January 7, 2004
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WINNER OF THE PROJECT CENSORED 2005 AWARD!
Scientists uncover radioactive trail in Afghanistan
by Stephanie Hiller
"Astounding" levels of uranium in the urine of Afghan
civilians
Four months after the attacks in Afghanistan by the US and its allies, under the banner of Operation Enduring Freedom, a team of Canadian scientists led by former US Army adviser Dr. Asaf Durakovic, went to the battlefields to test Afghan civilians for evidence of depleted uranium. What they found shocked them.
Instead of depleted uranium, they found medically significant levels of non-depleted uranium in the urine of 100 percent of civilians tested, who live near bomb sites -- 400% to 2000% higher than the normal population baseline. Where did it come from?
Uranium does exist in nature. But all of the likely natural sources -- anomalous geological and agricultural conditions, uranium extracted from weapons production cycles, pottery, uranium mining -- were ruled out. While Al-Qaeda had small nuclear weapons, it did not have the means to deliver them. The uranium had to come from weaponry used during the recent war.
Non-depleted uranium, explains the first of two reports by the medical team, is the feed stock of the enrichment phase of the fuel and weapons development cycles. "NDU" is more radioactive than depleted uranium, whose use, beginning with the first Gulf war, has stirred considerable controversy, with government sources generally insisting that it is relatively innocuous. Nevertheless, more than 221,000 American soldiers are now on disability due to severe war-related symptoms attributed to the mysterious "Gulf War Syndrome" and a growing legion of independent scientists and war vets, among them former Army health physicist Doug Rokke and independent researcher Dai Williams, have marshalled stunning evidence that depleted uranium is the cause.
NDU is arguably not significantly more dangerous than DU; speakers at a panel discussion on uraniums weaponry held in Oakland, CA, last December 4, including Patricia Axelrod and Leuren Moret, argue that the issue of nondepleted uranium is nothing more than a red herring to distract attention from concerns about DU. But if the use of NDU indicates experimental application of new nuclear weapons, as the UMRC suggests, then it should alert the public that proliferation of small nuclear weaponry, proposed for some future use, has in fact already begun.
At the six sites studied by the UMRC research team -- two in Kabul, and others in villages South East of the city -- some type of bunker buster bombs had been employed to penetrate multiple levels of concrete and explode under buildings or in the subterranean tunnels Al Qaeda had used as military installations. In all but one location, the hits were accurate. Bombs penetrated roofs without exploding -- "a clue to the weapons' sophistication" -- in some cases punching through concrete floors before detonating. At the Yaka Root Radio Station, "the blast traveled through the walls, destroying equipment stored outside and damaging adjoining buildings and trees. No fire or heat effects were observed in the buildings or on the combustible materials (trees and wooden structures) outside the buildings."
Subjects interviewed reported large, dense dust clouds and smoke plumes rising from the point of impact, an acrid smell, followed by burning of the nasal passages, throat and upper respiratory tract.
Reports of that study and a subsequent one by the Uranium Medical Research Center in Canada are posted at the UMRC's web site. The author of the second study, Tedd Weyman, concludes his report with the following story:
In Bibimahro, a large suburban neighborhood in Southern Kabul, the Coalition attacked a government radar installation on a steep hill above the suburb. But they missed.
At 5:30 AM, Mr. Saheeb Daad and his 12-year-old son were returning from prayers at the mosque. "Mr. Daad hears an odd, revolving or whirling sound. It is a strange mechanical sound coming from above and rapidly increasing in volume. . . As Mr. Daad and Hussein approach their home, a brilliant green flash suddenly bursts out of the ground. It blinds them and is instantly followed by an explosion and pressure wave -- knocking the boy and his father to the ground.
"After regaining their orientation from the shock, they find they are uninjured. They quickly rise to their feet and run towards their house -- a mud brick, one story structure where Mrs. Daad is preparing the morning meal and Hussein's younger brothers are still sleeping.
