. When Lori had asked the doctors how her young, healthy and strong son had contracted cancer all they would say was "bad luck."
Her case worker and nurses at the hospital were more forthcoming with information. At different times during the six months nurses would take Lori aside and urge her to do some research on DU. The nurses' comments were "off the record," Lori said.
Asked whose idea it was for Dustin, a 20-year old from Daytona Beach with a passion for cars, to join the army in the summer of 2002, Lori said, "It was mine." Dustin had not wanted to join the army, his mother said.
But Dustin was never meant to be in a war zone, she added. The U.S. Army recruiter had promised her, that as her only child, he would not be sent to war.
As a single mother, Lori had approached an army recruiter out of concern for the well-being of her son. Although neither she nor Dustin's father have military backgrounds, Lori thought the army would be good for her son by giving him some needed discipline and direction.
Mechanically inclined, Dustin became an army mechanic, an E-4 Specialist serving in the 1st Maintenance Company under the 541st Maintenance Battalion from Fort Riley, Kansas, and was deployed to Iraq in August 2003.
Dustin's work in Iraq involved working on disabled army vehicles, including tanks, which his unit repaired and retrieved, or if damaged beyond repair, destroyed with explosives on the spot. Most of these vehicles, having been in the battlefield, would have been heavily laden with DU and other toxins.
Dr. Doug Rokke, former director of the U.S. Army's Depleted Uranium Project, said that mechanics like Dustin are not properly prepared or protected to be working on DU contaminated vehicles. Lori said that her son had not even been equipped with a pair of gloves, not to speak of a mask or protective garb. The army's failure to inform and instruct its personnel about the dangers of DU exposure is one of Dr. Rokke's main concerns.
At Christmas 2003, Dustin surprised his parents with an unexpected visit after only 4 months in Iraq. It was last time Lori would see her son in a healthy condition. A photo of Dustin taken in Iraq in February 2004 shows him smiling and strong.
In early March, however, Dustin began to complain of abdominal pains. He went to the doctors on his base 11 times during the month complaining of severe pain and constipation that lasted for weeks. He was sent back to his job and told to "work it out."
During the last two weeks of March, he wrote to his mother telling her that he could not keep anything down and that his pain was so persistent and unbearable he was afraid he would lose focus and let his buddies down.
On March 31st he passed out from pain and breathlessness. His sergeant happened to be with him and took him to the doctors who thought he had gall bladder problems and sent him to the hospital in Baghdad.
The next day, April 1st, was Dustin's 22nd birthday. After being assessed and heavily drugged with morphine, the doctors allowed him to call home to tell his mother that was very ill with cancer.
In Baghdad, the doctors had discovered that Dustin had a huge cancerous tumor on his esophagus, which severely restricted his breathing, a collapsed lung, the loss of a kidney, numerous blood clots and a tumor progressing on his liver.
The doctors could not believe that Dustin had been turned away so many times for medical help and still manage to endure as long as he did in his magnitude of pain while carrying an 80-pound pack on his back, his mother said.
Dustin was flown to the military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and then on to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.
From April through September, Dustin underwent 6 different types of chemo-therapy. Each therapy seemed to work only for a few days after which the cancer returned with a vengeance. On September 24, 2004, Dustin succumbed to the cancer that had affected every organ in his body except for his heart and brain as the autopsy later revealed.
"I knew from the start that Dustin had been either exposed to something in Iraq or his immune system had been affected by the vaccines they had to take," Lori said. "The doctors would not comment on my thoughts but at the end they agreed they had never seen anything like it."
The nurses, however, told Lori to keep researching DU. "Dustin is not the first and he won't be the last," one nurse told her confidentially.
"The medical profession is the most controlled group in the U.S. in order to protect the nuclear weapons and nuclear power programs," Lauren Moret, a Berkeley-based radiation expert said about the silence of the doctors. The gagging of medical professionals has been achieved through a piece of legislation called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), under which a doctor or nurse can be fined and imprisoned for disclosing health information to another person, even a family member.
"The story of Dustin Brim is just one more avoidable tragedy of our insane use of uranium munitions," Rokke said.
"When I lost Dustin, I lost myself," Lori said. "This is something that should not have happened.
"There is something going on but no one wants to talk about it on the record. I am sharing my son's story with you in the hope that perhaps it will make a difference."

Dustin Brim, 21, of Daytona Beach, Florida, in Iraq in February 2004. Within two months of this photo, Dustin would be severely afflicted with massive cancerous tumors that would prevent him from breathing and eating normally. Within seven months he would succumb to lymphoma at Walter Reed Hospital, age 22, an unnecessary and tragic death from depleted uranium poisoning. 

Dr. Doug Rokke, former director of the U.S. Army's Depleted Uranium Project, is pushing for the Army to comply with its own regulations on DU. One of the key points he makes is that U.S. military personnel are not informed or protected from the dangers of DU exposure.
The photo below shows how Dustin Brim and his fellow soldiers worked with contaminated combat vehicles without a stitch of protection.  Working with DU-laden vehicles without having "moon-suit" protective garb is certain to cause delayed casualties and long-term health problems.
As Dustin lay in Walter Reed Hospital dying of cancer, a nurse told Mrs. Brim to research depleted uranium effects on human health.  "He isn't the first and he won't be the last," she told his mother.

