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October 28, 2007 at 14:16:58

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"Collateral Damage?" You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!

by Timothy V. Gatto     Page 1 of 1 page(s)

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Let me make one thing perfectly clear and let me tell you where my sympathies lie. My heart doesn’t go out to the people that want us to become an anti-military country. My sympathies don’t go out to those that would call our troops baby-killers. The facts are that I spent 21 years with my brothers in uniform and I have made fast friendships and I have bonded with these men, some of these bonds continue to this day. Our military, especially the U.S. Army is one of the greatest institutions that have ever come out of this nation. The Army with all the other services does whatever there superiors ask of them, mostly without question and with a willingness to die to accomplish the mission given to them. We owe the greatest respect to the members of our military. I remember marching to a song that said “Ours is but to do or die” and I believed it. American soldiers from the beginning of our nation have been smarter, braver and more successful than any other Army in the world.

Having said that, I want to write about how this administration is using our Army and other services as cannon fodder for wars that make no sense, have nothing to with the defense of the United States and don’t uphold the Army’s oath to protect and defend the United States and the Constitution of The United States. This administration is putting our men and women in harm’s way for purely monetary gains. Gains that fill the coffers of the Defense Contractors, the contractors that work within the Army that have outsourced jobs traditionally done by the military themselves such as force protection, mess halls, administration, supply and many other jobs. We are also using our military to gain oil for multi-national energy corporations that aren’t even American.

The worst thing we are doing to our military besides using a back-door draft that takes National Guard units and trains them quickly to bring them to a country that is full of resistance fighters that would rather die than accept an American occupation and let’s them loose in a fight they are not trained for, nor do they understand. The Stop-Loss policy of not letting American soldiers get out when their tour of duty is up, exposes them to a death in Iraq long after they should be home with their family. The very worst thing we do to our men and women in uniform is expose them to depleted uranium that bleeds radioactive isotopes that break DNA and cause every type of cancer and enter their reproductive organs and cause birth defects that will surface in the generations to follow.

The Army has a habit of telling American soldiers that substances they are exposed to will not harm them. Soldiers, used to following orders generally trust their commanders because those same men will take them into combat. This degree of trust will not be found in any organization, anywhere else in the world. They trusted the military when they took ships after World War II and ringed Bikini Atoll in the pacific and the men were made to come to the decks of the flotilla and given goggles so they could watch an explosion of an atomic bomb not five miles away. My father, a Marine that had fought in Okinawa and was in the occupation of Japan was there. He died of cancer at 59 that had ravaged his body. Then there was Vietnam when we used the defoliant Agent Orange and told the soldiers that it only hurt plants. I was given a 55 gallon drum of “Dioxin” to put around the fence-line at a missile site fence line in Hazlet New Jersey so that the grass wouldn’t grow where the fence was. We spread it by hand. My son now has three special needs children. I don’t know if I was the cause, but I think of it.

Then there was the F-104 Starfighter where the radar Cyystron was between the knees of the pilot. The pilots had unshielded ionized radiation beaming right into their reproductive organs. It didn’t stop there, the United States had the Nike-Hercules system around every major city in the nation and brigades overseas that had an unshielded Clystron tubes in the radars that emitted ionized radiation and glowed green with over 30,000 volts running through it. I got cancer five years ago under my tongue in the floor of my mouth, along with hundreds of other Air Defenders not only in this country, but in Germany, Belgium, Turkey, Korea and Japan that also used this “system”. I lost my teeth, had my tongue dissected, lost some of my gum and now I take narcotics to dull the pain from the two operations I had and the radiation that made me bleed from my throat.

Think all that is bad? You haven’t seen anything yet. The soldiers of today are walking through deserts and cities in Iraq that are rife with depleted uranium. The uranium has 60% of its radiation with a half life of something like 100,000 years. These guys that came back with Gulf-War syndrome probably came back with radiation sickness. The Army is fully aware of the hazards of depleted uranium, but the mind-set of the Defense Department is to ignore things like this. These are civilians that sit in the Pentagon and make policy that basically says that “soldiers are expendable”. Now in Iraq, soldiers are constantly exposed to ground peppered with DP shells and munitions. These guys and girls are coming home with altered DNA that will in some cases bring them cancer and deformed children.

