Re: IMPORTANT DEPLETED-URANIUM FORUM

From: ceniza (ceniza_at_newmessages.org)
Date: 08/12/04 

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2004 05:16:51 -0500

this time, you make sense, mahareeshi.

Dr. Jai Maharaj <usenet@mantra.com> wrote in message
news:PHcRgVDfkCkCXwy@gUuaDkOdIfG...
> Forwarded message from prez@usa-exile.org
>
> [ Subject: Important Depleted-Uranium Forum
> [ From: prez@usa-exile.org
> [ Date: 10 Aug 2004 23:40:44 -0500
>
> MARIN COUNTY'S NEWS MONTHLY - FREE PRESS
>
> (415)868-1600 - (415)868-0502(fax) - P.O. Box 31, Bolinas, CA, 94924 USA
>
> August, 2004
>
> Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up
> GI's Will Come Home To A Slow Death
>
> By Carol Sterritt
>
> "There are only two things worth knowing in life,
> but I forget what they are." - John Hiatt, American songwriter
>
>
> Now I remember what the two important things are. One is that the
> situation is dire. (And thus we need the artist and musician, the
> soul healer and the clown, more than ever.)
>
> The other is that despite the horror of the day, there are people
> who are so brave and beautiful in both thought and action that one is
> moved to tears.
>
> Look at the mindfulness of actions here in this county. For years,
> certain people in Marin have devoted a large portion of their lives
> to an outfit called the Marin Peace and Justice Coalition. Inside
> that group, some members are beginning a major work that could affect
> military service today and in the future when a draft might be
> instituted.
>
> One such Peace and Justice member is Yvette Wakefield. For over
> eighteen months, she has examined the Depleted Uranium issue. A
> county employee, she has often read the inscription on the 20 North
> San Pedro Building. This inscription reads: "The mission of health
> and human services is to promote and protect the health, well-being,
> self-sufficiency and safety of all people in Marin."
>
> Yvette could not reconcile what she learned about depleted uranium
> (DU) with the idea of health and human safety. For one thing, she had
> befriended Leuren Moret, a geoscientist who is now a world-renowned
> authority on DU. Moret, who comes from a Quaker background, once
> worked at Livermore Labs. She now travels the world speaking out
> against the "omnicide" destructiveness of this material.
>
> The Creation of a World-Class Activist
>
> How could someone like Moret, who once worked for the war industry,
> become a friend of a "peacenik," like Wakefield. Or for that matter,
> how could she herself become a peace activist? Well, back in 1991,
> Moret had a major realization. According to Moret, "In 1991 I became
> a whistleblower at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory near San
> Francisco, CA. Richard Berta, the Western Regional Inspector for the
> Department of Energy, told me, "The Pentagon exists for the oil
> companies and the nuclear weapons labs exist for the Pentagon."
>
> The more Moret learned, the more she became convinced that research
> and work involving depleted uranium was immoral. Beginning in 1991,
> depleted uranium was used to support three policies: One, to test the
> radiobiological effects of 4th generation nuclear weapons (still
> under development); Two, to blur and break down the distinction
> between conventional and nuclear weapons; Three, to make it easier to
> reintroduce nuclear weapons into the US military arsenal.
>
> While at her job at Livermore, Moret watched America wage a short
> and apparently victorious Gulf War. In just a few short weeks, and
> after only 110 American casualties, we routed Iraq from Kuwait. But
> the true toll of this war upon our young servicemen and women
> occurred over the next decade. Of the 700,000 troops who served in
> the region, 267,000 suffered from some form of disability. Not only
> that, but some soldiers "infected" their spouses with disabilities
> similar to their own. Or they suffered the tragedy of having a child
> born with birth defects. Some victory, huh?
>
> At first, in its usual fashion, the Department of Defense (DOD) and
> the Pentagon simply denied that this was happening. Those men and
> women, who had been hale and hearty before their military service,
> were now branded "malingerers."
>
> But internationally, other researchers spoke on record that these
> illnesses had nothing to do with malingering. Testimony from Admiral
> Vishnu Bhagwat, Former Chief of the Naval Staff, India reads, "DU
> weapons emit Alpha particle dose impacting a single cell from U-238
> some 50 times the annual dose level. Cancer is initiated with one
> alpha particle, its daughter isotopes affect generations as the
> isotopes bio-concentrate in plants and animals. They then travel up
> the food chain. It is a nuclear weapon because the energy is derived
> from the nucleus of the atom. The particles enter the body through
> the lungs, the digestive system or breaks in the skin.
>
