[ RadSafe ] Fwd: What is Depleted Uranium?

[Norm Cohen]

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Subject: What is Depleted Uranium?
Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 03:46:36 -0700 (PDT)

courtesy The Lone Star Iconoclast Online

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A Scientific Perspective

An Interview With
LEUREN MORET, Geoscientist

Interview Conducted
By W. Leon Smith
and Nathan Diebenow


Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who works almost around the clock educating  
citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other  
officials on radiation issues. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the  
Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain  
Project. She is currently working as an independent citizen scientist and  
radiation specialist in communities around the world, and contributed to  
the U.N. subcommission investigating depleted uranium. According to  
Wikipedia online encyclopedia, Moret testified at the International  
Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan in Japan in 2003, presented at the World  
Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and spoke at the  
World Court of Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India, in  
January 2004.

THE INTERVIEW


ICONOCLAST: What are the latest developments with reducing depleted  
uranium exposures on U.S. troops?


MORET: A young veteran named Melissa Sterry of Connecticut has introduced  
a bill into the Connecticut Legislature requiring independent testing of  
returning Afghan and Gulf War veterans going back to 2001. She said that  
she did it because she’s sick, and her friends are dead, and that’s from  
serving in the 2003 conflict. I have been following the bill and talking  
to her. Yesterday, she testified twice at the United Nations. I said, “Why  
don’t we get this bill all over the U.S. in state legislatures because it  
informs the public and get the local media to cover it.”
The U.S. has blocked any accountability at international and national  
levels. There’s a total cover-up just like with Agent Orange, the atomic  
veterans, MKULTRA, the mind control experiments the CIA did. This is more  
of the same, but the issue is much, much worse because the genetic future  
of all those contaminated is effected. Now vast regions around our world,  
as well as our atmosphere, are contaminated with the depleted uranium.  
They’ve used so much. It’s the equivalent number of atoms, as the Japanese  
professor calculated it, to over 400,000 Nagasaki bombs that has been  
released into the atmosphere. That’s really an underestimate.
I went to Louisiana in April. I was invited to speak at the University of  
New Orleans for three days. One of the veterans asked me to be in their  
April 19 protest and rally through the City of New Orleans. He took the  
Connecticut bill straight to the Legislature, and he got two legislators  
to sponsor it, and he said, “Just whiteout the name ‘Connecticut’ and  
write in ‘Louisiana’ on the bill.” You’re not going to believe it. It  
passed 101 to 0 yesterday in the Louisiana House.
I want you to write about it because we want it (the DU testing bill) in  
Texas. Nevada is going to introduce it. Congressman Jim McDermott is going  
to put it into the Washington legislature. We want to get the governor of  
Montana to do it because he’s the first governor to demand his National  
Guard be returned. I think half of them are back. He said, “I need them in  
the state.”
The DU issue is just really, really, really, really so awful. I don’t  
think there’s any greater tragedy in the history of the world in what  
they’ve done.


ICONOCLAST: Is there a danger of depleted uranium, being used in weaponry  
over there, spreading by air over here?


MORET: The atmosphere globally is contaminated with it. It’s completely  
mixed in one year. I’m an expert on atmospheric dust. I’m a geoscientist,  
a geologist, and that’s what I studied and did my research on. It’s really  
a fascinating subject. We have huge dust storms that are a million square  
miles and transport millions of tons of dust and sand every year around  
the world.
The main centers of these dust storms are the Gobi Desert in China, which  
is where the Chinese did atmospheric testing, so that’s all contaminated  
with radiation, and it gets transported right over Japan, and it comes  
straight across the Pacific and dumps all its sand and dust on the U.S.,  
North America. It’s loaded with radioactive isotopes, soot, pesticides,  
chemicals, pollution — everything is in it — fungi, bacteria, viruses.
The Sahara Desert is another huge dust center, and it goes up all over  
Europe and straight across the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, and up the East  
Coast. Of course, you get it in Texas with those hurricanes. They all  
originate in the Sahara Desert.
The third region is the Western United States, which is where the Nevada  
test site is located. We did 1,200 nuclear weapons tests there, so all  
this radiation that is already there, which is bad enough, has caused a  
global cancer epidemic since 1945. All of that radiation was the  
equivalent of 40,000 Nagasaki bombs. We’re talking about 10 times more.
In April of 2003, the World Health Organization said they expect global  
cancer rates to increase 50 percent by the year 2020.
Infant mortality is going up again all over the world. This is an  
indicator of the level of radioactive pollution.
When the U.S. and Russia signed the partial test ban treaty in 1963, the  
infant mortality rate started dropping again, which is normal.
Now they are going up again. It’s the global pollution with this radiation.