See also:

How Depleted Uranium Particles Damage Human Health


January 7, 2005

Depleted uranium weapons, and the untold misery they wreak on mankind, are taboo subjects in the mainstream media. This exclusive report should break the media embargo imposed on the American people.

Despite being a grossly under-reported subject in the mainstream, there is intense public interest in depleted uranium (DU) and the damage it inflicts on humankind and the environment.

While this writer has been actively investigating DU weapons and how they contribute to Gulf War Syndrome, the corporate-controlled press ignores the illegal use of DU and its long-lasting effects on the health of veterans and the public.

In August 2004, my ground-breaking four-part series on DU weapons and the long-term health risks they pose to soldiers and civilians alike was published in a Washington, D.C. based newspaper. Information provided to me by experts and scientists, and the articles that were published threreafter, have increased public awareness of how exposure to small particles of DU can severely affect human health.

Leuren Moret, a Berkeley-based geo-scientist with expertise in atmospheric dust, corresponds with me on DU issues. Recently Moret provided a copy of her letters to a British radiation biologist, Dr. Chris Busby, about how nanometer size particles—less than one-tenth of a micron and smaller—of DU once inhaled or absorbed into the body, can cause long-term damage to one’s health.

Busby is one of the founders of Green Audit, a British organization that monitors companies “whose activities might threaten the environment and health of citizens.”

Moret’s writings were meant to assist Busby in a legal case being heard in the High Court in London where a former defense worker, Richard David, 49, is suing Normal Air Garrett, Ltd., an aircraft parts company now owned by Honeywell Aerospace, claiming exposure to DU on the job has made his life a “living hell.”

David worked as a component fitter on fighter planes and bombers but had to quit due to health problems. He says he developed a cough within weeks of starting work.

Today, David suffers from a variety of symptoms like those known as Gulf War Syndrome, including respiratory and kidney problems, bowel conditions and painful joints. Medical tests reveal mutations to his DNA and damage to his chromosomes, which, he says, could only have been caused by ionizing radiation. He has also been diagnosed with a terminal lung condition.

Honeywell denies DU was ever used at the plant in Yeovil, Somerset, where David worked for 10 years until 1995. David claims that DU’s existence at the plant was denied because it is an official secret.

David has asked the High Court for more time to gather evidence. The hearing is due to resume in April. “I don’t have any legal representation,” David said, “so I am representing myself. It is a real David versus Goliath case.

“I am confident I will win. I hope to set a precedent for other cases of people who have suffered from the effects of depleted uranium,” he said.

Moret’s letters on the particle effect of DU is based on research done by Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist and former scientist with the Manhattan Project and the National Laboratory at Livermore, Calif. Fulk, who has developed a “particle theory” about how DU nano-particles affect human DNA, donates his time and expertise to help bring information about DU to the public.

Asked about Fulk’s particle theory, Busby said it is “quite sound.”

“DU is much more dangerous than they say,” Busby added. “I’ve always said that it contributes significantly to Gulf War Syndrome.”

When Moret’s correspondence to Dr. Busby was posted on the Internet over the New Year’s holiday under the title “How Depleted Uranium Weapons Are Killing Our Troops,” some 6,000 people read the letter in the first two days. The following Monday, a producer from BBC’s Panorama program contacted Moret to arrange an interview.

If the BBC follows up with an investigation on the health effects of DU, it may be hard for the U.S. media to maintain their cover-up. More than 500,000 “Gulf War Era” vets currently receive disability compensation, many of them for a variety of symptoms generally referred to as Gulf War Syndrome. Experts blame DU for many of these symptoms.

“The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse,” Robert C. Koehler of the Chicago-based Tribune Media Services wrote in an article about DU weapons entitled “Silent Genocide.”

“DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe it or touch it; the substance also alters one’s genetic code,” Koehler wrote. “The Pentagon’s response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is its moral co-conspirator.”
U.S. GOVERNMENT KNOWS

The U.S. government has known for at least 20 years that DU weapons produce clouds of poison gas on impact. These clouds of aerosolized DU are laden with billions of toxic sub-micron sized particles. A 1984 Department of Energy conference on nuclear airborne waste reported that tests of DU anti-tank missiles showed that at least 31 percent of the mass of a DU penetrator is converted to nano-particles on impact. In larger bombs the percentage of aerosolized DU increases to nearly 100 percent, Fulk told me.

DU is harmful in three ways, according to Fulk: “Chemical toxicity, radiological toxicity and particle toxicity.”

Particles in the nano-meter (one billionth of a meter) range are a “new breed of cat,” Moret wrote. Because the size of the nano-particles allows them to pass freely throughout the organism and into the nucleus of its cells, exposure to nano-particles causes different symptoms than exposure to larger particles of the same substance.

Internalized DU particles, Fulk said, act as “a non-specific catalyst” in both “nuclear and non-nuclear” ways. This means that the uranium particle can affect human DNA and RNA because of both its chemical and radiological properties. This is why internalized DU particles cause “many, many diseases,” Fulk said.

