Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Non sapevano nulla?

http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0201-01.htm
Published on Thursday, February 1, 2001 in the Irish Times
Deception Over Health Risks of Depleted Uranium
by Lara Marlowe
Is depleted uranium, the waste product of the nuclear industry used to
make tank-piercing weapons, responsible for Gulf War syndrome and
Balkans syndrome?
The US Department of Defence and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
both still deny it. But in July 1990 - the month before Saddam Hussein
invaded Kuwait - a report submitted to the US army by Science
Applications International Corporation compared the merits of tungsten
and depleted uranium (or DU) as armour penetrators. DU is a "lowlevel
alpha radiation emitter which is linked to cancer when exposures are
internal, and chemical toxicity causing kidney damage", the report
said.
Following combat, it added, "the condition of the battlefield, and the
long-term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues
in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic
penetrators . . ." The report warned that "aerosol DU exposures to
soldiers on the battlefield could be significant, with potential
radiological and toxicological effects". A navy memo dated September
1990 alludes to "the hazard created from residual radiation of a spent
round" and notes that "prolonged exposure could cause illness".
How can one explain that children of Gulf War veterans suffer the same
birth defects as Iraqi children born in zones contaminated by DU? That
the same symptoms - fatigue, depression, respiratory and kidney
problems and in many cases leukaemia - affect civilians and soldiers
exposed to DU in both the Gulf and the Balkans? And if DU is harmless,
why is Kuwait paying private companies millions of dollars to
decontaminate its battlefields? Who will pay to decontaminate Iraq,
Bosnia and Kosovo?
Three journalists, Martin Meissonnier, who is French, the Belgian
Frederic Loore and Roger Trilling from the US, have spent two years
investigating DU production, use and effects. Their conclusions -
published in Paris on Monday by Robert Laffont in a book, Depleted
Uranium, the In- visible War - are causing tremors in the defence
establishments of the US and Britain, the only states to have used DU
weapons.
The book and a television documentary by the same journalists show the
US government was at best grossly negligent and deceitful towards US
nuclear workers, soldiers and the civilians of Iraq and former
Yugoslavia. At worst - as stated by Paul Sullivan, the head of the
National Gulf War Resource Centre - the US is guilty of knowingly
contaminating parts of the Gulf and former Yugoslavia for the next 4.5
billion years.
Uranium is found in nature. Those who oppose the use of DU in weapons
do so on emotional, not scientific, grounds, NATO and Pentagon
spokesmen tell us. If there is no proof, most people conclude, then why
worry?
But when he says that DU is a safe material, US Col Eric Daxon ignores
even the study produced by his own Armed Forces Radiology Research
Institute, which concluded that DU forms tumours and mutates genes in
laboratory mice. "Strong evidence exists to support detailed study of
potential DU carcinogenicity," the institute's study concluded.
So why did NATO only recently warn Albanian Kosovars not to let their
children play on destroyed tanks? Why was a video on the dangers of DU,
made in 1995 by Capt Doug Rokke of the US army, never shown? Why were
US servicemen and women now suffering from Gulf War syndrome allowed to
scramble over destroyed Iraqi armour taking photos? Why did their
commanding officer, Gen Barry McCaffrey, wear nuclear-biological-
chemical protective clothing when he visited units in the desert?
Mr Trilling admits that "there's a doubt in everybody's mind" about the
exact relationship between DU and cancer, and he does not exclude the
likelihood that vaccines given to soldiers, the bombing of chemical
plants in Serbia and Iraq and the oil well fires in Kuwait also
contributed to ailments. "DU is a terror weapon in the sense that no
one really knows what it does," he says. "The Gulf veteran groups are
desperate to find out. The people we talk to are half mad with terror."
The authors were among the first to report that uranium at the only
three US plants which process DU was contaminated with transuranics -
highly radioactive elements including plutonium. The plants were meant
to process natural uranium, but in the 1950s, without notifying the
workers or surrounding communities, the US Department of Energy decided
to reprocess spent fuel from military nuclear reactors.
In other words, the hundreds of tonnes of DU fired in the Gulf and in
the Balkans were not so "depleted" after all. It was in response to a
question from Mr Trilling on January 17th that the outgoing Pentagon
spokesman, Kenneth Bacon, acknowledged the plutonium contamination that
independent scientists began to suspect in the early 1990s.
THE US anti-DU activist Dan Fahey sums up the Pentagon's attitude
as, "Don't look, don't find". Congress ordered the Pentagon to
investigate the effects of DU in 1993, but nearly eight years later it
has undertaken no serious research on the inhalation of DU or the birth
defects afflicting veterans' children. When Gerry Wheat, a Gulf War
veteran wounded with DU shrapnel, complained of pain in his left
kidney, the Veterans' Administration hospital insisted on checking his
right kidney instead.
It was known from 1952 that the defoliant Agent Orange caused cancer,
degenerative diseases and birth defects. Yet when Vietnam veterans
suffered these afflictions, the Pentagon insisted there was no evidence
they were caused by Agent Orange. Workers at Paducah Gaseous Diffusion
Plant, which produced DU in Kentucky, breathed and touched carcinogenic
plutonium dust for decades before the Department of Energy admitted in
1999 that the entire place was contaminated. Ten thousand Paducah
workers, many of them cancer-stricken, are now suing the US government.
In Italy, Belgium and France, criticism of NATO's use of DU is growing.
Yet the number of countries with DU weapons has doubled to more than 40
since Meissonier, Loore and Trilling began their research. "It's a
burgeoning industry," Meissonier says. "There aren't any wars on at the
moment, so why can't there be a moratorium until the scientists figure
out what these weapons do?"
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 said.
la cosa che mi chiedo, ma a quelli che su SCI dicono che non e' vero e
che invece va tutto  bene, li pagano almeno?
O le loro stronzate le sparano "a gratis"???
Donato
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