ICONOCLAST: I had one of our correspondents send me a series of  
photographs of the Al-Asad dust storm in Iraq on April 28.


MORET: That dust is what I’m talking about.


ICONOCLAST: In the picture you can see a gigantic wall of sand.


MORET: I have 16 pictures of that storm. They’re posted with photos from  
Iraqi doctors of the children of people with cancer and leukemia. So what  
did you think of that dust storm?


ICONOCLAST: I thought it was really dramatic.


MORET: It remobilizes all the radiation, but those are the larger chunks.  
The DU burns at such high temperatures. It’s a pyroforic metal which means  
it burns. The bullets and big caliber shells are actually on fire when  
they come out of the gun barrel because they are ignited by the friction  
in the gun barrel. Seventy percent of the DU metal becomes a metal vapor.  
It’s actually a radioactive gas weapon and a terrain contaminant.
I’ll email you the URL of the 1943 memo to General Leslie Grove under the  
Manhattan Project. It’s the blueprint for depleted uranium. They dropped  
the atomic bombs, but they did not use the DU weapons because they thought  
they were too horrific.
I’ve toured and gone all over Japan with a pediatrician in Basra and an  
oncologist, a cancer specialist. These poor doctors — their whole families  
are dying of cancer. He has 10 members of his family with cancer now that  
he’s treating, and this is just from Gulf War I. They’ve used much, much,  
much more in 2003. All over the whole country.


ICONOCLAST: What can soldiers expect when they come home?


MORET: If they were in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, they’re coming home with  
rectal cancer from sitting on ammunition boxes. The young women are  
reporting terrible problems with endometriosis. That’s the lining of the  
uterus malfunctioning, and they just bleed and bleed and bleed. Some of  
them have uterine cancer — 18 and 19 and 20 year olds.
The Army will not even diagnose it. They send them back to the  
battlefields. They won’t treat them or diagnose them. A group of 20  
soldiers pushed from Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003 in all the fighting. Eight  
of those 20 soldiers have malignancies.


ICONOCLAST: Does exposure to depleted uranium effect their psychological  
background when they come home?


MORET: Depleted uranium are these particles that form at very high  
temperatures. They are uranium oxides that are insoluble. They are at  
least 100 times smaller than a white blood cell, so when the soldiers  
breathe, they inhale them. The particles go through the nose, go through  
the olfactory and into the brain, and it messes up their cognitive  
abilities, thought processes.
It damages their mood-control mechanism in the brain. Four soldiers at  
Fort Bragg came back from Afghanistan, and within two months, those four  
had murdered their wives. This is part of the damage to the brain from the  
radiation and the particles.
The soldiers from Gulf War I in a group of 67 soldiers who came back, they  
had DU in their equipment, in their clothes, in their bodies, in their  
semen, and they had normal babies before they went over there to war. They  
came back, and the VA did a study. Of 251 Gulf War I veterans in  
Mississippi, in 67 percent of them, thier babies born after the war were  
deemed to have severe birth defects. They had brains missing, arms and  
legs missing, organs missing. They were born without eyes. They had  
horrible blood diseases. It’s horrific.
If you want to look at something, Life magazine did a photo essay which is  
still on the Internet. It’s called “The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm.” You  
should look at that — oh, my God, the post-Gulf War babies playing with  
their brothers and sisters who are normal.
Basically, it’s like smoking crack, only you’re smoking radioactive crack.  
It goes straight into the blood stream. It’s carried all throughout the  
body into the bones, the bone marrow, the brain. It goes into the fetus.  
It’s a systemic poison and a radiological poison.


