DEPLETED URANIUM EXPERTS:
PENTAGON “LIES” ABOUT D.U. DANGERS AND DENIES SOLDIERS PROMPT MEDICAL CARE
By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
The Pentagon is engaged in a “criminal” conspiracy to conceal the real dangers of uranium weapons, experts say, in order to allow the continued use of its super lethal “Silver Bullet” – while avoiding liability for the consequences.
Far from the radioactive battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, another war is being waged. This war – over the use of depleted uranium weapons – is being fought between the military top brass and the men who know too well the dangers of depleted uranium: former military doctors and nuclear scientists.
This war, being fought to reveal the truth about depleted uranium (DU) weapons − and the consequences of their use − has been waged for more than 13 years, since the U.S. first used DU weapons against Iraq. Most Americans, however, are completely unaware of this historic struggle because the Pentagon has used its power to prevent information about DU from reaching the public.
John Hanchette, editor of USA Today from 1991 to 2001, in a recent interview with anti-DU activist Leuren Moret, said he had written several news stories about the harmful effects of depleted uranium on Gulf War veterans. However, every time he was ready to publish a story about the devastating illnesses afflicting Gulf War vets the Pentagon called USA Today and pressured him not to publish the story.
Hanchette was eventually replaced as editor and now teaches journalism to college students.
Dr. Doug Rokke, 37-year Army veteran and former director of the Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, has become an outspoken “warrior for peace” in the war against DU weapons. Rokke is fighting for medical care for all people exposed to DU: active soldiers, veterans, and civilians, including Iraqis, and for “remediation” or cleansing of all DU contaminated land.
“Anyone who demands medical care and environmental remediation faces ongoing and blatant retaliation,” Rokke said. “Anybody who speaks up – their career ends.”
During the first Gulf War, Rokke was theater health physicist with the 12th Preventive Medicine Command professional staff and served on three special operations teams. Rokke, and members of his teams, were exposed to large amounts of depleted uranium during recovery of U.S. tanks and armored vehicles mistakenly hit by DU weapons.
Today, Rokke is fighting to get the Pentagon to abide by its own regulations regarding medical care for all individuals exposed to DU and remediation of areas affected by its use.
The military records of one of Rokke’s comrades, who is suffering from the effects of DU exposure, have been completely “gutted” from Army archives, Rokke told American Free Press.
“They [defense officials] willfully ignore existing U.S. Dept. of Defense directives that require prompt and effective medical care be provided to ‘all’ exposed individuals,” Rokke says.
Rokke points to a recent U.S. Army Medical Command memo dated 29 April 2004, from Lt. General James B. Peake about medical management of Army personnel exposed to DU. The memo, which says, “all personnel with actual or potential exposures to DU will be identified, assessed, treated (if needed), and assigned a potential exposure level (I, II, or III),” reiterates the U.S. Army regulations originally written by Rokke’s team in 1991, he said.
“A radio bioassay has to be done within a few days of exposure,” Rokke said. “This means nasal and pharyngeal swabs being taken and 24-hour urine and fecal analysis.”
“Today,” Rokke writes, “although medical problems continue to develop, medical care is denied or delayed for all uranium exposed casualties while U.S. Dept. of Defense and British Ministry of Defense officials continue to deny any correlation between uranium exposure and adverse health and environmental effects.”
Rokke said the individuals at the Department of Defense are engaged in a “criminal” conspiracy to deny the toxicity of DU weapons. “The lies by senior Dept. of Defense officials are designed to sustain use of uranium munitions and avoid liability for adverse health and environmental effects,” he said. According to Rokke, a recent Gulf War Review reported that only 262 vets had been treated for DU poisoning through September 2003.
The military’s strategy of lies and concealment about the dangers of DU began in March 1991, Rokke said, shortly after the first widespread use of DU weapons by the U.S. occurred in the war against Iraq.
On 1 March 1991, Lt. Col. Michael V. Ziehmn of Los Alamos National Lab wrote a memo about the effectiveness of DU penetrators. The “future existence” of DU weapons should be assured by active “proponency” by the Dept. of Defense, Ziehmn wrote.
