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Weapons of Self-Destruction
By David Rose
Vanity Fair via Truthout
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/041115roco04?page=1
November 2004 Issue
Is Gulf War syndrome - possibly caused by Pentagon ammunition - taking its toll
on GI's in Iraq?
When he started to get sick, Staff Sergeant Raymond Ramos's first instinct
was to fight. "I had joint pains, muscle aches, chronic fatigue, but I tried to
exercise it out," he says. "I was going for runs, working out. But I never got
any better. The headaches were getting more frequent and sometimes lasted all
day. I was losing a lot of weight. My overall physical demeanor was bad."
A 20-year veteran of the New York National Guard, Ramos had been mobilized
for active duty in Iraq in the spring of 2003. His unit, the 442nd Military
Police company, arrived there on Easter, 10 days before President Bush's
mission accomplished appearance on the USS. Abraham Lincoln. A tall,
soft-spoken 40-year-old with four children, the youngest still an infant, Ramos
was proud of his physique. In civilian life, he was a New York City cop. "I
worked on a street narcotics team. It was very busy, with lots of overtime-very
demanding." Now, rising unsteadily from his armchair in his thickly carpeted
living room in Queens, New York, Ramos grimaces. "The shape I came back in, I
cannot perform at that level. I've lost 40 pounds. I'm frail."
At first, as his unit patrolled the cities of Najaf and al-Diwaniyya,
Ramos stayed healthy. But in June 2003, as temperatures climbed above 110
degrees, his unit was moved to a makeshift base in an abandoned railroad depot
in Samawah, where some fierce tank battles had taken place. "When we first got
there, I was a heat casualty, feeling very weak," Ramos says. He expected to
recover quickly. Instead, he went rapidly downhill.
By the middle of August, when the 442nd was transferred to Babylon, Ramos
says, the right side of his face and both of his hands were numb, and he had
lost most of the strength in his grip. His fatigue was worse and his headaches
had become migraines, frequently so severe "that I just couldn't function." His
urine often contained blood, and even when it didn't he would feel a painful
burning sensation, which "wouldn't subside when I finished." His upper body was
covered by a rash that would open and weep when he scratched it. As he tells me
this, he lifts his shirt to reveal a mass of pale, circular scars. He was also
having respiratory difficulties. Later, he would develop sleep apnea, a
dangerous condition in which he would stop breathing during sleep.
Eventually, Ramos was medevaced to a military hospital in Landstuhl,
Germany. Doctors there were baffled and sent him on to the Walter Reed Army
Medical Center, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. There, Ramos says, one
neurologist suggested that his condition could have been caused by some
long-forgotten head injury or might just be "signs of aging." At the end of
September 2003, the staff at Walter Reed ordered him to report to Fort Dix, New
Jersey, where, he says, a captain went through his record and told him, "I was
clear to go back to Iraq. I got the impression they thought I was faking it."
He was ordered to participate in a long-distance run. Halfway through, he
collapsed. Finally, on July 31, 2004, after months of further examinations,
Ramos was discharged with a medical disability and sent home.
Symptoms such as Ramos's had been seen before. In veterans of Operation
Desert Storm, they came to be called Gulf War syndrome; among those posted to
Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, Balkans syndrome. He was not the only member of
the 442nd to suffer them. Others had similar urinary problems, joint pains,
fatigue, headaches, rashes, and sleep apnea. Today, some scientists believe
that all these problems, together with others found in war-zone civilians, can
be traced to the widespread use of a uniquely deadly form of ammunition.
In the ongoing Iraq conflict, just as in the Gulf War of 1991 and in the
Balkans, American and British forces have fired tens of thousands of shells and
cannon rounds made of a toxic and radioactive material called depleted uranium,
or DU Because DU is dense-approximately 1.7 times as dense as lead-and ignites
upon impact, at a temperature of about 5,400 degrees, it can penetrate armor
more effectively than any other material.
