Depleted Uranium Killing Vets faster Than Bush Gets Troops
Killed In Iraq
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/07/268636.shtmlauthor: Yes Magazine
Depleted uranium exposure from the first gulf war is killing American veterans faster than Bush's war on Iraq is killing troops every day. Ten times as much depleted uranium munitions has been used in the second war on Iraq. The Pentagon continues to ignore the health effects of depleted uranium on its troops and war victims. Its suggestion? Duct tape. The Bush death legacy continues.
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The War Against Ourselves
An Interview with Major Doug Rokke
Doug Rokke has a PhD in health physics and was originally trained as a forensic scientist. When the Gulf War started, he was assigned to prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, and sent to the Gulf. What he experienced has made him a passionate voice for peace, traveling the country to speak out. The following interview was conducted by the director of the Traprock Peace Center, Sunny Miller, supplemented with questions from YES! editors.
QUESTION: Any viewer who saw the war on television had the impression this was an easy war, fought from a distance and soldiers coming back relatively unharmed. Is this an accurate picture?
ROKKE: At the completion of the Gulf War, when we came back to the United States in the fall of 1991, we had a total casualty count of 760: 294 dead, a little over 400 wounded or ill. But the casualty rate now for Gulf War veterans is approximately 30 percent. Of those stationed in the theater, including after the conflict, 221,000 have been awarded disability, according to a Veterans Affairs (VA) report issued September 10, 2002.
Many of the US casualties died as a direct result of uranium munitions friendly fire. US forces killed and wounded US forces.
We recommended care for anybody downwind of any uranium dust, anybody working in and around uranium contamination, and anyone within a vehicle, structure, or building that’s struck with uranium munitions. That’s thousands upon thousands of individuals, but not only US troops. You should provide medical care not only for the enemy soldiers but for the Iraqi women and children affected, and clean up all of the contamination in Iraq.
And it’s not just children in Iraq. It’s children born to soldiers after they came back home. The military admitted that they were finding uranium excreted in the semen of the soldiers. If you’ve got uranium in the semen, the genetics are messed up. So when the children were conceived—the alpha particles cause such tremendous cell damage and genetics damage that everything goes bad. Studies have found that male soldiers who served in the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to have a child with a birth defect and female soldiers almost three times as likely.
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Originally published at:
http://www.yesmagazine.org/25environmentandhealth/rokke.htm homepage:
http://www.votetoimpeach.org/
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