According to one statement on its website, the Snake River Alliance executive director, Andrea Shipley has claimed, “The fact that this was shipped [from Kuwait] with hazardous levels of lead and this was not exposed until it came to the port in Washington is a major concern. Idaho authorities, particularly DEQ, must continue adequately monitoring this waste to know exactly what will arrive in Idaho. Safe and responsible clean-up is critical to safeguard the health of Idahoans and our environment.”
Shipley continued, “Depleted uranium is both a toxic heavy metal and a radioactive substance creating health risks that may be far more varied than is recognized in federal regulations today. When depleted uranium is exposed to the elements it becomes volatile, so the safest and most responsible clean-up is essential.”
Finally, the executive director of the Snake River Alliance noted, “Most importantly, the use of depleted uranium in armor piercing shells and bullets shows an inextricable link between the reusing of nuclear waste and warfare. There is no viable solution for nuclear waste at this time.”
Here in Kuwait, it is interesting to note that once-again neither the Kuwaiti government nor the U.S. military are willing to share how expensive the contract was to ship 6700tons of uranium and lead waste back to the USA.
On the other hand, many in Kuwait have now publicly and privately voiced relief that some of the depleted uranium left-over from the 1991 war, known in the U.S. as “Operation Desert Storm”, have been taken away.
Most Kuwaitis don’t speak openly about depleted uranium these days, but if prodded, most have worries and seem to concur with the view shared by doctors who visited the Gulf in the early 1990s and noticed the high rate of birth defects and deformations.
One writer, Cynthia Arbuthnot, had shared in Scotland, that she finds governments everywhere cover up or stonewalling her on her calls for more data and information.
Arbuthnot wrote in 2001, “Since I discovered that depleted uranium weapons had been used, every attempt to find out the truth has been met with a wall of lies. Many of those who have investigated this - and this includes the top experts in the world - have been threatened, shot at and fired from their jobs. I have been receiving death threats for five years now, some of them imaginative, some boring.”
Referring to her visit to Iraq and Kuwait in 1991, Arbuthnot reminisced, “When I arrived in Iraq, doctors were already reporting a rise in congenital abnormalities in the newborn and a threefold rise in cancers and leukemias, especially in children. Birth defects and illness were also affecting Gulf veterans. Their search for answers and treatment has been met with bureaucratic stonewalling and lies. As they have attempted to find answers for themselves and for the sick and dying, their homes have been raided by the Ministry of Defense Police. Computers, disks and documents have been removed.”
Just a few months prior to the shipping of 6700 tons of contaminated sand from Kuwait in April, a contact of mine here in Kuwait (i.e. someone who has researched this issue of DU weapons for years) had met with a Harvard researcher who has claimed that Kuwait was suffering no damage from after-affects of depleted uranium.
The contradiction between this so-called expert’s statement and two governments’ willingness to ship 6700 tons of sand to Idaho screams for more research and public accountability in the USA and Kuwait
Is the U.S. doing enough research on this matter?
Is the USA publicizing the research or scrawling it away in the Bush Presidential Archives in College station, Texas—which will not be open to the public or researchers for another quarter of a century?
In the meantime, here is one website, which follows the DU issue. You can get recent reports of DU base and DU testing site closures, etc. at DU CURRENT ISSUES:
http://www.wise-uranium.org/dissti.html
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
