FEBRUARY/MARCH 2006

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Iconoclast: "An exposer of icons. Icon-buster. Fighter for Truth, Justice, and the American Way."

HAVE DU WILL TRAVEL
February 28, 2006 7:13 PM

About This Feature...

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

When The Iconoclast learned of a study conducted by Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan that suggests that depleted uranium radiation had traveled from Iraq to Great Britain during “shock and awe,” we knew it was time to more fully explore the implications.

We decided to “lay it all on the table,” as best we could by interviewing noted scientists and people in the know about radiation, those who have become medical casualties, those who have gone through the military system, and those who possess an upper tier knowledge of radiation in general.

This is clear: the day that depleted uranium was introduced into the arsenal of doom was quite literally the day the earth stood still, with scientists worldwide uniting to voice concern that genocide had found a home on our planet. At the other extreme, militarists hailed the nuclear substance as their newest advantage in maximizing destruction. It became a trump card with the ability to destroy the masses, even those yet unborn.

On the battlefield, DU has been hailed as the best, and what country does not want its soldiers to be given the best of tools in a time of war? Yet the bloody afterglow of radiation and its dire consequences for civilization have caused others to describe DU as “death unlimited.”

We were told by the U.S. military in Iraq that there is no longer a need for depleted uranium munitions there and that, indeed, the current deployment is not using DU. However, this past week it was announced that the Army has placed a $38 million order for new DU munitions, extending the original contract for fiscal year 2006 up to $77 million.

DU is a controversial subject.

The Iconoclast attempted to get some answers.

We were pleased that some individuals were forthcoming when we attempted to interview them and we were disappointed at others who broke promises to call us back after they learned the subject matter was depleted uranium.

Although the quantity of text in this report tends to weigh heavier for individuals opposed to the use of depleted uranium, the Iconoclast spent considerable time attempting to obtain Q&A viewpoints that might be on the other side of the argument. It was in this venue that promised phone calls were not returned and our reporters got multiple run-arounds in reaching the “top brass.”

Nevertheless, The Iconoclast has produced this special feature which provides our readers a chance to listen in on some of the conversations and draw their own conclusions.

Among those interviewed, in the order they appear in this feature, were:

• Chris Busby, author of the study: “Did the use of Uranium weapons in Gulf War 2 result in contamination of Europe?”

• Leuren Moret, geological scientist and international radiation expert.

• Dr. Ernest J. Sternglass, Emeritus Professor of Radiological Physics in the Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

• Dr. Rosalie Bertell, PhD, GNSH, President of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health (IICPH), and Editor in Chief of International Perspectives in Public Health.

• Major Doug Rokke, Ph.D. (retired), former director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project, Vietnam and Gulf War Veteran.

• Major Denise Nichols (retired), Gulf War Veteran and retired U.S. Air Force Reserve Major,Vice Chairman of the National Vietnam Veteran and Gulf War Veterans Coalition.

• Ann Ham, Public Affairs, U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine.

• Captain William Roberts, Multi-National Forces Iraq Spokesman.

• Tim Hix, Vietnam Veteran exposed to Agent Orange, dying of cancer.

• Karl Schwarz, presidential candidate, author, technology company founder whose son served in Iraq.

We lead off with the news story about the study.

Dr. Chris Busby, who obtained a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of London, has served as the scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk and director of the environmental consultancy Green Audit

‘To my mind, it’s a human rights issue.’

Iconoclast Interview With Chris Busby

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ICONOCLAST: What impact do you think the report will have on the United States?

BUSBY: I think the most important thing is that it makes clear that the use of depleted uranium involves indiscriminate effects on civilians. And so it takes it away from being the weapon of legitimate use in a military situation and puts it in the same category as weapons like nerve gas that affect large populations. So that, to my mind, would make it illegal under the considerations of the Geneva Convention.

ICONOCLAST: The London Times did an article last Sunday and the Ministry of Defense said that it is unfeasible that depleted uranium could have traveled so far.

BUSBY: The point is that material from Chernobyl which is 1,800 miles to the east of Great Britain traveled to Great Britain and contaminated Wales, Scotland, and various parts of the United Kingdom. And they might well have said that it was equally unfeasible for it to travel that distance in the opposite direction to the general flow of the wind, but we have examined computer models of wind directions over the period of the Gulf War and it’s quite clear the material from Iraq could have come through the United Kingdom because of the particular types of depressions and anticyclone systems that were there. The American NOAH website has a computer program that enables you to model the origin of air masses that coordinate on the globe and we use the NOAH system to back track material that was in the Aldermaston field over the period and a lot of that material did come from Iraq according to the calculations of this computer program.

ICONOCLAST: Is monitoring still going on on a frequent basis and are you following the models?

BUSBY: Uranium is still being measured.

ICONOCLAST: How are the people of London taking this news?

BUSBY: There are a lot of different responses to our paper, from the Ministry of Defense and from the Royal Society and from the Environment Agency who are the people who deal with this in our country. They all seem to be different responses. None of them seem to be very sensible. The Environment Agency at one point said they thought it was somebody digging the road up. The Royal Society said that it might be from Iraq but actually it’s probably natural uranium from a sandstorm. The Ministy of Defense is just saying it’s unfeasible for it to come all that distance.

So really it’s kind of knee-jerk denial, for, because as far as the MoD is concerned, it makes quite a big difference to the ethical basis of their use of uranium as a weapon.

ICONOCLAST: If they say it’s from other local environmental sources, such as a p ower station, wouldln’t that have alerted authorities to be on the lookout.

BUSBY: The problem with the argument about the power station is that we’ve looked at the data from 2000 to 2004, and there’s data every two weeks. In that whole period from 2000 to 2004, there’s only one enormous increase in radiation, in uranium, and that’s during the time of the Iraq war. It would be quite extraordinary that the power station happened to produce these releases just at the same time as the war occurred, and, secondly, there aren’t many power stations. The nearest nuclear power station is at Sellafield and the wind was blowing north at the time. It was blowing from the south so anything that would have come out of there would have gone north. It wouldn’t have gone to Reading which is about 600 miles southeast of the power station.

ICONOCLAST: What do you think the result of this report will be. Do you think it will get people’s attention?

BUSBY: I think it will have tremendous impact. At the moment, what happens is that they’re just going to go off and think about it and try to bury it. There’s a legal case in this country at the moment relating to some activists who damaged a B-52 bomber that was carrying depleted uranium to Iraq. It’ll certainly be used in this court case. They’ll argue that the U.S. was using weapons of indiscriminate effect. I hesitate to say mass destruction, because it’s not quite in that category, but certainly it’s a very toxic substance that can cause genetic damage and congenital malformations and cancer. And even if it’s a very small risk of all of these things, and this is what they argue, if you are contaminating people in the United Kingdom, then you’re clearly contaminating people in Turkey and Greece and Italy and France — a hugh swathe of Southern Europe, and so the population that has been contaminated is extremely large. So you are likely to have had some effect.

And in any case, it’s a human rights issue. People don’t actually want to inhale uranium, strange as it may seem.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think that the health of a good number of Londoners has been effected by this?

BUSBY: Not just Londoners, it would be people over the whole of Southern Europe. And the answer is that I don’t know. We will certainly look, and the first place that we will be looking will be in infant mortality, congenital malformations.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think that there will be an uprising against DU?

BUSBY: There’s already an uprising against DU. Everybody thinks that DU should be an illegal weapon. Everybody. I don’t know anybody, except the military — who say that it’s a valuable weapon in tank warfare. I can’t think of anybody who thinks that the use of a radioactive weapon like that is justified under any circumstances.

I mean, after all, the military says, “Oh, we need this weapon because if enables us to win wars.” Well fair enough! But you might as well use nerve gas, or biological weapons. The same argument applies.

ICONOCLAST: Here in the United States, very few people are aware of what DU is. It doesn’t mean anything to them. So what do you think we need to do in the United States?

BUSBY: You people in the media need to make it more clear that the United States is the major user of this weapon and that it should be banned, because it’s a very serious, and what goes around comes around. You can be sure that if it has come to the United Kingdom, it’s certainly gone to America.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think your paper will open the eyes of many people in the government in Europe?

BUSBY: I think so. I think it will have a big impact. It might not have quite sunk into them yet, but over a period of time they will have to accept that this is the first clear evidence that this stuff is capable of traveling such large distances, and therefore it is capable of contaminating huge populations.

ICONOCLAST: Scientists have been saying that DU travels and that it is a global problem. Can they look at your study as being proof?

BUSBY: A lot of people have theorized that it travels long distances, because these particles are very small and they can be kept in the atmosphere, in motion and by electro-static effects and so on. There was always the fear that this was the case, and the military has argued that this was not true. I’ve been in Kosovo where I measured these particles, but this is the first really strong evidence that they can travel long distances, and irony is that the evidence has actually come deployed by the military themselves around the atomic weapons establishment.

To my mind, it’s a human rights issue. Originally, it was an issue relating to whether or not it should be used in Iraq and if the population of Iraq is being contaminated and possible the Gulf War veterans being contaminated, but now we are seeing that everybody is being contaminated. We are all Gulf War veterans.

Leuren Moret, of Berkeley, Calif., is an independent scientist who works on radiation and public health issues with communities around the world. She earned her B.S. in Geology at U.C. Davis in 1968, and her M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from U.C. Berkeley in 1978.
Moret is a geoscientist who became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. She now dedicates her life to revealing and understanding the actual health effects of radiation exposure. She has worked extensively on the impact of radiation on public health from nuclear power plants and atmospheric testing and how radiation moves through the environment.
Moret works with the Radiation and Public Health Project, a group of independent scientists and has written a scientific report on depleted uranium for the United Nations subcommission investigating the illegality of depleted uranium munitions. She has been trained on radiation issues by a former Manhattan Project Scientist and retired insider at the Livermore Lab who is an expert on radioactive fallout and rainout. Together with Dr. Hari Sharma, they have studied high levels of depleted uranium measured in the tissue samples of 70 residents of Basra, Iraq, who died after the Gulf War from internal exposure to depleted uranium.
She wrote the forword to Akira Tashiro’s award-winning “Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium,” and appears in the recently released DVD “Beyond Treason” that was produced by Power Hour Productions <http://www.beyondtreason.com/>, an 89-minute film that presents comprehensive documentation from United States Government archives of a massive cover-up, including military and civilian experimentation, dating back over 60 years.

‘Depleted uranium is the trojan horse of nuclear war.’

Iconoclast Interview With Leuren Moret

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ICONOCLAST: What do you think of the Busby report? Do you think it’s pretty accurate?

MORET: Oh, I think it’s totally accurate. Those numbers are from the British government. There is absolutely no doubt at all that those numbers are completely accurate. That facility has been there for years. It was established out of concern for the public to monitor the nuclear powerplant emissions and the nuclear weapons facility emissions in Britain. They have the best equipment. They have the best technicians. They have the best scientists doing all of that monitoring, whose numbers have to be completely correct. If anything, they would be lower than the actual amounts that they were measuring. They would never make them higher.

ICONOCLAST: How would you describe what happened?

MORET: What happened is Dr. Busby is on a British government committee and he is an official scientific advisor on low level radiation to the British government. He also works with the European Parliament and they asked him to produce an independent report on low level radiation for the European Parliament. He produced something with 45 other scientists called the ECRR Report. It came out in January of 2003. I took it all over the Eastern U.S. and was introducing it and talking to it before they even had a press conference and released it in Britain. He went to Bosnia and Kosovo and collected depleted uranium samples and we’ve all been very concerned about the transport of these tiny particles all over the world. I am really the one who brought this issue out into the open. It was perfectly reasonable and justified for him to ask the Aldermaston facility for those numbers.

