"Nukculurr" Warfare in Iraq

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

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From: "The New Rulers of the World" by John Pilger, Verso, NY, 2003:

"Under the economic embargo imposed by the United Nations Security Council
in 1990 and upgraded the following year, Iraq is denied equipment and
expertise to decontaminate its battlefields, in contrast to how Kuwait was
cleaned up after the Gulf War. The U.S. army physicist responsible for
cleaning up Kuwait was professor Doug Rokke, whom I met in London. Today, he
himself is a victim. ' I am like many people in southern Iraq', he said. 'I
have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. The
contamination was right throughout Iraq and Kuwait. With the munitions
testing and preparation in Saudia Arabia, uranium contamination covers the
entire region. The effect depends on whether a person inhaled it or ingested
it by eating or drinking, or if they got it in an open wound. What we're
seeing now, respiratory problems, kidney problems, cancers, are the direct
result of the use of this highly toxic material. The controversy over
whether or not it's the cause is a manufactured one; my own ill-health is a
testiment to that.'

Professor Rokke says there are two urgent issues to be confronted by people
in the west, 'those with a sense of right and wrong': first, the decision by
the United States and Britain to use a 'weapon of mass destruction', such as
depleted uranium. He said, 'In the Gulf War, well over 300 tons were fired.
An A-10 Warthog attack aircraft fired over 900,000 rounds. Each individual
round was 300 grams of solid uranium 238. When a tank fired its shells, each
round carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. These rounds are not
coated, they're not tipped; they're solid uranium. Moreover, we have
evidence to suggest that they were mixed with plutonium. What happened in
the Gulf was a form of nuclear warfare.'

'The second issue is the denial of medical care to American and British and
other allied soldiers; and the tens of thousands of Iraqis contaminated. At
international symposiums, I have watched Iraqi officials approach their
counterparts from the Department of Defence and Ministry of Defence and ask,
plead, for help with decontamination. The Iraqis didn't use depleted
uranium; it was not their weapon. They simply don't know how to get rid of
it from their environment. I watched them put their case, describing the
deaths and horrific deformities that are showing up; and I watched them
rebuffed. It was pathetic.'  " (pp. 51-52)

Jim C.