It's also remarkably cheap. The arms industry gets its DU for free from
nuclear-fuel processors, which generate large quantities of it as a by-product
of enriching uranium for reactor fuel. Such processors would otherwise have to
dispose of it in protected, regulated sites. DU is "depleted" only in the sense
that most of its fissile U-235 isotope has been removed. What's left-mainly
U-238-is still radioactive.
Three of the main weapons systems still being used in Iraq-the M-1 Abrams
tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the A-10 Warthog attack jet-use DU
ammunition. A 120-mm. tank round contains about nine pounds of solid DU When a
DU "penetrator" strikes its target, up to 70 percent of the shell's mass is
flung into the air in a shower of uranium-oxide fragments and dust, some in the
form of aerosolized particles less than a millionth of a meter in diameter.
When inhaled, such particles lodge in the lungs and bathe the surrounding
tissue with alpha radiation, known to be highly dangerous internally, and
smaller amounts of beta and gamma radiation.
Even before Desert Storm, the Pentagon knew that DU was potentially
hazardous. Before last year's Iraq invasion, it issued strict regulations
designed to protect civilians, troops, and the environment after the use of DU
But the Pentagon insists that there is little chance that these veterans'
illnesses are caused by DU
The US suffered only 167 fatal combat casualties in the first Gulf War.
Since then, veterans have claimed pensions and health-care benefits at a record
rate. The Veterans Administration reported this year that it was paying
service-related disability pensions to 181,996 Gulf War veterans-almost a third
of the total still living. Of these, 3,248 were being compensated for
"undiagnosed illnesses." The Pentagon's spokesman, Dr. Michael Kilpatrick,
deputy director of its Deployment Health section, says that Gulf War veterans
are no less healthy than soldiers who were stationed elsewhere.
Those returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom are also beginning to report
illnesses in significant numbers. In July 2004, the V.A. disclosed that 27,571
of them-16.4 percent of the total-had sought health care. Of that group, 8,134
suffered muscular and skeletal ailments; 3,505 had respiratory problems; and
5,674 had "symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions." An additional 153 had
developed cancers. The V.A. claims that such figures are "typical of young,
active, healthcare-seeking populations," but does not offer figures for
comparison.
There is also evidence of a large rise in birth defects and unprecedented
cancer rates among civilians following the first Gulf War in the Basra region
of southern Iraq, where the heaviest fighting took place. Dr. Kilpatrick says,
"I think it's very important to try to understand what are the causes of that
high rate of cancer and birth defects. There has to be a good look at that, but
if you go to the M. D. Anderson hospital, in Houston, Texas, you're going to
find a very high rate of cancer. That's because people from all over the
country with cancer go there, because it's one of the premier care centers.
Basra was the only major hospital in southern Iraq. Are the people there with
these different problems people who lived their entire lives in Basra, or are
they people who've come to Basra for care?" It is possible, he says, that some
other environmental factor is responsible for the illnesses, such as Saddam's
chemical weapons or poor nutrition. "I don't think anything should be taken off
the table."
In October 2004, an early draft of a study by the Research Advisory
Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, a scientific panel run by the V.A.,
was leaked to The New York Times. According to the Times, the panel had
concluded that there was a "probable link" between veterans' illnesses and
exposure to neurotoxins, including a drug given to troops in 1991 to protect
them from nerve gas, and nerve gas itself, which was released when US-led
forces destroyed an Iraqi arms depot. Asked why there was no mention of DU in
the report, Dr. Lea Steele, the panel's scientific director, says that her
group plans to address it in a later report: "We've only just begun work on
this topic. We are certainly not ruling it out."
DU's critics, meanwhile, say it's entirely possible that both neurotoxins
and DU are responsible for the widespread sickness among veterans.
