Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja

Originally posted by sweatmonicaIdo
And what exactly were we supposed to do?

To stay at home, perhaps?

Insurgents from Fallujah were killing Americans and Iraqis. We did what we had to do to pacify that city and we did it. Its unfortunate what happened in the long run, it really is. But I don't see how it is "evil" or "criminal."

This is true, but the people that you call "insurgents" were just "citizens" according to some different view. US soldiers were INVADERS and they expressed their right to fight back. Did you know that war on Iraq was based on some HOAX? After investigation following the invasion, the US-led Iraq Survey Group concluded that Iraq had ended its nuclear, chemical, and biological programs in 1991 so the invasion of Iraq was ILLEGAL.

Why doesn't anybody have anything to say about the atrocities committed by the Iraqi insurgency? Are the unitnended effects of DU that much worse than an insurgent injecting Iraqi civilians with gasoline?

In this you are absolutely right:
but the effects described in the OP don't match the one i would expect from use of DU
And atrocities and violations of human rights are being perpetrated every day, WORLDWIDE mate: don't focus just on Iraq while much worse things are being done to humans, daily. How about Sudan? And China? And North Korea?
And what about Rwanda?
A GENOCIDE has been perpetrated there, while in the US you were watching David Lettermann show.
And palestinians? How comes that all we are able to see are kamikazes, but we ALWAYS forget that israeli are invaders and palestinians have been STOLEN of their houses, their children, their dignity, their right to be called HUMAN BEINGS?

reply to post by internos


Iraqis have express the right to fight back? Excuse me but based on what I've seen, it seems to me that the Iraqis are the invaders based on the large number of casualties inflicted by the freedom fighters of Iraq.

Lead is known to cause cancer as well. Lead has been used in ammunition for centuries. Same old arguement just a new "bullet" to argue against thats all.

Originally posted by WWJFKD
reply to post by princeofpeace

 

This isn't business as usual here. DU is a crime against humanity. These peoples lands have been laid to waste due to our actions. In a fair fight a guy with a gun meets on a field with a guy with a gun and one of them leaves. This is no fair fight we are talking about here and this is not what people have come to expect from war. Collateral damage is understood but "WE" will never leave these lands as they were - we have destroyed these lands and people for too many generations to come. watch the film.

reply to post by princeofpeace

Lead is known to cause cancer as well. Lead has been used in ammunition for centuries. Same old arguement just a new "bullet" to argue against thats all.

Yes & biological warfare has been used for centuries too, from flinging rotting carcasses over the walls of fortresses to poisoning water supplies etc. By your argument it'd be ok to use anthrax: just a new germ to argue over, thats all.
Lead certainly is both toxic & carcinogenic, but nowhere near as bad as DU. The difference being that lead can be cleared up before the worst effects get to the surviving population, otherwise northern France, Belgium & most of Germany would be a polluted wasteland full of mutants. Whereas radioactivity messes people up very quickly by comparison, especially when the forces who put it there will not allow any proper investigation into where it is, how much & how best to go about clearing it up.
Its not just a crime, its uncivilised.

reply to post by princeofpeace


Are we actually attempting to rationalize the use of "Depleted Uranium". Have we truly come to this. Have we become so cold and callous that we can even attempt to rationalize this atrocity? Or is it more likely that we really dont understand just what Depleted Uranium means to those on the field of battle and those who would dare tread later where these munitions have been used? Show of hands, Who watched the film? Take the time to find out just what is going on "down range" from a perspective that I doubt you are familiar with. Listen to the stories from our boys and the local inhabitants. Find out the facts from the experts in the field and then as an educated person attempt to rationalize the use of these munitions. This is what other countries do to each other and their populaces, not us. I refuse to accept the futher use of this material or to engage in a rationalization debate with those who quite frankly have no idea what they are talking about.

liberalpro.blogspot.com...

Beyond Treason; The Call for A Congression Investigation

I couldn’t sleep last night. Its 4:49AM and I have a headache and a knot in my stomach. I just watched a movie called Beyond Treason. It’s about how the U.S. Military has used it’s soldiers as guinea pigs in many outrageous experiments, the last being one that is continuing, the exposure to ionized radiation by using depleted uranium in munitions. Many people out there know me by my writing, but what people don’t really know about me is that I have been exposed to ionizing radiation and I know what it can do to a person. I have had cancer, I have peripheral neuropathy, constant pain and I take over 13 medications for the side effects.

The point is that this government, from George Bush Sr. to Clinton and now to Bush Jr. has known about the effects of depleted uranium and the ionizing radiation that comes from it. Soldiers from the First Gulf War have had over 200,000 cases of VA certified disability from their service. That is a 60,000% increase over previous wars. In the first Gulf War we used over 340 tons of depleted uranium. In Afghanistan, over 1,000 tons to date, in the Second Iraq War we have used 2,400 tons of the stuff.

Uranium gives off Alpha, Beta and Gamma rays. The Uranium that is dispersed after vaporizing on the target can be as small as .1 micron. That means that ionized uranium is in the air, the soil and the water, and it has a half-life of 4.5 Billion years! This means that the two countries that we invaded will forever be contaminated, and the contamination will never pass. Not only is the land contaminated, but our soldiers who enlisted to help fight this “Global War on Terrorism” will pass this on to their families by their semen. They will infect their wives and any future children. Many Veterans have had children that were born healthy but fail to thrive. In some cases the hearts of their children burst at 4 or 5 months old. This is fighting a war on terrorism? It sounds to me like since we didn’t find weapons of mass destruction, we brought our own.

