America's Dirty Bomb Secret
November 9th 2011 13:06
America's Dirty Bomb Secret
by
peterxdunn
The dubious morality of the coalition commanders that prosecuted the war in Iraq sank to an all time low with the Battle of Fallujah fought in 2004. For it was here that - according to the evidence that is now emerging - an illegal, indiscriminate terror weapon was unleashed upon Iraqi combatants and civilians alike. This wasn't a precision guided bomb or missile designed to minimise collateral damage. This was a bomb designed to give you the biggest bang for your buck short of going nuclear. Thermobaric weapons: such as the biblical sounding MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Burst), are not new. But those deployed at Fallujah appear to have been modified to include a highly toxic ingredient not normally associated with such weapons: enriched uranium.
Thermobaric bombs are designed to create massive explosions. They use a fuel-air-explosive technique to create huge fireballs that expand at supersonic speed which, in turn, generate a blast wave capable of collapsing buildings and crushing people to death over a wide target area. Their use – along with cluster bombs and munitions employing white phosphorous - in heavily populated urban areas such as Fallujah, is banned under the Geneva Convention. The fact that these devices were also modified with the addition of highly radioactive uranium 235 takes the criminality associated with their use to a whole new level. We are, here, looking at chemical warfare and the deliberate dispersal of radioactive isotopes that will poison the environment – and its inhabitants - for many years to come.
Exposure to uranium 235: even at relatively low levels, causes genetic damage. People who have been exposed to the ionizing radiation emitted by it acquire a high probability that: should they go on to have children, their offspring will be born with terrible deformities. When the radiation that they are exposed to is emitted by particles that they have, inadvertently, ingested into their bodies then the statistical probability of fathering or mothering a deformed child rises exponentially. This is the nightmare scenario that we are now looking at in Fallujah.
Extract from a report published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health, July 2010:
• "The people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by U.S. atomic bomb strikes in 1945,"
Fatimah Ahmed: child victim of a war crime.
This is pure evil, made manifest, in our world.
Enriched uranium does not occur naturally. It is manufactured using complex industrial processes that require a massive investment in raw materials, trained personnel and supporting infrastructure. None of these requirements were present in Iraq. There is, therefore, only one explanation that adequately accounts for the presence of uranium 235 at Fallujah: it was deliberately introduced into the local environment by coalition forces.
The evidence for this heinous crime was uncovered by a team led by Professor Christopher Busby of Ulster University. Originally his team's purpose – in visiting Iraq in 2010 and 11 – was to assess the impact on public health generated by the widespread use of anti-tank depleted uranium (DU) projectiles. Finding uranium 235 was: for Busby's team, both shocking and totally unexpected. It should also be noted that the Iraqi combatants at Fallujah were insurgent irregulars: not regular army, and that they did not possess any tanks, armoured vehicles or heavy artillery; therefore there wasn't any real need to use DU penetrator munitions against them. Put simply: there shouldn't have been any radioactive residue - left over from the air and ground assaults conducted in 2004 – present at all.
We are, nonetheless, left with these horrendous statistics:
• In September 2009 there were 170 babies born at Fallujah General Hospital. Of these 24% died within a week. This is 5 times the average infant mortality rate for the Middle East.
• 76% of the babies that died had severe deformities.
• When tested by Professor Busby and his team, residual uranium 235 contamination was found in the hair of the parents of all the children born with deformities.
• The incidence of childhood cancer is now 12 times higher than the norm.
• Cases of breast cancer are now 10 times higher.
• The rate of leukemia has risen to a staggering 38 times higher than the norm.
• 76% of the babies that died had severe deformities.
• When tested by Professor Busby and his team, residual uranium 235 contamination was found in the hair of the parents of all the children born with deformities.
• The incidence of childhood cancer is now 12 times higher than the norm.
• Cases of breast cancer are now 10 times higher.
• The rate of leukemia has risen to a staggering 38 times higher than the norm.
Doctors are also reporting that many of the babies that are born free of any obvious deformity go on to develop severe disabilities as they get older. The situation has, in fact, now gotten so bad that doctors are advising women: in Fallujah and neighboring areas, not to have children. It would appear that – when the coalition forces attacked in 2004 – they were not only determined to kill large numbers of civilians: over 60% of all casualties were women, children or elderly, but also kill off the future of Fallujah as a viable community.