ICONOCLAST: What about the people in the United States that are here? You  
say that DU is being mixed and spread globally?


MORET: Yes, it’s being mixed globally. We’re getting secondary smoke. It’s  
the secondary smoke effect. You know the people who inhabit a room with  
smokers? They are getting that secondary smoke, and so are we.


ICONOCLAST: Is that secondary smoke getting thicker as we speak?


MORET: Yeah, the concentration of the depleted uranium particles in the  
atmosphere all around the globe is increasing. There are indications that  
the U.S. will go in June and bomb the heck out of Iran. We’re monitoring  
the U.S. Army ammunition factories. They have very large orders for those  
huge bunker buster bombs that have 5,000 lbs. of DU in the warhead.


ICONOCLAST: So the prognosis for America isn’t really good?


MORET: No, it’s really bad.


ICONOCLAST: And if this continues then?


MORET: It’s going to kill off the world’s population. It already is, and  
it doesn’t just effect people. It effects all living systems. The plants,  
the animals, the bacteria. It effects everything.


ICONOCLAST: So the things that we eat for instance, if they have DU in  
them, then we’ll just get it in our systems, and so we’re polluting the  
oceans, so that could effect all marine life?


MORET: Yes, it’s in the air, water, and soil. The half-life of DU, Uranium  
238, is 4.5 billion years the age of the Earth.


ICONOCLAST: With the damage that’s been done to this point, can we turn  
back? We can’t clean it up?


MORET: There’s no way to clean it up. What happens is these tiny particles  
float around the Earth. There are still plutonium and uranium floating  
around the Earth from bomb testing. These particles are so tiny that  
molecules bumping into them keep them lofted in the air, and so the only  
way for them to get out of the atmosphere is rain, snow, fog, pollution,  
which will clear them out of the air and deposit them in the environment.  
What happens is the surface of these particles gets wetted by the moisture  
in the air. They come down and land on stuff and stick to it like a glue.  
You can’t ever get the particles off whatever they’re sticking to because  
have you ever put a drop of water on a microscope slide and then put  
another one on top of it? Can you pull those apart?


ICONOCLAST: No.


MORET: Okay, that’s the same effect that happens to radioactive particles.  
Once they are removed from the atmosphere, they stick to any surfaces they  
land on. In a way they are removed from circulation from the atmosphere.  
You can’t wash them off. If it keeps raining or they’re in a creek, you  
know, if they’re on rocks or stones or something in a creek, they won’t  
even wash off.
You didn’t know it was this bad, did you?


ICONOCLAST: No, I knew it was bad, but I thought it was fairly isolated.


MORET: No. What is over there (in Iraq) is over here in about four days. I  
don’t know if you followed Chernobyl. That big bubble of radiation went  
around and around the world, but this is dust. It becomes a part of  
atmospheric dust. Like the dust storm you saw in that photo, it goes  
everywhere.


ICONOCLAST: Is it in the upper levels of the atmosphere or the lower  
levels?


MORET: It’s in lower orbital space.
They brought the Mir spacecraft back down to Earth when they got done  
using it, and there was something called a space midge which covered the  
electronics on the outside of the spacecraft and protected it from  
radiation that comes from the sun because electronics are real vulnerable  
to radiation. They analyzed the surface of that space net and found  
uranium and uranium decayed products which they said came from atmospheric  
testing or burned up spacecraft with nuclear materials or nuclear reactors  
on board. Uranium can also come from supernovas, but they thought that the  
most likely sources were atmospheric testing and the nuclear materials we  
put in space.


ICONOCLAST: Essentially then, you’re saying that we’re conducting a  
nuclear war.


MORET: Yes, and that’s exactly what it is. We’ve conducted four nuclear  
wars since 1991. Yeah, these are nuclear wars. DU is a nuclear weapon.


ICONOCLAST: From the point of view of a scientist, what needs to happen to  
correct this?


MORET: Well, we need to stop the use of it. We’ve built an international  
movement to stop the use, the manufacture, the storage, the sales, and the  
deployment of depleted uranium weapons.


ICONOCLAST: Are the munitions we sell to other countries contained with  
depleted uranium?