Members of the 442nd have vivid memories of being exposed to DU Sergeant
Hector Vega, a youthful-looking 48-year-old who in civilian life works in a
building opposite Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, says he now struggles with
chest pains, heart palpitations, headaches, urinary problems, body tremors, and
breathlessness-none of which he'd ever experienced before going to Iraq. He
recalls the unit's base there: "There were burnt-out Iraqi tanks on flatbed
trucks 100 yards from where we slept. It looked like our barracks had also been
hit, with black soot on the walls. It was open to the elements, and dust was
coming in all the time. When the wind blew, we were eating it, breathing it. It
was everywhere." (The Department of Defense, or D.O.D., says that a team of
specialists is conducting an occupational and environmental health survey in
the area.)
Dr. Asaf Durakovic, 64, is a retired US Army colonel and the former head
of nuclear medicine at a veterans' hospital in Wilmington, Delaware. Dr.
Durakovic reports finding DU in the urine of 18 out of 30 Desert Storm
veterans, sometimes up to a decade after they were exposed, and in his view DU
fragments are both a significant cause of Gulf War syndrome and a hazard to
civilians for an indefinite period of time. He says that when he began to voice
these fears inside the military he was first warned, then fired: he now
operates from Toronto, Canada, at the independent Uranium Medical Research
Centre.
In December 2003, Dr. Durakovic analyzed the urine of nine members of the
442nd. With funds supplied by the New York Daily News, which first published
the results, Durakovic sent the samples to a laboratory in Germany that has
some of the world's most advanced mass-spectrometry equipment. He concluded
that Ramos, Vega, Sergeant Agustin Matos, and Corporal Anthony Yonnone were
"internally contaminated by depleted uranium (DU) as a result of exposure
through [the] respiratory pathway."
The Pentagon contests these findings. Dr. Kilpatrick says that, when the
D.O.D. conducted its own tests, "our results [did] not mirror the results of
Dr. Durakovic." "Background" sources, such as water, soil, and therefore food,
frequently contain some uranium. The Pentagon insists that the 442nd soldiers'
urinary uranium is "within normal dietary ranges," and that "it was not
possible to distinguish DU from the background levels of natural uranium." The
Pentagon says it has tested about 1,000 vets from the current conflict and
found DU contamination in only five. Its critics insist this is because its
equipment is too insensitive and its testing methods are hopelessly flawed.
At a briefing before the Iraq invasion in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick tried
to reassure reporters about DU by citing the cases of about 20 Desert Storm
vets who had DU shrapnel in their bodies. "We have not seen any untoward
medical consequences in these individuals," he said. "There has been no cancer
of bone or lungs, where you would expect them." It appears that he misspoke on
that occasion: one of these veterans had already had an arm amputated for an
osteosarcoma, or bone tumor, at the site where the shrapnel entered. Dr.
Kilpatrick confirms that the veteran was treated by the V.A. in Baltimore, but
says his condition may not have been linked with the shrapnel: "Osteosarcomas
are fairly common." Studies have shown that DU can begin to move through the
body and concentrate in the lymph nodes, and another of the vets with shrapnel
has a form of lymphatic cancer. But this, Dr. Kilpatrick says, has "no known
cause." He concedes that research has not proved the negative, that DU doesn't
cause cancer. But, he says, "science doesn't in 2004 show that DU causes any
cancer."
It does, however, show that it may. Pentagon-sponsored studies at the
Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, have found
that, when DU was embedded in animals, several genes associated with human
tumors underwent "aberrant activation," and oncoproteins of the type found in
cancer patients turned up in their blood. The animals' urine was "mutagenic,"
meaning that it could cause cells to mutate. Another institute project found
that DU could damage the immune system by hastening the death of white blood
cells and impairing their ability to attack bacteria.
In June 2004 the US General Accounting Office (G.A.O.) issued a report to
Congress that was highly critical of government research into Gulf War syndrome
and veterans' cancer rates. The report said that the studies on which federal
agencies were basing their claim that Gulf War veterans were no sicker than the
veterans of other wars "may not be reliable" and had "inherent limitations,"
with big data gaps and methodological flaws. Because cancers can take years to
develop, the G.A.O. stated, "it may be too early" to draw any conclusions. Dr.