They’d always given them to him before, but when he asked them two years ago, out of concern about the transport of these materials, they refused to give them to him. I asked him why and he said that. Three years ago, Halliburton took over that facility. I asked, did Halliburton take over a British government air monitoring facility and he said yes. That’s very interesting and they’re the ones who wouldn’t give you the numbers and he said yes. Last Jan.1, in 2005, the Freedom of Information Act went into law and was effective on that day and that’s the day he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the numbers. They still refused to give them to him and so there was a long delay. Finally, Halliburton gave him the numbers, but they wouldn’t give him any of the 2003 numbers for the Iraq war. When I saw how high that number was, 1,700, I understood exactly why they had taken the facility over three years before. It was too high.

ICONOCLAST: What should the numbers be?

MORET: Less than 30. We should only be measuring natural uranium in the air that is coming out of mineral sources and natural sources. There already is contanimation from nuclear weapons testing and even lower orbital space is contaminated with uranium and uranium decay products. I discovered a paper on it in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, which was written in 2002. That is a very, very small amount. What they’re measuring now are these horrendous peaks that exactly correlate with the battlefield events in Iraq and Kosovo and Bosnia and Afganastan. And there is even a piece during a Chechnya conflict in ‘98 and ‘99, which indicates the Russians are using it, too, in Chechnya.

ICONOCLAST: If you have shock and awe going on in Iraq and the readings are being monitored in the UK, is it like a sweep of these going through there and then you have your spikes and then it goes back down, is that in the air?

MORET: Yes. This is just pollution to have a point source, a battlefield or whatever that is releasing this into the air. On those filters in Britain, there were also sand and dust particles that were 1 to 5 microns that also came from the Middle East. These are well known all over Europe because sand and dust storms that originate in the Middle East and Central Asia and especially North Africa have been identified for centuries in Europe.

They were called blood rains because in the hot desert conditions, iron oxide coats the grains of sand and dust and when they’re transported North over Europe and they’re rained out, those iron oxides stain the rain kind of the color of a weak wine and they were a bad omen. Boy, they sure are a bad omen now, because they’re also transporting radioactive isotopes. Now, that sand and dust, we already know where that’s coming from, were on the filters with the much smaller particles of depleted uranium, which the average particle size for atmospheric test is a tenth of a micron. These DU particles form at really high temperatures under battlefield conditions and they’re very tiny. They’re called nanoparticles.

ICONOCLAST: Do they land on the ground?

MORET: No. These are so small that the movement in the air currents and the big convection cells which are weather fronts and stuff, keep them suspended. They don’t settle out. They have to be rained out or snowed out or permanently suspended.

ICONOCLAST: If this is in the air in the UK and it rains, do they become part of the soil?

MORET: Yes. They rain on buildings and rooftops and on trees and leaves and on people. Because they’re wet, they stick to whatever they land on and it is almost impossible to remove it.

ICONOCLAST: They radiate when they’re there?

MORET: Yes. So, it’s causing an epidemic of melanoma, globally. That means skin cancer, especially in children. There are increases in infant mortality now being reported in the New York Times a couple of years ago. I saw an article in January of 2003, Mysterious Increases in Infant Mortality in 20 Regions of Europe. It’s a global disaster. There’s a frog die-off going on. Frogs are dying off all over the world. The worst thing is the global increases in diabetes. Diabetes is an immediate response just within months to these depleted uranium battles. We can see especially huge increases in the Gulf states which are Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and then on up the east coast.

ICONOCLAST: How do you know they’re attributed to DU?

MORET: Because the increases correlate each year with the battles. When there aren’t battles or that stuff isn’t transported sufficiently across the Atlantic, then there is not much of an increase. It drops off or stabilizes.

ICONOCLAST: The reason the Gulf states are affected more is because of the Trade Winds?

MORET: Yes. These are not hurricanes. These are huge sand and dust storms that are a million square miles in size.

ICONOCLAST: Are the affects permanent or if they quit using this type of ammunition, would it reverse.

MORET: Well, it’s like atmospheric testing contamination of radioactive pollution of the atmosphere. As it’s rained out and snowed out, it’s deposited in the environment and it sticks to any surface where it lands. It’s removed from the atmosphere. The most harmful pathway of exposure is inhalation. If it is sticking to things, at least it’s not in the air and eventually it’s going to end up in the ocean. But that will be a long, long time.

ICONOCLAST: One thing that the Times article suggested was that radiation experts also said that other environmental sources were more likely to blame. What would they be referring to?

MORET: This is typical spin. They’ve been saying this for years and they say, well, it’s in your backyard. It’s in the soil. That’s true, but the concentration of uranium that occurs throughout the earth is like one part per two and a half million. So, it’s a very low concentration and a lot of it is in the ocean. It’s not getting these huge concentrations in Britain on air filters at atomic monitoring facilities because it’s from a natural source. This is airborne. The air monitoring station isn’t just measuring at one site. They had over five sites where they were measuring these numbers and they were actually higher away from the actual facility where the emissions are coming out. If it was from that facility, the numbers would have been the highest at the facility because it would have been the point source. The fact that you’re finding Middle Eastern dust and sand on the filters with the DU indicates that it is coming from the Middle East.

ICONOCLAST: You can tell what kind of sand it is by some kind of test?

MORET: Oh sure. All the nuclear facilities in every country in Europe — Greece and Romania and Italy — they monitor every single day, those sand and dust storms from whatever is coming from whatever direction. They’ve always done that. During the battle of Kosovo and Bosnia, the European Parliament requested that all those countries do air monitoring of radioactive pollution and of chemical pollution coming from the NATO invasion of Yugoslavia. These were very extensive reports and are available from the EU. I don’t think there is any place it’s more monitored than Europe because they just have the infrastructure and the facilities and they know everything.

ICONOCLAST: The spikes that occurred, when they occurred, were an oddity? You wouldn’t have spikes normally.

MORET: There has to be a point first, to have such high levels. The highs and lows from the weather conditions and the direction of the wind currents is consistent with these high levels in Britain.

ICONOCLAST: It says in this article that on two occasions, levels exceeded this ratio in which the Environmental Agency must be informed so within safety limits.

MORET: They say that, but none of it is safe. A report issued by the National Academy of Sciences came out in July. It’s the seventh report over the last 30 or 40 years, which is an official scientific academy report in the United States and it stated very clearly there is no safe level of radiation exposure.

ICONOCLAST: They also say in this article that other experts says local environmental sources, such as a power station, were more likely at fault. What would a power station be?

MORET: A nuclear power plant.

ICONOCLAST: Wouldn’t they have had some kind of major. . .

MORET: It would have had to be a Chernobyl event in Britain, which they couldn’t hide because of their country’s, you know, I told you they are all monitoring, they would have been alarmed. It would have had to been a huge accident.

ICONOCLAST: So, that doesn’t hold any water.

MORET: No. By the way, the abundance of uranium in the earth’s crust is 2.4 parts per million. Sea water is actually smaller. It has a very low concentration. What they always say is that it’s in the soil all over your yard and you can dig around and its there. Or, it’s coming from another source. It’s coming from a nuclear power plant nearby. It just can’t be true because the air currents were coming directly from the Middle East and they weren’t being transported from other power plants or sources in Britain.

Dr. Busby, because he’s an expert on radiation and this kind of stuff, because of how I told you this is transported all over the world, it’s completely mixed in the global atmosphere in one year, no matter where they used it. It’s just mixed that quickly. It’s amazing. In the report that was produced after the first Gulf War, it was from all the oil well fires and all the munitions and all the battlefields. That was a thick, black cloud that covered the area for a whole year after Gulf War I. That city had material that was deposited globally in the ice record in tropical glaciers, on the Antarctic Ice Sheet, in Hawaii, in the Himalayas, in the Alps, and a year later, it was deposited in the ice record all over the world. What happens is that the equator is very warm and the poles are very cold and this temperature gradient caused a mixing in the atmosphere of hot and cold air. They need to all be the same temperature. That causes of this violent mixing and the new particles are part of all of that. They are just globally mixed in one year.

ICONOCLAST: What happens if the levels get real high in the waters and fish end up with . . .

MORET: They don’t need to be high. Low level radiation is devestating. It’s a thousand times more harmful, according to Busby’s European Committee on radiation risk report.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies only considered cancer and birth defects as legitimate diseases caused by radiation exposure. They only considered the exposure of the victims to neutrons and gamma rays, which were external. They said there was no internal contamination. We know that that’s not true. Everybody in Japan was contaminated by the bombs. It wasn’t until Cherynobyl when they could actually measure the radiation and fields and dose. Then they looked at each chromosome and determined that the gamuts were 1,000 times higher than what that ICRP model would have predicted. Then they also counted the genetic mutation in wheat and in mice. They knew what the exact dose was and they saturated from the ICRP model how many defects there should be in the DNA and they counted a dozen times higher or a dozen times more than had been predicted.

We know the ICRP model is faulty. It can’t be used at all for internal exposure. It wasn’t done correctly, anyway. It was perfectly reasonable and legitimate for Dr. Busby to request those air monitoring numbers from Aldermaston, because we know that that’s the dust from the Middle East. We know it ends up in Europe and Britain. I’ve been to England in the morning and in the evening. I went out in the street, and there was this red sand all over cars and all over windshields and in the streets. That was from North Africa.

ICONOCLAST: Should the people in Britain be alarmed?

MORET: Yes! But there is nothing they can do. We have to stop these weapons. They’re altering atmospheric testing. The equilavent of 40 thousand Hiroshima bombs have been released into the atmosphere. The amount of radiation included with the emissions from the nuclear power plants have created, according to Dr. Roseleaf herself, the death and mutilation and diseases in 1.3 billion people. It’s had a global effect. What they’ve released since 1991 is the equalivent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. That’s 10 times more than during atmospheric testing. We are having a very serious public health threat globally. You can see it in the infant mortality increases. They started down as soon as they stopped testing in 1963. They kept going down until these darn unanium wars started in 1991. We’re having a global frog die-out. They’re living in the fresh water, rain waters that is washing out. We’re having a decline in fisheries globally. We’re just stripping this beautiful planet of all these diverse forms of life.

ICONOCLAST: This absorption into the atmosphere globally, there is no safe place?

MORET: There is no safe place. There is no possible way to escape from it.

ICONOCLAST: Are there uranium detectors that people can buy?

MORET: Yes. You’re going to have much higher readings along the Gulf Coast region, right where you are. I looked at the diabetes rates in those states and Texas really got slammed. It goes up the East Coast. All of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. are on the East Coast. People are being exposed to various products from the nuclear power plants emission, but they’re getting exposed to DU, too, the decay products. What is the most harmful effect from both exposures, surprisingly enough, is particulate from the nanoparticle. That is a nonspecific catalyst. Each one of them has an enzyme effect. Catalytic or enzyme poisons are biologically the most damaging of all. That’s why the soldiers and people who were exposed are sick within 24 to 48 hours. It’s that catalytical effect.

ICONOCLAST: If you live close to a power plant there’s a chance . . .

MORET: You’re absolutely being internally exposed 24 hours a day. Every breath that you take. A 100 mile radius is where you get the highest exposure. We collected chicken eggshells and baby teeth from people living around the Indian Point Reactor and the levels in the chicken eggshells was the same as in the baby teeth. It’s just completely poisioning the air, the soil, the food, the water, and blood. These tiny particles go right through your skin. They go through everything and a really good example of the horrible effect is the World Trade Center disaster. All of the huge numbers of metal and tiny particles, the highest ever measured in the United States, in fact, I think around the world, were measured in the month after the Trade Center disaster.

ICONOCLAST: Is that because of fires or explosions.

MORET: The fire. That building came down and all this kinetic energy, you know all the energy that it takes to build a building and carry all those materials up, when that building collapses, that is kinetic energy which is released and it created a very hot pile which continued to burn for months.