Asked if this is how DU causes severe birth defects, Fulk said, “Yes.”
MILITARY AWARE

The military is aware of DU’s harmful effects on the human genetic code. A 2001 study of DU’s effect on DNA done by Dr. Alexandra C. Miller for the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., indicates that DU’s chemical instability causes 1 million times more genetic damage than would be expected from its radiation effect alone, Moret wrote.

Dr. Miller requested that questions be sent in writing and copied to a military spokesman. She did tell me that it should be noted that her studies showing that DU is “neoplastically transforming and genotoxic” are based on in vitro cellular research.

Studies have shown that inhaled nano-particles are far more toxic than micro-sized particles of the same basic chemical composition. British toxicopathologist Vyvyan Howard has reported that the increased toxicity of the nano-particle is due to its size.

For example, when mice were exposed to virus-size particles of Teflon (0.13 microns) in a University of Rochester study, there were no ill effects. But when mice were exposed to nano-particles of Teflon for 15 minutes, nearly all the mice died within 4 hours.

“Exposure pathways for depleted uranium can be through the skin, by inhalation, and ingestion,” Moret wrote.
“Nano-particles have high mobility and can easily enter the body. Inhalation of nano-particles of depleted uranium is the most hazardous exposure, because the particles pass through the lung-blood barrier directly into the blood.

“When inhaled through the nose, nano-particles can cross the olfactory bulb directly into the brain through the blood brain barrier, where they migrate all through the brain,” she wrote. “Many Gulf era soldiers exposed to depleted uranium have been diagnosed with brain tumors, brain damage and impaired thought processes. Uranium can interfere with the mitochondria, which provide energy for the nerve processes, and transmittal of the nerve signal across synapses in the brain.

“Damage to the mitochondria, which provide all energy to the cells and nerves, can cause chronic fatigue syndrome, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and Hodgkin’s disease.”

 

Marion Fulk (left) a nuclear physical chemist and former scientist with the Manhattan Project and the National Laboratory at Livermore, California, with Christopher BollynPhoto - Helje Kaskel

Pentagon Suppresses Truth about Dangers of Depleted Uranium


August 31, 2004

Poisonous Uranium Munitions Threaten Global Health

The use of weapons containing uranium violates existing laws and customs of war and “constitutes a war crime or crime against humanity,” according to a leading U.S. expert on humanitarian law.

Karen Parker, a San Francisco-based expert in armed conflict law, told American Free Press that the use of radioactive uranium weapons violates the Hague and Geneva Conventions as well as the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980.
Although no treaty specifically bans DU weapons, they are illegal “de facto and de jure,” Parker said. However, a class action lawsuit by victims of DU weapons will probably be required for a court to ban their use, she said.
‘ILLEGAL FOR ALL COUNTRIES'
“A weapon made illegal only because there is a specific treaty banning it is only illegal for countries that ratify such a treaty,” Parker wrote in a paper, “The Illegality of DU Weaponry,” presented at the International Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany last October. However, “a weapon that is illegal by operation of existing law is illegal for all countries.”
Parker, a delegate to the UN Commission on Human Rights since 1982, provides legal advice to the UN on DU weapons and other matters of humanitarian law.
“DU weaponry cannot possibly be legal in light of existing law,” Parker said.
“In evaluating whether a particular weapon is legal or illegal when there is not a specific treaty, the whole of humanitarian law must be consulted,” Parker wrote.
According to humanitarian law, the illegality of DU weapons is based on four criteria:
The first is the “territorial” test. Weapons may only be used in the legal field of battle. Weapons may not have an adverse effect off the legal field of battle.
The second is the “temporal” test, meaning that weapons may only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. A weapon that continues to act after the war violates this criterion.
The territorial and temporal criteria are meant to prevent weapons from being “indiscriminate” in their effect.
The third rule is that a weapon cannot be unduly inhumane. The Hague Convention of 1907 prohibits “poison or poisoned weapons.” Because DU weapons are radioactive and chemically toxic, as the military knows, they fit the definition of poisonous weapons banned under the Hague Convention.
WHAT THE MILITARY KNOWS
The Defense Department is well aware of the toxic effects of DU. In an official presentation by U.S. Army Reserve Col. J. Edgar Wakayama at Fort Belvoir, Va. on Aug. 20, 2002, the dangers of exposure to DU were clearly spelled out:
“Inhalation exposure has a major effect on the lungs and thoracic lymph nodes,” Wakayama read from a slide. “The alpha particle taken inside the body in large doses is hazardous, producing cell damage and cancer. Lung cancer is well documented,” he noted.
“Urine samples containing uranium are mutagenic [capable of producing mutation]” and “the cultured human stem bone cell line with DU also transformed the cells to become carcinogenic,” Wakayama read.
DU deposited in the bone causes DNA damage because of the effects of the alpha particles, Wakayama stressed. One gram of DU emits 12,000 high-energy alpha particles per second.
The fourth rule for weapons, the “environmental” test, says that weapons cannot have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment.
Wakayama advised, “Heavily contaminated soil should be removed if the area is to be populated with civilians.”
Wakayama described the dangers to children playing in contaminated soil and the leaching of DU into local water and food supplies.
DU FAILS ALL LEGAL CRITERIA
DU weaponry fails all four tests, Parker says. Because it cannot be contained to the battlefield, it fails the territorial test. Airborne DU particles are carried far from the battlefield affecting distant civilian populations and neighboring countries.
Because the uranium dispersed on the ground and in the air cannot be “turned off” when the war is over, DU fails the temporal test.
“The airborne particles have a half-life of billions of years and have the potential to keep killing . . . long after the war is over,” Parker wrote.
“The status of DU as nuclear, radiological, poison or conventional does not change its illegality. When the weapons test is applied to DU weaponry, it fails,” she concluded.
DU weapons fail the humaneness test because of how they kill, Parker says, “by cancer, kidney disease etc, long after the hostilities are over.
“DU is inhumane because it can cause birth defects such as cranial facial anomalies, missing limbs, grossly deformed and non-viable infants and the like, thus affecting children . . . born after the war is over,” Parker said.
“The teratogenic [interfering with normal embryonic development] nature of DU weapons and the possible burdening of the gene pool of future generations raise the possibility that the use of DU weaponry is genocide,” she wrote. “Willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health” of civilians constitutes a grave breach of the fourth Geneva Convention, and this is “exactly what DU weapons do.”
Finally, because DU weapons cannot be used without unduly damaging the natural environment, they fail the fourth rule for weapons, the environmental test.
“No available technology can significantly change the chemical and radiological toxicity of DU,” the Army Environmental Policy Institute reported to Congress in 1994. “These are intrinsic properties of uranium.”
“Regarding environmental damages, users of these weapons are obligated to carry out an effective cleanup,” Parker wrote. “The cost of legal claims and environmental cleanup for the gulf wars alone could be staggering.”
“Use of DU weaponry necessarily violates the ‘grave breach' provision of the Geneva Conventions, and hence its use constitutes a war crime or crime against humanity,” Parker concluded.
Questions regarding the legality of DU weapons were sent in writing to the Pentagon's appointed spokesman on DU matters, James Turner.
Turner told AFP that he was “not qualified” to answer such questions.
By press time the Pentagon had not responded to repeated requests for information.