“If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability,” Ziehmn wrote. “I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after action reports are written.”
The Los Alamos memo was sent directly to Rokke’s team in Saudi Arabia: “This memo told us to be sure that we should only report our findings so DU munitions could always be used,” Rokke said. “In other words − lie.”
After American Free Press began its series on DU weapons, the U.S. Army alerted the Center for Disease Control, an Atlanta-based agency of the Dept. of Health and Human Services.
“The CDC is going to do a whitewash on DU,” Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at Lawrence Livermore Lab, said. Fulk told AFP that he had received this information directly from CDC officials.
According to Fulk, the CDC is preparing to “whitewash” DU in the same way it conducted its recent Public Health Assessment on Lawrence Livermore Lab, where America’s nuclear bombs are assembled.
AFP asked Stephanie C. Creel of the CDC about the position of the nation’s public health agency on the toxicity of DU. Creel said the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) on-line “fact sheet” would provide the “most in-depth information” on the subject.
Under the section “How can uranium affect my health?” the ATSDR “fact sheet” states: “The radiation damage from exposure to high levels of natural or depleted uranium are [sic] not known to cause cancer.”
“DON’T WORRY – BE HAPPY”
“No apparent public health hazard,” read the CDC assessment of Livermore lab, published 29 June 2004, about local exposure levels to tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, Fulk said.
“It’s nonsense,” Fulk said. “It’s [tritium] been dumped all around the area. It goes through glass and steel,” he added. “Dilution is the solution to pollution,” he added. “Don’t worry – be happy.”
“Depleted uranium” is a misnomer, Fulk said. Depleted uranium, or Uranium-238, is concentrated uranium that has had the naturally occurring fissile material, Uranium-235, removed. Uranium occurs in nature in a mixed form and comprises only about 2 parts per million of the Earth’s crust.
“Depleted” uranium is still very radioactive, however. While one gram of U-235 emits 81,000 alpha particles per second, U-238 emits 12,000 per second. The high-energy alpha particles being emitted from DU molecules lodged in the body cause the most damage, according to Fulk and other nuclear scientists.
“Depleted uranium dust that is inhaled gets transferred from the lungs to the regional lymph nodes, where they can bombard a small number of cells in their immediate vicinity with intense alpha radiation,” said Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a nuclear medicine specialist who previously served as the Pentagon’s expert on DU.
A GAS WARFARE INSTRUMENT
In 1943, Dr. James B. Conant of the U.S. War Department wrote a memo on the “Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon.” Conant wrote that such materials could be used “as a gas warfare instrument” and estimated that “one millionth of a gram” would be fatal.
Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a hi-tech defense contractor based in San Diego, published an extensive article about the dangers of DU six months before President George H.W. Bush waged war against Iraq in 1991.
“Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are probably the ground troops that re-enter a battlefield following the exchange of armor-piercing (DU) munitions, either on foot or motorized transports,” SAIC wrote in its July 1990 magazine.
“Short term effects of high doses can result in death, while long term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer,” SAIC wrote.
AFP submitted written questions to the U.S. Army Medical Command asking how the army can claim that DU exposure is harmless when military documents from 1943 to 1990 have repeatedly stressed its lethal toxicity.
“The two positions are not opposing,” Mark A. Melanson of the Army’s Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine in Aberdeen, Md., responded. “As with all potentially hazardous material, the amount determines the risk.”
Melanson said the Army was complying with its own regulations regarding medical care for DU exposure, saying: “Soldiers are being screened by completing the Post Deployment Health Questionnaire upon demobilization. Troops identified as being at potential risk for DU exposure are directed to provide a urine bioassay for analysis.”
Rokke disagrees: “That is too late. Hence they find a way out.” As for the troops “identified as being at potential risk,” Rokke said, “Not hardly. No one knows about the risks or problems.”
Although AFP tried repeatedly to speak directly to Melanson about the quantity of DU that the Army considered hazardous, he did not come to the phone.