ICONOCLAST: Did the EPA take action?

MORET: Well, the EPA scientists were very alarmed about it and about the nanoparticle pollution in the air, but they weren’t allowed to say anything, because of the administrator who was a coverup artist. She and her husband had very strong ties, including personal investments in companies that were related to the insurance companies in the World Trade Center. The EPA scientists were not allowed to say anything.

ICONOCLAST: So people breathed all these particulates.

MORET: Yes.

ICONOCLAST: What do you think is the significance of Busby’s report, overall.

MORET: It concerns everything that I’ve been saying for five years. That this pollution of depleted uranium particles are traveling. They’re being carried on air currents and they’re being transported all over the world.

ICONOCLAST: The reports by the military and the U.S. and Britain are wrong?

MORET: Well, the military job is to kill people and to destroy things. Depleted uranium is a very effective weapon. They are not responsible for anything that happens after that point. So they’re going to cover it up so that they can continue to use weapons that kill lots of people and destroy things. The U.S. government, the British government, the Australian government and countries that have used DU are violating international treaties. They are violating the Geneva and the Hague conventions. They’re violating the Geneva 1925 gas protocal that prohibits gas weapons that kill indiscriminately. We are violating our own federal laws. It meets the definition under U.S. federal code in two of three categories. It’s a weapon of mass destruction under our own federal law. It violates U.S. military law. What they’re really worried about is that they would be financially responsible for these terrible weapons and it would totally bankrupt any country. We can never clean up the Middle East or Central Asia. We can’t clean up the atmosphere. They poisioned our world.

ICONOCLAST: What is the long-term prognosis for Iraq?

MORET: Oh, Iraq, the former Yugoslovia, and Afghanastan are completely uninhabitable now. No one should be living there.

ICONOCLAST: Where do these people go?

MORET: Well, they’re just going to slowly die. Their DNA is already destroyed.

ICONOCLAST: How long does a soldier have to be in Iraq before he has health problems.

MORET: What Major Doug Rokke told me, he was in charge of the depleated uranium cleanup team in Iraq, he said we were sick within 24 to 48 hours. Many soldiers have described that . . .

ICONOCLAST: What kind of sickness is it? What are the symptoms?

MORET: The symptoms are all of a sudden they started feeling sick and muscle and joint pain and rashes. Just a general malaise and losing control of their body functions. Some of them came back in adult diapers after Gulf War I. The men have burning semen and they internally contaminate their wives. Vanity Fair magazine’s David Rose did a wonderful article. A very indepth, very hard-hitting article, in the December 2004 issue. I’ve been to panels. Some of them are so sick that their heads are down on their arms all of the time except when they are talking. They have chronic fatigue. Any surgery or wounds that they have will not heal because their immune system is completely damaged by the DU particles. One breath of air can give you a fatal dose.

ICONOCLAST: If this is happening through the Trade Winds coming up along the Texas coast, how would people tell if they’ve had exposure?

MORET: They can’t tell. Suddenly, people are getting diabetes. Infant mortality is increasing. These are ways that they can tell or they can notice, for instance, the frog die-off in the environment. These are environmental indicators. There is no way to clean it up and there is no way to avoid exposure.

ICONOCLAST: There is no test you can do?

MORET: Yes. You can get a urine test, but you should have a geology lab measure the uranium in the urine and then look at the isotopic ratio to see if it has the signature of depleted uranium. It won’t be the same as on natural uranium. I don’t know of any uranium mines in Texas. It wouldn’t be coming from the environment.

ICONOCLAST: Is there anything else you want to add?

MORET: We’ve got over 12 or 14 depleted uranium bills in the state legislatures and we did that because we couldn’t get anywhere with the Federal government. It’s been a presidential coverup under President George Herbert Walker Bush, under Clinton who used it in Yugoslovia. It was under George Herbert Walker Bush when it was used for the first time on the battle field by the U.S. government in 1991 in the Iraq war. George W. Bush is responsible for using it in Afghanastan and Iraq. These three presidents are the three biggest war criminals in the history of the entire world. They’ve gotten away with it because they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the coverup. As long as they can keep people studying it and there is no definitive proof and stuff like that, statements like that are coming out from established scientists in the Pentagon, then the big lie continues. We know by this horrific information published by Dr. Busby that, indeed, this is an environmental issue. It is a global issue and its all being transported all over the world. The Aldermasten Report is the most important one that has come out so far.

ICONOCLAST: What are the hopes of the bills before the Legislature.

MORET: What I did was take the Connecticut bill that got bogged down in the Conneticut Legislature, requiring mandatory testing by the state of returning soldiers who want it, to Louisiana in April of 2005. They had voted unanimously in the House and in their Assembly and the governor signed it into law within eight weeks of me giving it to them on April 19. That was just astounding. I was really shocked. A week later, it was attached to Congressman McDermott’s depleted uranium bill before Congress and, in fact, it was your interview with Doug and me and Melissa Sterry in that whole issue of the paper. I mean you’re President Bush’s hometown newspaper in Crawford, and your paper was attached as a supporting document to that bill. So everybody in the Pentagon and in Congress read that, not to mention the VA and probably the state department. Your paper went all over the government. That’s very important.

ICONOCLAST: But there are other states that are following suit?

MORET: Yes. And now we have, actually, the states have legal jurisdiction over the National Guard so they’re able to pass laws like specifically covering the National Guard. They can’t do it for the regular soldiers, they don’t have legal jurisdiction. What we’re doing is forcing the Pentagon and the Federal Government to follow their own laws and directives and orders to test soldiers; to train them before they’re sent over there, soldiers who’ll be handling it, and then to give them medical treatment when they come back and they’re sick. We’re forcing them to do that for National Guard and then the states are making the government pay for it, the federal government, because they’re violating their own laws and mandates. It’s getting a lot of local media attention. It’s getting activsts and citizens all riled up about this issue and then it’s making the other soldiers and veterans who are not getting this treatment angry because they’re entitled to it too. So we’re pushing states against Federal law.

ICONOCLAST: So about a third of the states have moved forward on this.

MORET: We have it in the New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Legislature. It’s going into California and Oregon. It’s in Washington, Hawaii and I think Michigan or Minnesota. Louisiana has already passed it. Connecticut has passed it into law. We’re really started a snowball thing.

ICONOCLAST: Where do you start the ball rolling. Does someone contact the governor?

MORET: I think the most effective thing is to find two Vietnam veterans. They’ve already been through the Agent Orange poision and all the lies of the government. They’ve all been thrown in the trash can and filed lawsuits that were dismissed. The Vietnam veterans are really the most dangerous group to the federal government. They’ve been the most effective. I gave it to two veterans in Louisiana and they went into the Legislature and looked them in the eye and said now, you’re not going to turn down two Vietnam veterans. It’s impossible to do that. What happened just last week in the Hawaii legislature is that Rep. Ito, who was the chair of the Veterans Committee, refused to introduce the depleted uranium bill into the Legislature so Doug and I and other experts started writing to the Legislaters and encouraging the citizens to put more pressure on Ito. A veteran wrote a letter to Ito that said we’re a group of 3,500 veterans that have agreed to vote as a block and if you don’t put that into the Legislature, we’re going to vote you out. That’s effective. You have to do something and you feel better already. The hardest thing is to take that first step and to do an action.

We need to remind people what Ghandi said . . . “Even a small lamp dispells the darkness.”

Depleted uranium is the trojan horse of nuclear war. It keeps killing and there is no way to turn it off and there is no way to clean it up. After we’re all dead and wipe out our own species, the earth will heal itself.

Ernest Sternglass, Ph.D., is Director, and Chief Technical Officer of the RPHP Baby Teeth Study.
In 1963, Dr. Sternglass was invited to testify before the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, as to how the exponential increase in strontium-90 in baby teeth caused by bomb-test fallout was associated with increased childhood leukemia. His research and testimony played a role in President Kennedy’s decision to sign the Partial Test Ban Treaty.
As Professor Emeritus of Radiological Physics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, Dr. Sternglass has written numerous articles on the health effects of low-level radiation.
His 1981 book Secret Fallout: Low-level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island established him as a pioneer in the study of the health effects of low-level radiation.

‘What we’ve done is to replace the fallout from bomb testing with the so-called small permitted releases from nuclear plants.’

An Interview With Dr. Ernest Sternglass

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ICONOCLAST: I thought maybe you would be willing to discuss depleted uranium and its health implications.

STERNGLASS: I’ve been examining all the latest findings that have been reported and the evidence is just simply overwhelming that the DU particles travel around the world and they are far more toxic than anyone had suspected for uranium.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think the study is legitimate?

STERNGLASS: The latest thing that has happened in this field is that Dr. Chris Busby together with another person prepared a paper that is called ‘Did The Use of Uranium Weapons in the Gulf War 2 Result in the Contamination of Europe?’ and he shows the evidence from the measurements of the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Britain and it’s just overwhelming.

What he finds is just remarkable.

It turns out that the British people who develop atomic weapons have been monitoring activity in the air for years and under freedom of information he was able to get hold of the data they had stopped publishing years ago in 1999. They kept measuring it and essentially this is what they found. Compared to a period of a few years during which these measurements were averaged the article says that typically the levels were the order of 100 units. Then during the three weeks between the Gulf War events that took place on March 19, the first strike of our airplanes against Bagdad, then on March 20, the second round of air strikes took place, the 21st of March, heavy aerial attacks on many cities, on April 14, the major fighting was declared over.

So he looked at these three weeks and the number of stations that measured radioactivity in Britain, and he found that instead of 100 units average in the background use in the same place suddenly it rose to 600 during those three weeks. They tested it in every possible way. They even looked at the details of the geographic and the meteorological data and he published the charts for the Atlantic and Europe and the meteorological office, and, low and behold, there is no other way, and in fact they could show that air from Africa in that direction moved all the way to Europe and deposited some sand from the Sahara, so there was simply no alternative to the use of battlefield uranium.

It has been clearly shown to allow these fine particles that have less than a quarter of a million diameter. They measured it and calculated in three weeks how many of these particles would be taken in by a person breathing normally and spending some time outdoors and they calculated that 23 million tiny particles of a quarter million diameter in the concentration that they measure would reach the body and go to the lungs and enter the lymphatic system and produce all kinds of organ damage.

ICONOCLAST: What does that mean to the average citizen of Great Britain? That they have a better chance of getting cancer?

STERNGLASS: Not only cancer. I have been particularly studying the recent rise of diabetes that has taken place around the world. I’ve looked at the 50 states in the United States for which the CDC has just recently published the detailed data by age group, 18-44, 45-64, 65-74, 75+, plus the total for the whole number, and the age adjusted rates for every state between 1994 and 2004.

The overwhelming evidence is that, for instance, in Alaska there was a huge rise, especially sensitive in the 75+ age group, which went from a low of 5.8% of the population that age in 1997 to as high as 13.7% by the year 2003. There was a peak in between of 15.1 in 2002 and there are no nuclear plants anywhere near Alaska.

A very comparable rise of the same order of percentage rise especially for the total age adjusted rate occurred in Japan. Evidence has been published in China about Japan and China recently that Japan has almost twice the rate of diabetes that we have in our nation. Typically, the greatest rises in our case have initially taken place in areas near large nuclear facilities like in Tennessee and downwind to the northeast in Kentucky and West Virginia. In fact, the areas in the west which are relatively far from the oceans on both sides, like Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado, those states had relatively low rates of diabetes in the early years of 1994. But then they rose and essentially achieved pretty much the same levels as the states with large nuclear facilities.

ICONOCLAST: How does radiation cause diabetes?