Depleted Uranium Stricken Vets Denied Care


August 20, 2004
Pentagon Hides DU Dangers to Deny Medical Care to Vets

Far from the radioactive battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan , another war is being waged. This war, over the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons, is being fought between the military top brass and the men who understand the dangers of DU: former military doctors and nuclear scientists.

This war is for the truth about uranium weapons, and the consequences of their use, and has been waged for more than 13 years—since the U.S. government first used DU weapons against Iraq . Most Americans, however, are unaware of this historic struggle, because the Pentagon has used its power to prevent information about DU from reaching the public.
John Hanchette, editor of USA Today from 1991 to 2001, in a recent interview with anti-DU activist Leuren Moret, said he had written several news stories about the effects of DU on gulf wars veterans. Every time he was ready to publish a story about the devastating illnesses afflicting soldiers, however, the Pentagon called USA Today and pressured him not to publish the story. Hanchette was eventually replaced as editor and now teaches journalism to college students.
Dr. Doug Rokke, 37-year Army veteran and former director of the Army's Depleted Uranium Project, has become an outspoken “warrior for peace” in the war against DU weapons. Rokke is fighting for medical care for all people exposed to DU: active soldiers, veterans and civilians, including Iraqis, and for “remediation” or cleansing of all DU-contaminated land.
“Anyone who demands medical care and environmental remediation faces ongoing and blatant retaliation,” Rokke told AFP. “Anybody who speaks up—their career ends.”
During Gulf War I, Rokke was theater health physicist with the 12th Preventive Medicine Command professional staff and served on three special operations teams. Rokke and members of his teams were exposed to large amounts of uranium during recovery of U.S. tanks and armored vehicles mistakenly hit by DU weapons.
Today, Rokke is fighting to get the Pentagon to abide by its regulations regarding care for individuals exposed to uranium and remediation of contaminated areas.
The military records of one of Rokke's comrades, who suffers from the effects of DU exposure, have been completely “gutted” from Army archives, Rokke told AFP.
“They [defense officials] willfully ignore existing Department of Defense directives that require prompt and effective medical care be provided to ‘all' exposed individuals,” Rokke says.
Rokke points to a U.S. Army Medical Command memo dated April 29, 2004, from Lt. Gen. James B. Peake about medical management of Army personnel exposed to DU. The memo, which says “all personnel with actual or potential exposures to DU will be identified, assessed, treated (if needed), and assigned a potential exposure level (I, II, or III),” reiterates the U.S. Army regulations originally written by Rokke in 1991, he said.
“A radio bioassay has to be done within a few days of exposure,” Rokke said. “This means nasal and pharyngeal swabs being taken and 24-hour urine and fecal analysis.
“Today,” Rokke writes, “although medical problems continue to develop, medical care is denied or delayed for all uranium-exposed casualties while Defense Department and British Ministry of Defense officials continue to deny any correlation between uranium exposure and adverse health and environmental effects.”
Rokke said the individuals at the Department of Defense are engaged in a “criminal” conspiracy to deny the toxicity of DU weapons. “The lies by senior Defense Department officials are designed to sustain use of uranium munitions and avoid liability for adverse health and environmental effects,” he said. According to Rokke, a recent Gulf War Review reported that only 262 vets had been treated for DU poisoning through September 2003.
The military's strategy of lies and concealment about DU began in March 1991, shortly after the first widespread combat use of DU weapons by the U.S. government in Iraq , Rokke said.
On March 1, 1991, Lt. Col. Michael V. Ziehmn of Los Alamos National Lab wrote a memo about the effectiveness of DU penetrators. The “future existence” of DU weapons should be ensured by active “proponency” by the Department of Defense, Ziehmn wrote.
“If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability,” Ziehmn wrote. “I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after-action reports are written.”
When American Free Press began this series on DU weapons, the U.S. Army alerted the Centers for Disease Control, an Atlanta-based agency of the Department of Health and Human Services.
“The CDC is going to do a whitewash on DU,” Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at Lawrence Livermore Lab, said. Fulk told AFP he had received this information directly from CDC officials.
AFP asked Stephanie C. Creel of the CDC about its position on the toxicity of DU. Creel said the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) on-line “fact sheet” would provide the “most in-depth information” on the subject.
The ATSDR fact sheet: “The radiation damage from exposure to high levels of natural or depleted uranium are [sic] not known to cause cancer.”
“No apparent public health hazard,” the CDC assessment of Livermore lab, published June 29, said about local exposure levels to tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, Fulk said.
“It's nonsense,” Fulk said. “It's been dumped all around the area. It goes through glass and steel.”
Depleted uranium is a misnomer, according to Fulk. Depleted uranium, mostly U-238, is uranium that has had the naturally occurring fissile material, U-235, removed. DU is very radioactive, however. While one gram of U-235 emits 81,000 alpha particles per second, U-238 emits 12,000 per second. These high-energy particles coming from DU particles lodged in the body cause the most damage, according to Fulk and others.
“Depleted uranium dust that is inhaled gets transferred from the lungs to the regional lymph nodes, where they can bombard a small number of cells in their immediate vicinity with intense alpha radiation,” said Dr. Asaf Durakovic, former Pentagon expert on DU.
Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a defense contractor in San Diego , published an extensive article about the dangers of DU six months before President George H.W. Bush waged war against Iraq in 1991.
“Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are probably the ground troops [who] re-enter a battlefield following the exchange of armor-piercing (DU) munitions,” SAIC published in its July 1990 magazine.
“Short-term effects of high doses can result in death, while long-term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer,” SAIC wrote.
AFP submitted written questions to the U.S. Army Medical Command asking how the Army can claim that DU exposure is harmless when military documents have stressed its lethal toxicity.
Mark A. Melanson, of the Army's Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine in Aberdeen , Md. , responded in an email: “The two positions are not opposing. As with all potentially hazardous material, the amount determines the risk.”
Melanson wrote that the Army was complying with its own regulations regarding medical care for DU exposure, saying: “Soldiers are being screened by completing the post deployment health questionnaire upon demobilization. Troops identified as being at potential risk for DU exposure are directed to provide a urine bioassay for analysis.”
Rokke said: “That is too late. Hence they find a way out.”
AFP repeatedly tried to speak to Melanson about the quantity of DU that the Army considered hazardous. He did not return phone calls.
“An individual could [safely] breathe in up to a gram per year every year for 50 years,” Melanson recently told The New York Daily News.
“That's absolutely absurd,” Fulk said. Fulk said the number of alpha particle emissions from a gram of DU lodged in the body over a year would be about the same as one-10th of all the cells in his body.
The inhaled DU particles have a tendency to bind with phosphate in the human body, found in the bones and the DNA. The alpha particle being emitted to the cells nearby “is doing the dirty work,” Fulk said.
Painful breathing and respiratory problems are the first and most common symptoms of DU inhalation, Rokke said. Dr. Janette Sherman told AFP she met a 31-year-old female former soldier at a Maryland veteran's hospital who had recently served in Kuwait . Sherman, a toxicologist, was shocked when the young woman told her that she required a lung transplant.

