And now for something you'll really enjoy! Apologies to my readers: this newsletter usually announces doom and gloom, so this week, here’s something to lighten our hearts:
During the Veterans for Peace Conference, VFP awarded Pace e Bene co-founder Fr. Louie Vitale their Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award. Fr. Louie opened up his church in the Tenderloin every night so that the homeless would have a place to sleep. Fr. Louie and I were the only two elders working with DASW (Direct Action to Stop War) to shut San Francisco down the day following the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Fr. Louie served six months hard time in Lompoc for "trespassing" at Vandenberg AFB. To replace the weapon's grade plutonium in a missile firing, Vandenberg substitutes DU (read below). Prisoners in Lompoc received milk from cows grazing grass contaminated by Fukushima fallout. Below is an excerpt by Will Covert introducing Fr. Louie.
Now on to the matter at hand, the presentation of this year’s 2016 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award. The recipient of this award should be an individual who is deserving to join the ranks of those former recipients. The recipient should also have a significant and lifelong commitment to the cause of Peace and Justice. So with close to 50 year of activism at home and abroad the recipient of this year’s award has been on an unwavering quest for Peace and Justice for decades. However, his quest for Peace and Justice, as with the other recipients of this award, is sought through nonviolence. Seeking Peace and Justice by any means is one thing, seeking Peace and Justice through Nonviolence is quite another. In a land where the predominant thought on violence and on war is that violence will triumph over nonviolence and that there always have been wars and that there always will be wars, seeking Peace and Justice through Nonviolence is somewhat analogous to Ginger Rogers statement about dancing; that is, doing it backwards and in high heels. I’m not suggesting to you that this years recipient of the achievement award wears heels but, I know him well enough to say that if he thought it would bring him closer to his objective, to a just and peaceful world, he’d where high heels, and without question.
For full text of Louie's dedication
HIROSHIMA – NAGASAKI DAY -- PART II
Where You Might Have Been And When
Exhale. Inhale.
Depending on where you were and when you were there, you have just inhaled a
nanoparticle of DU (depleted uranium) smaller than 10 microns. If you served in
the First Gulf War, particularly around Basra in southern Iraq, and
particularly if you found yourself near the “Highway of Death,” where Saddam’s
tanks and personnel carriers tried making a dash of it out of Kuwait and back
toward Basra, you most certainly inhaled many nanoparticles of DU. You came
home from the three-week war with particles lodged in your lungs, particles
that passed through your alveoli and into your bloodstream, eventually to lodge
in your muscles, in your bones, in your brain, wherever the red rivers of your
body took them, and you became a statistic. If you were assigned to clean out
damaged tanks, tanks caught in crossfire, you will most certainly have inhaled
DU. If you were assigned to prepare damaged tanks and personnel carriers for
shipment and burial in the United States as the government of Kuwait demanded
after the war, you are sure to have inhaled DU, or it may just as easily have
penetrated through your skin. You were never warned by any commanding officer
that you would come into contact with DU. Sixty-five of a hundred of you would
have children with severe illnesses, missing eyes, blood infections,
respiratory problems and fused fingers, because DU remained lodged in the place
it came to rest within your body, irradiating neighboring cells in a kind of
‘bystander’ effect, leading to an 8-fold increase in genetic damage. You are
three times more likely to have children with birth deformities than fathers
who did not serve in the Gulf. Your babies are 65% more likely to have physical
abnormalities, and your wives and partners are 40% more likely to miscarry.
They are the lucky ones.
By 2003, following
the First Gulf War, Basra saw a five-fold increase in congenital malformations,
and a quadrupling incidence of malignant diseases. If you were a child of
Basra, playing in abandoned vehicles or tanks, you would have inhaled DU and
probably ingested it. You, too, would become a statistic—an Iraqi one—one of
hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children developing childhood leukemia. You
would be five times more at risk for developing cancer of the thyroid. You
would be condemned to a short life of bodily suffering, and while you sickened
and died, you would have to see the pain in your mother’s eyes, your father’s
grief—if you still had a mother or a father. If you were or are a woman in
Basra, your risk of giving birth to a severely handicapped child would have
increased 60%. Either you might have been helpless to prevent a pregnancy, or
perhaps you would have ignored the advice of those Iraqi doctors who had not
already fled Iraq who said, “Iraq is no longer a place to have children,”
because had you given birth to such a child, you would have had to care for it
with the little food available to you, bathed him with contaminated rain or
sewer water. Perhaps you would have had to carry him, if in his short life he
could never have hoped to walk, or see, or feed himself—or any of the kinds of
things that characterize human living in the world. And you yourself might be
one of the 70 out of 1,000 people to develop cancer (Viewzone. “Depleted
Uranium: Anatomy of an Atrocity”).