Kilpatrick dismisses this report, saying it was "just the opinion of a group of
individuals."
Yet another Pentagon-funded study suggested that DU might have effects on
unborn children. After finding that pregnant rats transmitted DU to their
offspring through the placenta, the study concluded: "Fetal exposure to uranium
during critical prenatal development may adversely impact the future behavioral
and neurological development of offspring." In September 2004, the New York
Daily News reported that Gerard Darren Matthew, who had served in Iraq with the
719th Transportation Company, which is based in Harlem, had tested positive for
DU after suffering migraines, fatigue, and a burning sensation when urinating.
Following his return, his wife became pregnant, and their daughter, Victoria
Claudette, was born missing three fingers.
Ultimately, critics say, the Pentagon underestimates the dangers of DU
because it measures them in the wrong way: by calculating the average amount of
DU radiation produced throughout the body. When we meet, Dr. Kilpatrick gives
me a report the Department of Defense issued in 2000. It concludes that even
vets with the highest exposures from embedded shrapnel could expect over 50
years to receive a dose of just five rem, "which is the annual limit for
[nuclear industry] workers." The dose for those who inhaled dust from
burned-out tanks would be "far below the annual guideline (0.1 rem) for members
of the public."
But to measure the effect of DU as a whole-body radiation dose is
meaningless, Asaf Durakovic says, because the dose from DU is intensely
concentrated in the cells around a mote of dust. The alpha particles DU
emits-high-energy clumps of protons and neutrons-are harmless outside the body,
because they cannot pass through skin. Inside tissue, however, they wreak a
havoc analogous to that of a penetrating shell against an enemy tank,
bombarding cell nuclei, breaking chains of DNA, damaging fragile genes. Marcelo
Valdes, a physicist and computer scientist who is president of Dr. Durakovic's
research institute, says the cells around a DU particle 2.5 microns in diameter
will receive a maximum annual radiation dose of 16 rads. If every pocket of
tissue in the body were to absorb that amount of radiation, the total level
would reach seven trillion rads-millions of times the lethal dosage.
In the potentially thousands of hot spots inside the lungs of a person
exposed to DU dust, the same cells will be irradiated again and again, until
their ability to repair themselves is lost. In 1991, Durakovic found DU in the
urine of 14 veterans who had returned from the Gulf with headaches, muscle and
skeletal pain, fatigue, trembling, and kidney problems. "Immediately I
understood from their symptoms and their histories that they could have been
exposed to radiation," he says. Within three years, two were dead from lung
cancer: "One was 33, the other 42. Both were nonsmokers, in previously
excellent health."
DU, he says, steadily migrates to the bones. There it irradiates the
marrow, where stem cells, the progenitors of all the other cells the body
manufactures in order to renew itself, are produced. "Stem cells are very
vulnerable," Durakovic says. "Bombarded with alpha particles, their DNA will
fall apart, potentially affecting every organ. If malfunctioning stem cells
become new liver cells, then the liver will malfunction. If stem cells are
damaged, they may form defective tissue."
If DU is as dangerous as its critics allege, it can kill even without
causing cancer. At her home in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Susan Riordon recalls the
return of her husband, Terry, from the Gulf in 1991. Terry, a security captain,
served in intelligence during the war: his service record refers to his setting
up a "safe haven" in the Iraqi "theatre." Possibly, Susan speculates, this led
him behind enemy lines and exposed him to DU during the long aerial bombing
campaign that preceded the 1991 invasion. In any event, "when he came home, he
didn't really come home," she says.
At first, Terry merely had the usual headaches, body pain, oozing rash,
and other symptoms. But later he began to suffer from another symptom which
afflicts some of those exposed to DU: burning semen. "If he leaked a little
lubrication from his penis, it would feel like sunburn on your skin. If you got
to the point where you did have intercourse, you were up and out of that bed so
fast-it actually causes vaginal blisters that burst and bleed." Terry's medical
records support her description. In England, Malcolm Hooper, professor emeritus
of medicinal chemistry at the University of Sunderland, is aware of 4,000 such
cases. He hypothesizes that the presence of DU may be associated with the
transformation of semen into a caustic alkali.