Depleted Uranium Blamed for Cancer Clusters Among Iraq War Vets


August 15, 2004

A discovery by that nearly half of the recently returned soldiers in one unit from Iraq have “malignant growths” is “critical evidence,” according to experts, that depleted uranium weapons are responsible for the huge number of disabled Gulf War vets – and damage to their DNA.
A growing number of U.S. military personnel who are serving, or have served, in the Persian Gulf, Iraq , and Afghanistan have become sick and disabled from a variety of symptoms commonly known as Gulf War Syndrome. Depleted uranium (DU) weapons have been blamed for causing many of the symptoms.
“Gulf War vets are coming down with these symptoms at twice the rate of vets from previous conflicts,” said Barbara A. Goodno from the Dept. of Defense's Deployment Health Support Directorate.
A recent discovery by the author that nearly half the soldiers in one returned unit have malignant growths has provided the scientific community with “critical evidence,” experts say, to help understand exactly how depleted uranium affects humans – and their DNA.
One of the first published researchers of Gulf War Syndrome, Dr. András Korényi-Both said that 27-28 percent of Gulf War veterans have suffered chronic health problems, more than 5 times the rate of Viet Nam vets, and 4 times the rate of Korean War vets.
Korényi-Both said his son had recently returned from Iraq , where he had been part of the initial assault from Kuwait to Baghdad . From his unit of 20 men, 8 now have “malignant growths,” Korényi-Both said.
Dr. Korényi-Both is not an expert on DU, but has written extensively about how the fine desert sand blowing around Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula provides a ideal vehicle for toxins, increasing the range and effect of biological and chemical agents, such as DU, that attach themselves to the particles of sand.
Korényi-Both described how, during the 1991 Gulf War, he and others had inhaled large quantities of sand dust that could have been laden with chemical or biological agents. The sand “destroyed our immune systems,” he said.
FULK'S THEORY
Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at Lawrence Livermore lab, is investigating how DU affects the human body. Fulk said that 8 malignancies out of 20, in 16 months, “is spectacular – and of serious concern.”
The high rate of malignancies found in this unit appears to have been caused by exposure to DU weapons on the battlefield. If DU were found to be the cause, this case would be “critical evidence” of Fulk's theory on how the DU particulate affects DNA.
Such quick malignancies are caused by the particulate effect of DU, according to Fulk:
When DU (Uranium 238) decays, it transforms into two short-lived and “very hot” isotopes – Thorium 234 and Protactinium 234. As it transforms in the body, the DU particle is firing off faster and faster “bullets” into the DNA, Fulk said, or wherever it is lodged. Because uranium has a natural attraction to phosphorus, however, it is drawn to the phosphate in the DNA.
As the Uranium 238 decays, it releases alpha and beta particles with millions of electron volts. When a DU particle makes this transformation in the human body it releases “huge amounts of energy in the same location doing lots of damage very quickly,” Fulk said.
Thorium 234 has a half-life of 24 days and emits a beta particle of .270 million electron volts as it transforms into Protactinium 234, which has a half-life of less than 7 hours. Protactinium then emits a beta particle of 2.19 million electron volts as it transforms into the more stable Uranium 234.
The chemical binding energy in the molecules of the human cell is less than 10 electron volts. One alpha particle from U-238 is over 4 million electron volts, which is like “nuking a cell.”
Leuren Moret, a scientist who is opposed to the use of DU, compared it to sitting in front of a fire and putting a red-hot coal in your mouth. “The nuclear establishment wants us to believe that it is like sitting in front of the fire and warming the whole body evenly – and that no harm is done, but that is not the reality,” she said.
“We can expect to see multiple cancers in one person,” Moret said. “These multiple unrelated cancers in the same individual have been reported in Yugoslavia and Iraq in families that had no history of any cancer. This is unknown in the previous studies of cancer,” she said. “A new phenomenon.”
The Pentagon's Goodno questioned Dr. Korényi-Both's report that 8 of 20 recently returned soldiers from one unit had experienced malignant growths. Goodno and Korényi-Both did agree, however, that Iraqi chemical and biological agents had not played a role in the 2003 invasion.
This is significant because three factors have generally been blamed for causing Gulf War Syndrome: Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, the cocktail of vaccinations given to coalition soldiers, and depleted uranium. The absence of any detectable chemical or biological agents during the 2003 invasion of Iraq reduces the number of potential factors for the malignancies in the veterans to pre-war vaccinations and DU.
