LATEST NEWS FROM PERDANA GLOBAL PEACE ORGANISATION

Please sign the petition at http://3iii.org/petition/iraqi-oil-revenues-for-iraqi-refugees-petition

More than 4.5 million Iraqis, a fifth of the population, have been displaced inside and outside their country due to the sectarian policies of the occupation and the governments it has installed since the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The international community, the occupation powers, and the government in Iraq are legally required to support and protect Iraqi refugees.

Iraqi refugees are Iraqi citizens who have a full right to live in dignity, a right to benefit equally from national resources, and a right to return to their homes.

The UN Security Council, as the highest body of the UN, has the power and legal duty to ensure that the needs of Iraqi refugees are met by passing a resolution to require that the Iraqi state allocate proportionate revenue to responsible agencies and hosting countries.

Call for action

Displaced and refugee Iraqis cannot wait until they can return home for their essential needs to be met. The international community has the moral obligation to act now. UNSC Resolution 986 of 1995 established that Iraqi oil revenue is for all Iraqis. As Iraqi citizens, Iraqi refugees have equal rights to share in the wealth of Iraq.

We call upon all governments, UN agencies and organizations, law, human rights and humanitarian associations, and all people of conscience to work together towards ensuring that the UNSC adopt and implement this proposal of obliging the Iraqi state to allocate oil revenues for Iraqi refugees.

We demand that states particularly those involved in the illegal invasion and destruction of Iraq fulfill their obligations and responsibilities and provide necessary funding for the UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) mission of protecting displaced Iraqis.

We call upon all to raise funds and take all measures to provide direct aid to Iraqi refugees and the organizations helping them.

Humanity is in distress in Iraq. Our moral responsibility is to save it. Join us.

Attached is the platform of the Iraqi International Intiative

http://3iii.org/proposal

* To endorse, contact: hanaalbayaty@3iii.org

* To sign the petition: http://3iii.org/petition/iraqi-oil-revenues-for-iraqi-refugees-petition

* To stay informed on the campaign: www.3iii.org

Iraqi International Initiative on refugees

First Signatories:

Hans von Sponeck, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq (1998-2000), Germany.

Denis Halliday, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq (1997-1998), Ireland.

Ms. Niloufer Bhagwat, Advocate, Vice President of the Indian Association of Lawyers.

Mathias Chang, 37 years in the antiwar movement, Malaysia.

Sabah Al-Mukhtar, President Arab Lawyers Association, UK.

Issam Al-Chalabi, Former Iraqi Oil Minister, Iraq-Jordan.

Saeed .H. Hassan, Former Iraqi Permanent Representative to the UN, Iraq -Egypt.

Dr Curtis F J Doebbler, Professor of law, at Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine.

Dirk Adriaensens, Member Executive Committee BRussells Tribunal, Belgium.

Dahr Jamail, Independent Journalist, Author of “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, USA.

Paola Manduca, Geneticist and Antiwar Activist, New Weapons, Italy.

Bert De Belder, M.D., Coordinator, Medical Aid for the Third World, Belgium.

Mohammed Aref, Science Writer, Advisor for Arab Science&Technology Foundation, UAE.

Abdul Ilah Albayaty, Writer, Iraqi Political Analyst, Iraq-France.

Dr Ian Douglas, Writer, Egypt.

Hana Al Bayaty, Iraqi International Initiative Coordinator, France-Iraq / Egypt.

The Roots of the United Nations :

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/202.html

Leuren Moret on Conscious Media Network

http://www.consciousmedianetwork.com/members/lmoret.htm

After the devastation in Iraq where more than a million Iraqi citizens have been killed, millions displaced as refugees in neighbouring countries, and the barbarity committed in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, one would have thought that war as an option to resolve international disputes would be rejected except as a last resort or in self-defence.

But war drums are beating loudly again and young men and women are being trained to wage another murderous war, this time against another hapless country, Iran. The alleged crime, for which the world???s citizens are called in to support, is that Iran is producing nuclear weapons.

