NUCLEAR
29 06 2007I read this a couple of months ago and I have not been able to get it out of my head. It is from Derrick Jensen’s fabulous book ‘Endgame‘ (page 63/64).
As well as affecting U.S. soldiers, DU (depleted uranium) has probably already harmed 250,000 Iraqis. The same can be said for residents of Bosnia, and soon we’ll be saying the same for the people of Afghanistan. Leukemias and cancers have gone up by 66 percent in recent ye
ars in southern Iraq, with some locales experiencing a 700 percent increase. And there have been birth defects. Oh, how there have been birth defects. One doctor began her report. “In August we had three babies born with no heads. Four had abnormally large heads, and two with short limbs. In October, one with no head, four with big heads and four with deformed limbs or other types of deformities.
Which finally brings us to the pictures. There are two groups: pictures I have not seen, and pictures I have. Here is what one person wrote about those which I have not (and of course I don’t expect to soon see similar text in America’s much-vaunted and certainly uncensored capitalist “free press”TM): “I thought I had a strong stomach - toughened by the minefields and foul frontline hospitals of Angola, by the handiwork of the death squads in Haiti and by the wholesale butchery of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my breakfast last week at the Basrah Maternity and Children’s hospital in Southern Iraq. Dr. Amer, the hospital’s director, had invited me into a room in which were displayed colour photographs of what, in cold medical language, a re called “congenital anomalies,” but what you and I would better understand as horrific birth deformities. The images of these babies were head-spinningly grotesque - and thank god they didn’t brin out the real thing, pickled in formaldehyde. At one point I had to grab hold of the back of a chair to support my legs. I won’t spare you the details. You should know because - according to the Iraqis and in all likelihood the World Health Organisation, which is soon to publish its findings on the spiralling birth defects in southern Iraq - we are responsible for these obscenities. During the Gulf war, Britain and the United States pounded the city and its surroundings with 96,000 depleted uranium shells. The wretched creatures in the photographs - for they were scarcely human - are the result, Dr. Amer said. he guided me past pictures of children born without eyes, without brains. Another had arrived in the world with only half a head, nothing above the eyes. Then there was a head with legs, babies without genitalia, a little girl born with her brain outside her skull, and the whatever-it-was whose eyes were below the level of its nose. Then the chair-grabbing moment - a photograph of what I can only describe (inadequately) as a pair of buttocks with a face and two amphibian arms. Mercifully, none of these babies survived for long. Depleted uranium has an incubation period in humans of five years. In the four years from 1991 (the end of the gulf war) until 1994, the Basrah maternity hospital saw 11 congenital anomalies. Last year there were 221.
There are photographs, too, that I have seen, some of the worst of my life. There are infants with one large eye in the middle of the face; infants - still alive, with huge eyes staring - with the exploded heads of the hydrocephalic; infants with translucent skin or skin covered with some unknown white substance or covered with welts or deep split open fissures or with charred looking skin or skin like dark glazed pottery; infants with ambiguous genitals (these are called, for some reason, “non-viable children”); infants - unfortunately alive - with no eyes and their bones fused and stunted; an infant - also unfortunately alive - with no anus, and with her bowel and gastro-urinary tract on the outside of her body.
These pictures all lead to me ask, not rhetorically, but with every expectation of answers: What, precisely, is this culture’s calculus of casualties? The lives of how many of these children are worth the life of one efficient executive, one prank-playing stockbroker? How many of these children’s lives are worth one Porsche, or the gasoline it takes to burn off in the wind? The lives of how many children add up to the value, to take a modern unit of currency, of a barrel of oil?
Have a look at what your tax pays for.
According to Mark Thomas (I haven’t checked yet) the British Soldiers Gulf War Veterans association list DU as a weapon of mass destruction.
If you watch Danny Schechter’s film Weapons of Mass Deception there is a part in a British army office where there is a list of subjects they are not supposed to mention. DU is one of them.
And just in case the phoney debate in this country is starting to swing you toward thinking nuclear power is a good idea and not at all like nuclear weapons, here is a short documentary about Chernobyl 20 years after it happened.
It IS alarming. Could it be that the war people want to make land with oil uninhabitable? What is their ultimate goal?
i heard something last night, governments destroy what they can and save only what they must. or something like that.
Denial or punitive rationing of resources is the smart and lazy ghoul’s way of ruling populations; redlining districts to deny affordable credit, tuition just out of reach, unless you go into hock, malign neglect in the wake of natural disasters and so forth. Active, willful destruction is where they go when control is difficult, when they want it right away or when the ghouls are too stupid to manipulate controlling structures.
“Ghouls” is almost the right word for Bu$hCo’s ilk. They’re far worse though, because they create far more death than even they can profit from. Traditionally, Ghouls exist to clean up the natural excrement and rot of once living things.
I wonder if the real reason folks don’t rise up against these disgusting “Leaders” is because they just can’t believe anyone could be so inhuman as to commit such atrocities knowingly..? Well, I hope that’s part of it, anyhow. Otherwise we really are a far more malevolent species than I could ever bring myself to acknowledge.
Leave it to them to give honest ghouls a bad name. I think you’re right that people simply can’t believe they’re that vicious.
thanks for posting this michael, I really didn’t want to see it … but I think I probably also really had to.
that is how i felt when i read it.
Micheal,
I was surprised you posted my comment - however, one cursory look at your site did reveal the ‘no we can’t do that’ type of ill-informed criticism.
For example, on the issue of securing the future energy supply that our advance societies need, you argued that ‘just in case the phoney debate in this country is starting to swing you toward thinking nuclear power is a good idea and not at all like nuclear weapons, here is a short documentary about Chernobyl 20 years after it happened.’
So there we have it, no need for our society to develop nuclear power for the future, all we need do is watch a documentary about Chernobyl and we will see the error of our ways.
However, the Chernobyl accident is no real reason why we in the advanced West can’t have nuclear power. Indeed, why should the entire World hold back the development of nuclear energy because of the death of 56 people?
56 is the official death toll from the disaster, but from your perspective, those deaths mean we should not dabble with the messy business of nuclear science. Of course those deaths are regrettable, but they should not be used as an argument against developing nuclear power in the future.
there are alos a number of birth deformities and a majorly increased cancer rate. the number 56 may have been the initial death toll but in fact, far more people are affected.
also, nuclear power uses a lot of carbon based fuel in the cycle of mining to decommissioning. i have read that it uses nearly 70% as much as burning fossil fuels do so i am not convinced it is the best strategy.
renewables are the way forward and the amount of R&D money that goes to them is pitifully small compared to other kinds of generation.
[...] me by. A superb, well written, informative, eye opening, sometimes stomach churning (look up the nuclear post on depleted uranium), blog that shouldn’t be missed. Charles Arcario. Over at Charlies [...]