Washblog || Why the Depleted uranium study on behalf of the WA Natl Guard is important

Why the Depleted uranium study on behalf of the WA Natl Guard is important

By Arthur Ruger
Sat Feb 18, 2006 at 03:49:02 PM PST
Section: Washington State Topic: Legislation

I want to follow up on Lietta's recent article Depleted uranium study WA Natl Guard IS funded! Tx Sen Doumit

Led by Senator Mark Doumit and the Senate's Ways and Means Committee, Washington State has a chance to act in a profoundly wise manner. They will join other wise legislators across the country who have not been fooled by Pentagon's and Republican adminisration's shush-now pooh-poohing of the serious, tragic and potentially calamitous medical /financial impact of the use of depleted uranium in American weaponry in Iraq and the Middle East.

Earlier last year, the Connecticut House voted 144-0 to approve the kind of legislation Doumit and company gave life to and moved closer to the Governor's desk for signature.

Depleted Uranium is not a figmentary notion in the minds of conspiracy theorists - the sort of people easily dismissed and discredited by political manipulators and suppressed by Pentagon authorities.

More and more attention is drawn to this issue requiring that more and more authorities address the issue; a situation that itself debunks the old DU-debunking in the early years of the war.

Bored on a Saturday moving into the afternoon, out of curiosity I googled "depleted uranium victims" and rather than click "web" on Google, I clicked "images."

What came up included victim pictures of greater tragedy and criminality than anything we've seen in the original and now recent 2nd issuances of photos from Abu Ghraib.

These D.U. pictures are so numerous, one can only conclude the legitimacy of the problem or fall back on a stubborn insistence that camera-clickers from all over the world have conspired to attempt the most massive and hideous fraud ever perpetrated.

Denying and refusing to believe the D.U. tragedy will eventually be tantamount to denying the Holocaust.

After seeing those pictures, I again googled "depleted uranium" and clicked on "web" to see how easily one can become informed about whether or not our legislature is wasting time by looking into DU effects on our National Guard and the regular military members who reside in this state.

Well, I'll tell ya ... Our legislators are not wasting time. Any who try to diminish the effort or its importance have been just plain been lazy ... too lazy to even Google.

Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst, current events observer, Internet columnist and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel now published by Authorhouse.com.

His articles appear regularly at his blog, Valenzuela's Veritas and at Information Clearing House as well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe.

The following are excerpts from his lengthy article, The Killing Fields: Ghosts of the Walking Dead.

Lengthy yes, but - I promise you - an article worth reading in its entirety.

The Killing Fields
Meanwhile, all around Iraq and its cities a clandestine yet deadly killer lurks, invisible and unseen, devastating in its capacity to destroy human DNA, a silent death sentence that has and will befall hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of unsuspecting human beings, both Iraqi and American.
This killer festers in the air, water, food supply, vegetation and ground, infiltrating the porous bodies of human beings, cementing itself for life.
It lingers on streets and rivers and buildings and homes, carried by wind and rain and through the daily weather patterns of Mesopotamia.
... Depleted uranium is a silent mass murderer, a clandestine nuclear bomb whose mushroom cloud is never seen exploding, yet the radiation and heavy metals excreted from the weapons it envelopes when they strike their target, the heat evaporating uranium particulates into the air, become airborne contagions that latch onto our carbon and organic bodies.
It attacks our organs and our bones, our nerves and blood, mutating our DNA genetic sequence, destroying our immune systems, penetrating our reproductive systems and causing various terminal cancers.
... Depleted uranium used fifteen years ago is now being felt where American ordnance was dropped from the sky above, as lands, food supply, water and air once contaminated, inhaled and ingested release the WMD lingering in their midst.
Child deformities, stillbirths, mutated fetuses, miscarriages and birth defects have been springing up for quite some time now, as the DU embedded in the sperm and eggs of parents transfers over to the embryo.
The mutations taking place, along with the deformities now apparent yet hardly ever seen in human society, are gross distortions of human normalcy, creating beings the likes of which have never been seen before. The photos of what DU can do to newborn babies and fetuses are available on the Internet.
Entire regions, towns and neighborhoods are experiencing clusters of these mutations in their newly born babies, with doctors unable to explain the sudden rise in defects and deformities that did not exist previously.
... Iraq has been transformed into a vast killing field, a wasteland overrun by the remnants of America's silent WMD, a cheap and money saving weapon...
... Already, 11,000 American soldiers, veterans of the first Gulf War, have died thanks to Gulf War Syndrome, cancer and disease. Over 350,000 veterans, out of 700,000 who served, have asked for serious disability, most of these veterans being in their late twenties and early thirties, in the prime of their lives, cleared as healthy before the war in military conducted medical physicals.
Depleted Uranium is the most likely culprit, as many more get diagnosed with terminal diseases and illnesses every year. Many veterans of Gulf War One and now the Iraq/Bush War have themselves been giving birth to deformed and defective children, much like their Iraqi counterparts.
Depleted Uranium, it seems, does not discriminate nor does it need a passport to infect human beings. It has been imported into America by our returning soldiers, a great percentage of which most likely have remnants of depleted uranium buried deep inside them.
How many American veterans of Gulf War One and the Iraq/Bush War will in the next few decades succumb to cancer or destroyed immune systems? How many of their children will be born like those in Iraq, unable to live more than a few days or months because their bodies are infested with DU, their appearance no longer presenting the appearance of a human child?
It is estimated that 40,000 to 80,000 more veterans will die in the next twenty to thirty years as the effects of DU run their course. How many more will produce offspring with genetic birth defects, gross mutations of fetuses, miscarriages and stillborns?
... In their whispered plea can we also see what might happen to tens of thousands of our own men and women, themselves hosts carrying the demons of the Iraqi Killing Fields back home.
Is the price of what America has done in our name worth our silence and indifference?