> "One gram of DU releases more than 12,000 particles per second. The
> radiation slowly kills the cells that make life possible. The Gulf
> War syndrome of 1991 did just that (reported by Dr. Asaf Durakovic,
> Prof. of Medicine, Georgetown University, and discoverer of the Gulf
> War Syndrome.)"
>
> Our military has lobbed more than 500 tons of DU munitions on
> Afghanistan. Professor Yagasaki has calculated that 800 tons of DU is
> the "atomicity equivalent to 83,000 Nagasaki bombs." This fact he
> presented to the World Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg in
> October 2003. The amount of DU used in Iraq in 2003 equals nearly
> 250,000 Nagasaki bombs. Just as the Gulf War vets and their families
> have been imperiled by their service in Gulf War I, those veterans
> about to return from the Iraq war will undoubtedly face similar
> consequences.
>
> The Local FallOut
>
> This is why Yvette Wakefield is concerned. Should Marin County
> expend the energy and funding to nurture its children with healthy
> baby clinics, education Kindergarten to twelfth grade, sports
> programs and parks and recreation, only to then hand our kids at age
> eighteen over to the military? And not just any military, but one
> that plans on dispatching its personnel to a killing field where they
> will, even if surviving the "normal" activities of the battlefield,
> come home to a life of infirmity, sickness and hospitalization?
> Wakefield has problems with this idea.
>
> A trained paralegal, she began work on a County-wide resolution that
> would proclaim the unacceptability of any Marin citizen serving in
> any area of the world where their health might forever be destroyed
> by DU.
>
> Her working draft of this resolution reads: Therefore in view of
> those dangers posed by exposure to depleted uranium, Marin County
> requires that all Marin residents serving in the United States Armed
> Forces and its Reserves be prohibited from serving in those areas
> where depleted uranium weaponry is used. This is because we
> acknowledge that our residents should not be required to face the
> life-threatening and lifelong health problems of radiation poisoning.
> Their having faced the normal dangers of combat should be enough.
> Soldiers who survive their military service are entitled to return
> home to a normal life of working, having families and friends and
> engaging in normal activities.
>
> She is now building a case for her resolution. She has set up a
> public forum on August 12, at 7:30 PM at the First United Methodist
> Church 9 Ross Valley Drive, San Rafael. Both Leuren Moret and Dennis
> Kyne will be speaking at the event. Their talk is titled "Depleted
> Uranium - The Trojan Horse of A Nuclear War." Once people in Marin
> hear the truth of the DU deployment, and they realize the horrific
> consequences born by the populations in the Middle East and our
> soldiers, they can be counted on to be supporters of this County-wide
> resolution.
>
> Where DU Policies Came From, and Why They Continue
>
> The use of depleted uranium can be traced back to certain
> Nixon-Kissinger era decisions. When our country was stymied by the
> 1973 oil embargo, Nixon remarked that we have to make sure that an
> oil embargo will never happen again. Perhaps he would have been
> stopped by the test ban treaty of 1963, signed by Russia and the
> United States, both super powers at that time. According to the
> treaty, nuclear war was outlawed. But one way for a nation to achieve
> sovereignty over another nation was and is to utilize depleted
> uranium weaponry. Although such weaponry will not necessarily offer
> up a mushroom cloud, the wake of its devastation can be as deadly.
> Thus a policy of using depleted uranium in weapons began. It first
> surfaced in the Arab-Israeli war, Fall 1973, when Israel received and
> used such weapons from the United States. It used these weapons under
> our country's supervision. (Never think for a moment that the Muslim
> nations hate us for our shopping centers and our democracy, our
> backyard swimming pools and our skyscrapers. They hate us for what we
> have done, and are doing, to them.)
>
> The population-devastation politics of DU continues to this day. It
> is an effective policy. Witness what is occurring to the civilian
> population in Iraq. Following the Gulf War, birth defects and cancer
> cases rose exponentially. In one Baghdad hospital, which in pre-war
> days saw a single birth defect a week, there soon occurred three and
> four birth defective babies in a single day. (According to Moret,
> these defects are a deliberate contamination of the population.) For
> the past thirteen years, rare leukemias and bone cancers have been on
> the rise there. And of course, in the days of sanctions, the hospital
> supplies and equipment to help those affected were unavailable. Now,
> after the devastation of the "shock and awe" campaign of Spring,
> 2003, supplies are equally non-existent. Also, hospitals are now