It could be that what we have witnessed here is the genesis of a new military doctrine. Warfare normally entails one army seizing the ground from under another army's feet; and then hanging on to it. Here the objective seems to have been to kill thousands, blow everything up and irradiate the area so that there could be no recovery, no re-building or return to normality. There is a truly chilling logic at work here. If you have the means to destroy an enemy – but not the means: IE enough soldiers, to occupy the land on which he stood – then poison that land and render it useless; create a dead zone inhospitable to any future occupancy or activity.
It should not be forgotten, either, that the victims of this crime were not all Iraqis. Before the ground assault began in July 2004 Fallujah was bombed continually for two months. It would have been during this aerial bombardment that the devices containing uranium 235 released their invisible toxins into the environment. So when the infantry assault got underway – as the American and British soldiers were carefully edging their way, on foot, along Fallujah's dusty streets – their desert boots were kicking up microscopic radioactive particles that would penetrate their bodies defences and leave them with a deadly memento of their service in Iraq.
Now there probably isn't a provision within the Geneva Convention that adequately covers what occurred at Fallujah. That it constituted a crime against humanity is still, nonetheless, indisputable. The problem lies in the fact that normally – when a case is heard in a court of law – the victims and perpetrators of the crime in question are all identified beforehand. With the evil act committed here, however, we do not know who all of the victims are because some of them are yet to be born. So the question becomes: how do we take the pain and suffering of future generations into consideration when prosecuting those responsible for this inhuman transgression?
It might turn out, of course, that the perpetrators are never prosecuted. What we have to hope for here is that the global democracy movements: such as Occupy Wall Street, are ultimately successful and lead to a re-definition of democracy and the establishment of political systems wherein the rule of law extends into all the nooks-and-crannies from where it is – at the moment – prevented: by privilege and political corruption, from operating.
There is, also, another legal dimension to be considered. Among the coalition members, we have to consider America to be the main suspect in any investigation into criminal acts perpetrated during the conflict in Iraq. America is a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and as such has undertaken a legal obligation to to refrain from nuclear weapons proliferation. Developing hi-tech dirty bombs: containing fissile material, and then deploying them in a theatre of war could not be described as anything other than illegal proliferation. So what has the IAEA got to say about all of this?
Furthermore, the radioactive material contained in these weapons had to come from somewhere. So it was either manufactured in America and not declared to the IAEA: who are charged by the UN with monitoring the production – and end use - of fissile materials worldwide (not just in Iran). Or it was secretly diverted from some other program. The latter option here is by far the most likely. I say this because America has an ongoing arrangement with Russia: referred to as the Megatons to Megawatts Program, under which highly enriched uranium (comprising 90% uranium 235) from Russia's decommissioned nuclear weapons is diluted to become low enriched uranium (comprising 20% uranium 235) for use in American nuclear power stations. Ominously, this means that America has access to hundreds of metric tons of highly toxic material. Now we know that the IAEA is not monitoring what the United States is actually doing with all this poison: that it is – in fact - guilty of a dereliction of its duty as set out by its United Nations mandate. This leaves the USA – with all conscience set aside - free to divert enriched uranium from civilian to military use without restriction.
Then there's this. In the past, dirty bombs: conventional explosives encased in radioactive waste, have always been associated with terrorism. Indeed, our governments - and commentators in the mainstream media - have made much of the terrorist's willingness to detonate such demonic devices at the heart of our communities. They have even used the 'dirty bomb scenario' to persuade us to accept the erosion of our civil liberties as a necessary requirement in the prosecution of the 'war on terror'. What are we, then, to make of our new found knowledge? That our own governments are complicit in the use of the these terror weapons against civilian populations.
Ask yourself: are we really the good guys?
Unfortunately this issue is not going to go away. America, the West and Israel are now preparing to launch a war against Iran to seize its oil fields. Iran is a big country. How much of it – do you think – is to be irradiated in order bring this proud nation to its knees? And how many deformed babies are to be born, live in pain for a short while, and then die before we realize that to allow this horror makes criminals of us all?
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