"Blowin’ in the wind" ( is the US testing DU weapons in Australia ?)

[WearyOne]

Blowin’ in the wind
Commentary by Kerryn Higgs
August 2, 2005 12:11 PM

Review of Blowin’ in the Wind - a Frontline Films production, produced by David Bradbury and Peter Scott, directed by David Bradbury, Australia, 2005.

<snip>
The film is a wake-up call to Australians. As the US military presence is quietly extended across the country, we are not being told whether DU weapons have been or will be fired on our soil. Many locals living near bombing ranges are very worried – for their health, their fertility and their livelihoods. Bradbury interviews people from Lancelin, WA, where contamination could compromise the cray fishery and from the Shoalwater Bay area, which exports beef to Japan and pineapples to the rest of Australia.

<snip>
In 2003, the US Navy abandoned its bombing range on Vieques after decades of protest from the local people and their supporters in the US. About two thirds of that once paradisal Puerto Rican island had been used since World War II for aerial bombing, ship to shore bombardment and amphibian assault (precisely the activities planned for Shoalwater Bay).

Apart from the endless nerve-wracking boom and thud, child cancer rates on Vieques soared to 250% above the Puerto Rican average in the last thirty years. After denying that they had used DU on Vieques, the US military admitted in 2000 that it had fired just a few hundred DU shells ‘by accident’. Either that’s a grave understatement or, if one takes the military’s word that exposure to DU was ephemeral on Vieques, it is obvious that DU is not the only deadly toxin being generated at bombing ranges.

http://webdiary.smh.com.au/archives/kerryn_higgs/001351.html