"It hurt [Terry] too. He said it was like forcing it through barbed wire,"
Riordon says. "It seemed to burn through condoms; if he got any on his thighs
or his testicles, he was in hell." In a last, desperate attempt to save their
sex life, says Riordon, "I used to fill condoms with frozen peas and insert
them [after sex] with a lubricant." That, she says, made her pain just about
bearable. Perhaps inevitably, he became impotent. "And that was like our last
little intimacy gone."
By late 1995, Terry was seriously deteriorating. Susan shows me her
journal-she titled it "The Twilight Zone"-and his medical record. It makes
harrowing reading. He lost his fine motor control to the point where he could
not button his shirt or zip his fly. While walking, he would fall without
warning. At night, he shook so violently that the bed would move across the
floor. He became unpredictably violent: one terrible day in 1997 he attacked
their 16-year-old son and started choking him. By the time armed police arrived
to pull him off, the boy's bottom lip had turned blue. After such rages, he
would fall into a deep sleep for as long as 24 hours, and awake with no memory
of what had happened. That year, Terry and Susan stopped sleeping in the same
bedroom. Then "he began to barricade himself in his room for days, surviving on
granola bars and cartons of juice."
As he went downhill, Terry was assessed as completely disabled, but there
was no diagnosis as to why. His records contain references to "somatization
disorder," post-traumatic stress, and depression. In 1995 the army doctors even
suggested that he had become ill only after reading of Gulf War syndrome.
Through 1998 and 1999, he began to lose all cognitive functions and was
sometimes lucid for just a few hours each week.
Even after he died, on April 29, 1999, Terry's Canadian doctors remained
unable to explain his illness. "This patient has a history [of] 'Gulf War
Syndrome' with multiple motor, sensory and emotional problems," the autopsy
report by pathologist Dr. B. Jollymore, of Yarmouth, begins. "During extensive
investigation, no definitive diagnosis has been determined.... Essentially it
appears that this gentleman remains an enigma in death as he was in life."
Not long before Terry's death, Susan Riordon had learned of Asaf
Durakovic, and of the possibility that her husband absorbed DU His urine-test
results-showing a high DU concentration eight years after he was presumably
exposed-came through on Monday, April 26: "Tuesday he was reasonably cognitive,
and was able to tell me that he wanted his body and organs to go to Dr.
Durakovic," she remembers. "He knew it was too late to help him, but he made me
promise that his body could help the international community. On the Wednesday,
I completed the purchase of this house. On Thursday, he was dead.
"It was a very strange death. He was very peaceful. I've always felt that
Asaf allowed Terry to go: knowing he was DU-positive meant he wasn't crazy
anymore. Those last days he was calm. He wasn't putting the phone in the
microwave; he had no more mood swings."
After Riordon's death, Dr. Durakovic and his colleagues found
accumulations of DU in his bones and lungs.
Dr. Durakovic suspects the military of minimizing the health and
environmental consequences of DU weapons, and suggests two reasons it may have
for doing so: "to keep them off the list of war criminals, and to avoid paying
compensation which could run into billions of dollars." To this might be added
a third: depleted uranium, because of its unique armor-penetrating
capabilities, has become a defining feature of American warfare, one whose loss
would be intolerable to military planners.