Statistics published in Encyclopedia Britannica's 2003 Almanac indicate that 325,000 Gulf War vets were receiving compensation for service-related disabilities in 2000. The almanac lists 580,400 combatants in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, yet only 467 U.S. personnel were actually wounded during the conflict. The 325,000 disabled Gulf War vets are equivalent to 56 percent of the number of military personnel “serving in the theater of operation.”
Furthermore, in 2000, nine years after the three-week war in Iraq had ended, the number of disabled vets from the Gulf War was increasing yearly by more than 43,000. While the number of disabled vets from previous wars is decreasing by about 35,000 per year, since the “War on Terror” began in 2001, the total number of disabled vets has grown to some 2.5 million.
MORE DISABLED VETS
“More than ever before,” Brad Flohr of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs said about the total number of disabled vets. Asked if there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II, Flohr said he believed so.
Terry Jemison of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs said that current statistics indicate that more than half a million veterans of the 14-year-old “Gulf War era” are now receiving disability compensation. During this period, some 7,035 soldiers are reported having been wounded in Iraq .
With 518,739 disabled “Gulf-era veterans” currently receiving disability compensation, according to Jemison, the number of veterans disabled after the war is more than 73 times the total number of wounded, in and out of combat, from the entire 14-year conflict with Iraq.
DEPLETED URANIUM WEAPONS
Last December, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a nuclear medicine expert who has conducted extensive research on depleted uranium, examined nine soldiers from the 442nd Military Police Company of New York and found that four of the men had absorbed or inhaled depleted uranium (U-238).
Several of the men had traces of another uranium isotope, U-236, which is only produced in a nuclear reaction process. U-236 is a man-made isotope of uranium.
“These men were almost certainly exposed to radioactive weapons on the battlefield,” Durakovic said.
“Due to the current proliferation of DU weaponry, the battlefields of the future will be unlike any battlefields in history,” Durakovic, then Chief of Nuclear Medicine for the Veterans Administration said after the first Gulf War, in which he served.
Since 1991, the U.S. military has used DU in munitions as penetrating rods, which destroy enemy tanks and their occupants, and as armor on U.S. tanks. When DU penetrating rods strike a hard target some of the radioactive and chemically toxic DU is vaporized into ultra-fine particles that are easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin.
According to a survey of 10,051 Gulf War veterans, conducted between 1991 and 1995 by Vic Sylvester and the Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm Association, 82 percent of veterans reported having entered captured Iraqi vehicles. “This would suggest that 123,000 soldiers have been directly exposed to DU,” Durakovic said.
“Since the effects of contamination by uranium cannot be directed or contained, uranium's chemical and radiological toxicity will create environments that are hostile not only to the health of enemy forces but of one's own forces as well,” Durakovic said.
“Because of the chemical and radiological toxicity of DU, the small number of particles trapped in the lungs, kidneys, and bone greatly increase the risk of cancer and all other illnesses over time,” Durakovic, an expert of internal contamination of radio-isotopes, said.
According to Durakovic, other symptoms associated with DU poisoning are: emotional and mental deterioration, fatigue, loss of bowel and bladder control, and numerous forms of cancer. Such symptoms are increasing showing up in Iraq 's children and among Gulf War veterans and their offspring, he said.
“Although I personally served in Operation Desert Shield as Unit Commander,” Durakovic said, “my expertise of internal contamination was never used because we were never informed of the intended use of DU prior to or during the war.”
“The numbers are overwhelming, but the potential horrors only get worse,” Robert C. Koehler of the Chicago-based Tribune Media Services wrote in his March 25 article on DU weapons, “Silent Genocide.”
“DU dust does more than wreak havoc on the immune systems of those who breathe it or touch it; the substance also alters one's genetic code,” Koehler wrote. “The Pentagon's response to such charges is denial, denial, denial. And the American media is its moral co-conspirator.”
As I reported earlier, the smallest particles of DU, when inhaled, are capable of moving throughout the human body, passing through cell walls and affecting the person's Master Code, according to Fulk, and the “_expression of the DNA.”
Four years after the Gulf War of 1991, Life magazine published a photo-essay entitled “The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm,” which focused on the numerous cases of severe birth defects that had occurred in families of veterans from that war.
Life reported, “Of the 400 sick vets who had already answered [Don Riegle's Senate Banking] committee inquiries, a startling 65 percent reported birth defects or immune-system problems in children conceived after the war.”
I asked the Dept. of Veterans Affairs if they kept records of the birth defects occurring among the families of veterans, and was told they do not.