Or suppose that you
had become pregnant in Falluja following the assaults of April or November
2004, in which NATO used white phosphorous and DU. According to the
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, your chances
of giving birth to a child with neural tube defects affecting the brain or
lower extremities, with cardiac or skeletal abnormalities, or with cancers,
would have multiplied eleven times, and your city would have seen a 15% drop in
the number of boy children born. In a study conducted by Dr. Samira Ghani, 11%
of babies born in Fallujah were premature (under 30 weeks), 14% of fetuses
spontaneously aborted, and of 547 babies born to a sampling of 55 families, 15%
had serious birth defects. Such defects, which were extremely rare in Iraq
prior to the large- scale use of DU weapons, are now commonplace (Martin
Chulov. “Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US
assault”). (Photographic documentation showing such anomalies as infants born
without brains or faces, with their internal organs outside their bodies,
without sexual organs, or without spines, can be seen at http://stgvisie.
home.xs4all.nl/VISIE/extremedeformities.html.)
Their cover-ups
notwithstanding, the U.S. military is aware of DU’s harmful effects on the
human genetic code. Already in 2001 Dr. Alexandra Miller had completed a study
for the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute at Bethesda indicating
that DU’s chemical instability causes one million times more genetic damage to
DNA than would be expected f rom its radiation effect alone. But by interfering
with their rights to conduct their own investigations, the U.S. has prevented
Iraqis from obtaining the data needed to confront the enormity of the health
damage to the population caused by DU (Prof. Souad N. Al-Azzawi. “The
Responsibility of the US in Contaminating Iraq”).
Dr. Hardan is a
special advisor to the World Health Organization. He documented the effects of
DU in Iraq between 1991 and 2002. “American forces admit to using over 300 tons
of DU weapons in 1991. The actual figure is closer to 800. This has caused a
health crisis that has affected almost a third of a million people. As if that
were not enough, America went on to use 200 tons more in Baghdad during the
recent invasion.” According to Dr. Ahmad Hardan, writing about Basra, it took
two years of research to obtain conclusive proof of what DU actually does:
. . . but now we know
what to look for, and the results are terrifying. Nothing can prepare someone
for the sight of hundreds of preserved fetuses scarcely human in appearance, or
babies born with terribly foreshortened limbs, with intestines outside their
bodies, with huge bulging tumors where their eyes should be, with single eyes,
like a cyclops, without eyes, or limbs, and even without heads. Such defects
are almost unknown except in babies born near A-bomb test sites in the Pacific.
Dr. Hardan reports
that he arranged for a delegation from Japan’s Hiroshima Hospital to visit in
order to share their experience about the radiological diseases Iraq was likely
to see over time. But this delegation declined to come after the Americans
objected. Likewise, a world-ranking German cancer specialist agreed to come,
only to be denied entry into Iraq.
John Hanchette, who
is a professor of journalism and one of the founding editors of USA Today,
reports that, although he prepared news breaking stories about the effects of
DU on Gulf War veterans and Iraqi citizens, each time he was ready to go to
press, he received a phone call from the Pentagon requesting he not publish.
Since, he has been replaced as editor of USA Today.
Dr. Keith
Braverstock, the World Health Organization’s chief expert on radiation, alleges
that his report “On the Cancer Risks to Civilians in Iraq from Breathing
Uranium-Contaminated Dust” was deliberately suppressed.
Dr. Alim Abdul Hameed
Yacoub published three studies between the years 1998 and 2002 indicating that
malignant diseases in the children of Basra showed a 60% rise from 1990 to
1997, including a 120% increase in malignancies in all children under the age
of 15. He demonstrated a 160% increase in uterine cancer, a 143% increase in
thyroid cancer, a 102% increase in breast cancer, and an 82% increase in
lymphomas. His results also showed that new generations of cruise missiles
contain DU.
Dr. Yacoub was twice
attacked in his home by pro-occupation militias two weeks before he was killed,
along with his son, when his car was forced off the highway on his way back
home to Basra. Other researchers were deprived of their freedom by imprisonment
without accusation, and some 250 Iraqi scientists were assassinated after
Iraq’s invasion by occupation militias (Dr. Souad Al-Azzawi: “Depleted Uranium
Radioactive Contamination in Iraq: an Overview”).
Dr. Asaf Durakovic,
Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) founder, accompanied by a research team,
conducted a three-week trip in October of 2003, collecting some one hundred
samples of soils, civilian urine and tissue from Iraqi soldiers in ten Iraqi
cities. They determined that their samples revealed hundreds of thousands of
times normal radiation levels. When he went on record stating that the U.S.
doesn’t “want to admit that they committed war crimes by using weapons...banned
under international law,” he was warned to stop his work. Subsequently he was
fired from his position, his house was ransacked, and he reported receiving
death threats.
The Pentagon and the
Department of Defense have interfered with publication of UMRC’s studies by a
campaign of misinformation in the press, through the funding of research grants
refuting UMRC’s scientific findings, and by destroying the reputation of UMRC’s
staff, physicians and laboratories. The re-framing of the data as a debate
between government and experts polarizes the issues and obscures the scientific
facts based on irrefutable data. In this, the UN’s regulatory agencies, the
military, and defense sector manufacturers are all complicit (Doug Westerman. “Depleted Uranium—Far
Worse Than 9/11”).
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