The Awful Truth

chychochycho wrote: chycho www.chycho.com On 8 December 2007 Dahr Jamail, an award winning American journalist who is best known as one of the few unembedded journalists to report extensively from the Iraq War, spoke to roughly 200 people at the Vancouver planetarium in British Columbia Canada about his book, "Beyond the Green Zone", and the catastrophic occupation of Iraq. The following is part of the Question and Answer period that followed the lecture. The full lecture is available on youtube in 6 parts and ... Read Full Story

The Nuclear Regulator Commission will hold hearings tomorrow and Wednesday in Hawaii on an application by the US Army for a permit to have depleted uranium at its Pohakuloa Training Area, a vast stretch of flat land in what’s called the “saddle” between the sacred mountains of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island, and at the Schofield Barracks on the island of Oahu. In fact, what the Army is asking for is a permit to leave in place the DU left over from years of test firing of M101 mortar “spotting rounds,” that each contained close to half a pound of ... Read Full Story

JP Kelly wrote: The work was inspired by a desire to bring to light the fact that a highly dangerous substance is being spread throughout the world in the name of military superiority. Depleted uranium (DU) is used in munitions as projectiles because it is extremely dense and will easily penetrate through armor. DU emits alpha particles which can be stopped by a piece of paper and so DU is purported to be safe. When a DU projectile is fired it creates minute particles of DU which are spread throughout the environment. Once ingested, these particles are able to cause chromosome damage as well ... Read Full Story

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15 , could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it has used much more extensively–and in more urban, populated areas–in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War. Depleted uranium, despite its rather benign-sounding name, is not depleted of radioactivity or toxicity. The term “depleted” refers only to its being depleted of the U-235 isotope needed for fission reactions in nuclear reactors. The nuclear waste material ... Read Full Story

The military is aware of DU’s harmful effects on the human genetic code. A 2001 study of DU’s effect on DNA done by Dr. Alexandra C. Miller for the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., indicates that DU’s chemical instability causes 1 million times more genetic damage than would be expected from its radiation effect alone. Studies have shown that inhaled nano-particles are far more toxic than micro-sized particles of the same basic chemical composition. British toxicopathologist Vyvyan Howard has reported that the increased toxicity of the nano-particle is due to its size. For example, when mice were exposed to virus-size particles ... Read Full Story