MORET: We have. In 1968 the first depleted uranium weapons systems that we  
found a patent for suddenly appeared in the U.S. patent office. It was for  
the Navy. It was sort of a Gatling gun style weapon system that you  
mounted on ships. It rapidly fires like 2,500 bullets a minute. It’s over  
3,000 now. They’ve improved the design. Then in 1973, we gave depleted  
uranium weapons systems to the Israelis and supervised their use. They  
used them in the Arab-Israeli war and completely wiped out the Arabs in  
five days. Then the show was on the road. That was the first actual  
battlefield demonstration of this new weapon system.
Hughes Aircraft developed the full-length system which is for the Navy.  
That’s the Gatling gun system. They still use it. That was produced in  
1974 and tested. Within six months the U.S. government had sold the DU  
weapons system to 12 entities which included many branches of the U.S.  
military and other counties. We’ve sold DU weapons systems to about — we  
don’t know exactly for sure — it’s been about 12 or 17 countries. The good  
news is that normally such a weapons system that effective would have been  
sold to 80, 100, or 120 countries by now. But because of the radiological,  
biological, and environmental hazard, countries were not only afraid to  
buy it, the ones who did buy it are afraid to use it. The only countries  
we know that have used DU are Britain, the U.S., and Israel.
The United Nations in 1996 passed a resolution that depleted uranium  
weapons are weapons of mass destruction, and they are illegal under all  
international laws and treaties.
In 2001, the European Parliament passed a resolution on DU. What happened  
is that the NATO forces went into Yugoslavia in 1998 and ’99 and flew  
39,000 bombing runs and completely bombed Yugoslavia into radioactive  
rubble. Germany and the U.S. made the most money on the destruction of  
Yugoslavia, and they made sure that countries that didn’t know about the  
DU, that the peacekeepers from those countries like from Italy and  
Portugal, were sent to the most contaminated regions in Yugoslavia.  
Germans and Americans didn’t send their own troops into those areas. They  
were in the least contaminated areas. These poor soldiers from other  
countries came back and died within weeks or in a couple of days or  
months. The parents in Portugal and Italy are furious and went to the  
Parliament and media, and there was just a huge media storm of articles  
about DU.
The cat was out of the bag because of the 1998 NATO invasion of  
Yugoslavia. The cat was out of the bag, but Japanese troops have been sent  
into Somawa. They’re self-defense forces. It was the most contaminated  
area where the heaviest fighting happened in Iraq. We can expect those  
soldiers to be really, really sick.


ICONOCLAST: What about Iraq itself? What’s been done thus far?


MORET: It’s uninhabitable. The whole country. Yugoslavia, Iraq, and  
Afghanistan are completely uninhabitable.


ICONOCLAST: But people live there, so they’re going to live there  
suffering?


MORET: Well, you can see from the birth defects and the illnesses that it  
is pretty severe. Each year the number of birth defects and illnesses will  
rise because of the total contamination levels in all living things will  
increase because they are breathing that air and drinking water and eating  
the food from contaminated soils. It’s just a slow death sentence. The  
same with Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.
Depleted uranium is a very, very, very effective biological weapon. This  
is the primary purpose for using it. Marion Falk (a retired chemical  
physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence  
Livermore lab), who is the Manhattan Project scientist I work with, taught  
me pretty much everything about radiation and particles and DU. He said  
the purpose of weapons used by the military is not only to injure and kill  
the enemy soldiers, but the purpose is to kill, maim, and disease the  
civilian population because it reduces the productivity of a country and  
pretty soon a lot of their resources are going to be used for taking care  
of sick people. They will have fewer and fewer healthy workers.
Of course, once you cause mutation in the DNA, that damage is passed on to  
future generations of that affected person or animal or plant. DNA does  
not repair itself.


ICONOCLAST: So the mutations would be probably destructive moreso than  
constructive.


MORET: Oh, the mutations are causing those birth defects.


ICONOCLAST: They’re not evolutionary diseases?


MORET: No, they are evolutionary. They are inherited by all future  
generations and passed on. It’s like if you have red hair and all of your  
future generations will have that gene.