> faced with the consequences of having only sporadic electricity and a
> lack of clean water. (The Bagdad population has survived the past
> winter by utilizing rainwater, collected in pots and pans put out on
> their roofs.)
>
> The stories related to birth defects are heart-breaking. Some Iraqi
> babies are born with eyeballs the size of lemons protruding from
> their eye sockets. Some babies have no brains. Some babies are born
> without any skin. Some pregnancies, although carried close to full
> term, result in a birth of only a lump of flesh, with no discernable
> torso, limbs or head or facial features.
>
> Our soldiers are coming home from our Middle East "adventures" with
> bodies pushed to the breaking point. On KPFA radio in June, it was
> revealed that of nine returning servicemen to New York City, six
> tested positive for unusually high levels of radioactivity in their
> bodies. Those with the highest levels already feel its effects. They
> are mind-numbingly tired; they have rashes, muscle aches and pains,
> and their nervous systems are impaired.
>
> The Horrific Working of Pernicious Materials
>
> These men were average soldiers in terms of their war experiences.
> But for certain soldiers, especially those who have survived the
> destruction of their tanks, the radiation diseases hit hard and heavy.
>
> By its nature, DU is aerosolized when impacted by explosion. Also
> the metal components of DU-hardened tanks become a deadly,
> inhale-able radiation upon explosion. The men and women experiencing
> this first hand are unaware that every breath they take during these
> events is impacting their lungs and blood streams with nano-sized
> charged particles that begin the ruin of their health immediately.
>
> Unlike the Japanese survivors of atomic blasts, who first felt
> radiation sickness within three days to a week, our soldiers can
> experience symptoms almost immediately. This is the result of the
> aerosol effects of the materials. The radioactive dust can be
> pulverized to the point that it is one hundred times smaller than
> bacteria. The particles go from the air to the lungs to the blood
> stream. They then end up attacking the body's mitochondria. The
> results range from multiple sclerosis type illnesses, to Parkinson's,
> to chemical sensitivities, and of course, at a somewhat later date,
> various cancers.
>
> Our nation's youth will sacrifice their prime years to this
> devastation, wearing adult diapers, shuffling along with walkers,
> using oxygen tanks, and trying to live with blindness and hearing
> loss.
>
> Meanwhile, our nation's policy shapers have big plans inside our
> country as well. In both Ohio and Kentucky, DU processing plants are
> underway. Both these areas have high unemployment rates. The local
> populace, desperate for work and a steady income, will have few
> qualms about what they are doing or why they are doing it. They will
> be told that the work is safe, and indeed it will seem so. There is
> no stench to uranium processing; the tiles and linoleum in the plants
> will no doubt be spotless. Those who recruit them will seem friendly
> and kind. The fact that the DU workers may have health problems five
> or ten years down the road is not a big matter for concern. After
> all, if you don't consider reality, how can it bother you?
>
> I ask that if you are moved by this account of Depleted Uranium
> devastation, you make a commitment. Red circle the date of the public
> forum, August 12th, on your calendars. For further information, call
> 415 721 2844. The lives you save are your own. After all, the air a
> Baghdad housewife breathed in this morning can be in your lungs by
> tomorrow afternoon.
>
>
============================================================================
====
> Public Forum "Depleted Uranium - The Trojan Horse of a Nuclear War."
> 7:30 PM at the First United Methodist Church, 9 Ross Valley Drive,
> San Rafael CA.
>
> End of forwarded message from prez@usa-exile.org
>
> Jai Maharaj
> http://www.mantra.com/jai
> Om Shanti
>
> Hindu Holocaust Museum
> http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
>
> Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
> http://www.hindu.org
> http://www.hindunet.org
>
> The truth about Islam and Muslims
> http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate
>
> The terrorist mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:
>
> "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth:
> I came not so send peace, but a sword.
> "For I am come to set a man at variance against his
> father, and the daughter against her mother, and the
> daughter in law against her mother in law.
> "And a man's foes shall be they of his own
> household.
> - Matthew 10:34-36.
>
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Relevant Pages

  • Marin Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up - GIs Will Come Home To A Slow Death
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