Depleted Uranium Weapons - The Real Dirty Bombs


August 6, 2004
Lost in the media circus about the Iraq war, supposedly being fought to prevent a tyrant from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, is the salient fact that the United States and Britain are actively waging chemical and nuclear warfare in Iraq – using depleted uranium munitions.

The corporate-controlled press has failed to inform the public that, in spite of years of UN inspections and numerous international treaties, tons of banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – used and unused – remain in Iraq . Indeed, both chemical and radioactive WMD have been – and continue to be used against U.S. and coalition soldiers.

The media silence surrounding these banned WMD, and the horrendous consequences of their use, is due to the simple fact that they are being used by the U.S.-led coalition. They are the new “Silver Bullet” in the U.S. arsenal. They are depleted uranium weapons.
Depleted uranium (DU) weapons were first used during the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. The Pentagon estimated that between 315 and 350 tons of DU were fired during the first Gulf War. During the 2003 invasion and current occupation of Iraq, U.S. and British troops have reportedly used more than five times as many DU bombs and shells as the total number used during the 1991 war.
While the use of DU weapons and their effect on human health and the environment are subjects of extreme importance the Pentagon is noticeably reluctant to discuss these weapons. Despite numerous calls to specific individuals identified as being the appointed spokesmen on the subject, not one would answer their phone during normal business hours for the purpose of this article.
Dr. Doug Rokke, on the other hand, former director of the U.S. Army's Depleted Uranium Project, is very willing to talk about the effects of DU. Rokke was involved in the “clean up” of 34 Abrams tanks and Bradley armored vehicles hit by friendly fire during the 1991 Gulf War. Today he suffers from the ill effects of DU in his body.
Rokke told American Free Press that the Pentagon uses DU weapons because they are the most effective at killing and destroying everything they hit. The highest level of the U.S. and British governments have “totally disregarded the consequences” of the use of DU weapons, Rokke said.
The first Gulf War was the largest friendly fire incident in the history of American warfare, Rokke says. “The majority of the casualties were the result of friendly fire,” he told AFP.
DU is used in many forms of ammunition as an armor penetrator because of its extreme weight and density. The uranium used in these missiles and bombs is a by-product of the nuclear enrichment process. Experts say the Department of Energy has 100 million tons of DU and using it in weapons saves the government money on the cost of its disposal.
Rather than disposing of the radioactive waste, it is shaped into penetrator rods used in the billions of rounds being fired in Iraq and Afghanistan . The radioactive waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons industry has, in effect, been forcibly exported and spread in the environments of Iraq , Afghanistan , the former Yugoslavia , Puerto Rico , and elsewhere.
THE REAL “DIRTY BOMBS”
“A flying rod of solid uranium 18-inches long and three-quarters of an inch in diameter,” is what becomes of a DU tank round after it is fired, Rokke said. Because Uranium-238 is pyrophoric, meaning it burns on contact with air, DU rounds are burning as they fly.
When the DU penetrator hits an object it breaks up and causes secondary explosions, Rokke said. “It's way beyond a dirty bomb,” Rokke said, referring to the terror weapon that uses conventional explosives to spread radioactive material.
Some of the uranium used with DU weapons vaporizes into extremely small particles, which are dispersed into the atmosphere where they remain until they fall to the ground with the rain. As a gas, the chemically toxic and radioactive uranium can easily enter the body through the skin or the lungs and be carried around the world until it falls to earth with the rain.
AFP asked Marion Falk, a retired chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence Livermore lab, if he thought that DU weapons operate in a similar manner as a dirty bomb. “That's exactly what they are,” Falk said. “They fit the description of a dirty bomb in every way.”
According to Falk, more than 30 percent of the DU fired from the cannons of U.S. tanks is reduced to particles one-tenth of a micron (one millionth of a meter) in size or smaller on impact.
“The larger the bang” the greater the amount of DU that is dispersed into the atmosphere, Falk said. With the larger missiles and bombs, nearly 100 percent of the DU is reduced to radioactive dust particles of the “micron size” or smaller, he said.