STERNGLASS: There was an article in January 2005 in Science, in which they found that what was going on, and this is really amazing, is that they find that obesity is also rising and no one knows quite why. They find that there are genetic factors, mutations, damage to the pancreas and to the islands of beta cells that produce insulin that normally produce adequate amounts of insulin. In the case of Type 1, they stop producing insulin all together and in the case of Type 2, they often don’t supply enough.

Genes that control the production of certain hormones are damaged and all of this is explained. These biological mechanisms are now becoming clear, but nobody knows what is triggering the whole chain and that’s exactly what is now available in the article that appeared in Science, Volume 311 on Feb. 3, 2006, page 622-628. It’s an article called ‘The Toxic Potential of Materials at the Nano Level.’ It explains in detail how any kind of material, it could be ordinary carbon or a metal that is not radioactive, if these particles are small enough, that is tinier than a micron, which is a millionth of a meter, or one ten thousandths of a centimeter, if these particles are that small, it turns out they are toxic in themselves, whatever they are composed of.

That’s exactly what’s happening in the case of nanoparticles which are produced when the uranium burns upon impact and melts steel and the fine particles are so small, they act like a gas. So what you’re getting is a gas of uranium that gets transported around the world and is now proven by these latest measurements.

And so what we’re seeing is an epidemic of all types of conditions that we did not understand, that have been in continuous rise in this country in the last 15 years, actually since the mid-80s. A very consistent rise, especially in cancers that are known to be produced by radioactive materials.

The most well-known of these is thyroid cancer, and the incidence of thyroid cancer has the most new cases, not mortality, because most people do not die of thyroid cancer because it can be treated, but the incidence of thyroid damage in general and in particular thyroid cancer has been going up steadily and this is again due to radioactive products.

We know that this is true now that other cancers, especially pancreatic and breast cancer, have been rising. The incidence of mortality has leveled off in breast cancer and has come down slightly, that is the total number of people who die of breast cancer has been declining slightly because of the great improvement of medical techniques of early detection, early treatment, and successful treatment by chemicals and surgical techniques that have been developed.

We have had no real understanding of why diabetes has been rising so enormously and now it all comes together. It’s all happening at this very moment, in fact.

I’m in the process of writing a paper that I will be presenting in Japan in the middle of March. I’m leaving for Japan on March 8 and it’s just mind-blowing to what degree measurements by the Weapons Establishment in England show that these fine particles travel thousands of miles around the world and, in fact, Leuren Moret has pictures that NASA satellites took showing the sand storms going across the Atlantic and all over the world so we have totally underestimated the very serious nature of the use of uranium as weapons.

ICONOCLAST: I know that the government in Texas, for instance, have been promoting better diets for students. They say junk food is the cause of obesity.

STERNGLASS: It’s the combination of all these factors. This is what happens a series of articles in recent years have shown that one key reason diabetes is produced is that in the centers in the brain that control appetite and that receive signals from fatty tissue, hormones are sent out, when either the brain center is damaged or the production of chemicals that signal that enough fat is accumulated so that there is no need to eat more, when this is damaged then people simply cannot stop eating and this happens particularly strongly in the case of young people who live in areas where there’s a lot of milk that was shipped into inner cities from somewhere with nuclear reactors nearby.

It happens in Washington D.C., Baltimore, New York City, all of which we see milk from around the area, Three Mile Island, Peachbottom, and the Virginia reactors and the ones in New Jersey because the states, and we published a book that describes this in detail in 1990 called “Deadly Deceit,” in which my associates Dr. Jay Gould, who just recently passed away and Ben Goldman, interviewed House officials in different states, especially D.C., and the states around this area and they said yes, we mix the milk from these areas because there is a law that was passed way back during the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s to protect farmers whose milk just doesn’t taste quite good and it allows the federal government to help them by buying the milk and making sure that the farmer receives the full price and then they mix it with other milk and ship it to other areas where it is consumed.

ICONOCLAST: So you’re saying that milk is contaminated with DU?

STERNGLASS: Often is it not only contaminated with DU, but with the permitted releases of nuclear plants, which you know they typically emit such elements as cesium 137 and strontium 190, as well as fine particles of uranium and plutonium, and these products and other heavy elements that are produced in the reaction in the reactor. These are tiny particles that enter the environment, get into the milk, into the grass, a cow concentrates some of them like radioactive iodine and radioactive strontium, especially. The theory was that by diluting it there would be too small a concentration to see, but, unfortunately, the dose response curve over the last 20-30 years, it has been discovered, is not a straight line. In fact, the greatest effect rises for tiny doses. It rises rapidly for the first 50 hundred milligrams and then flattens out, and this is called the logorhythmic dose response.

This diluted milk, or milk that has quite a bit of radioactivity in it, was extrapolated and was believed would be too small to make a significant detectable difference. But it turns out, in fact, to be very sensitive and, therefore, we find that in Washington D.C. which has no cows of its own, it developed during the recent years of nuclear reactors since the 1970s essentially, when the large reactors began operating D.C. began to have the highest infant mortality in the nation, together with the highest number of children born below normal weight. And this is moreso than in areas that have a very large concentration of black people like Mississippi, Louisiana, many of the states in the South.

And so the overwhelming evidence that is coming together is that it is a combination of many things that we did not fully understand. We did not understand that the dose response is not a straight line, but rises very rapidly for the tiny doses and curves down and becomes flat. That’s why not everybody in Europe died from the huge releases in Cherynobyl. We saw children and infant mortality peak in the summer of 1986 from Cherynobyl. We published papers on this. We found that wherever there were high levels measured by the EPA by radioactive iodine, and radioactive strontium that came from Cherynobyl in certain parts of the country, in those areas, there was an increase in total mortality over the previous years, and also mortality and infectious diseases and infant mortality. That could not have been explained except for the existence of this superlinear dose response, which again, is something that we had never seen.

With the number of ordinary x-rays, for instance, there was a straight line relationship between the number of x-rays given and the incidence of childhood cancer, when mothers received x-rays during pregnancy. That is a paper I published in 1963.

At that time, I was unaware of the evidence that the children who die of cancer as a result of the x-rays are not representative of what happens when you have internal doses from substances that keep giving you radiation over days, weeks, months, and years, especially since strontium 90 deposits in the bone and stays there for many years in children and even longer in adults. Typically in children two to three years, there’s a half life, biologically in children, and about five to ten years in adults. We simply underestimated enormously, by factors of hundreds to thousands of times, what tiny doses of internally deposited materials do as compared to what we experienced in over a hundred years of experience with medical x-rays.

ICONOCLAST: What do you think needs to happen to correct matters?

STERNGLASS: Number one, we absolutely have to convert our nuclear plants to natural gas, which we’ve done in Colorado and Colorado now has a relatively low rate of cancer and infant mortality, compared to other states. That can be done and has been done in other countries too. Sweden and many of the other European nations: Italy has now shut down its nuclear plants, Austria shut down its nuclear plants and the Germany is committed to converting to eliminating nuclear plants and replacing it with wind or solar power and geothermal power.

We’re the only nation in the world that has spent the least amount of money on alternative methods of generating energy. We’ve invested so much in uranium in the ground, all the major investment firms urged and invested enormously in uranium. And we have enormous investments in oil and gas, of course. Many people want to continue to burn coal. It can be burned in a cleaner way, but all this has been done much more in Europe where people felt no guilt about having developed the bomb and tested it in the first place.

ICONOCLAST: Is it more dangerous having nuclear power plants or having DU ammunitions.

STERNGLASS: I would say that you cannot make a comparison.

If you live downwind from a nuclear plant, and you can look at our website, <radiation.org>, you’ll see a series of articles and some of them are directly available, including my book, “Secret Fallout,” is available on the internet through the website for free. You will see that there was a decline in infant mortality all the way since 1935 in the country and that leveled off when we began nuclear bomb testing in Nevada in the 1950s and actually rose for the first time in 1958.

Recently, in 2002, after declining a little bit after the end of nuclear testing in ‘63, it did not go back to the baseline as expected. Infant mortality, in a sense, is twice as many babies are dying in this country in the first year of life as should be if the initial trend had continued.

What we’ve done is to replace the fallout from bomb testing with the so called small permitted releases from nuclear plants.

We’ve confirmed this, as described in our website article listed there. There are 21 articles and letters to medical journals and international referee journals that explain all this and that warned about it but the industry and our present government and Washington wants to continue the construction of new nuclear plants and even consider new nuclear weapons to replace old ones and to build bunker busters that would supposedly penetrate deeply into underground storage of chemical weapons and so on.

Russia, China, and England are also reluctant to end this, but it is now happening in many countries in the world that they are going to other alternative means of generating electricity. And finding other fuels and oils, such as biomass, of which I just recently attended a conference in Austria, and many of these countries are doing things that we should be doing. Right now, for instance, Denmark is producing more than 20 percent of the energy by wind power alone. Sweden has decided that in another 15 to 20 years, it will replace all its coal and nuclear plants with alternative means of generating electricity.

ICONOCLAST: Any other comments?

STERNGLASS: I would say that we have to end the use of ammunition that contains uranium in any form. We have to understand that we made a tragic mistake in vastly underestimating the doses from internal emittors that we inhale with our air and ingest with our food and milk and our drinkng water.

It is simply going to destroy the economy of this nation, as well as its health, and as I’ve published in papers, it affects the brain. It has led to a decline in SAT scores all through the period, typically 18 years after major nuclear test in Nevada. There was a decline in SAT scores that could not be explained. I predicted in the article that when the testing would end, 18 years later, the SAT score would begin to recover. That’s exactly what happened. It never recovered its early level because we replaced the fallout from the bomb test with radiactive, permitted releases that we thought and felt, as I did when I was a young scientist and engineer and the research laboratory in Westinghouse here in Pittsburgh, when I believed it was a wonderful development to replace the dirty coal plants with clean nuclear reactors too cheap to meter.

We had no idea as to the enormous great seriousness of the low level of continued doses from the tiny amounts that we thought were so inocuous, based on all the years of our studies of x-rays.


Rosalie Bertell, PhD, GNSH, is president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health (IICPH), and editor-in-chiefof International Perspectives in Public Health.
Dr. Bertell served four years as co-chair for Canada on the Ecosystem Health Workgroup of the Science Advisory Board to the U.S. - Canada International Joint Commission (IJC) on the Great Lakes, and currently serves on the IJC Nuclear Task Force. She also serves as advisor to the Great Lakes Health Effects Program of Health Canada, and to the Environmental Assessment Board of Ontario.
Dr. Bertell directed the International Medical Commission - Bhopal which investigated the aftermath of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, and of the International Medical Commission - Chernobyl, which convened the Tribunal on violations of the human rights of victims in Vienna, April 1996.
She has received numerous awards and five honorary Doctorate degrees since launching the IICPH in 1984. Awards include United Nations Environment Programme, Global 500 Laureate (1993); Alternative Nobel Prize: Right Livelihood Award (1986); World Federalist Peace Award (1988); Ontario Premier’s Council on Health: Health Innovator Award (1991); and Marguerite D’Youville Humanitarian Award, Lexington, MA (1992).
Dr. Bertell is a member of the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart.
She earned a Doctorate in Biometry at the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., in 1966, and has been working ever since time in environmental epidemiology. She has collaborated in analyses undertaken in the U.S., Canada, Japan, the Marshall Islands, Malaysia, India, Germany, Ukraine, and other countries.
Author of “Handbook for Estimating the Health Effects of Ionizing Radiation” (1984, 1986) and the popular non-fiction book: “No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth,” together with other written works, Dr. Bertell has reached medical, scientific, and popular audiences around the globe.
“No Immediate Danger” has been translated into Swedish, French, German, and Finnish.
By choice, Dr. Bertell works with indigenous people and economically developing countries as they struggle to preserve their human rights to health and life in the face of industrial, technological, and military pollution.
She was a founding member of IICPH, an attempt to institutionalize her growing concern for human survival on an intact planet.

