April 29, 2004
revised May 3
What Will Be Their "Choice"?
Afghan and Iraqi women face the prospect of deformed babies
By Stephanie Hiller
"Of course, if Iraq was used as a testing ground for radioactive weaponry, as appears to have been the case in Afghanistan, then the true civilian costs in cancers, birth defects and human suffering could be immeasurable." - Heather Wokusch, "America's Shameful Legacy of Radioactive Weaponry"
In an impressive display, 1.2 million American women came out full force on the streets of Washington DC this week to protect their right to have an abortion and protest the Bush Administrations policies toward women.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, women face a different choice.
It's not about reproductive rights. It's about reproduction.
The issue is not whether to have a baby, but whether the baby will be born deformed, as so many babies have been in Iraq since the First Gulf War left behind tons of depleted uranium.
How many children have already been crippled by radiation in Iraq and Afghanistan is not certain. Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, from the Cancer Treatment Center in Basrah, Iraq presented his photographs in a Power Point exhibit at the Uranium Weapons Conference; these horrific images and others taken in Iraq may be viewed at www.uraniumweaponsconference.de.
Another doctor, Mohammed A. Salman, an eye surgeon from Bagdad, has reported babies who have been born with only one eye or who are missing both eyes, a rare anomaly which normally exists at 1 in 50 million births, yet he has seen 9 cases in two years.
Pregnant Afghan women, says Dr. Mohammed Miraki of the Afghan Depleted Uranium Recovery Fund, are terrified that their child will be born deformed. Miraki reports:
The father of one of the victims from Kundoz whose wife had given birth to a deformed child that hardly resembled an infant said this to our survey team in Kabul:"My wife was pregnant and we were happily waiting for the moment to see our second child. On the day of the delivery, my wife felt weird, saying that she did not feel good and had pain in her abdomen. Whe the baby was born, it was hardly a human. It looked as if some one had beaten a baby and then covered its body with flour. My poor child looked like someone has rolled it in a basket of flour. When my wife saw the baby, she went into shock and died after 5 hours." Zar Ghoon, December 2002.
Exact figures on birth deformities are virtually nonexistent because the United States has bombed hospitals and other medical facilities, and destroyed all the medical records, attests physician April Hurley who traveled to Bagdad as a member of the Iraqi Peace team. A press release from the Association of Humanitarian Lawyers also notes the destruction of medical records (http://www.naturodoc.com/library/News/Iraq-DU.htm)
But what do statistics matter to a young woman having sexual intercourse with her husband in Iraq or Afghanistan? The birth of one deformed baby with organs outside its body, or little sticks for legs, webs for fingers, tumors again outside the body, maybe no heart or no brain, must seem a very real and tangible proof that becoming pregnant carries enormous risk.
What choice will be hers?
Rising levels of radiation in the region
Now, with repeated attacks on Iraq stirring up the residues from both Gulf Wars, more civilians are being exposed to radioactive particles in the air.
Depleted uranium is pyroforic -- under the intense heat of explosion, it becomes a gas laden with radioactive alpha particles. The term "depleted" is one physicists use to describe uranium that has been depleted by the removal of one isotope, U-235, which is the only form of uranium used in reactors. Only half a percent of what they mine is useable for that purpose. The rest -- believe it or not &endash; 99 percent of every pound of uranium -- is waste generated from the extraction process.
But the word depleted has been misleading, encouraging the public to think that this product is stripped of its toxicity. It hasn't. It is all radioactive, and the US now has a million tons of uranium mixed with plutonium, the most toxic material known, stored right here in our own country.
Using deleted uranium for weapons has proved a handy way of moving that waste into the economy -- and out of the country. For the military, depleted uranium has several additional features. As the heaviest metal it makes a good penetrator, going deep into underground buildings or through cement floors without blowing up until it gets to the bottom.
This points to another feature of this form of warfare: it's invisible. Unlike the familiar mushroom cloud dominating the horizon, these bombs give off only a brief flash. But that flash is deadly, sending forth millions of ionized particles into the atmosphere -- mostly alpha particles. Inhaled, this radiation may be picked up for 25 miles around the blast, and it only takes one alpha particle traveling through the blood into the tissues to start the nuclear reactions that will cause the disease and death of the body, and damage to the chromosomes that will carry on for generations.
It is difficult to ascertain how many tons of depleted uranium weapons have been used. The US has admitted to using "small" amounts like 350 tons -- 350,000 pounds --in Yugoslavia of highly toxic material, but according to internationally known weapons expert Leuren Moret, sources have demonstrated there is much more.
In Afghanistan, the US claims to have used no depleted uranium. But scientists from the Canadian Uranium Medical Research Center, a lab run by Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a former medical officer of the US military, have discovered that another type of radioactive uranium has been found in high doses in the urine of residents living close to bomb sites in Kabul, Tora Bora and Jallalabad. (see http://www.umrc.net) . UMRC scientists have tested the people and the soils at locations in Iraq and Afghanistan and found them to be 400% to 2000% higher than normal radiation levels. This area also supplies water to Kabul, the major urban center, and it is also the farming region to the North, the Shomali Plain, already littered with land mines from the Soviet war.