They lied regarding the WMD in Iraq

Now, despite statements by the IAEA that there is no evidence of Iran embarking on any nuclear weapons programme, the war mongering nations are once again claiming otherwise and demanding this to be an excuse for war. Clearly they are lying again. Once again they want an excuse for going against another oil rich country which is also a Muslim country.

Israel has now called for the dismissal of El Baradei for reporting the truth about the current state of affairs in Iran. Britain???s Prime Minister has however issued a statement that Britain would support and lead in the war against Iran. President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are equally, if not more belligerent in calling for a war against Iran.

War is mass murder

It is uncivilised. Is the world going back to the age when disputes for honour were settled by duels in which the more proficient with weapons always had the upper hand? Are we to condone the mass killings of innocent civilians because of the folly and blood lust of their government leaders as was the case in World War I and World War II?

Let us not repeat a century of killings and mass murder by WMDs with another century of mass murders and the killings of the innocent.

Peace and peaceful resolutions of disputes must prevail

I therefore call upon all world leaders, secular and religious, to join me in this global effort to condemn wars and to promote the peaceful resolution of the present US / Iran dispute and all future international disputes.

God willing our efforts will succeed.

DR. MAHATHIR MOHAMAD
KUALA LUMPUR
16TH NOVEMBER 2007

by Christopher Busby

It was in 1993, when a group of twenty-four affected soldiers approached Professor Asaf Durakovic, one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of radiation, that a cause came to light.

They had many times the “safe” level of chemically toxic and radioactive depleted uranium (DU) in their bodies. Durakovic, although a senior officer in the U.S. Army during the first Persian Gulf War, had been unaware that the weapons used had contained depleted uranium.

“I was horrified,” he said. “I was a soldier, but above all I am a doctor.” By 1997, it was estimated that ninety thousand U.S. veterans were suffering from Persian Gulf War Syndrome.

Durakovic, who is also medical consultant for the Children of Chernobyl project at Hadassah University, Jerusalem, lost his job as Chief of Nuclear Medicine at the Veteran’s Administration Medical Facility at Wilmington, Delaware as a direct result of his work with Persian Gulf War veterans contaminated with radiation, he states.

Two other physicians, Dr. Burroughs and Dr. Slingerland of the Boston VA, also lost their jobs when they asked for more sensitive equipment to better diagnose the soldiers referred to them by Professor Durakovic.

Oddly, all the records pertaining to the sick soldiers at the Delaware VA went missing, a syndrome of another kind which has become familiar on both sides of the Atlantic.

Two years before Durakovic’s discovery, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) “self initiated” a report warning the government that if fifty tons of the residual dust from the explosions of the weapons on impact was left “in the region”, they estimated it would generate “half a million” extra cancer deaths by the end of the century (2000.)

Iraq’s cancers and birth deformities have become an anomaly, compared to those in the Pacific Islands and amongst British troops after the nuclear testing in the 1950s.

Further, “depleted” is a misnomer. These weapons are made from waste from the nuclear fuel cycle and thus contain the whole lethal nuclear cocktail. DU weapons (sold to seventeen countries that are known and possibly others — why let poisoning the planet and its population get in the way of numerous millions of quick bucks) are equivalent to spreading the contents of a nuclear reactor around the globe.

And far from fifty tons and that chilling warning, in Iraq several thousand tons now cover this ancient Biblical land, and with the bombs raining daily, the audit rises nearly hour by hour. The U.S. is currently by far the largest user of DU weapons. Over the past decade, they have bought more than sixteen million DU shells and bullets from Alliant Tech Systems alone. (Source: Janes.)

Strangely, this time, there have been few reports of soldiers with the terrible effects of 1991, where they were only in the region for a few weeks. Although troops now remain for months or a year, Persian Gulf War Syndrome mark 2 seems not an issue. Perhaps it is because, reportedly, doctors treating returning troops have been threatened with jail and or hefty fines if they say anything regarding DU-related symptoms.

The implication regarding compensation to countries affected by this poisoned legacy (DU’s lethality lasts for four and a half billion years) and troops is financially stratospheric. Since the 2003 invasion, U.S. troops have denied entry to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and all other radiation experts seeking to test ground and air levels.