ICONOCLAST: So if I had a precondition to heart disease because of the  
radiation, then the generation that would come after me would have the  
same problem?


MORET: Well, if you damage the cell or parts of the cell or functioning of  
cells, that doesn’t necessarily damage the DNA. There are two kinds of  
damage: one damages the cells of the living organism, and that may not be  
passed on, but if you damage the DNA in the egg or the sperm, that is  
passed on to all future generations.


ICONOCLAST: So the guys coming back from the war, their sperm is probably  
going to be —


MORET: Damaged. Yes. They also have depleted uranium in their semen. When  
they’re intimate with their partners, they internally contaminate them  
with depleted uranium. The women become sick themselves. They have  
depleted uranium in their bodies, and there is something called burning  
syndrome. Just absolutely horrible. You can read about it in an article by  
David Rose in the December Vanity Fair. It’s on the Internet.
A friend of mine is the widow of a Canadian Gulf War veteran. David Rose  
interviewed her, and she griped about the burning semen. She said, “I had  
20 condoms full of frozen peas in my freezer at all times, and after we  
were intimate, I would insert one into my vagina, and that is the only way  
I could bear the pain from the burning semen.” And it goes through  
condoms, too.


ICONOCLAST: Gosh, durn!


MORET: Yeah, you should see the high school classes when I talk about the  
burning semen and the internal contamination. The girls’ mouths go into  
little round Os, and the boys start panicking because they’re like, “I’ll  
never get sick!” (laughs) The name of this article is “Weapons of  
Self-Destruction.”


ICONOCLAST: How much DU will it take to kill off all known life on this  
planet?


MORET: The amount of radiation released is certainly going to have a very,  
very profound global impact, and we’re already seeing infant mortality  
increasing globally. The fetus is the most susceptible to radiation damage  
because all the cells are rapidly dividing, the limbs and the bodies  
developing, so when you start introducing toxic chemicals and radiation,  
it really damages the natural process of fetal development.
The reason they were able to convince the Senate to sign the partial test  
ban treaty in 1963 was because of the increase in infant mortality. It had  
been dropping and declining two or three percent for quite a long time  
each year because of better prenatal care and educating mothers.
Infant mortality started going up after the bombs were dropped on  
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially in the ‘50s when the big bomb testing  
started.
By 1963, it was really obvious that the bomb testing globally was having a  
real impact on the unborn. They signed the partial test ban treaty. Russia  
and the U.S. stopped atmospheric testing, and the infant mortality rate  
started going down right away. They’re going up again now. This is global  
radioactive pollution, and how long it would take to eliminate all life is  
something nobody knows, but the depleted uranium is a very, very effective  
biological weapon.
There are two purposes for the military use of weapons. One is to destroy  
the enemy soldiers, and the other, which is just as important, is to  
destroy the enemy civilian population. By causing illnesses and disease,  
long lingering illnesses really impact the productivity and the economy of  
a country. It was Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters that actually  
destroyed the Soviet Union because the former Soviet Union is very, very  
sick from all the radiation that was released. They were much more  
sloppier than we were.
I have a World Health Organization world health survey which they  
published in the Journal of American Medical Association last June. The  
impact of atmospheric testing is very, very apparent by the percentage of  
population in each country they investigated for some form of mental  
illness. For instance, Japan is 8.8 percent. Nigeria is very low — 4.7  
percent. They have almost no radiation in Nigeria. In the Ukraine where  
they had the Chernobyl accident, it is 20.4 percent. Spain is at 9.2  
percent. Italy is 8.2 percent. It’s pretty low because they don’t have  
nuke plants. France is 75 percent reliant on nuclear power, so you have  
mental illness in 18.4 percent of the population. Mexico is at 12.2  
percent, and the United States is at 26.3 percent — the highest rate of  
mental illness in the world.
And George Bush and his siblings were all exposed in utero to bomb testing  
fallout in the United States. He had a toddler sister who died of leukemia  
when she was about three.
I worked with a group called the Radiation And Public Health Project.  
Their website is <www.radiation.org>. We are all radiation specialists,  
well-known scientists, and independent scientists. We’ve collected 6,000  
baby teeth around nuclear power plants and measured the radiation in them,  
and one of our members is the neighbor of the women who worked with all of  
the Bush children, including President Bush himself, because they had  
severe learning disabilities.