The neighbour's house -- which shared a common brick wall with the Daad's -- is nothing but a low pile of rubble, roofing materials and bodies. The Daad's house is still mostly intact; except for one room. In horror, they discover that nothing remains of the children's sleeping room. It is flattened to rubble just like the neighbour's house. Buried under the remains are Mr. Daad's two youngest sons. Entangled in the remains of the neighbour's house are eight bodies -- mother, grandmother and six little girls.
"By this time the neighbours have filed into the street. People rush to look for survivors and pull out the bodies. Mr. Daad digs through the remains of their house to rescue his tow young sons. They died in his arms as the sun rose over the mountain.
"The neighbour's house received the rocket's impact directly. Nothing remains to indicate that a house sat on this lot a few minutes earlier.
"No one heard the attack plane . . . Tactical fighter bombers, AC-130 gun-ships and A-10 Warthogs fly at low altitudes, often only 25 to 30 meters. They work their way through valleys, between hills and mountains so their engines' sounds will follow them rather than precede them. . .
"Kabul was occupied by US and British Special Forces troops by this time. There was no local resistance to the OEF air and ground forces, nor were there reports of anti-aircraft defensive responses. Government military facilities were abandoned . . . The approach and backdrop to the Bibimahro Tapa installation is surrounded by densely populated, residential neighborhoods, including a hospital . . .
"It wasn't a large weapon. The angel of entry was about 35 degrees. The crater is shallow, perhaps a meter deep and 4 to 5 meters in diameter. This bomb would be considered small compared to the 6 meter deep by 30-meter diameter craters we investigated elsewhere. Rather than a high explosive, fragmentation or thermobaric weapon, designed for maximum body county, it was one of the new generations of "precision-destruction" warheads, intended to destroy "hard targets" and avoid collateral damage. But in Bibimahro that day, the immediate effects were not so discriminating. . .
"The afternoon we arrived at Bibimahro, a dozen young children were using the crater as a playground."
"It's releasing subatomic particles that slice through DNA inside the body." -- Tedd Weyman
Awakened Woman talked with Tedd Weyman by telephone in December. He explained that this nondepleted uranium is some 70 percent higher in quantity of radioactive U-235 than depleted uranium. "But that's not really the issue," he said.
"The issue is that there's more than one stockpile of metallurgical sources being used for large bunker-buster heavyweight weapons -- a different type of bomb" than depleted uranium weaponry, and much bigger. He acknowledged that "since there's been no disclosure" by Coalition forces, the evidence is circumstantial. But the bomb craters are particularly radioactive, as are the rice fields in the immediate area of the bombing, whereas kilometers away levels are much lower.
"So the people who were there during the bombing, who inhaled the dust, they have very high levels being excreted in their urine, which is an indication that they've inhaled a tremendous amount."
From the description in the reports, these bombs sound like the Nuclear Penetrator Missiles discussed in Bush's Nuclear Posture Review in March, 2002, which the Administration said they were going to test.
"Yes," said Weyman, "exactly."
And they tested them … in Afghanistan?
"Yes, that's my hunch. We tested the prototypes there.
"Whether they have continued to use them we will soon know in Iraq, because we've collected materials from similar bomb craters in Iraq."
"Is it worse than depleted uranium?"
"It's equally bad. The term depleted reduces the psychic impact." However, "there's evidence coming out of the Defense Department well before they started using these [DU] weapons that it's toxic and it is dangerous. It's only in the last ten years that they've played this game, downplaying the medical significance of these weapons."
Depleted uranium was first used during the Persian Gulf War. It has since been used in the Balkans, and huge amounts have been used in the recent war on Iraq.
Numerous independent scientists at the Uranium Weapons Conference held last October in Hamburg, Germany, testified to the huge increase in birth deformities and cancers wherever DU has been used. At a meeting of the International Court Tribunal for Afghanistan held last December in Tokyo, the court ruled that the US was guilty of multiple war crimes in Afghanistan, among them the use of depleted uranium which is illegal by international law.