In Bosnia and the other parts of the former Yugoslavia where DU weapons were used (with missiles also dropped accidentally in neighboring countries, by the U.S., to whom all the world’s lives are seemingly cheap) the “Iraq Syndrome” quickly became apparent.

Even European peacekeepers on relatively short tours of duty became ill and developed leukemia and other cancers, and a number died. A five man film crew from BBC Scotland all tested DU positive after filming for less than a week there.

Afghanistan too was “liberated” in 2001, by uranium weapons, which continue to be routinely used, condemning generations yet to be born to deformities and the living — the newborn and under fives the most susceptible — to cancers and other horrific DU-related conditions.

Durakovic also found high levels of uranium in hospital patients there, as there will undoubtedly be in the occupying forces. He also found identical conditions to Iraq amongst the young: “Children born with no limbs, no eyes, or with tumors protruding from their mouths and eyes.”

The latest country to fall victim to uranium weapons is Lebanon — but with a difference; it transpires. Dr. Chris Busby*, founder of the Low Level Radiation Campaign and Green Audit, is Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk and also sits on the (UK) Ministry of Defence Uranium Oversight Board.

Israel is one of the countries that possess uranium weapons. “The first evidence that the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) were using them (in the July-August 2006 Israeli bombardment) was a Getty Picture Library image of an Israeli soldier carrying a DU anti-tank shell,” says Busby.

He then noted a report in Lebanon’s Daily Star saying that Dr. Khobeisi, a scientist, had measured gamma radiation in a bomb crater at Khiam in the south of the country, at ten to twenty times higher (samples taken from different locations in the crater) than naturally occurring background radiation.

The following month, independent researcher Dai Williams** went to Lebanon on behalf of Green Audit to investigate and bring back samples to the UK for testing. He also brought back an air filter from an ambulance. Tested at the Harwell UKAEA laboratory: “The results were astonishing.”

Both soil and filter contained enriched uranium with the soil sample containing uranium about nine times higher than the natural background. (Remember how threatening the West has become towards Iran’s efforts to enrich uranium?)

The soil sample was also sent to the School of Ocean Sciences in North Wales for a second test by a different method for certainty. The results were the same.

Busby asks, “Why use enriched uranium? It is a bit like shooting your enemy with diamonds.” He contends it is possible that it is a smoke screen for the wider use of depleted uranium, as the final contamination “when all gets mixed up after the war has a natural isotopic signature” (i.e.: can be read as uranium which occurs naturally in nature).

There are two other chilling possibilities says Busby: a fusion bomb or a thermobaric bomb, both of which would need enriched uranium. Certainly, doctors were reporting bodies in conditions they could find in no medical manuals, as in the attack on Falluja, Iraq.

Lebanese authorities denied the presence of enriched uranium; Israel denied using it. The bombardment had ended on the agreement that UN peacekeepers went in. Given their debilitation and mortality rate in the Balkans, this lethal presence might well have deterred them. To be certain, the incident was not isolated. Williams returned to Lebanon and brought back soil and water samples from Khiam and other sites. Enriched uranium was found in water samples from two separate craters in Khiam and in one of the soil samples. Then the money ran out.

The samples tested had already cost ?2,000. Donations from an Arab friend and Swiss supporters totaled ?850 — and Dai Williams had paid the rest out of his own money. More work is needed, but it is now known that the IDF used enriched uranium in Lebanon.

“Since it is in the ambulance air filter, it is also in the lungs of the inhabitants… the Lebanese people have been sacrificed to cancers, leukemia, birth defects, like the people of the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq,” says Busby, adding, “and it may be worse: since we still do not know what the weapon was.”

And have these weapons been used on the people of Gaza and the West Bank? Furthermore, Israel is not only decimating those she perceives as her enemies, but her own people, neighboring countries, and even those further afield.

In context, Green Audit studied airborne uranium at sites in the UK between 1998 and 2004. There was only one period in which uranium in the air “significantly” exceeded the naturally occurring background presence: during the bombing of Iraq, in March and April 2003.