Think that’s the worst, you haven’t seen anything yet. The people of Afghanistan and Iraq have to live within radioactive land. They have kids with an average life expectancy of six months if they are affected. The cancer rates in some areas that have a high concentration of DP have five or six cases of cancer a day! Bone cancer, leukemia, thyroid cancer and squamous cell cancer like I had, are rife in these nations. These weapons are classified as weapons of mass destruction and we subject our soldiers and the population of our adversaries with it daily.

Look, I know what I went through and I know how I feel about the ones that are still serving, I love them like brothers. When they come back, they could marry your daughter and leave them with deformed children and make them widows at an early age. This is not just an Army problem, it’s an American and international problem. Our government is acting like a criminal enterprise. Talk to your friends, write your Congress people, write the Bush Administration and support the ban on depleted Uranium. It’s for all of us.

That’s the way I see it.

 

http://liberalpro.blogspot.com

Tim was banned from the site for posting private email from the publisher to him on his blog, and then attacking the publisher and the site in emails and articles. OEN has no responsibility to publish articles from people who attack the site. Tim's accusations that he was banned for his political positions are untrue. Check his articles. He repetitively wrote about and had published exactly the things he claimed he was banned for doing.
Former Chairman of the Liberal Party of America, Tim is a retired Army Sergeant. He currently lives in South Carolina. A regular contributor to OpEdNews, he is the author of Kimchee Kronicles and is currently at work on a new novel.

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I am an environmental engineer and consultant for hazardous waste sites around the US.
Andrew JacksonI am an environmental engineer and consultant for hazardous waste sites around the US.

US Foreign Policy is a Worldwide Ecological Crisis

The ’depleted’ uranium that America has thrown in large quantities into the living spaces of its enemy is essentially spent nuclear reactor fuel. It’s basically uranium. At high impact speeds uranium penetrates steel and concrete like a knife cutting through butter. In the process it heats up, becomes flammable, and explodes with an intense heat (5,000-10,000 decrees C.) and evaporates into tiny particles that are radioactive and are dispersed through the air. The nano-sized particles are uniquely destructive to people as the human body has no effective defenses to particles of that small size (as small as 1/10,000th the size of a blood cell). The alpha-radiating particles get into any place in the body and cause a wide range of damage creating upwards to 100 different types of diseases, including genetic defects. DU warfare is a new type of nuclear war with delayed effects unfolding up to half a decade in the future.

DU is also used, because the stuff is cheap, since it became considered a waste product. The nuclear fuel cycle wasn’t designed that way. What is now a waste product would have been a resource for the fast flux breeder reactor in the original design, creating energy and new fuel at the same time. The fast flux program was shut down most likely, because it would have created an energy-rich economic renaissance that the imperial neo-feudalist clique, which depends on poverty, would not have survived. It was also likely for this reason that the world’s nuclear fusion power development has been put on the slow burner, otherwise nuclear fusion-power might have replaced nuclear fission-power by now. The world certainly wouldn’t have been awash with cheap DU waste products for the production of cheap and horrendously dirty bombs.

The end result is that the world is now starving itself while it is building bombs with waste products that shouldn’t have been created in the first place.
 Since 2002 the DU pollution of the Earth’s atmosphere, and thereby near-space, has been significantly increased . The Tora Bora bombing in Afghanistan added 2.5 times as much as the 1991 dessert war in nano-sized uranium pollution to the atmosphere, and five times as much was added again with the "Shock and Awe" bombing that followed in 2003 and the horror show that came after it. The Korea Times reported on Dec. 23, 2005, that the U.S. military has 2.7 million depleted uranium bombs pre-positioned in South Korea.  If the Korean report is true, and if a similar stockpile has has been pre-positioned for the bombing of Iran, the DU pollution of the Earth’s atmosphere, and thereby near space, might become increased 50-fold when the next round of America’s pre-emptive wars is being launched. The horrors that result from that increase cannot even be predicted.