"This may sound overly dramatic," said Weymann, "but why don't they go there and be present with [these weapons]? People will not sniff the dust that these weapons have contaminated. Yet they will quite willingly say it won't hurt the civilians. It's just a hypocrisy…"
Other agencies associated with governments and even with the UN continue to downplay the health effects of uranium weaponry.
"We're under attack constantly, from the United Nations Environmental Program, the Defense Departments in Canada and Britain, by people that they finance -- so called DU activists that they've funded -- that we're manufacturing this just to get attention.
"But we're about to invite the UNEP -- to provide GPS coordinates for all these bombsites and to accompany them, to arrange translators for them, because they say they won't look for it until they know where the bomb sites are. So we have them all identified -- over 10,000 bomb sites we have coordinates for. I'm not saying they're all contaminated but we can provide them for them. They can bring their instruments, they can test them in their labs. Our material's all been published in scientific journals like Military Med Journal in the United States. We're not here to play games. We're here to do serious scientific investigations."
Depleted or not depleted, these types of weapons on detonation release a radioactive dust which, when inhaled, goes into the body and stays there. "It has a half life of 4.5 billion years. Basically it's a permanently available contaminant, distributed in the environment, where dust storms or any water nearby can disperse it. It's a heat formed, ceramicized, insoluble that stays in the body for the remainder of the life of the person who imbibed it and so its effects are much different than if it was sitting on the ground beside you. It's releasing subatomic particles that slice through DNA inside the body. So whatever cells are adjacent to those particles, they're all at risk. Self repair mechanisms fail, the cells mutate, and from there you get precancerous tissues. So this is well established scientifically although they say there's no reported case of DU causing cancer. But that's like saying there's no reported case of a jack knife in your purse having killed somebody so therefore all jacknives don't kill. It's doubletalk."
At the Uranium Weapons Conference, Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, a British-trained oncologist showed a PowerPoint demonstration that can be viewed at the conference web site, including photographs of the kinds of birth deformities and tumors he has been seeing at the Saddam Teaching Hospital in Basra, where cancer had increased dramatically before the recent war. In 1989 there were 11 abnormalities per 100,000 births; in 2001 there were 116 per 100,000. In 1988, 34 people died of cancer; in 1998, 450 died of cancer; in 2001 there were 603 cancer deaths.
We may never know how many more cancers will result from the last Iraq war because, as Dr. April Hurley has testified, all the records disappeared during the war.
In any case, the possible use of new nuclear weapons in the attack on Afghanistan signifies that the Nuclear Posture Review announced in March 2002, six months after Operation Enduring Freedom, is already in effect. From nuclear exchanges in video games and "nuking" food in the microwave to depleted uranium and nuclear penetrator missiles, the American public is gradually being prepared to accept the fact that the use of nuclear arms is becoming "business as usual" in 21st century warfare.
Next week: AWE interviews San Francisco attorney Karen Parker on the illegality of these weapons.
Please see the report from the ICTA at http://www.awakenedwoman.com/icta.htm/
For more information on DU and non-DU:
"America's Dirty Secret" by Robert James Parsons in Le Monde Diplomatique at http://www.mondediplo.com/2002/03/03uranium
"Iraqi Cancers, birth defects blamed on U.S. depleted uranium," by Larry Johnson, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, <http//seattlepi.nwsource.com/printer2/index.asp?ploc=b&crefer=http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/95178.du12.shtml>
"Project Afghanistan" at Uranium Medical Research Center http://www.umrc.net
Uranium Weapons Conference http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de
Traprock Peace, http://www.traprockpeace.org
Helen Caldicott's new Nuclear Policy Research Organization (see especially the report "Depleted Uranium: Scientific Basis for Assessing Risk) http://www.nuclearpolicy.org
Stephanie Hiller is the editor of Awakened Woman.