As with the radionuclides from Chernobyl, which affected Europe and the globe and still contaminate agricultural land, the potentially deadly wave of invisible particles traveled on the wind from Iraq. “We are all (Persian) Gulf War victims now,” commented Busby’s colleague Richard Bramhill.

Can anything be done to halt the use of these genocidal weapons? Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois and author of The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, thinks so. He has launched a campaign for a global pact against uranium weapons.

Boyle points out that the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibits “the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices.” Clearly, he says, DU is “analogous” to poison gas.

The government of France is the official depository for the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Boyle contends that rather than aiming for an international treaty prohibiting the use of DU, which would probably take years, pressure should be put on every state to submit a letter to the French government to enforce a ban.

“All that needs to be done is for anti-DU citizens, activists and NGOs in every country to pressure their foreign minister to write to their French counterpart, drawing attention to the Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare of 17th June 1925, prohibiting uses as above.”

The letter should add that this Protocol is believed to “already prohibit the use in war of depleted uranium ammunition, uranium armor plate and all other uranium weapons.” A request should be made that the letter be circulated to all other High Contracting Parties to the 1925 Protocol and addressed to:

His Excellency,

The Foreign Minister,

Republic of France,

37, Quai d’Orsay,

75351 Paris, France.

Or Fax: 33-1-43-17-4275.

Professor Boyle points out, “As the Land Mines Treaty demonstrates, it is possible for a coalition of determined activists and NGOs, acting in concert with at least one sympathetic state, to bring into being an international treaty to address humanitarian concerns.”

Such a sympathetic state exists. Belgium outlawed uranium weapons earlier this year. If the rest of the world does not follow, what will happen is what Richard Bramhill calls “a DU-locaust” — of the children of the countries where these weapons have been used, of soldiers, of the uranium miners, and of the munitions workers, as the living, dead, and deformed prove.

* Author of Wings of Death and of Wolves of Water (2007) essential reading on radiation’s horrors, published by Green Audit (admin@greenaudit.org). Busby is also involved in Radioactive Times, the journal of the Low Level Radiation Campaign, a detailed quarterly update on nuclear industry shenanigans (http://www.llrc.org ).

George Monbiot
Tuesday November 20, 2007
The Guardian

George Bush and Gordon Brown are right: there should be no nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The risk of a nuclear conflagration could be greater there than anywhere else. Any nation developing them should expect a firm diplomatic response. So when will they impose sanctions on Israel?

Like them, I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb. I also believe it should be discouraged, by a combination of economic pressure and bribery, from doing so (a military response would, of course, be disastrous). I believe that Bush and Brown - who maintain their nuclear arsenals in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty - are in no position to lecture anyone else. But if, as Bush claims, the proliferation of such weapons “would be a dangerous threat to world peace”, why does neither man mention the fact that Israel, according to a secret briefing by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, possesses between 60 and 80 of them?

Officially, the Israeli government maintains a position of “nuclear ambiguity”: neither confirming nor denying its possession of nuclear weapons. But everyone who has studied the issue knows that this is a formula with a simple purpose: to give the United States an excuse to keep breaking its own laws, which forbid it to grant aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction. The fiction of ambiguity is fiercely guarded. In 1986, when the nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu handed photographs of Israel’s bomb factory to the Sunday Times, he was lured from Britain to Rome, drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents, tried in secret, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He served 12 of them in solitary confinement and was banged up again - for six months - soon after he was released.

However, in December last year, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, accidentally let slip that Israel, like “America, France and Russia”, had nuclear weapons. Opposition politicians were furious. They attacked Olmert for “a lack of caution bordering on irresponsibility”. But US aid continues to flow without impediment.

As the fascinating papers released last year by the National Security Archive show, the US government was aware in 1968 that Israel was developing a nuclear device (what it didn’t know is that the first one had already been built by then). The contrast to the efforts now being made to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb could scarcely be starker.