In May, Melanson told the New York Daily News: “There are safe levels of depleted uranium intake,” Melanson is quoted having said. “An individual could [safely] breathe in up to a gram per year every year for 50 years.”
“That’s absolutely absurd,” Fulk said about Melanson’s comments. Quickly doing the math, Fulk said the number of alpha particle emissions from a gram of DU lodged in the body over a year would be “as many as the stars in the sky” – and about the same as one-tenth of all the cells in his body.
The inhaled DU particles have a tendency to bind with phosphate in the human body, found in the bones – and the DNA. The alpha particle emitted into the cells nearby “is doing the dirty work,” Fulk said.
“A single nano-size particle can cause cancer,” Leuren Moret told AFP, “and, in fact, that is exactly what is causing cancer – one alpha particle from a particle of DU.”
“Two factors appear to increase the effectiveness of radioactive dust or smoke as a weapon,” Conant wrote in 1943: “It cannot be detected by the senses;” and “It can be distributed in a dust or smoke form so finely powdered that it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough be extremely damaging.
“The most serious effect would be permanent lung damage appearing months later from the persistent irradiation of retained particles, even at low daily rates,” Conant wrote.
Painful breathing and respiratory problems are the first and most common symptoms of DU inhalation, Rokke said.
Dr. Janette Sherman told AFP that she met a 31-year old female veteran at a Maryland VA hospital who had recently served in Kuwait. Sherman, a toxicologist, said she was shocked when the young woman told her that she needed a lung transplant.
Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press http://www.americanfreepress.net
This is the third of a series by Christopher Bollyn. For the first two parts, please see:
Part I: “Depleted Uranium: U.S. Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity”, http://www.americanfreepress.net/depleted_uranium.html ;
Part II: “Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD: MD Says Depleted Uranium Definitively Linked”, http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cancer_epidemic_.html
and
THE REAL DIRTY BOMBS: DEPLETED URANIUM, by Christopher Bollyn
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout4.php&id=1881&blz=1
PENTAGON “LIES” ABOUT D.U. DANGERS AND DENIES SOLDIERS PROMPT MEDICAL CARE
By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
The Pentagon is engaged in a “criminal” conspiracy to conceal the real dangers of uranium weapons, experts say, in order to allow the continued use of its super lethal “Silver Bullet” – while avoiding liability for the consequences.
Far from the radioactive battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, another war is being waged. This war – over the use of depleted uranium weapons – is being fought between the military top brass and the men who know too well the dangers of depleted uranium: former military doctors and nuclear scientists.
This war, being fought to reveal the truth about depleted uranium (DU) weapons − and the consequences of their use − has been waged for more than 13 years, since the U.S. first used DU weapons against Iraq. Most Americans, however, are completely unaware of this historic struggle because the Pentagon has used its power to prevent information about DU from reaching the public.
John Hanchette, editor of USA Today from 1991 to 2001, in a recent interview with anti-DU activist Leuren Moret, said he had written several news stories about the harmful effects of depleted uranium on Gulf War veterans. However, every time he was ready to publish a story about the devastating illnesses afflicting Gulf War vets the Pentagon called USA Today and pressured him not to publish the story.
Hanchette was eventually replaced as editor and now teaches journalism to college students.
Dr. Doug Rokke, 37-year Army veteran and former director of the Army’s Depleted Uranium Project, has become an outspoken “warrior for peace” in the war against DU weapons. Rokke is fighting for medical care for all people exposed to DU: active soldiers, veterans, and civilians, including Iraqis, and for “remediation” or cleansing of all DU contaminated land.
“Anyone who demands medical care and environmental remediation faces ongoing and blatant retaliation,” Rokke said. “Anybody who speaks up – their career ends.”
During the first Gulf War, Rokke was theater health physicist with the 12th Preventive Medicine Command professional staff and served on three special operations teams. Rokke, and members of his teams, were exposed to large amounts of depleted uranium during recovery of U.S. tanks and armored vehicles mistakenly hit by DU weapons.