‘It violates all traditional ideas of war.’

An Interview With Dr. Rosalie Bertell

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ICONOCLAST: I have some questions regarding DU and thought you might be willing to discuss it with me.

DR. ROSALIE BERTELL: I am an environmental epidimiologist and have worked for more than 30 years on low-dose radiation. I do know a lot about DU.

ICONOCLAST: I understand we are seeing a higher incidence of diabetes, cancer, and leukemia because of DU. Have you done any studies regarding that?

BERTELL: Well, obviously, they’ve used so much of it and it’s an aerosol. An aerosol can float in the air a long time and can go great distances. So, that said, it’s probably pretty well spread at least in the northern hemisphere from both Gulf Wars, and also they used it in Kosovo and apparently in Afghanistan. A lot of it’s out there. But whether or not it’s connected with diabetes I can’t prove.

ICONOCLAST: How does exposure affect the body?

BERTELL: First of all, it’s an internal exposure, and the current studies on internal exposure are not very reliable, so people have been speculating on what might be a reasonable outcome. It certainly can upset the hormone system and that is one of the causes of diabetes. But there is no hard evidence that it really does this. It is logical and credible, but the government is so focused on cancer that it doesn’t ever study it.

ICONOCLAST: Are you familiar with the report due out on March 1 regarding the travel of DU to the UK.

BERTELL: Yes.

ICONOCLAST: What are your thoughts on that?

BERTELL: Well, it’s a well-done study and, you now, I always keep a little reservation because often we don’t have any idea what NATO or Aldermaston or the British military are doing, and so when you find DU in the air, you can assume it’s coming from the Gulf War, but it might be the military’s doing something that you don’t know.

Actually Chris Busby who wrote this is a yatchsman and he did check all the weather and the wind and the back breeze that does come from Iraq and he did a pretty good study. It’s just that you always have an unknown factor because the military is not accountable to people.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think the people in the UK need to be alarmed at the results of this study?

BERTELL: Not just the people in the UK, but people all over.

ICONOCLAST: All over the world?

BERTELL: Yeah, at least the northern hemisphere.

ICONOCLAST: Is there anything people can do to protect themselves from the radiation that you know of.

BERTELL: I wish there was. About the only thing we know to do is drink distilled water to get heavy metals out of the body. That’s one thing. Another is replace the proteins which would be lost. You know, a heavy metal does two things. It forms a compound with the chemicals in the body to get rid of heavy metals and it also causes free radicals and the same enzyme that gets rid of a heavy metal is also the one that fights the free radicals. Because you have a heavy metal which is radioactive, if it tries to get rid of the heavy metal it’s not going to be there to fight the free radicals, so you are going to have some kind of problems internally with this. You can’t use the same enzyme for two purposes.

ICONOCLAST: So we need to eat more protein?

BERTELL: Proteins would help because it would replace the enzyme that you need.

ICONOCLAST: As far as trying to put a stop to the use of depleted uranium, do you think the public should do that?

BERTELL: I think it shouldn’t be used. It’s a gas, and we’ve already signed the Geneva protocol not to use gas in warfare. It’s already illegal. It’s a metal fume. A metal fume is a gas.

ICONOCLAST: I see.

BERTELL: I think a weapon like this is so indiscriminate, it’s going to be exposing civilians, women and children and the elderly. You know, it violates all traditional ideas of war. And it exposes people who are not fighting, whether it’s countries not fighting or civilians in the country where the war is.

That is unacceptable.


Doug Rokke. Ph.D., is a Vietnam and Gulf War veteran and an expert on ‘depleted uranium.’ He headed the US Army’s DU Project after the Gulf War, and is a victim of DU contamination.
He appears in the recently released DVD “Beyond Treason” that was produced by Power Hour Productions <http://www.beyondtreason.com/>, an 89-minute film that presents comprehensive documentation from United States Government archives of a massive cover-up, including military and civilian experimentation, dating back over 60 years.

‘There ain’t no buck stopping anywhere.’

An Interview With Major Doug Rokke

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ICONOCLAST: We’re doing a story about the release that’s coming out March 1 . . .

ROKKE: Chris Busby’s work.

ICONOCLAST: Right. What’s your take on it.

ROKKE: Brian Spratt’s comment in The London Times — he’s from the Royal Acadamey of Sciences — he said if anything it was the stir-up of the natural uranium from the shock and awe. That’s crazy. If there was that much there to begin with, it got there because we dumped it there.

Some other British Ministry of Defense people said that this was released from the nuclear power plants.

As you’re totally aware, nuclear power plants don’t have that stuff to release. It is totally encased in the power rods. That’s also absolutely nuts.

When you look at it, it is extremely important to note that the use of uranium munitions is absolutely confirmed. It is thoroughly confirmed that they’re absolutely refusing to comply with the Army regulations to clean it up. They’re simply refusing to comply with the orders and mandates that regulate medical care, not only for the U.S. troops, but for all the coalition forces, and up and beyond that by the Geneva Convention, all the Iraqis and all the civilians. That’s not just Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Afghanastan, or the Balkans, but here in the United States.

I think what was so funny is that the story broke from Chris Busby’s work, where they’re measuring the high concentrations. Now, if they’re measuring the concentrations there in England, there’s no doubt that it is all the way across the continent, which is extremely important. That goes back to even more emphasis on cleaning up the contanimation as is required by the regulation. And the same thing, even more important, for the medical care.

When you read the story in The London Times, and Brian Spratt says from shock and awe they stirred up all this stuff, natural uranium is at parts per million. That’s like one grain of pepper in a salt shaker. With the DU, we’ve used thousands of tons over there and its scattered all over the place. On-site measurements verify that. Still photography verifies it. Live video verifies it. All you have to do is watch this stuff on the evening news when they’re hitting anything because the DU signature is absolutely distinctive. There is nothing like it. You can see from the Bunker Busters and everything else and all that’s fired from the tanks, it’s just absolutely crazy.

Now, what was really interesting yesterday, the Army just ordered $38 million worth of DU munitions from Allied Tech up in Minneapolis. That’s 120 mm round, 829. This stuff is awesome. I’ve used the 829 round, it’s absolutely awesome.

ICONOCLAST: In what regard?

ROKKE: It’s a DU round. It just literally destroys everything. It’s a 120 mm round, over 4,700 grams, incredible velocities. It just destroys everything. Now, there are no targets left in Iraq. We haven’t had any armored targets in Iraq. We haven’t had any, so why would they be ordering millions and millions of dollars worth of munitions, except to invade Iran. That’s the only reason they’d be doing that stuff. We’ve absolutely verified that they’ve shot up apartment buildings, they’ve shot cars and trucks, they’re shooting anything they can. If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t move, shoot it, too, and use DU because it’s a weapon of choice. It is that good.

ICONOCLAST: Are they at the point now that cleanup would be impossible?

ROKKE: It was from the beginning. They never cleaned up the highway of death that’s all around Basra. They just didn’t do it and they didn’t do the medical care. All the orders for medical care have absolutely just been totally ignored. The VA, and it should be coming out with a new publication, but the VA publishes a thing called “Gulf War Review.” Volume 13, No. 1, on page 12 was published last spring so it’s a year or so old. They acknowledged that in 14 years they had only tested 270 people. I had over 400 names submitted personally.

Now you look at Chris Busby’s work. He is an incredible scientist. He is absolutely sound, solid.

ICONOCLAST: What do you think about the delay in getting the numbers because of the government not releasing those?

ROKKE: The government is not going to release that. They’re not going to acknowledge using this stuff. The government is not going to acknowlege the environmental effects. They have no intention of it. The fact that they just and went and bought 38 million more dollars of ammo just absolutely verifies and proves it. You know, Karen Parker has done work as far as illegal use of uranium munitions. In the stuff that we did it absolutely verifys it and Karen Parker’s work in the United Nations shows this stuff is illegal.

When you go to the common task right now, it states point blank that it makes food and water unusable. Well, you can’t do that. You can’t clean it up.

In 1995, we released a report we had started in 1992, back when we got the task, and in December of 1992, a guy named Walker, assistant Secretary of the Army, told us at that time to figure out ways that would reduce the toxicity and DU so it could be used. Obviously, you can’t do that. It’s impossible, but they don’t give a flying rat’s ass.You’ve got everything going around and around. The guy from your hometown down there knows perfectly well this stuff is dangerous. He knows what the orders and the regulations are. He is the commander-in-chief of the military. Yet he’s not enforcing the mandatory medical care. He’s not enforcing the mandatory environmental remediation. Now, you’ve got contamination measurements as far away as England. This means you have to have incredible contamination figures all over the place. This stuff is not like playing checkers, where you can hop, skip, and jump a space.

ICONOCLAST: Anywhere in between there and London and beyond?

ROKKE: In all directions. It has to be. We know that gross contanimation exists in Iraq. That’s a given. We’ve got the videos. We’ve got the on-site measurements. The military has acknowledged that and has not cleaned it up. The key thing is we now have additional evidence of confirmed contamination, which we already knew. But, the consequences of the refusal to comply with the environmental remediation and medical care have now resulted in contamination all over the place.

That’s absolutely unacceptable.

Now, with this big new purchase of DU ammo, it’s sort of like what is going on here? To me, and I have to look at it from a military point of view, for Gulf War II we started planning back in ‘95, was thoroughly ready to go, and they finally implemented it.

They just had to have justification to scare the population and do it, okay?

It had nothing to do with 9-11 or terrorism or anything else. It was just strickly, we’re gonna do it, you know, for oil shit. So you’ve got all of that stuff and then you’re using it where there are no real targets. They called for it and now we’ve got it all over.

I’ve got video, I mean I’ve got entire apartment buildings that were totally destroyed with DU munitions, civilian apartment buildings. The Army officers on tape refusing to clean it up. Someone needs to ask the president if he intends to enforce the law.

You’ve got to have some sort of accountability.

We had gotten fed up the the Clinton administration and so we went over to the Bush side, hoping for improvement. It all fell apart completely. It just fell apart.

ICONOCLAST: Why do you think it fell apart?

ROKKE: Cheney.

ICONOCLAST: His influence?

ROKKE: Completely. When you look at this stuff, you’ve got everybody lying through their teeth. You’ve got everybody lying through their teeth and ignoring everything.. Georgie Bush didn’t know what was going on. Cheney has always been there. Cheney was there when we did those no bid contracts with Haliburton per Madelyn Albright back in ‘92, -93. I’ve still got those things.

If you look at everything with Haliburton and with KBR,, total misuse of funds. They’re billing for stuff that they’re not doing. They can’t account for anything.

To me this is just symptomatic. Total carelessness. Total disregard for everything.

Army regulations have the force of U.S. law.

On the medical care order, Ron Peak ordered that medical care. Colonel Bobbing, according to the order, that supposed to make it happen.

I was born back in the time when Harry Truman said the buck stops here. Well, there ain’t no buck stopping anywhere. The buck is getting blown all over the place.

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Major Denise Nichols (retired), is a Gulf War veteran and retired U.S. Air Force Reserve Major,Vice Chairman of the National Vietnam Veteran and Gulf War Veterans Coalition.

‘We’re like little sheep, little lambs that didn’t know the truth.’

An Interview With Major Denise Nichols

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ICONOCLAST: What is the current status of individuals coming back from Iraq:

NICHOLS: They’re not getting tested for DU and they should be. There should be an organized approach that everybody gives urine samples as soon as they hit the ground back home. There should be an organization doing that across the board. It’s not happening.

People are having to go to the states to at least get the opportunity for the National Guard, and that’s ridiculous. There needs to be an organized program. Every single one of them needs to be tested, whether they are National Guard, reserve, or active duty.

