Washblog

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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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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Thank you Arthur Ruger for your efforts.

I can't even think about the use of depleted uranium in munitions.  I don't have the ability to comprehend the enormity of the problem, much less describe it.  I dimly recall reading that we've (thus far) used 10x more DU during Bush's Folly than in Desert Storm (Gulf War).  If the consequences were bad before, how much worse will it be now?

There are two aspects of Bush's Folly that I can't get my head around.  

First, the use of DU.  How will the Iraqis ever forgive us?  We just converted much of their country into a permanent SuperFund site, making it all but uninhabitable.  How does one mitigate that kind of environmental damage?  We don't have the technology.

Second, the 14 (?) permanent military bases we're building.  We never planned to leave.  It's like a sick game of high-stakes chicken.  The architects of this land grab are betting that we'll secure the oil in the Middle East before anyone else and that the economies of anyone who could (or would) oppose us (China, India, Russia) will crash before ours.

Wikipedia has some good pages on depleted uranium, health and environmental effects of depleted uraniam, and Gulf War Syndrome.

by zappini on Sun Feb 19, 2006 at 11:17:32 AM PST

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... know that DU has been - from the start when Lietta roused the two of us out of sitting around ant bitching about Bush - the thing that lit the fire initially.

We're both self-conscious about self-promoting so we rely on each other to brag about ourselves.

D.U. is her baby.

Lietta blogged the following thoughts in 2004 after being contacted by the Lehrer News Hour to come and film one of her sermons (we are both lay preachers) in South Bend and then afterward film an interview at our Bay Center home. The interview became part of a News Hour piece that aired 10/04 on opposing viewpoints about the war.

Sigh...sigh, I think I'll post my first sermon too, since it is exactly DU that raised my alarm enough to compel me to speak out..it seems a human issue to me, a-political and certainly not something that could be construed as partisan. An issue military families will hold in common beyond who should be President or Commander-in-Chief and beyond the constraints of definitions about what constitutes a patriotic show of loyalty in supporting the troops.

Make no mistake, my support of and for the soldiers is unwavering, they are the ones mustering up the courage to prevail at the risk to their own selves, lives and future livlihoods.

However, I do also believe as civilians we have a responsibility to our soldiers to be looking after their well being by our own actions at home, not strictly how we vote in upcoming elections or our political differences, but the fact of issues that directly affect and impact our soldiers now and when they come home.

************
Her original "D.U. Sermon", given in March, 2004,  can be linked at her Mysterium Tremendum, a collection of her sermons.

Arthur
You sure you ain't staking too much on yer theories? Not enough common sense?

by Arthur Ruger on Mon Feb 20, 2006 at 09:45:50 AM PST

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