ICONOCLAST: How do we know that the Bush children were exposed?


MORET: By the year of their birth. The year they were carried by their  
mother. You have to look at how much bomb testing material was released  
into the atmosphere, and there’s a direct correlation to the decline in  
SAT scores for all teenagers in the U.S. to the amount of radiation that  
was released into the atmosphere the year their mother was carrying them.  
These are delayed effects of radiation exposure in utero.


ICONOCLAST: So they were living in Connecticut, but they were still  
feeling the effects of the radiation in Nevada?


MORET: Two years ago the U.S. government admitted that every single person  
living in the United States between 1957 and 1963 was internally exposed  
to radiation. So for any pregnant woman during those years, her fetus was  
exposed.


ICONOCLAST: What type of radiation levels are we talking about?


MORET: It’s low levels, and the main pathways are drinking water and dairy  
products. It even killed the baby fish in the Atlantic. Strontium-90 is a  
man-made isotope that comes out of nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors.  
They measured the levels of strontium-90 in milk in Norway from the 1950s  
up until the 1970s, and they measured the decline in the fishing catch in  
that same period, and as the strontium-90 increased in the milk in Norway,  
fishing catches declined.
By 1963, when the U.S. tested a nuclear bomb almost every day (they did  
250 tests in one year because the treaty was going to be signed), the  
fishing catch declined by 50 percent. In the Pacific, it declined 60  
percent because there was Russian, Chinese, French, and U.S. testing in  
the Pacific.


ICONOCLAST: So we’re still eating those contaminated fish today. Has the  
genetic code been changed?


MORET: The oceans are getting whatever is getting rained down, snowed  
down, or fogged down from the atmosphere. It’s getting into the oceans.  
This big frog die-off, which is global, is certainly related to the  
radiation in the rainwater. It’s a global nuclear holocaust. It effects  
all living things. That’s why they call it “omnicide,” which means it  
kills all living things — the plants, the animals, the bacteria.  
Everything.


ICONOCLAST: You think we ought to have the Weather Channel report on the  
current sand storm conditions in Iraq so we can prepare four days in  
advance for the radiation?


MORET: I’ll tell you what I did when 9/11 happened.
I called all the doctors with Radiation And Public Health Project, and I  
said, “Get out of town, and don’t come back until it has rained three  
times.” One lived 12 miles downwind from the Pentagon. She went out on her  
balcony with her geiger counter. I said, “Get that geiger counter out of  
your purse.” We had just done a press conference in San Francisco, and I  
knew she had it in her purse. Well, the radiation levels were 8-10 times  
higher than background.
We called the EPA, HAZMAT, FBI, and said, “Get all those emergency  
response workers suited up. They need to be protected.” Two days after  
9/11, the EPA radiation expert for that region called back and said, “Yup,  
the Pentagon crash rubble was radioactive, and we believe it’s depleted  
uranium, but we’re not worried about that. It’s only harmful if it’s  
inhaled.”
He said, “We’re worried about the lead solder in the plane.” Well, you  
know what’s in Tomahawk missiles? They have depleted uranium warheads. The  
radioactive crash rubble contaminated with DU is evidence of a DU warhead.


ICONOCLAST: I did not think about that, but going back to my original  
question: Should the Weather Channel report for us on the toxic dust  
storms in Iraq?


MORET: But how could people get away from them? These dust storms are a  
million square miles. They’re huge, and they come right across the  
Atlantic, the Caribbean, and Texas coast line, and right up the East  
Coast. There are people who are going to leave the state every time  
there’s a hurricane It’s in the food, drinking water, dairy products, and  
then the problem with Uranium 238, which is 99.39 percent DU, is that it  
decays in over 20 steps into other radioactive isotopes.
That’s why I call it the “Trojan Horse.” It’s the weapon that keeps  
giving. It keeps killing. This is like smoking radioactive crack. It goes  
right in your nose. It crosses the olfactory bulb into your brain. It’s a  
systemic poison. It goes everywhere. These particles that form at very  
high temperatures — 5,000-10,000 degrees C — are nanoparticles. They are a  
10th of a micron or smaller. A 10th of a micron is 100 times smaller than  
a white blood cell. They get picked up in the lipids and probably the  
cholesterol and go right through the cell membranes of the cell. They  
screw up the cell processes. They screw up the signaling between the cells  
because the cells all talk to each other and coordinate what they’re  
doing. It messes up brain function.


