DEPLETED URANIUM: THE CHILD KILLER
Depleted Uranium is used in shells for its armor penetration and destructive power. When a round of Depleted Uranium hits a target up to 70% of the round can burn up during impact and penetration. This creates a firestorm of Depleted Uranium oxide particles of extremely fine ceramic uranium dust (some finer than military gas mask filters) that is spread by the wind, inhaled and absorbed into the human and animal bodies and is taken up by plants and animals, becoming part of the food chain. According to the United Nations Environmental Program any portion of the round leftover in the soil can can pollute the environment and create up to a hundredfold increase in uranium levels in ground water. The Journal of Environmental Radioactivity reported, Children playing with soil may be identified as the critical population group, with inhalation and/or ingestion of contaminated soil as the critical pathway. In May-June 2003 issue of E: The Environmental Magazine Ed Ericson wrote "the Pentagon has cashiered or attempted to discredit its own experts, ignored their advice, impeached scientific research into DUs health effects and assembled a disinformation campaign to confuse the isssue. Soldiers in the US and Brittan who handle Depleted Uranium ammunition are required by military regulations to wear gloves and masks. DU is certainly a weapon of mass destruction (WMD).
Some 300 tons of Depleted Uranium were used by coalition forces in southern Iraq in 1991. Ten years ater the war, DU shell holes are still 1,000 times more radioactive than the normal level of background radiation and the areas around the shell holes are still 100 times more radioactive. Experts say that the fine uranium dust produced by the shells has spread by the wind, contaminating large areas of the surrounding region, including the city of Basra, which is 200 kilometres away from sites where large numbers of DU shells were fired.
Between 1,000 and 3,000 tons of Depleted Uranium was used during the three-week war in Iraq in 2003 with a considerable part of it used in the cities. There was wholesale bombardment of targets inside densely-populated areas. Journalist Scott Peterson from the Christian Science Monitor used a simple Geiger counter to measure levels that at times reached 1,900 times the normal background rate in parts of Baghdad in May 2003. The city has a population of six million. It took 2 to 4 years for the rise in cancers in Iraq to become evident after Gulf War 1. By the end of the decade there will be an explosion of cancers in the Iraqi population with children, who play in the dirt, making up a significant number of those to die of cancer.
One in four of the American personnel who fought in Gulf War 1, more than 150,000 soldiers, are suffering a range of medical disorders including lymphomas, leukemia, and lung, brain, gastrointestinal, bone and liver cancers collectively described as "Gulf War Syndrome". We have killed more of our own people than they have.
These numbers will be repeated among those returning home from the current Iraqi war.
(For the real story click on this link, but I warn you, it is utterly ghastly and utterly another Bush family legacy. Merry Christmas America, from your gov't to you.)
http://wake-up-america.net/depleted_uranium.htm 
Topic: Another Horror Story (Read 2389 times)