Dai Williams, another independent resarcher, has discovered patents showing that familiar weaponry definitely used in Afghanistan -- cluster bombs, big BLUs and others -- are made with depleted uranium.
Meanwhile, Marc Herold, documenting uncounted Afghan casualties during "Operation Enduring Freedom" (did they mean in that happy hunting ground?) posits that 3000 tons of the deadly material was discharged there.
And most recently, Admiral Bhagwat, retired from the Indian Navy, has come out with the most alarming figures to date, based on calculations Japanese scientist Yagasaki, that the total use of uranium weaponry has blasted the landscape with 250,000 times the radiotoxicity of the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, a bomb which now would be classified a "small nuke" in the vast nuclear arsenal.
What has also been covered up in the media and by government scientists as well, on behalf of Pentagon policy and the weapons industry, is the fact that this radiation -- which compared to an atom bomb appears to be "low-level radiation" -- this low level radiation is insidious and toxic, as Ernest Sternglass demonstrated many years ago and detailed in his book, Secret Fallout (available on the internet at www.ratical.org) where he meticulously documents the effects of fallout on the health of women and babies. As he pointed out there, radiation has raised the death rate, particularly during periods of exposure following nuclear bomb tests and power plant discharges and meltdowns like Three Mile Island. In 1986, the year of Chernobyl, 40,000 additional deaths occurred in the United States that cannot be accounted for by any other means. Yet Sternglass was silenced.
Jay Gould confirmed in his book Deadly Deceit that there has been a steady and intentional distortion of data implanted into state and federal health records to support false and misleading reassurances that radiation has not already damaged the health of the American people. There's plenty of evidence that our health is failing. The cancer rate alone has risen over the last forty years to now affect one in three Americans during their lifetimes. We are besieged by a host of other chronic diseases due to immune system malfunction and the effect of "free radicals" which are likely due, in whole or in part, to radiation.
What then of the health of those in the war zone, with no medical supplies, poor diet, and contamination all around?
Choice?
The radiation now permanently jangling the chromosomes and disturbing the cells of the lungs, blood, bone, and major organs of the Afghan and Iraq population is far more intense. And, it will stay there. It is already in the soil and water and it will remain there for 4.5 billion years.
Independent scientists here and abroad have attested to that fact. At the Uranium Weapons Conference held last October in Hamburg, Germany, scientists and activists from all over the world met and considered the results of their independent and separate research. Their findings confirm what Doug Rokke has been charging all along, that "Gulf War Syndrome" the mysterious illness debilitating Gulf War vets (half of whom have since been put on disability) is in fact due to exposure to radioactive weapons. That the Pentagon has known since 1942 of the health effects of depleted uranium has also been documented.
California geoscientist Leuren Moret, who was formerly employed by the Lawrence Radiation Lab in Berkeley, has spoken internationally on the rising danger of nuclear contamination. She testified before the World Court on Afghanistan held in Tokyo last December, which found the Bush Administration guilty of war crimes for the use of these indiscriminate weapons.
The situation in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, and in the surrounding regions, where dust storms will carry the radioactive dust, is critical.
What is a woman's right to choose when she knows that the water she is drinking has been contaminated with nuclear radiation? When the food she is eating and most importantly the milk, if she can get some, will also be contaminated? When she lives every day with the knowledge that her people have been guinea pigs for American radioactive weapons tests. Faced with this verdict of perpetual death, for herself and for the generations that come after her, what will be her choice?
No, she won't be able to refuse her wifely duty to her lawfully wedded spouse.
No, she won't be able to obtain contraception (due in part to Bush's global gag rule).
No, she won't be able to get an abortion.
No, she can't put that baby up for adoption!
Five years after the Kosovo war, the women of Yugoslavia are begging for abortions. This is the reality that Iraqi and Afghan women will be facing, are facing now.
References:
The amount of material now available on the Internet is truly staggering, but a visit to the Speakers Page at the Uranium Weapons Conference (www.uraniumweaponsconference.de) will provide many more studies and reports than you can read in one night.
I have relied heavily on the work of Leuren Moret (www.mindfully.org and <http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de> as well as personal conversation) and the reports from the Uranium Medical Research Center in Toronto. (see <http://www.umrc.net> and my interview with UMRC's Tedd Weymann at< http://www.wakenedwoman.com/umrc.net> ) Ernest Sternglass' research in his book Secret Fallout at www.ratical.org/ is invaluable to an understanding of low-level radiation.
I also recommend Admiral Vishnu Bhawat's address to the Internationsl Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War Conference held February 29, 2004 in Delhi http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/Bhagwat-Silent-WMDs-DU29feb04.htm, Marc Herold's work, particularly "America's 'New' Wars: Precisely Delivering 'Lethal Injection' by Using Depleted Uranium" http://traprockpeace.org/DUessayMWHerold.pdf and the work of Rosalie Bertells.