No greater pollution of the environment of the entire Earth exists or is possible than that caused by the use of depleted uranium weapons.

The depleted uranium (DU) is spent nuclear reactor fuel that becomes vaporized in the explosions of the DU weapons into nanometre-sized particles, half of which are smaller than the wavelengths of light. The minuscule particles become airborne like a gas and are distributed around the world in the global air-currents, while they remain permanently radioactive. The resulting radioactive pollution of the global environment has the potential to turn the Earth into death trap. The DU particles kill indiscriminately, without warning, and in most cases slowly over the span of years and decades by way of illnesses that are hard to heal, like cancers, diabetes, and a long list of illnesses that by circumstantial evidence have been linked with DU poisoning.

by Andrew Jackson (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 11 comments) on Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 6:10:09 PM
 


A political junky from childhood cut my teeth on vietnam era protests.Have lived in Bucks county all my life.My favaorite saying" Good ani't cheap and cheap ain't good,never has been never will be"
tjbA political junky from childhood cut my teeth on vietnam era protests.Have lived in Bucks county all my life.My favaorite saying" Good ani't cheap and cheap ain't good,never has been never will be"

DU

We ,no not us,the criminals in  the white house have dropped 1520 tons of DU on Iraq.The horoshima bomb contained 64 kilos of enriched uranium DU is 60% strenght of  concentrated enriched uranium.Running the math it would seem the bush criminal has one more charge to answer to ,the equivelent of over 15,000 horoshima sized bombs since the start of the illegal,unconstitutional military incursion of Iraq.

by tjb (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 234 comments) on Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 8:52:52 PM
 


A well traveled and slightly worse for wear 72 year old Englishman; widower, several children and grandchildren and a penchant for wondering 'what is the hidden agenda' in almost everything I read. A keen interest in American culture (an oxymoron?) (JOKE!) and politics and an international world view, except where I haven't got first hand experience of the parts of the world I have not visited. Editor of some books about the Qur'an and Islam. Teacher of English in little known countries like Mau...

to see more of bio, click on member name

ibrahim turnerA well traveled and slightly worse for wear 72 year old Englishman; widower, several children and grandchildren and a penchant for wondering 'what is the hidden agenda' in almost everything I read. A keen interest in American culture (an oxymoron?) (JOKE!) and politics and an international world view, except where I haven't got first hand experience of the parts of the world I have not visited. Editor of some books about the Qur'an and Islam. Teacher of English in little known countries like Mau...

to see more of bio, click on member name

Doctors for D.U.

This article says it all and I thank Timothy V. Gatto for telling it like it is.

I have been aware of this catastrophe for some time. It seems to me that a useful rallying idea would be to co-opt every doctor to lead the charge against this devestating horrific thing that has been willfully thrust upon us all. Who better than doctors, that have to see all these soldiers, these deformed births, these cancer patients, these shattered lives, to bring this into the light of day so that we can all do whatever we can to put a stop to this, bring the culprits to justice, and care as best we can for every American and British soldier, every Iraqi, every Serb, every Italian, Belgium, Dutch peacekeeper that already is showing up as victims of this 'crime against humanity'.

If you have a better idea of how we can organise against this scourge, or a better name for such an enterprise, feel free, but something needs to be done before any more D.U is used and released into the atmosphere to kill us all. The hotspots are in Iraq, Serbia, Croacia but the background radiation is already higher in Britain and Australia. And the effect of Chenoble were felt in Britian, France, Germany because of the prevailing winds. We could not eat lamb for a few years from the wWelsh mountains sheep, but that pales in comparison to the area round Chenoble where the radiation is into the food chain, so people have no choice but to eat their own grown vegatables, givng them further radioactivity, or to move, any many cannot.