That’s exactly what the World Court ruled. It is against the U.N. Charter to use weapons of mass destruction and that’s exactly what we are doing. Not only on the so-called “enemy”, but on our own troops that feel the effects of “Fallout”. Yes, you read me right, fallout. This is exactly the same result of a “Dirty Bomb” that the U.S. Government keeps threatening the people of this nation might happen if a “terrorist” explodes radioactive material with a bomb.

Why haven’t you heard this on the “Mainstream Media”? The reason you haven’t is because the MSM is controlled by the same people that make their money in the Defense Industry. GE and Westinghouse own many outlets; ABC, Sci-Fi Channel, History Channel, MSNBC, CBS and a host of others. The rest are owned by supporters of this corrupt and treasonous administration that thinks nothing of killing off their soldiers for profit and gain. Your sons and daughters will eventually have to deal with this problem we have created.

I am calling for a Congressional Investigation into the scope and breadth of the problem of Depleted Uranium used by our Armed Forces in direct violation of the UN Charter. I am calling on The Veterans Administration to come clean about ionized radiation, a problem they have known about since 1950. No more diagnosis of “PTSD” in soldiers who are sick. These soldiers aren’t stressed out, they are sick! Don’t fool yourself for a minute, the President knows about this. This could possibly be the reason that 120 Veterans are taking their lives each week according to a report by CBS that got past the censors’.

This President and the two preceding President’s should be charged with treason. They should be charged, tried and imprisoned for the rest of their natural lives. They have not only ruined the future of the men and women that have served them, but they have also contaminated Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq forever. There is no “clean-up” operation that can be done. They are guilty of genocide, no different than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. Through their own arrogance and extraordinary powers that we give the Executive Branch, they have used this nation as a killing machine. We kill not just the enemy, but our allies and our own soldiers.

We have been ruled by criminals since Ronald Reagan left office. I have something on him too that I’ll write about in another article. The problem of killing our own soldiers and whole nations aren’t the only crime they have committed. They have also stolen this nation’s wealth and put it into their own pocket, but that’s another article.
Please help me to get Congress to launch a full-scale investigation into the use of depleted uranium. I will write to my Congressional leaders and I pray that you will write too. I don’t care if you are a Conservative Republican or a Liberal/Progressive Democrat or hate them all. This is a matter of utmost urgency to stop the indiscriminate loss of life in these countries and to get the Veterans that served us the care they deserve. As an American you can do nothing less, and if you can’t do this, we WILL have nothing left.

That’s the way I see it.

Tim Gatto

Edited to include authors name

[edit on 16-11-2009 by WWJFKD]

Italian national television (RAI), during one of those rare moments in which was not making propaganda for Silvio Berlusconi, found the time to lay out a dossier regarding the use of White Phosphorus Cells in Fallujah, yes, in Fallujah, by some strange coincidence the town we are talking about.

The controversy has raged for 12 months. Ever since last November, when US forces battled to clear Fallujah of insurgents, there have been repeated claims that troops used "unusual" weapons in the assault that all but flattened the Iraqi city. Specifically, controversy has focussed on white phosphorus shells (WP) - an incendiary weapon usually used to obscure troop movements but which can equally be deployed as an offensive weapon against an enemy. The use of such incendiary weapons against civilian targets is banned by international treaty.


The debate was reignited last week when an Italian documentary claimed Iraqi civilians - including women and children - had been killed by terrible burns caused by WP. The documentary, Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, by the state broadcaster RAI, cited one Fallujah human-rights campaigner who reported how residents told how "a rain of fire fell on the city". Yesterday, demonstrators organised by the Italian communist newspaper, Liberazione, protested outside the US Embassy in Rome. Today, another protest is planned for the US Consulate in Milan. "The 'war on terrorism' is terrorism," one of the newspaper's commentators declared.

Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre is a documentary film by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta which first aired on Italy's RAI state television network on November 8, 2005. The film documents the use of weapons that the documentary asserts are chemical weapons, particularly the use of incendiary bombs, and alleges indiscriminate use of violence against civilians and children by military forces of the United States of America in the city of Fallujah in Iraq during the Fallujah Offensive of November 2004.

The film's primary themes are:

Establishing a case for war crimes against civilians committed by the United States.
Documenting evidence for the use of chemical devices by the US military.
Documenting other human rights abuses by American forces and their Iraqi counterparts.

This article offers a synopsis of the material presented in the documentary.

Fallujah, The Hidden Massacre

ALt links:
Alternate link # 1
Alternate link # 2
Alternate link # 3
Alternate link # 4

According to White Phosphorus Fact Sheet - Federation of American Scientists WP Status is: In use around the world

I have to say that parts of the doc are very controversial, including questions that have ben raised about Jeff Englehart's reliability.
Anyway, it's very worthy to be watched, in my humble opinion.
Look, i can realize how frustrating is to fight an asymmetric war, to live the continuous nightmare to fall victim of some random IED left there by some dude who has probably nmothing to do with insurgency: i also understand that sometimes you need to take some painful decision, if you really want to achieve some results from some campaign. But NOTHING justifies the act to condemn innocent children who even have yet to born to live half a life rather than a normal one They did nothing wrong, i don't see why they have to pay for no reasons.


[edit on 17/11/2009 by internos]

Originally posted by Alethea

It won't be long before you find the same evidence beginning to happen here.
Those dust clouds filled with DU circle the globe.

Not really, DU is very heavy almost twice as dense as lead, it tends to fall down and stay down.

However the radiation is what will come back and haunt the returning soldiers.