In 1991, the US used DU weapons to kill thousands of Iraqis in tanks and
armored vehicles on the "highway of death" from Kuwait to Basra. The one-sided
victory ushered in a new era of "lethality overmatch"-the ability to strike an
enemy with virtual impunity. A Pentagon pamphlet from 2003 states that a
central objective of the American military is to "generate dominant lethality
overmatch across the full spectrum of operations," and no weapon is better
suited to achieving that goal than DU
The value of depleted uranium was spelled out more simply in a Pentagon
briefing by Colonel James Naughton of the army's Materiel Command in March
2003, just before the Iraq invasion: "What we want to be able to do is strike
the target from farther away than we can be hit back.... We don't want to fight
even. Nobody goes into a war and wants to be even with the enemy. We want to be
ahead, and DU gives us that advantage."
If the Pentagon is right about the risks of DU, such statements should not
be controversial. If it is wrong, says retired army colonel Dr. Andras
Korenyi-Both, who headed one of the main field hospitals during Desert Storm
and later conducted some of the first research into Gulf War syndrome, the
position is less clear-cut. "You'd have to deal with the question of whether
it's better not to use DU and have more of your soldiers die in battle or to
use DU and lose very few in the field-but have them get sick and die when they
get home."
One desert morning in the early spring of 1991, while sitting in his
office at the Eskan Village military compound near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
Lieutenant Doug Rokke was shown a memorandum. Rokke, a health physicist and
training specialist, was a reservist and had recently been ordered to join the
Third US Army's depleted-uranium-assessment team, assigned to clean up and move
American vehicles hit by friendly fire during Operation Desert Storm. The memo,
dated March 1, came from a senior military officer at the Los Alamos National
Laboratory, in New Mexico.
During the Gulf War, it said, "DU penetrators were very effective against
Iraqi armor." However, "there has been and continues to be a concern regarding
the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the
effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically
unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal.... I believe we should keep
this sensitive issue at mind when after-action reports are written."
Rokke says: "I interpreted the memo to mean: we want this stuff-don't
write anything that might make it difficult for us to use it again."
Rokke's assignment was dangerous and unpleasant. The vehicles were coated
with uranium-oxide soot, and dust lay in the sand outside. He wore a mask, but
it didn't help. "We could taste it and smell it," he says of the DU "It tasted
very strong-and unmistakable." Years later, he says, he was found to be
excreting uranium at 5,000 times the normal level. Now 55, he pants during
ordinary conversation and says he still gets a rash like the one Raymond Ramos
of the 442nd suffers from. In addition, Rokke has joint pains, muscle aches,
and cataracts.
In 1994, Rokke became director of a Pentagon project designed to learn
more about DU contamination and to develop training that would minimize its
risks. "I'm a warrior, and warriors want to fulfill their mission," Rokke says.
"I went into this wanting to make it work, to work out how to use DU safely,
and to show other soldiers how to do so and how to clean it up. This was not
science out of a book, but science done by blowing the shit out of tanks and
seeing what happens. And as we did this work, slowly it dawned on me that we
were screwed. You can't do this safely in combat conditions. You can't
decontaminate the environment or your own troops."
Rokke and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments at the US
Department of Energy's Nevada nuclear-test site. They set fire to a Bradley
loaded with DU rounds and fired DU shells at old Soviet tanks. At his remote,
ramshackle farmhouse amid the rural flatlands of central Illinois, Rokke shows
me videos of his tests. Most spectacular are those shot at night, which depict
the fiery streak of the DU round, already burning before impact, followed by
the red cascade of the debris cloud. "Everything we hit we destroyed," he says.
"I tell you, these things are just ... fantastic."
The papers Rokke wrote describing his findings are more sobering. He
recorded levels of contamination that were 15 times the army's permissible
levels in tanks hit by DU, and up to 4.5 times such levels in clothing exposed
to DU
The good news was that it was possible, using a special Department of
Energy vacuum cleaner designed for sucking up radioactive waste, to reduce
contamination from vehicles and equipment to near official limits, and to
"mask" the intense radiation around holes left by DU projectiles by sealing
them with layers of foam caulking, paint, or cardboard. (Such work, Rokke
wrote, would naturally have to be carried out by teams in full
radiological-protection suits and respirators.)