While the Pentagon officially denies the dangers of DU weapons, since at least 1943 the military has been aware of the extreme toxicity of uranium dispersed as a gas. A declassified memo written by James B. Conant and two other physicists working on the U.S. nuclear project during the Second World War, and sent to Brig. Gen. L.R. Groves on October 30, 1943, provides the evidence:
“As a gas warfare instrument the [radioactive] material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs,” the 1943 memo reads. “In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small. It has been estimated that one millionth of a gram accumulation in a person's body would be fatal. There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty.”
The use of radioactive materials “as a terrain contaminant” to “deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiations” is also discussed in the Groves memo of 1943.
“Anybody, civilian or soldier, who breathes these particles has a permanent dose, and it's not going to decrease very much over time,” Leonard Dietz, a retired nuclear physicist with 33 years experience told the New York Daily News . “In the long run … veterans exposed to ceramic uranium oxide have a major problem.”
Inhaled particles of radioactive uranium oxide dust will either lodge in the lungs or travel through the body, depending on their size. The smallest particles can be carried through cell walls and “affect the master code - the __expression of the DNA,” Falk told AFP.
Inhaled DU can “fool around with the keys” and do damage to “practically anything,” Falk said. “It affects the body in so many ways and there are so many different symptoms that they want to give it different names,” Falk said about the wide variety of ailments afflicting Gulf War veterans.
Today, more than one out of every three veterans from the first Gulf War are permanently disabled. Terry Jemison of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs said that of the 592,561 discharged veterans from the 1991 war in Iraq , 179,310 are receiving disability compensation and another 24,763 cases are pending.
The “epigenetic damage” done by DU has resulted in many grossly deformed children born in areas such as southern Iraq where tons of DU have contaminated the environment and local population. An untold number of Americans have also been born with severe birth defects as a result of DU contamination.
The New York Daily News conducted a study on nine recently returned soldiers from the New York National Guard. Four of the nine were found to have “almost certainly” inhaled radioactive dust from exploded DU shells.
Laboratory tests revealed two manmade forms of uranium in urine samples from four of the 9 soldiers. The four soldiers are the first confirmed cases of inhaled DU from the current Iraq war.
“These are amazing results, especially since these soldiers were military police not exposed to the heat of battle,” said Dr. Asaf Duracovic, who examined the soldiers and performed the testing. “Other American soldiers who were in combat must have more DU exposure,” Duracovic said. Duracovic is a colonel in the Army reserves and served in the 1991 Gulf War.
The test results showing that four of nine New York guardsmen test positive for DU “suggest the potential for more extensive radiation exposure among coalition troops and Iraqi civilians,” the Daily News reported.
“A large number of American soldiers [in Iraq ] may have had significant exposure to uranium oxide dust,” Dr. Thomas Fasey, a pathologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center and an expert on depleted uranium said, “And the health impact is worrisome for the future.”
HOTTER THAN HELL
“I'm hotter than hell,” Rokke told AFP. The Dept. of Energy tested Rokke in 1994 and found that he was excreting more than 5,000 times the permissible level of depleted uranium. Rokke, however, was not informed of the results until 1996.
As director of the Depleted Uranium Project in 1994-95, Rokke said his task was three fold: determine how to provide medical care for DU victims, how to clean it up, and how to educate and train personnel using DU weapons.
Today, Rokke says that DU cannot be cleaned up and there is no medical care. “Once you're zapped – you're zapped,” Rokke said. Among the health problems Rokke is suffering as a result of DU contamination is brittle teeth. He said that he just paid out $400 for an operation for teeth that have broken off. “The uranium replaces the calcium in your teeth and bones,” Rokke said.
“You fight for medical care every day of your life,” he said.
“There are over 30,000 casualties from this Iraq war,” Rokke said.
The three tasks set out for the Depleted Uranium Project have all failed, Rokke said. He wants to know why medical care is not being provided for all the victims of DU and why the environment is not being cleaned up.
“They have to be held accountable,” Rokke said, naming President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and British prime minister Tony Blair. They chose to use DU weapons and “totally disregarded the consequences.