There are deserted villages in that area, which look absolutely charming but are deadly. Do we want that everywhere? I wrote an article for OPEDNEWS called "Nuclear, wind/solar power and the vegetables of the New World Order" which covers some of this as well as many other things, and finished by asking "can the average office/factory worker grow his own vegetables? Can You? And where is the land where you can do that? Where are the hippie communes when we need them?" Of course I should have continued to say that the vegetables might well be radioactive from the D.U. fallout, so you would have to choose your peice of land carefully. But will there be ANY land free of this world wide scourge, blown by the winds?

 

And I am sure it is not an isolated case and can only grow more horrific as the news gets out. Do what ever you can to publicize this; it is the one thing that effects everyone, the one thing that everyone can get behind to stop any more D.U. being spread, the one thing that everyone can use to stop the war in Iraq and prevent the war on Iran, the one thing that can bring down Bush's callous and despicable regime and all his bloodthirsty enablers, the neocons, the dual citizenship zi-people, the fanatical religious nuts and the monied corporations and the pentagon hawks who have absolutely no regard for humanity, the ones who write such 'plans' as 'the great game' and 'the chessboard of the world' in terms of influence and hegomany. Ordinary people do not figure in these peoples minds, only power and influence. They need to be combatted, removed from the levers of power and marginalised, and I am being extremely charitable as to what should happen to these enablers of the end of the world.

There is no future if the world becomes radioactive, not for humans, not for animals, not for anything, except perhaps the cockroaches. Which is oddly apt, that the only thing to survive being the cockroaches, which was caused by those same cockroaches living in our midst. And what do most people do when they see a cockroach on the floor of their kitchen?

We must stamp these people out!

by ibrahim turner (25 articles, 32 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 178 comments) on Monday, October 29, 2007 at 10:26:53 AM
 


I am an environmental engineer and consultant for hazardous waste sites around the US.
Andrew JacksonI am an environmental engineer and consultant for hazardous waste sites around the US.

Native Wisdom needs to take its place NOW

US Policies of aggression, nuclear arms, nuclear weapon development, nuclear weapon use threats, and missile shields will only serve to antagonize China, Russia, and some Middle Eastern countries. The inevitable event will be one or many nuclear weapons fired against the United States in the very near future. The only thing that can stop this is for the globalization movement to stop its power grab and for native peoples to be given equal voice in institutions like the United Nations. The native peoples are the moral reserve of humanity, not the rich overbloated bankers, politicians and royalty. The world needs to come together to end racism against religions and ethnicities. We should start with Iran and immediately. The Third Major shaking of the earth on US soil was prophesized by the Cherokee long ago. Its time to listen to the native wisdom again, and let go of the snake oil politicians who are only concerned about themselves.

America has lost its self-determination as the government has been hijacked from its inhabitants by elite factions in Israel, Saudi Arabia and Europe. America no longer operates with self-preservation as a goal. In parallel, Israel is leading and sometimes following on the same suicide path.

Most americans have forgotten the old adage, "If you live in a glass house, you shouldn't throw rocks." The lack of collective wisdom and common sense as a nation will be our demise.

According an AP article, "The Iranian parliament said the US Army and the CIA were terrorists because of the atomic bombing of Japan; the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq; support of the killings of Palestinians by Israel; the bombing and killing Iraqi civilians and the torture of imprisoned terror suspects." A statement signed by the 215 members who voted for the resolution reads, "The aggressor U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency are terrorists and also nurture terror.

Depleted Uranium will serve the purpose of turning the world community against the US in future world confict certainly after the coming US-Iran war. In light of the use of DU in the Middle East and Afganistan, the world community will destroy the United States and Israel. This is ultimately the plan that will serve the interests of the One World Government and New World Order.

Although DU has about 60% of the radioactivity of the natural uranium for an equal mass of substance (Cantaluppi and Degeto, 2000), elevated uranium activity concentrations have been observed in most of the surface soil samples and all of the biological samples collected in Kosovo. In some soils, elevations of even seven thousand times higher than the background uranium level have been observed.

by Andrew Jackson (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 11 comments) on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 at 3:25:31 PM
 

 

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