So what happens when we question the leaders who have done this on our behalf and in our name?

Valenzuela is a gifted writer who captures passion in his words and expresses that passion well.

To supplement Valensuela's thoughts, I recommend the following as well.

Depleted Uranium - A Hidden Looming Worldwide Calamity
found at Global Research.CA

These are what we ought to be sharing with our legislators.

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Why the Depleted uranium study on behalf of the WA Natl Guard is important | 4 comments (4 topical)

These children must be remembered

Any political action people take, including what we say, has to be informed by an understanding of what is at stake -- just how profound the suffering is of the innocent victims of bad government policy.

Ideologues throw their words around and feel proud of how well they can insult each other. The reality is that, on issues like this, labels like liberal or conservative -- or Democrat, Green, Liberatarian, Republican -- these labels should have nothing to do with it.

Regular people -- people who operate according to ordinary humane ethics would not allow large corporations to profit through perpetrating this kind of obscenity if they could see the connections between profit and this murderous obscenity. Until regular people start thinking for themselves and demanding accountability from government and transnational corporations, our taxes will continue to subsidize the exposure of children to poison that turns them inside out, literally, our taxes will continue to pay for this monsterousness.

Poor dear innocents, poor darlings.

by noemie maxwell on Sat Feb 18, 2006 at 04:55:59 PM PST

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The State DU Effort and Beyond

Arthur,

Congratulations to you and all your colleagues for the outstanding work you've done on funding a state DU bill. What you've accomplished in a relatively short amount of time is simply astonishing. I'm in awe at how effective your efforts have been.

As I understand it, the line item for $150,000 is to fund a study to determine the adequacy of the training National Guard servicemembers receive with regard to DU exposure. I believe such a study to be quite useful. For example, I'd be interested to know whether servicemembers are trained to immediately exit a vehicle perforated by friendly-fire DU penetrators.

I imagine that next year you'll attempt to get SB 6732 reintroduced and passed. This bill, like the Connecticut one, is important for a number of reasons. Right now, there simply isn't enough data from studies of servicemembers exposed to DU. State programs could begin collecting data that the VA Follow-up Study hasn't yet collected.

The kind of work Dr. McDiarmid is doing at the VA is very expensive, as I understand it. While many in the field consider her studies useful, others believe that there are large knowledge gaps in the DU database. The federal government has a role in funding the kind of expensive studies needed to fill those gaps.

There are two efforts you might want to know about. First, Dr. Jenan Hassan at the University of Basra's children's clinic has been collecting data on children with congenital malformations and cancers. She has tied the rising rate of these diseases to geographic location--specifically, areas where DU munitions were used. Dr. Amy Hapopian and colleagues at the University of Washington are working with Dr. Jenan Hassan to put her data into publishable form.

Second, the 36th District Democrats have an Iraq Public Health and Humanitarian Crisis task force, of which I am the Chair. This task force includes researchers from the University of Washington, some of whom are associated with Dr. Hagopian's team. This task force has been pushing the DU issue into the United States Senate via Sen. Cantwell's office. We've made some progress with the Senate Armed Services committee, which deals with DoD matters. However the Armed Services committee would only deal with DU as it pertains to active-duty servicemembers. If it turns out that the kind of studies we want funded are conduced by the VA, we'll have to turn to the Senate Veterans Affairs committee.

It just so happens that Sen. Patty Murray is on the Veterans Affairs committee. She is just the senator we need to advocate for VA-funded DU studies. However, I have some experience with how long it can take to get anywhere with a United States senator. I'm certain that Sen. Cantwell's office would help introduce the task force to Murray staff members, but veterans support will be key in convincing Sen. Murray to take on this issue.

At some point in the coming months, I would love to work with a veterans group--say, Military Families Speak Out--on the DU issue. DU bills have already been introduced in the House; the United States Senate is the last frontier.

If you've gotten this far, thanks for listening.

David Edelman

by PCO3318 on Sat Feb 18, 2006 at 09:16:53 PM PST

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Forgiveness</