Dr. (Henry) Dorochovich who was punished, also, who was part of Doug Rokke’s team needs to be the head person of the lab that ultimately does this. Our trust in the system, as currently set up, is not there because they don’t even take calls from the Gulf War vets that were tested for DU, as they call and try to tell them their health has changed. They are not actively tracking these people’s health even though they tested a small number. I say small in comparison to the numbers of us that served in the first Gulf War.

ICONOCLAST: They did about 200 out of thousands?

NICHOLS: Oh, yeah. We had 689,000 deployed. When I first started asking, I asked for heavy metal testing at the VA. They wouldn’t do it. I begged them. I said, “Come on. This might give us some answers of what’s going on.” That was back in ‘93-’94. It hasn’t changed one iota.

They are passing bills in the states. It’s a shame because people are trying to do something productive, but I doubt that it will really change anything because there’s not an organized approach to getting everybody tested. And it shouldn’t just be if you think there’s a problem. No. There is a problem. Accept that there was DU used in theatre that we want to know just as much as the firefighters in New York want to know their health status. It should be open. It should be transparent.

I’ve been in D.C. when Melissa McDermott presented. She wouldn’t address the questions from people that were there. She wouldn’t answer those. She brushed them off. So the transparency is not there.

ICONOCLAST: Is there a disconnect between the Congress and the Administration on this? This testing is required by law, is it not?

NICHOLS: By law it’s not. They say it’s available if they request it, and so many of them don’t understand. We’re like little sheep, little lambs that didn’t know the truth. I was over there and served on the border between Saudi and Iraq and I finally sent my urine off 10 years after to Dr. Dorochovich’s uranium metals project, and it came back with a trace. I was showing even that. They’re not even doing hair sampling, which would probably be cheaper and would show it right off the bat.

They’re not making that information available to the troops. You know, here’s a hair sampling kit if you want to pay for it yourself.

They’re not doing anything, nothing in an organized manner, and it’s because they don’t want to acknowledge what the truth and the hazards are. We now have three bills up there, but when the Democrats put it out the Republicans aren’t signing on. I’ve been pushing those three bills and telling people to send e-mails and write letters, call your Representatives, get them to sign on to these bills, show them that we are still alive out here and we want this done. There are three bills. If you go on <house.gov> and click on “thomas” and put in DU, they’ll pop up.

ICONOCLAST: Do you know what the thinking of the military brass is on DU?

NICHOLS: Basically, to not trigger any controversy.

ICONOCLAST: The reason for that would be...

NICHOLS: Let’s compare this to Agent Orange. Tactically DU works great, just like Agent Orange defoliated the triple canopy forest in Vietnam, cut down sniper attacks and all that. Okay. DU is a weapon that is very, very effective. They don’t want to give it up. When you’re fighting a war, you want the best, to protect lives in, but they don’t look at the long-term health effects. They never do. They never have. And until they learn that lesson, people need to keep speaking up and we need to keep educating and trying to get there. Everybody needs to be involved in bringing it up.

ICONOCLAST: Are you seeing a lot of soldiers in greater numbers with DU problems?

NICHOLS: I’ll tell you what’s going on right now. Gulf War vet have kind of gone quiet. They are trying to get the compensation if they haven’t. If they have gotten their compensation, they’re afraid to speak out. The other thing is when we have the casualties coming back like we do, arm and legs missing, the traumatic brain injuries, it’s very hard for each of us to stand up and keep going on because those are so obvious and such outstanding wounds. It’s almost like, “Well, we’re still alive. We’re whole. We would have rather lost a leg than deal with this lifelong health problem.” And cancer is topping the deaths that we continue to have. We can’t get them to do a Social Security match for the deaths of the Gulf War veterans for Gulf War I.

But, you know, having been a service person, you hesitate to come forward. If they have compensation, they are fearful they’ll lose it, no matter what little bit they’ve gotten. They’re scared to speak up.

And then when we talk about the new soldiers, it’s the same way. They saw their buddies killed. I found a few of them when I went to the NGWRC meeting. We had a handful of them come in. And there’s the obviously undiagnosed illnesses that are going on and the strange illnesses.

One guy had already had his perithyroid gland removed. I mean, that’s not normal, not at an early age. But his driver was killed. It’s hard to get them to stand up and start talking about these things.

We’ve got so much legitimate PTSD that’s not being dealt with effectively and you don’t want to mix the cases, because there are those with PTSD that are ill and will be ill and they are separate things.

That’s what we’ve had to battle against. They wanted to stick us in the PTSD and for a long time, therefore, tried to get people help. Our vets that were Vietnam vets, I was told the only way I can get them help is put them under PTSD, and I’d go, “He’s got some PTSD, but he’s got medical problem that are separate. Claim them both. Don’t let them classify them one way or the other.”

We’re still with that problem of dealing with all the different issues. It’s like the whole system is broken and nobody is seeing that it is broken.

You have people raising money publicly for the center that’s going to be developed in San Antonio. They are out there raising money now to try to get a state-of-the-arts center to help our amputees to recover as quickly and to the upmost.

ICONOCLAST: Are you familiar with the DU study being released on March 1?

NICHOLS: Yes. I haven’t read the whole study, but have picked up information coming out of Britain by Chris Busby.

ICONOCLAST: I guess the bottom line is that it somewhat proves that DU travels.

NICHOLS: Oh, yeah. There’s no doubt in my mind. I was at the border of Saudi/Iraq, and I have been saying that all along that we had sandstorms, and the sandstorms were like hurricanes coming through. And you’re telling me that stuff didn’t carry with the sand? Oh, come on. And not only that, the sand was contaminated when we were over there, when they hit the chemical facilities on the Thomasia and 50 others that we can’t get any proof out because we haven’t had anybody come forward with the videotape like we did for Thomasia. And, the chemical contamination. You’ve got a mixture of contamination on Gulf War I.

Gulf War II is, hopefully, just DU and anthrax. Hopefully. And the sand factor, which is a factor since sand has a silicon content.

Look at David Bloom, riding his Bloom-mobile, sucking in the sand. I was sitting there going, “My God.” And wondering if he took the shots that the military offered, which I bet he did, and we found out since that he did, breathing hazardous material into his lungs in the back of the Bloom-mobile, covering the story. And so, having been involved in a study that looked at hypercoagulation, a small sample study that every time we tested a Gulf War vet he showed positive, and that means you have sick blood, blood that’s going to clot, and so when he died a few of us were raising hell on trying to get people to pay attention to that hazard. We thought with David Bloom’s death that we could get some attention paid.

We got a little-bitty blip.

And all our soldiers were out there going through it, too.

Geeze, guys, the Agent Orange bill didn’t get passed until ‘91, and it didn’t effectively take care of their problems. They got limited to one agent, and there was red, white, and blue. There wasn’t just dioxin. Okay?

The vets get so tired of trying to go up there and push. You’re sick and you’re trying to advocate for other sick Gulf War vets. It gets mighty hard. I go to every meeting of the research advisory committee in D.C. They meet about three times a year now, and I’m always bugging them. Come on, guys.

I got a couple of them to go to the environmental medicine meeting, the chairman and the co-chairman. I was getting them together with a couple of docs, who were big doctors at one time, and an active duty flight surgeon who had gone into environmental medicine, who had the expertise.

In 1990, while we were all going over there, they knew we were going to come home sick. They went to this VA headquarters and begged, “Let us teach you all what we do with environmental medicine. We can train the doctors. You can put this program in effect, finding out what’s missing in the body and replacing those components as they become deficient so that your body can continue to try to fight.

And, they were ignored.

And, we’ve been lied to.

They kept saying, “We’re going to give you new money for research. Well, sh..., that was a big lie.

They’re dodging it every which way!

I just sit here and I shake my head every day, staying in tune with what’s going on.

You know, with this port security and Katrina? I’m going, “Boy, I only thought one part of the system was broken, veterans care and all. I look around and feel sorry for my daughter. I feel sorry for our kids. I’ve been out there trying to make a difference for the veterans. I sacrificed my life and my relationship with my daughter to go and do that a month at a time in D.C. My God, I shouldn’t have had to do that.

When some of us got tested Dr. Dorochovich collected urine samples to start getting them tested, and every urine sample got lost. He decided, “Well, I’ll start testing them here,” and he started ordering equipment and the VA fired him, of course. A remarkable man. He and Dr. Rokke have suffered. The whole team has suffered. I bumped into them one at a time until I had the whole team, and I didn’t know who they were until Doug Rokke sat me down and said, “Now let’s see, little Air Force nurse, let’s see who all you’ve met.” And kind of explained to me who the team Army was. Interesting. I went “Oh, my God.”
What are my choices? I was over there. Thought the anthrax shot was there to protect us, until I got home and found out the truth. Thought the PB was supposed to be good. Had my people take them. Didn’t force them, though. We weren’t told anything.
I’m one of the sick vets, too.

I also lost a brother-in-law, and now my brother. I will be headed back to Dallas shortly. I lost my brother-in-law in June and in November my brother got diagnosed and is dying of cancer. He’s back in the hospital and things aren’t looking good, so I’m trying to get my act together, my mind and emotional being together enough to face that.

So many things in our country are broken, and I hope America is waking up. I hope America looks and sees what’s going on with this.

One of the things that this country is supposed to be responsible for is defense and then taking care of veterans, and then natural disasters.

And they’re failing.

Every time I look I go, “My God.” It’s not just this administration. This has been going on for years. And our Congressmen and our Senators end up being paid for. Their seats are paid for. There are people that want to run that don’t have the money backup and can’t run. There are some good veterans running with a heart and soul, but they don’t have the money, and they probably won’t win, maybe one or two, hopefully.

The shame of it is that our country is not the way it was set up to be. with the common person going up there. It’s ruled by money and corporations. That’s part of the apathy in America.

I look for small changes, like in ‘’93 or ‘94 we lost Jason Clifton, who was out of Oklahoma. There was a hustle then, because the family wanted to donate his brain for research, to see if it could help us at all. And we’ve had ones after that. I kept bringing that up to the research advisory committee. Why don’t we have a place that if people want to donate these parts when they die, that might help us to find some answers for what to do, whatever. Well, lo and behold, we got the money for that and one that just died of cancer donated his brain. So they moved fast because we had one dying of cancer at the time.

On the other hand, as a lot of my vets tell me, “Denise, dammit, they know! Why do we have to spend money on research? And I agree with them. There are a lot of unpublished studies in the Army and they damn-well know and you can read it in the DU documents the way some of them are worded. If the consequences of DU became known it would become a political hot subject. If we could get people to carry the story. Where do you start?

During the Clinton adminstration we had to deal with the stain on the blue dress, over the vets. Fires in California, I mean, we’ve gone through everything. When we have thought we had a hot story that would make it, something would come up and take the news media off.

I feel for the Katrina people still living in tents. You’re history.

They’re all battling with whose fault it is and they leave the people, you know, just out there. I identify with them. I’m going, “Hey, a new group.”

I’ve got some Vietnam vets who have done investigations and have gone in quietly and, “We know there’s a sex trade out there,” but they don’t talk about that. When they do a story they miss what they really should concentrate on and I’m going, “God!”

You know, they’re controlled.

We’ve tried to do rallies in D.C. Well, it’s hard to get people to travel. Just like seeing the few that went up there to the Katrina hearings, a handfull of them. How do you get the masses up there to say “We’re not going to take it anymore.”

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Ann Ham works in public affairs, U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine.

‘There is exposure, but exposure doesn’t mean that it’s a threat.’

An Interview With Ann Ham

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ANN HAM: I know you are on a search for information about depleted uranium and the heath effects.

ICONOCLAST: Right. What prompted this is a story that came out in the London Times last Sunday. Are you familiar with that, about the study that Chris Busby did?