Today, Rokke is fighting to get the Pentagon to abide by its own regulations regarding medical care for all individuals exposed to DU and remediation of areas affected by its use.
The military records of one of Rokke’s comrades, who is suffering from the effects of DU exposure, have been completely “gutted” from Army archives, Rokke told American Free Press.
“They [defense officials] willfully ignore existing U.S. Dept. of Defense directives that require prompt and effective medical care be provided to ‘all’ exposed individuals,” Rokke says.
Rokke points to a recent U.S. Army Medical Command memo dated 29 April 2004, from Lt. General James B. Peake about medical management of Army personnel exposed to DU. The memo, which says, “all personnel with actual or potential exposures to DU will be identified, assessed, treated (if needed), and assigned a potential exposure level (I, II, or III),” reiterates the U.S. Army regulations originally written by Rokke’s team in 1991, he said.
“A radio bioassay has to be done within a few days of exposure,” Rokke said. “This means nasal and pharyngeal swabs being taken and 24-hour urine and fecal analysis.”
“Today,” Rokke writes, “although medical problems continue to develop, medical care is denied or delayed for all uranium exposed casualties while U.S. Dept. of Defense and British Ministry of Defense officials continue to deny any correlation between uranium exposure and adverse health and environmental effects.”
Rokke said the individuals at the Department of Defense are engaged in a “criminal” conspiracy to deny the toxicity of DU weapons. “The lies by senior Dept. of Defense officials are designed to sustain use of uranium munitions and avoid liability for adverse health and environmental effects,” he said. According to Rokke, a recent Gulf War Review reported that only 262 vets had been treated for DU poisoning through September 2003.
The military’s strategy of lies and concealment about the dangers of DU began in March 1991, Rokke said, shortly after the first widespread use of DU weapons by the U.S. occurred in the war against Iraq.
On 1 March 1991, Lt. Col. Michael V. Ziehmn of Los Alamos National Lab wrote a memo about the effectiveness of DU penetrators. The “future existence” of DU weapons should be assured by active “proponency” by the Dept. of Defense, Ziehmn wrote.
“If proponency is not garnered, it is possible that we stand to lose a valuable combat capability,” Ziehmn wrote. “I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after action reports are written.”
The Los Alamos memo was sent directly to Rokke’s team in Saudi Arabia: “This memo told us to be sure that we should only report our findings so DU munitions could always be used,” Rokke said. “In other words − lie.”
After American Free Press began its series on DU weapons, the U.S. Army alerted the Center for Disease Control, an Atlanta-based agency of the Dept. of Health and Human Services.
“The CDC is going to do a whitewash on DU,” Marion Fulk, a former nuclear chemical physicist at Lawrence Livermore Lab, said. Fulk told AFP that he had received this information directly from CDC officials.
According to Fulk, the CDC is preparing to “whitewash” DU in the same way it conducted its recent Public Health Assessment on Lawrence Livermore Lab, where America’s nuclear bombs are assembled.
AFP asked Stephanie C. Creel of the CDC about the position of the nation’s public health agency on the toxicity of DU. Creel said the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) on-line “fact sheet” would provide the “most in-depth information” on the subject.
Under the section “How can uranium affect my health?” the ATSDR “fact sheet” states: “The radiation damage from exposure to high levels of natural or depleted uranium are [sic] not known to cause cancer.”
“DON’T WORRY – BE HAPPY”
“No apparent public health hazard,” read the CDC assessment of Livermore lab, published 29 June 2004, about local exposure levels to tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, Fulk said.
“It’s nonsense,” Fulk said. “It’s [tritium] been dumped all around the area. It goes through glass and steel,” he added. “Dilution is the solution to pollution,” he added. “Don’t worry – be happy.”
“Depleted uranium” is a misnomer, Fulk said. Depleted uranium, or Uranium-238, is concentrated uranium that has had the naturally occurring fissile material, Uranium-235, removed. Uranium occurs in nature in a mixed form and comprises only about 2 parts per million of the Earth’s crust.