ICONOCLAST: Do you know what Iraq was like before the first Gulf War?


MORET: Iraq prior to the 1991 Gulf War was the most advanced in the entire  
Middle East. They had scrupulous databases of the health problems and  
disease rates, which is why the U.S. bombed all of the offices in the  
Ministry of Health. We destroyed all those records so that a pre-Gulf War  
health base could not be established to show how much these diseases have  
increased. This would concern the U.S. in terms of compensation for war  
crimes.
In these horrible U.N. sanctions, they (the Iraqis) could never get all of  
the protocol medicine for the treatment of leukemia. They (the U.N.) would  
say, “These steps of the leukemia treatment were components in weapons, so  
you can’t have that.” They never gave the people the full proper protocols  
in the areas of treatment they needed to get rid of the leukemia. It hid  
the effects of the depleted uranium because the children were starving.  
They had malnutrition. They had the healthiest population in the Middle  
East (prior to Gulf War I).


ICONOCLAST: Let’s talk about the children of Iraq.


MORET: After the Gulf War, they had maybe one baby a week born with birth  
defects in the hospitals in Basra. Now they are having 10-12 a day. The  
levels of uranium are increasing in the population every year. Every day,  
people are eating and drinking while the whole environment is  
contaminated. Just what you’d expect. There are more babies born with  
birth defects, and the birth defects are getting more and more severe.
An Iraqi doctor told me that babies are being born now that are lumps of  
flesh. She said that they don’t have heads or legs or arms. It’s just a  
lump of flesh. This also happened to populations that were not removed  
 from islands in the Pacific when the bomb tests occurred. Basically,  
governments were using them as guinea pigs.


ICONOCLAST: So all the countries that were equipped with nuclear weapons  
are guilty of those atrocities.


MORET: They were all doing it. France, Russia. China, and the U.S. And I’m  
not sure if Britain did bomb testing. They were real low key about it.


ICONOCLAST: Where are the radiation hot spots in the United States?


MORET: In the United States, it would be within a 100 miles of nuclear  
power plants. We have 110 nuclear power plants in the U.S. We have the  
most of any country in the world, but only a 103 are operating. Almost all  
of the entire East Coast.
What we did was we took government data from the Centers of Disease  
Control on breast cancer deaths between 1985 and 1989. Anywhere from  
within a 100 miles of a nuclear power plant is where two-thirds of all  
breast cancer deaths occurred in the U.S. between 1985 and 1989.
It’s also around the nuclear weapons laboratories. That would be Los  
Alamos in New Mexico, the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Lab in Idaho, and  
Hanford in Washington State, which is where they got the plutonium for all  
the bombs. They contaminated the entire Columbia River watershed and  
almost the whole state of Washington.
It gets into the water and into the plants and into the vegetation. If you  
eat clams or mussels or crabs or things like that, even certain kinds of  
fish that eat off of the mud at the bottom of the river, you have much  
higher levels of radiation in your tissues. It depends on each person and  
on how healthy they are, but this man from Washington State died suddenly.  
He was in his late 40s. They did an autopsy, and he was full of  
radioactive zinc. They went, “Where in the world did he get this? It only  
comes from nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors.” They studied his diet and  
discovered he loved to eat oysters. They found out where he bought his  
oysters and found the oyster beds. They were 200 miles off shore, from  
Washington State. The radiation was being carried off out to sea from the  
coastline. It was passing over this oyster bed. The oysters were just  
gobbling them up.


ICONOCLAST: What are the symptoms of DU poisoning?