ANN HAM: I honestly am not. There are a lot of people doing different studies about depleted uranium.

ICONOCLAST: Well, apparently, they were able to come up with some monitoring numbers....

HAM: Really low, low levels?

ICONOCLAST: There was a spike in the radiation in the days....

HAM: Oh, in a certain area.

ICONOCLAST: There at Aldermaston...

HAM: It wasn’t right in London, was it?

ICONOCLAST: I don’t know, I don’t have a map in front of me.

HAM: Yes, I did see that, but I think they determined, from what I read in the newspaper, that it was probably the content of the soil and someone had assumed that it had come through the air from...

ICONOCLAST: Shock and awe?

HAM: Yeah, but I don’t remember all the details.

ICONOCLAST: Of course, I have a copy of that report, but also I have a copy of that article that was published in the London Times and a guy named Brian Spratt who’s with the British Royal Society said that the uranium could have come from natural uranium of soil kicked up by shock and awe. That would indicate that it did travel. What I am wondering is regarding depleted uranium there in Iraq, in the testing of the troops, is that being done on a regular basis. Is that mandatory?

HAM: I don’t think it’s mandatory anywhere, but the process is when soldiers, all troops, redeploy, or come back from deployment in southwest Asia they are required to fill out a post-deployment health assessment form. It asks many question about your health, but it does have a whole series of places to bubble-in: do you think you might have been exposed to the following. It’s under exposures. And there they list whatever they think they’ve been exposed to and “other” for any other concerns. Also, after they complete this form, then the next thing they do is see a health-care professional. This could be a doctor. It would usually be a doctor, a health-care provider. This is a requirement. It’s been a requirement for at least two years now, that they complete this form and turn in their concerns about exposures.

When anyone comes back, if they have concerns about DU exposure, they absolutely can be tested. The Army will test them.

ICONOCLAST: And the Army pays for it?

HAM: Yes. Or the military pays for it. The DoD pays for it. And, as you know, some states now, I don’t know how they’re paying for it, but, I believe it’s Louisiana, uhm...

ICONOCLAST: Connecticut?

HAM: Connecticut, and New York is working to do it, to provide testing for all. And, you know, I’m really not clear on whether it’s military who deploy from those bases in those states or if it’s from people who are native of that state.

ICONOCLAST: I believe it’s national guardsmen.

HAM: I think you’re right. So, they would belong to the state. I’m not sure who is doing that testing. I don’t think we’ve been able to figure that out.

ICONOCLAST: It’s paid for by the federal govenment?

HAM: I don’t think so. I would have to dig deeper to find that. I don’t think I know who’s paying for it. I haven’t followed the Congressional proceedings. I know New York is pushing to do this right now. I don’t know how they are getting their funding to do it.

ICONOCLAST: Are you familiar with U.S. Army regulation 700-48, which mandates the immediate thorough environmental remediation of DU?

HAM: I’m not.

ICONOCLAST: I believe that was approved around the first Gulf war.

HAM: Is it about remediation about the terrority we’re in?

ICONOCLAST: Bascially that whenever depleted uranium munitions are used, that clean-up follows.

HAM: Are you sure that it was depleted uranium?

ICONOCLAST: I believe it was.

HAM: And not simply uranium?

ICONOCLAST: I believe it was depleted uranium. Let’s say a soldier doesn’t sign off that he was exposed. And then he gets back to the states and health problems do occur that would indicate exposure. What are his options at that point?

HAM: As far as I know, the form is not a closed loop. I believe they could express concern and they could be tested. Is that what you’re asking?

ICONOCLAST: Uh, huh.

HAM: I know they can be tested, because I’m thinking of the national guard in New York.

ICONOCLAST: Whenever they fill the form out, are they educated as to what the possibilities of exposure are?

HAM: No. No. They’re briefed on all kinds of medical threats. They get a medical threat briefing as soon as they are there or before they deploy and they are told about washing their hands and that kind of thing, but I don’t know if anyone could speak on if every single soldier, airman, navy, got a briefing on that. I can’t guarantee that happens.

ICONOCLAST: Do you have any statistics as to the number of soldiers that do claim that they were perhaps exposed to depleted uranium?

HAM: No, I don’t.

ICONOCLAST: Do you know where I would find those?

HAM: I would have to ask around. I can ask my health physics people. They might have a source for that. They’ve been working on this and other materials a long time.

ICONOCLAST: From a health-care standpoint, what position does your organization take on depleted uranium? Do you think it’s a threat?

HAM: No. No. It’s a threat as a weapon.

ICONOCLAST: I mean for health.

HAM: No. No. I do not.

ICONOCLAST: So you don’t feel that there is exposure due to depleted uranium?

HAM: There is exposure, but exposure doesn’t mean that it’s a threat. I mean, I’m exposed to lots of things, like bad perfume, but it’s not a threat.

ICONOCLAST: Do you know how many soldiers have been treated.

HAM: No, no. I don’t. Once again, I’ll have to check other sources. First of all, we aren’t a clearinghouse for all soldiers, DoD, service members, either before they deploy or after they deploy.

ICONOCLAST: Is there a clearinghouse anywhere?

HAM: I’ll have to ask and find out. I don’t know that.

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Captain William Roberts is a media spokesman for Multi-National Forces in Iraq.

An Interview With Captain William Roberts

‘Depleted uranium arms are not utilized by units currently deployed here in Iraq.’

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ICONOCLAST: We are doing a story pertaining to what was published in the London Times last Sunday. They did a story about depleted uranium radiation traveling to the U.K. during shock and awe. What is being done regarding U.S. Army regulation 700-48 that mandates immediate thorough environmental remediation in Iraq?

CAPT. WILLIAM ROBERTS: Actually, sir, any questions pertaining to things that happened in units that are no longer deployed to Iraq need to be referred either to the units that were here at the time or to the Pentagon U.S. Army Public Affairs Office. The units that are here not do not utilize that type of munition.

ICONOCLAST: They do not utilize what? Depleted uranium?

ROBERTS: Depleted uranium arms are not utilized by units currently deployed here in Iraq. We don’t have that type of combat operation during this time. And we cannot speak for units that are not here under our command. So any question on actions or activity that took place by previously deployed units have to either be sent to the units deployed here at that time or to the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs at the Pentagon which I believe is your appropriate point of contact and their contact information is available on the internet, at <www.usarmy.mil> and go to the public affairs link.

ICONOCLAST: When did they cease using depleted uranium?

ROBERTS: When combat operations ceased. We had uh, as I said I can’t speak for when they were used or what they were used for, but we do not have them. We’re not exactly facing an armored threat here in Iraq at this time.

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Army Orders $77 Million Worth Of New DU Rounds

MINNEAPOLIS — The U.S. Army has extended a previous order for 120-mm ammunition for its main battle tank to $77 million, it was announced last week.

Alliant Techsystems revealed that the original contract for M829A3 tank rounds had been extended for fiscal year 2006 by $38 million, increasing the number of rounds to 35,000.

This type of round, which is based on a depleted uranium penetrator, has been described as the most advanced armor-piercing kinetic-energy ordnance available, with outstanding accuracy and lethality.

Although critics claim that radiation from depleted uranium is a potential health hazard to tank crews and to individuals exposed to the material upon impact with its target, the military says that the heavy depleted uranium is not only a superb armor-piercer, but is a hardener for the Abrams’ armor.

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Tim Hix is a Vietnam veteran exposed to Agent Orange, dying of cancer.

‘That reminds me of the ash with Mount St. Helens. It darkened the skies in different continents.’

An Interview With Tim Hix

By Deborah Mathews
ICONOCLAST REPORTER

ICONOCLAST: When were you in Vietnam?

HIX: ’66, ‘67, and ‘68.

ICONOCLAST: Then, did you know that you were exposed to Agent Orange?

HIX: Not at that time.

ICONOCLAST: When did you find out?

HIX: Well, I suspected when my brother died from it nine years ago and he and I had been stationed together.

ICONOCLAST: Where were you stationed?

HIX: All different places. We were on the rivers and in the different harbors. Actually, we were up in the estuaries.

ICONOCLAST: You said your brother passed away nine years ago and up until that time you didn’t think of Agent Orange?

HIX: Not really. Here about four years ago I started thinking that he died of it and I had heard them talking about the Agent Orange registry. You have to sign up for it. I just went down and signed up and they do all kinds of testing on you. They told me that everything was fine. Well, that night, the Central Texas Agent Orange doctor, this oriental lady called me and she said that there was an abnormality in your blood, but it is nothing to worry about. So they did more testing and stuff and then said that I had cancer. I was diagnosed in June of 2002 with prostate cancer and in the lymph nodes too. That’s how it started. Now, not only do I have the cancer from it, but I also have the type two diabetes, which is also caused from Agent Orange.

ICONOCLAST: How long was your brother sick before he passed away?

HIX: About seven or eight month. They first thought he had pneumonia and then they found that it was mesothelioma.

ICONOCLAST: Have you had any trouble getting any of your treatments?

HIX: No, I haven’t had any trouble that way.

ICONOCLAST: Did they have to establish that you were sick from Agent Orange.

HIX: No, I’m fighting that to this day. That’s what my appeal is. They’re saying that I wasn’t. These things are caused by Agent Orange and that is presumed by the VA to be true, but because I was in the Navy, they say if you didn’t walk on the ground, which that wasn’t my primary function. Had I been in the infantry, there would be no problem. You get it automatically. Air Force and Navy have a problem. The thing of it is that Agent Orange was airborne. They sprayed it. That is my contention.

One of the guys that I served side-by-side with has been drawing 100 percent compensation since 1996. They arbitrarily changed the rule, the VA did. They didn’t change the congressional law, but they changed their manual.

ICONOCLAST: Why?

HIX: So they don’t have to pay. It encompasses hundreds of thousands.

ICONOCLAST: So, now, you are getting all of your medical care through the VA?

HIX: I still pay for it. I had to have a radical prostatectomy in September of 2002 and I got the bill and consequently ended up filing bankruptcy. This stuff is only paid for by the VA if it’s service connected and that is what I am fighting, to get the service connection.

ICONOCLAST: They say that your cancer was not a result of your time in the service in Vietnam.

HIX: Yes, and I even have a letter from my radiation oncologist at the Dallas VA Hospital. He is Vietnamese. He was in the very same places I was and he wrote a letter that is now in my file in Washington D.C., that in his professional opinion it was caused from Agent Orange in my military service.

ICONOCLAST: What do you know about DU?

HIX: Not a whole lot, but some. It’s going to cause all kinds of cancers and things like Agent Orange did.

ICONOCLAST: There is a study that has just come out about the DU showing up in England.

HIX: That is another thing about Agent Orange exposure. For a long time, they wanted you to prove where you were. I have a friend who had a cotton crop that was killed by diaxon, which is the active ingredient in Agent Orange. It had drifted over a hundred miles, right here in the state of Texas, from one guy killing some brush with it. It drifted over one hundred miles and killed their cotton crop and they collected on it. What is the difference there from Vietnam. It could drift a hundred miles there the same as here.

ICONOCLAST: Going back to Vietnam, you weren’t given any information to alert you to risks?

HIX: No. We were gung ho. They are now, too, and we just have another Vietnam. I don’t disagree that Sadaam should have been ousted, but we should have done it differently.

ICONOCLAST: I had an interview with Daniel Ellsberg and one of the first things he said to me is that he wished he had done what he had earlier and it would have made more of a difference. He also compared Iraq to Vietnam. If you could do something to get information out there to others . . .

HIX: I already do, but I’d like to get through this legal stuff and help other guys in my same situation. There are a lot of people who need help and answers. I’d like to see something like that happen with this depleted uranium.

I think DU is like Agent Orange. It kills every living thing. The vegetation it kills quickly, the people, it takes years to manifest.