“Depleted” uranium is still very radioactive, however. While one gram of U-235 emits 81,000 alpha particles per second, U-238 emits 12,000 per second. The high-energy alpha particles being emitted from DU molecules lodged in the body cause the most damage, according to Fulk and other nuclear scientists.
“Depleted uranium dust that is inhaled gets transferred from the lungs to the regional lymph nodes, where they can bombard a small number of cells in their immediate vicinity with intense alpha radiation,” said Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a nuclear medicine specialist who previously served as the Pentagon’s expert on DU.
A GAS WARFARE INSTRUMENT
In 1943, Dr. James B. Conant of the U.S. War Department wrote a memo on the “Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon.” Conant wrote that such materials could be used “as a gas warfare instrument” and estimated that “one millionth of a gram” would be fatal.
Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), a hi-tech defense contractor based in San Diego, published an extensive article about the dangers of DU six months before President George H.W. Bush waged war against Iraq in 1991.
“Under combat conditions, the most exposed individuals are probably the ground troops that re-enter a battlefield following the exchange of armor-piercing (DU) munitions, either on foot or motorized transports,” SAIC wrote in its July 1990 magazine.
“Short term effects of high doses can result in death, while long term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer,” SAIC wrote.
AFP submitted written questions to the U.S. Army Medical Command asking how the army can claim that DU exposure is harmless when military documents from 1943 to 1990 have repeatedly stressed its lethal toxicity.
“The two positions are not opposing,” Mark A. Melanson of the Army’s Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine in Aberdeen, Md., responded. “As with all potentially hazardous material, the amount determines the risk.”
Melanson said the Army was complying with its own regulations regarding medical care for DU exposure, saying: “Soldiers are being screened by completing the Post Deployment Health Questionnaire upon demobilization. Troops identified as being at potential risk for DU exposure are directed to provide a urine bioassay for analysis.”
Rokke disagrees: “That is too late. Hence they find a way out.” As for the troops “identified as being at potential risk,” Rokke said, “Not hardly. No one knows about the risks or problems.”
Although AFP tried repeatedly to speak directly to Melanson about the quantity of DU that the Army considered hazardous, he did not come to the phone.
In May, Melanson told the New York Daily News: “There are safe levels of depleted uranium intake,” Melanson is quoted having said. “An individual could [safely] breathe in up to a gram per year every year for 50 years.”
“That’s absolutely absurd,” Fulk said about Melanson’s comments. Quickly doing the math, Fulk said the number of alpha particle emissions from a gram of DU lodged in the body over a year would be “as many as the stars in the sky” – and about the same as one-tenth of all the cells in his body.
The inhaled DU particles have a tendency to bind with phosphate in the human body, found in the bones – and the DNA. The alpha particle emitted into the cells nearby “is doing the dirty work,” Fulk said.
“A single nano-size particle can cause cancer,” Leuren Moret told AFP, “and, in fact, that is exactly what is causing cancer – one alpha particle from a particle of DU.”
“Two factors appear to increase the effectiveness of radioactive dust or smoke as a weapon,” Conant wrote in 1943: “It cannot be detected by the senses;” and “It can be distributed in a dust or smoke form so finely powdered that it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough be extremely damaging.
“The most serious effect would be permanent lung damage appearing months later from the persistent irradiation of retained particles, even at low daily rates,” Conant wrote.
Painful breathing and respiratory problems are the first and most common symptoms of DU inhalation, Rokke said.
Dr. Janette Sherman told AFP that she met a 31-year old female veteran at a Maryland VA hospital who had recently served in Kuwait. Sherman, a toxicologist, said she was shocked when the young woman told her that she needed a lung transplant.
Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press http://www.americanfreepress.net
This is the third of a series by Christopher Bollyn. For the first two parts, please see:
Part I: “Depleted Uranium: U.S. Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity”, http://www.americanfreepress.net/depleted_uranium.html ;
Part II: “Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD: MD Says Depleted Uranium Definitively Linked”, http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cancer_epidemic_.html
and
THE REAL DIRTY BOMBS: DEPLETED URANIUM, by Christopher Bollyn
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout4.php&id=1881&blz=1