MORET: Soldiers on the battlefield have reported a metallic taste in their  
mouth. That’s the actual taste of the uranium metal. Then within 24-48  
hours, soldiers on the battlefield have reported that they felt sick. They  
start getting muscle aches, and they lose energy. Some of them came back  
incontinent. In other words, in adult diapers.
One woman reported that the first night home, she wanted to be intimate  
with her husband, but she had absolutely no feeling. She couldn’t feel  
anything from the waist down. This particulate matter damages the  
neuromuscular system, the nerves; it just goes everywhere. And there’s no  
treatment for it. These particles are very, very insoluble, so they can’t  
even dissolve in body fluids, so they can be excreted from the body. Then  
they keep releasing. Even when uranium decays, it turns into another  
radioactive isotope. So it’s a particle that just sits there shooting  
bullets until you die.
Another problem is that soldiers have crumbling teeth. Teeth just start  
falling apart. The uranium replaces calcium in the calcium-phosphate  
structure of the teeth. Some have complained about grand mal seizures,  
cerebral palsy. Some diseases reported at very high rates in Air Force and  
Army soldiers are Parkinson’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Hodgkin’s  
disease. This is damage to the mitochondria in the cells and the nerves.  
The mitochondria make all the energy for the body, so when you damage  
mitochondria, another symptom is chronic fatigue syndrome. There’s just  
not enough energy produced by the body to function normally.
I found a study in the SanDia Nuclear Weapons Laboratory employee  
newsletter in September 2003. They are doing major studies in  
mitochondrial disfunction related to Lou Gehrig’s, Hodgkin’s, and  
Parkinson’s diseases for veterans. Since it’s at a nuclear weapon’s lab,  
they are fully aware of the health damage.


ICONOCLAST: Tell me about the tests that detect for DU in the body.


MORET: The chromosome test in the best indicator. It’s $5,000. The urine  
test is a $1,000. If you test positive with the urine test, you know  
you’re contaminated. If you test negative, it does not mean that you’re  
not contaminated. It just means that you may or may not be contaminated  
but enough hasn’t dissolved in your blood stream to go through your  
kidneys to be excreted in your urine. Anyone who goes now cannot avoid  
being contaminated. Anyone. Anyone. Anyone. Everyone who goes to the  
Middle East and Afghanistan will be contaminated.
The DU issue affects every single living thing on this planet. What else  
has that impact? They have altered the genome for the entire planet  
forever with this DU. The Pentagon people say, “You’re exaggerating or you  
use the uranium word to scare people.” I don’t care if people believe me  
or not. All I can say is that over time what I am saying will actually be  
an underestimation of the long term effects.

What Is Depleted Uranium?

A Scientific Perspective
Interview with Leuren Moret, Geo-Scientist
A Military Perspective
Interview with Dr. Doug Rokke, Ph.D, former Director of the U.S. Army  
Depleted Uranium Project
A Survivor’s Perpsective
Interview with Melissa Sterry, Gulf War Veteran who is surviving the  
effects of depleted uranium

http://www.iconoclast-texas.com/News/19news03.htm

============================================================

Tues., May 31-Fri., Jun. 3: National Iraq Call-In Week. Urge your
member of Congress to support legislation for the withdrawal of
troops from Iraq. Sponsors: Progressive Democrats of America (PDA),
Code Pink, Peace Action, United for Peace & Justice (UFPJ), others.
Info: UFPJ, 212-868- 5545, http://www.unitedforpeace.org

Tues., May 31-Sat., Jun. 4: Book tour: Stop the Next War Now, 70
essays edited by Medea Benjamin (Global Exchange)...
Info: booktour.globalexchange.org &
http://www.globalexchange.org



		
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-- 
Coalition for Peace and Justice
UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave, Linwood
NJ 08221; 609-601-8583; cell 609-742-0982
ncohen12 at comcast.net; http://www.unplugsalem.org
http://www.coalitionforpeaceandjustice.org

"A time comes when silence is betrayal.
Even when pressed by the demands of
inner truth, men do not easily assume
the task of opposing their government's
policy, especially in time of war.
Nor does the human spirit move without
  great difficulty against all the apathy
of conformist thought, within one's own
bosom and in the surrounding world."

- Martin Luther King Jr.

 
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