ICONOCLAST: With DU, studies show that it is traveling around the globe.

HIX: That reminds me of the ash with Mount St. Helens. That cloud of ash traveled everywhere. It darkened the skies in different continents.

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‘I Love DU!’

Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter Discusses DU Weaponry

By Nathan Diebenow
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

AUSTIN — Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector during most of the Clinton Administration from 1991 to 1998, unapologetically said that he looked at the use of DU weapons from the standpoint of a U.S. marine in the heat of battle.

”You put me in charge of a couple hundred marines, and we’re dug in and a T80 battle tank comes over. I don’t want to fight an equal fight. I don’t want him anywhere close to me. I’m going to open up a 120 millimeter battletank gun with continued depleted uranium rounds that will carve up that tank like a hot knife through butter and kill everyone inside before they can even come close to me,” said Ritter, who, as a Marine, served as a ballistic missile advisor to Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf during the first Gulf War.

“I love DU!” he added during a talk at the St. Andrews Presbyterian Church sanctuary in Austin last Saturday. ”I want to be able to use it on my 20 millimeter Bushmaster, on my LAB25, so it’ll cut through T62 tanks. Why? I don’t want an equal fight, ladies and gentlemen. You send me to war, and I’ll kill the enemy. I’m going to slaughter them! I’m going to eviscerate them! I’m going to annihilate them! And I’m going to do it in a way that brings all my marines home or at least as many of them as I can. THAT’S-MY-JOB! My job is to wage war, not make the world lovey dovey. You click the “on” switch on, it’s going on, and I’m going to them, and you better give me the weapons to do the job.

”And you better understand that when you give me those weapons, and I use those weapons, there are repercussions. When I pull that trigger on a DU weapon I’m creating conditions that are harmful to American service members. I’m creating conditions that are harmful to innocent civilians that have to live in that area. If you don’t want that, don’t send me to war.”

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Karl Schwarz is a 2008 candidate for U.S. President, an author, and a nanotechnology company founder whose son served in Iraq.

‘They have exposed close to a million of our troops.’

An Interview With Karl Schwarz

By W. Leon Smith
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

ICONOCLAST: Regarding Chris Busby’s study about DU traveling, I would like to get a political perspective from you. You know, The London Times printed a short story about this recently and the Ministry of Defense there said that it’s unfeasible that depleted uranium could have traveled so far.

KARL SCHWARZ: Well, that’s what their stance is, but if you look a lot closer at the comments of this ministry and also the Royal Academy people, they come up with two diametrically opposed solutions and answers. One person says that this was natural uranium that was stirred up in the atmosphere through shock and awe in Iraq. If natural uranium could reach there, by God, the DU probably could, too.

I mean, that’s just to cut straight through the political-speak, okay?

You have to read that article real close to detect that, and you might even have to quote the article or cite it. They are actually saying that “no, this wasn’t DU from the use of depleted uranium weapons, this was natural uranium from Iraq that got stirred up into the atmosphere through shock and awe. Now that’s the official British stance “one.” Okay?

Official British stance “two” is somewhat more problematic. Evidently, according to this governmental official, they’ve had a Chernobyl that they didn’t bother to tell their citizens about. Because he claims that uranium was local source from their own nuclear reactors, you know, electrical power plants, and didn’t have anything to do with DU from Iraq. Well, as a matter of fact, the reason that they put them in pellets and they put them in cores and they sink them in heavy water is so that uranium can’t get out, and they are sealed.

Those plants do not put any uranium in the air whatsoever. If they do, they have to shut them down. Period.

ICONOCLAST: What are your thoughts politically on this. What do you think our government needs to be doing?

SCHWARZ: I think our government needs to face this issue head-on, not only as a public policy issue for the troops that they’ve had exposed to this ever since Desert Storm which includes Bosnia, which includes Afghanistan, also includes Iraqi Freedom, the second go-round over here. They have used depleted uranium weapons in all four of those deployments. The troops, if you start backtracking, you don’t ever read about this, but you can find it if you look for Bosnia syndrome, like Desert Storm syndrome. One of the reasons and how I got on this story, Leon, was up in Canada. They have a thing called the Uranium Medical Research Center.

They actually have one in Canada and one in the United States. The Canadians told me, “Oh, for the record, the reason we didn’t go to Iraq is we are already seeing some huge health issues on the Canadian troops that participated in Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. We’re not going to be exposing our folks to this stuff anymore. We’re against it.” Now, they’re coming to grips in their own country with some very real and very tragic health stories, and our government is sitting on it.

Now, from a public policy viewpoint, they need to take care of our veterans.

They put them over there on deployment on questionable issues. If you look back at this issue, we have created the circumstances to attack Iraq the first time. There were some very questionable issues surrounding Clinton’s bombing of Bosnia. If you go back on 9/11, dissect that story, it won’t stand the light of day. Within 12 hours they were ready to attack Afghanistan and they were actually practicing that invasion in the late spring and early spring of 2001. And then, all of a sudden, we find out that everything about Iraq was fabricated.

So, basically, the last four engagements, the last four deployments, are under questionable circumstances. And they have exposed close to a million of our troops. Now, if you go back and start to look at the health implications that’s going on, they put 425,000 Americans in Desert Storm and over 300,000 of them are having medical disability issues.

They go over there some of the healthiest people on the face of this planet and come home with their life devastated.

ICONOCLAST: I know that some of the state legislatures are in the process of allowing testing for DU...

SCHWARZ: They are mandating it. Actually 10 have the legislation pending and two others have passed it.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think Texas should do it?

SCHWARZ: Yes.

ICONOCLAST: Why haven’t we?

SCHWARZ: Why haven’t we? Because it’s not politcally acceptable to this federal government. A lot of the states will run scared if the federal government starts threatening them with loss of funding.

ICONOCLAST: Do you think that that’s going to happen to some of those 12 states?

SCHWARZ: They may have some toning to do. I heard that an overwhelming number of the Republicans in the Louisiana House and Senate voted to pass that legislation down there. I’m trying to get it stirred up in Arkansas. That’s where my son is from. I want him tested. He was over there a year in the Green Zone. Even though he wasn’t out where they were dropping the bombs, this stuff was spread everywhere.

I talked to one lady down in Florida. She’s a doctor and tested 87 of them and every one was positive.

ICONOCLAST: If they test positive, what’s their future?

SCHWARZ: Well, first off they are going to have to get a urine test and chromosome test, which costs about six grand to get those tests done. There are some things they can do related to heavy metal poisoning treatment. You know, if you can get the damn metal out of your system through various medical means of treating metal poisoning, the prognosis may be much better than it is right now.

ICONOCLAST: High protein diets?

SCHWARZ: That, but they also give you certain types of medicine to flush it out of your system. This stuff tends to go for you liver, your kidneys, your brain, and most of the vets I’ve talked to about this are having side effects, blurred vision, blurred memory, aching joints. They went over there healthy and came home like they were crippled.

ICONOCLAST: Is the federal government doing anything for them?

SCHWARZ: Stalling. The VA has been locked up in committee. They aren’t even proposing to be out with the fourth draft until December 2006. I can tell you that for some of the people who served in 2003, that will be too late.

ICONOCLAST: What do you think needs to happen?

SCHWARZ: I think the government needs to (1) honor its word to the U.S. soldiers, (2) I think they need to start testing anywhere downstream of these firing ranges, the bases, the nuclear weapons labs, the storage facilities. I think they need to start looking at the watershed and air drifting issues right here in the states. And I think they need to come public with what they are detecting on these high volume air sensors. We have them. I’ve been on some on two of our military bases and also government labs. They have those sensors on them.

And, for some reason, they don’t want anybody to know about it.

Now, the other thing I’ve noted, because I’m watching it, is the story that broke in the U.K. (about DU traveling) and was posted within 24 hours in Australia and has not been picked up by any U.S. newspaper, and I’ve personally put about 600 of them on notice. I also sent it to Canada, Germany, France, Ireland, U.K., Australia, Japan. The world desk, national news editors.

ICONOCLAST: What about the people that live in Great Britain. Have you heard any feedback?

SCHWARZ: Yes. Some of the people on my e-mail update list, who are from Armenia, all the west to Singapore and Australia. Then there’s about 18 or 19 of them in the U.K. They have all posted this on their blogs if they have blogs. Canada has been very actively pushing this out, because now it’s adding up in their heads why so many Canadian troops came home sick.

A lot of the Canadians I know said they felt ashamed when their government wouldn’t go to Iraq with us. That is the first time Canada has not joined us in a jolly good war. They felt a little ashamed, but now they are starting to see the truth. In fact, some of them that served in Afghanistan are now dead. Some of them in Bosnia, now dead.

ICONOCLAST: Do we need to change our munitions to something different?

SCHWARZ: Yes.

ICONOCLAST: Or can we?

SCHWARZ: We could. Well, we can and we can’t. Sometimes we’re a victim of our own successes. I’m pretty sure the Russians and the Chinese are going to try to come up with tanks that have the same type of depleted uranium and armor that the Abrams tank has. We can’t penetrate them. A tungsten-tipped projectile will not be effective enough. You’d have to kind of shoot it in the ass, like the tiger thing. You can’t go head-to-head with them.

What you could do is tremendously scale down the reasoning behind some of this stuff. Like they’re using depleted uranium as penetrators for bunker busters just so they can bust those up. There are ways to take those bunkers out in a ground assault. You could get in there and blow the doors open, take the thing out that way. You might have to bomb it from the air. You might lose a few more people, but at least you aren’t condemning millions of people.

The story that you saw coming out of the United Kingdom is a very typical response that even U.S. government labs do when they get caught with their britches down polluting the environment and exposing people to nuclear contamination. They basically always try to say “Oh, that was natural uranium.” The only problem is once you start doing these samples, you find plutonium, you find neptunium, and you find U-236, which is not naturally occurring, at least plutonium and U-236 are not. And they are finding that, as well. Now, those two things are highly radioactive and highly toxic, in fact, there may be one or two things invented by man that are more toxic that plutonium. That is lethal stuff. It doesn’t take much to do you in.

ICONOCLAST: So their arguments don’t hold water?

SCHWARZ: They don’t hold water. And this is one of those things, as long as they obfuscate, they are literally guilty of genocide. They are guilty of cruel and inhumane treatment of our soldiers. And, you stop and think about it, our allies, our coalition partners are starting to see this and I think that’s why they are starting to fold up on some of these military policies. They’re not going to keep exposing their populations to this crap.

And now, if this story is true, that they’re being exposed thousands of miles away, you may seen a worldwide uprising to nuclear arms, period. That would be a good thing. Darn, Leon, I’m not even an anti-war person.

I’m standing here, outside, right now, looking around. I mean, what if this crap is right out here on these people’s yards? They’re out here doing their gardening, maybe getting exposed to this crap. You have no way of knowing, and it doesn’t take much of this stuff to put your health over the edge.

ICONOCLAST: Some of the scientists I’ve talked to say that it is everywhere, and that it’s in what we consume.

SCHWARZ: In an article I have coming out tomorrow, I talk about how this is probably in our water, it’s in our food chain, it’s in the air we breathe, it’s in the materials we touch. You know, yeah, it’s around. And that scares me because I’ve been sitting here for the last 25 years wondering why my friends are getting so damned sick with disorders they don’t even have names for.

About the only science that I’m aware of that can address this is nanotechnology. They have not come up with any chemical means whatsoever to neutralize this crap. Nanotechnology might be the answer.

ICONOCLAST: How would that be the answer? What form?

SCHWARZ: You are actually getting down to submolecular size that could actually trap and catch this stuff, maybe change its properties, with the damage caused to the nanotube and not to the human body.

Karl Schwarz is a 2008 candidate for U.S. President, an author, and a nanotechnology company founder whose son served in Iraq.