At first, US diplomats urged Washington to make its sale of 50 F4 Phantom jets conditional on Israel’s abandonment of its nuclear programme. As a note sent from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to the secretary of state in October 1968 reveals, the order would make the US “the principal supplier of Israel’s military needs” for the first time. In return, it should require “commitments that would make it more difficult for Israel to take the critical decision to go nuclear”. Such pressure, the memo suggested, was urgently required: France had just delivered the first of a consignment of medium range missiles, and Israel intended to equip them with nuclear warheads.

Twenty days later, on November 4 1968, when the assistant defence secretary met Yitzhak Rabin (then the Israeli ambassador to Washington), Rabin “did not dispute in any way our information on Israel’s nuclear or missile capability”. He simply refused to discuss it. Four days after that, Rabin announced that the proposal was “completely unacceptable to us”. On November 27, Lyndon Johnson’s administration accepted Israel’s assurance that “it will not be the first power in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons”.

As the memos show, US officials knew that this assurance had been broken even before it was made. A record of a phone conversation between Henry Kissinger and another official in July 1969 reveals that Richard Nixon was “very leery of cutting off the Phantoms”, despite Israel’s blatant disregard of the agreement. The deal went ahead, and from then on the US administration sought to bamboozle its own officials in order to defend Israel’s lie. In August 1969, US officials were sent to “inspect” Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant. But a memo from the state department reveals that “the US government is not prepared to support a ‘real’ inspection effort in which the team members can feel authorised to ask directly pertinent questions and/or insist on being allowed to look at records, logs, materials and the like. The team has in many subtle ways been cautioned to avoid controversy, ‘be gentlemen’ and not take issue with the obvious will of the hosts”.

Nixon refused to pass the minutes of the conversation he’d had with the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, to the US ambassador to Israel, Wally Barbour. Meir and Nixon appear to have agreed that the Israeli programme could go ahead, as long as it was kept secret.

The US government has continued to protect it. Every six months, the intelligence agencies provide Congress with a report on technology acquired by foreign states that’s “useful for the development or production of weapons of mass destruction”. These reports discuss the programmes in India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and other nations, but not in Israel. Whenever other states have tried to press Israel to join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the US and European governments have blocked them. Israel has also exempted itself from the biological and chemical weapons conventions.

By refusing to sign these treaties, Israel ensures it needs never be inspected. While the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspectors crawl round Iran’s factories, put seals on its uranium tanks and blow the whistle when it fails to cooperate, they have no legal authority to inspect facilities in Israel. So when the Israeli government complains, as it did last week, that the head of the IAEA is “sticking his head in the sand over Iran’s nuclear programme”, you can only gape at its chutzpah. Israel is constantly racking up the pressure for action against Iran, aware that no powerful state will press for action against Israel.

Yes, Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. The president is a Holocaust denier opposed to the existence of Israel. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran responded to Saddam Hussein’s toxic bombardments with chemical weapons of its own. But Israel under Olmert is also a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. Two months ago it bombed a site in Syria (whose function is fiercely disputed). Last year, it launched a war of aggression against Lebanon. It remains in occupation of Palestinian lands. In February 2001, according to the BBC, it used chemical weapons in Gaza: 180 people were admitted to hospital with severe convulsions. Nuclear weapons in Israel’s hands are surely just as dangerous as nuclear weapons in Iran’s.

So when will our governments speak up? When will they acknowledge that there is already a nuclear power in the Middle East, and that it presents an existential threat to its neighbours? When will they admit that Iran is not starting a nuclear arms race, but joining one? When will they demand that the rules they impose on Iran should also apply to Israel?

Written by Sherwood Ross

Tuesday, 20 November 2007
By firing radioactive ammunition, the U.S., U.K., and Israel may have
triggered a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East that, over time, will
prove deadlier than the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan.
So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired,
asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, “The genetic future of the Iraqi
people for the most part, is destroyed.”

“More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric
testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium
weaponry since 1991,” Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition
fired by Israeli troops in Palestine.

Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years
at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, both of California.

Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, “The long-term
effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq is a toxic wasteland.
Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and
leukemia. In Iraq, the birth rate of mutations is totally out of
control.”

Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president
of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, “For every genetic
defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands
more that will be expressed.”

She adds, “the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive.”

Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written:
“Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population
of 5 million people are children who played in the burned-out tanks and
on the sandy, dusty ground.”

“Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic
effects of radiation than adults,” Caldicott wrote. “My pediatric
colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a
sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross
congenital abnormalities,” she wrote in her book, “Nuclear Power is not
the Answer”(The New Press).

Caldicott goes on to say the two Gulf wars “have been nuclear wars
because they have scattered nuclear material across the land, and
people—particularly children— are condemned to die of malignancy and
congenital disease essentially for eternity.”

Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the
radioactive elements in the shells fired, “the food, the air, and the
water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated,”
Caldicott explained.

Uranium is a heavy metal that enters the body via inhalation into the
lung or via ingestion into the GI tract. It is excreted by the kidney,
where, if the dose is high enough, it can induce renal failure or kidney
cancer. It also lodges in the bones where it causes bone cancer and
leukemia, and it is excreted in the semen, where it mutates genes in the
sperm, leading to birth deformities.

Nuclear contamination is spreading around the world, Caldicott adds,
with heaviest concentrations in regions within a 1,000-mile radius of
Baghdad and Afghanistan.

These are, notably, northern India, southern Russia, Turkey, Egypt,
Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Pakistan, Kuwait, the Gulf emirates, and Jordan.

“Downwind from the radioactive devastation in Iraq, Israel is also
suffering from large increases in breast cancer, leukemia and childhood
diabetes,” Moret asserts.

Doug Rokke, formerly the top U.S. Army DU clean-up officer and now
anti-DU crusader, says Israeli tankers fired radioactive shells during
the invasion of Lebanon last year. U.S. and NATO forces also used DU
ammunition in Kosovo. Rokke says he is quite ill from the effects of DU
and that members of his clean-up crew have died from it.

As a result of DU bombardments, Caldicott writes, “Severe birth defects
have been reported in babies born to contaminated civilians in Iraq,
Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan and the incidence and severity of defects is
increasing over time.”

Like symptoms have been reported among infants born to U.S. service
personnel that fought in the Gulf Wars. One survey of 251 returned Gulf
War veterans from Mississippi made by the Veterans Administration found
67% of children born to them suffered from “severe illnesses and
deformities.”

Some were born without brains or vital organs or with no arms, hands, or
arms, or with hands attached to their shoulders.

While U.S. officials deny DU ammunition is dangerous, it is a fact Gulf
War veterans were the first Americans ever to fight on a radioactive
battlefield, and their children apparently are the first known to
display these ghastly deformities.

Soldiers who survived being hit by radioactive ammunition, as well as
those who fired it, are falling ill, often showing signs of radiation
sickness. Of the 700,000 U.S. veterans of the first Gulf War, more than
240,000 are on permanent medical disability and 11,000 are dead,
published reports indicate.

This is an astonishing toll from such a short conflict in which fewer
than 400 U.S. soldiers were killed on the battlefield.

Of course, “depleted uranium munitions were and remain another
causative factor behind Gulf War Syndrome(GWS),” writes Francis Boyle, a
leading American authority on international law in his book “Biowarfare
and Terrorism,” from Clarity Press Inc.

“The Pentagon continues to deny that there is such a medical phenomenon
categorized as GWS—even beyond the point where everyone knows that
denial is pure propaganda and disinformation,” Boyle writes.

Boyle contends, “The Pentagon will never own up to the legal, economic,
tortious, political, and criminal consequences of admitting the
existence of GWS. So U.S. and U.K. veterans of Gulf War I as well as
their afterborn children will continue to suffer and die. The same will
prove true for U.S. and U.S. veterans of Bush Jr.’s Gulf War II as well
as their afterborn children.”

Boyle said the use of DU is outlawed under the 1925 Geneva Convention
prohibiting poison gas.

Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute,
writes in his “The Sorrows of Empire”(Henry Holt and Co.) that, given
the abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq as
well as Kosovo, the evidence points “toward a significant role for DU.”

By insisting on its use, Johnson adds, “the military is deliberately
flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition
as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.”

Moret calls DU “the Trojan Horse of nuclear war.” She describes it as
“the weapon that keeps killing.” Indeed, the half-life of Uranium-238 is
4.5-billion years, and as it decays it spawns other deadly radioactive
by-products.

Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the
initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400
miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation
quadrupled.

But it is in the Middle East, predominantly Iraq, where the bulk of the
radioactive waste has been dumped.

In the early Nineties, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority
warned that 50 tons of dust from DU explosions could claim a half
million lives from cancer by year 2000. Not 50 tons, but an estimated
two thousand radioactive tons have been fired off in the Middle East,
suggesting the possibility over time of an even higher death toll.

Dr. Keith Baverstock, a World Health Organization radiation advisor,
informed the media, Iraq’s arid climate would increase exposure from its
tiny particles as they are blown about and inhaled by the civilian
population for years to come.

The civilian death toll from the August, 1945, U.S. atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been put at 140,000 and 80,000, respectively.
Over time, however, deaths from radiation sickness are thought to have
claimed the lives of another 100,000 Japanese civilians.

#(Sherwood Ross is a Miami, Florida-based free-lance writer who covers
military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com.This
e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript
enabled to view it Ross has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily
News and several wire services and is a contributor to national
magazines.)

Bush Threat of World War III: Cuban Missile Crisis Redux

By Prof. Francis Boyle

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7285

Global Research, November 8, 2007

During the course of an October 17, 2007 press conference, President Bush Jr. terrorized the entire world with the threat of World War III if he could not work his illegal will upon Iran . Then Russian President Vladimir Putin responded in kind by likewise terrorizing the entire world with the prospect of yet another Cuban Missile Crisis if he did not get his way on the provocative anti-ballistic missile (A.B.M.) systems that the Bush Jr. administration plans to locate in Poland and the Czech Republic. These American A.B.M.s in Europe will constitute a necessary adjunct to the longstanding U.S. plan of launching a strategic nuclear first-strike against the former Soviet Union, now reincarnated as the Russian Federation . Seemingly effective U.S. A.B.M. systems will be required to take out the miniscule Russian strategic nuclear retaliatory forces that might survive a U.S. first-strike.

What really matters here are the perceptions: Namely, the Neo-Cons in the Bush Jr. administration believe that with the deployment of a facially successful strategic nuclear first-strike capability necessarily including A.B.M.s, the U.S. government could ultimately compel nuclear-armed Russia or China or both to do its bidding during a geopolitical crisis (e.g., over Iran or Cuba again). The classic case in point here was the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when the Soviet government knew that the United States wielded both strategic nuclear and conventional area military superiority, so it capitulated. American international political scientists have almost unanimously applauded this existential nuclear brinksmanship inflicted upon humanity by The Best and the Brightest (1972) of the Kennedy administration as a most salutary example of aggressive ?compellence? as opposed to allegedly defensive ?deterrence.?

Under the auspices of the Bush Jr. Neo-Cons, the U.S. government is breaking out of a publicly proclaimed strategic nuclear ?deterrence? posture and moving into adopting a strategic nuclear ?compellence? strategy with respect to nuclear-armed Russia and China , let alone the rest of the world. The Bush Jr. Neo-Cons calculate that henceforth the United States government will be able to compel even strategically-nuclear-armed adversaries like Russia or China or both to back down in a crisis, or otherwise to do its will, or at least to do nothing to stop it from attaining its geopolitical objectives. But see Stanley Kubrick?s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

By contrast, it was the terror of my own personal imminent nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis that first sparked my interest in studying international relations and U.S. foreign policy as a young boy of 12: ?I can do a better job than this!? Unfortunately, my generation of Americans has not. But the next generation must pick up the torch and fight for the very survival of humanity and our shared planet earth.

Professor Francis A. Boyle is the athor of “The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence” (Clarity Press: 2002).

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