Radio Free Taiwan

I just successfully upgraded my Wordpress software installation. I sure hope this reduces the comment spam. Yesterday, thinking I could never successfully upgrade it myself, I registered at Wordpress.com for a free online blog. But I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted, so I tried the upgrade. Boring, I know. My point is, I was ready to turn over a new blogging leaf. Henceforth I will attempt to use this blog as my personal soapbox, rather that as a “dimunitive little blog.” What follows in this post was the first and only entry I made at my Wordpress.com blog. But I do recommend that service for those wishing to begin a blog.

This is my first post in Year of the Dog. I’m a dog-born myself. I’m not usually superstitious, but I’m a little psyched for this. Maybe my serotonin is running high.
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Let’s start with depleted uranium, the bugbear that I think will destroy it’s masters in the near future.

The graphic above links to a LIFE magazine photo essay on Gulf War Syndrome and the possibility that children of American vets are suffering a higher rate of birth defects because of it.

This is strange. This Web page is not linked to from any of LIFE’s top pages. A search on Google tells me only 24 pages on the whole Internet point to this story. I have been researching depleted uranium for over a year and just discovered this page yesterday by following a link from an anti-DU site.

Also strange is that I cannot discover the date of the story. (Can anyone help me here?)

The story makes reference to DU as one of the possible causes of Gulf War Syndrome. It goes into more detail about other causes, such as vaccinations and bug spray. There are, however, two sidebars linked to in the story. One of the links works fine, but the other one, which would pop-up some further information on DU doesn’t show any text. That’s odd. So, I checked the source HTML and there was the text, which I will quote here:

DID EXPOSURE TO DEPLETED URANIUM CAUSE ILLNESS?
Allied tanks and airplanes fired a new kind of ammunition in the Gulf War: shells
jacketed with depleted uranium, a waste product from nuclear reactors. When such
a shell hits an enemy tank, it heats up, incinerating the vehicle’s crew. In a
1993 report, the General Accounting Office concluded that while troops using such
ordnance were unlikely to receive a radiation dose exceeding Nuclear Regulatory
Commission limits, “the Army has not effectively educated its personnel in the
hazards of DU contamination and in proper safety measures appropriate to the
degree of hazard.” And the safety of even low-level radiation exposure remains a
subject of scientific debate. For troops salvaging shrapnel-pocked equipment, or
working in areas filled with the dust and debris of tank battles, the risk may
have been especially high. Nearly a million DU-tipped shells were fired during
the war. Says Paul Sullivan, president of the Gulf War Veterans of Georgia:
“We’re talking about tons and tons of radioactive wastes floating around.”

WERE NERVE AND MUSTARD GASES PRESENT, AFTER ALL?
In 1975 a landmark Swedish study concluded that low-level exposure to nerve and
mustard gases could cause both chronic illness and birth defects. The Pentagon
denies the presence of such chemicals during the Gulf War. But the Czech and
British governments say their troops detected both kinds of gas, presumably
released during allied bombing of Iraqi chemical plants. And veterans’ advocate
Paul Sullivan recently obtained 11 pages of a secret Defense Department log
revealing that U.S. chemical alarms went off repeatedly during the war. Pentagon
spokesmen blame those alarms on faulty equipment and note that there have been no
reports of massive Iraqi gas deaths near the bombed factories. But former
congressional investigator Jim Tuite speculates that gases were blown straight
upward, then settled miles away as fallout. And, he says, Iraqis are suffering
health problems “similar to what we’re seeing in our veterans.” Ironically, much
of Iraq’s chemical arsenal was made by U.S. companies–80 of which face a
class-action suit by 2,000 ailing vets.

It seems a quotation mark was missing from the HTML code making it display wrongly. Surely, it was just an accident right? And unfortunately went undiscovered for years (this article certainly predates Gulf War II) on that page that is difficult to discover using Google or even the LIFE homepage. But hey, it is a story on DU in the mainstream media right? And this proves that there isn’t any censorship, right? And I’m sure this page will be referenced when the hearings come and people are taken to task for knowingly poisoning an entire country and exposing American and allied troops to a proven carcinogenic toxin.

The truth is that DU has made it into the mainstream news before. Here’s an example from 2003. And here is the 2003 BBC in-depth expose. It just has trouble staying in the news. Few other newspapers ever seem to pick up the story. This happened again last week. The Sunday Times of London reported that four sampling stations detected a significant rise in atmospheric radiation over England following the ’shock and awe’ assult on Bagdhad. The government simply stated it was impossible for the radiation to have come from Iraq, although weather records from that time showed favorable winds. Whether or not the radiation came from Iraq, I am disappointed the story was not pursued further. So far, only one other online news source has followed up.

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