When it came to clothes, however, DU particles "became imbedded in the
clothing and could not be removed with brushing or other abrasive methods."
Rokke found that even after he tried to decontaminate them the clothes were
still registering between two and three times the limit. "This may pose a
significant logistics impact," Rokke wrote, with some understatement.
The elaborate procedures required to decontaminate equipment, meanwhile,
would be almost impossible to implement in combat. "On a real battlefield, it's
not like there's any control," Rokke says. "It's chaos. Maybe it's night. Who's
going to come along and isolate contaminated enemy tanks? You've got a pile of
rubble and mess and you're still coming under fire. The idea that you're going
to come out in radiological suits and vacuum up a building or a smashed T-72
[tank]-it's ridiculous."
Large amounts of black DU-oxide dust were readily visible within 50 meters
of a tank hit by penetrators and within 100 meters of the DU-packed Bradley
that was set on fire. But less obvious amounts were easily detected at much
greater distances. Worse, such dust could be "re-suspended" in the atmosphere
"upon contact, if wind blew, or during movement." For American troops, that
meant that "respiratory and skin protection is warranted during all phases of
recovery." For civilians, even ones at considerable distances, it meant they
might be exposed to windblown DU far into the future.
After Rokke completed the project, he was appointed head of the lab at
Fort McClellan where it had been based. He resigned the staff physicist post
he'd held for 19 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and
moved south with his family. Early in 1996, after he began to voice the
conclusions he was drawing about the future viability of DU weapons, he was
fired. "Then I remembered the Los Alamos memo," he says. "They'd wanted
'proponency' for DU weapons, and I was giving them the opposite." I ask Dr.
Kilpatrick, the D.O.D. spokesman on DU, about Rokke's test firings. His reply:
"One, he never did that. He was in Nevada as an observer. He was not part of
that program at all. At that time he was working in education at an army
school, and his assignment was to develop educational materials for troops."
Rokke, he says, may have spent a few days observing the tests but did not
organize them.
Documents from Rokke's service record tell a different story. His
appraisal from December 1, 1995, written by Dr. Ed Battle, then chief of the
radiation laboratories at Fort McClellan, describes Rokke's mission as follows:
to "plan, coordinate, supervise and implement the US Army ... depleted uranium
training development project." He continued: "Captain Rokke has repeatedly
demonstrated the ability to function well above his current rank and is as
effective as any I have known." He had directly participated in "extremely
crucial tests at the Nevada Atomic Test Site," and his achievements had been
"absolutely phenomenal."
Rokke was awarded two medals for his work. The citation for one commended
him for "meritorious service while assigned as the depleted uranium project
leader. Your outstanding achievements have prepared our soldiers for hazards
and will have a vast payoff in the health, safety, and protection of all
soldiers."
Rokke's work in Nevada helped persuade the military that DU weapons had to
be dealt with carefully. On September 16, 2002, General Eric Shinseki, the US
Army chief of staff, signed Army Regulation 700-48, which sets forth strict
rules for handling items, including destroyed or disabled enemy targets, that
have been hit and contaminated by DU "During peacetime or as soon as
operational risk permits," it states, local commanders must "identify,
segregate, isolate, secure, and label all RCE [radiologically contaminated
equipment]. Procedures to minimize the spread of radioactivity will be
implemented as soon as possible." Under pre-existing regulations, damaged
vehicles should be moved to a collection point or maintenance facility, and
"covered and wrapped with canvas or plastic tarp to prevent spread of
contaminants," with loose items placed in double plastic bags. Soldiers who
carry out such tasks should wear protective equipment.
The burned-out tanks behind the 442nd's barracks in Samawah may not have
been the only DU-contaminated pieces of equipment to be left where they lay. In
the fall of 2003, Tedd Weyman, a colleague of Dr. Durakovic's, spent 16 days in
Iraq, taking samples and observing the response of coalition forces to General
Shinseki's directive. "When tanks shot up by DU munitions were removed, I saw
no precautions being taken at all," he says. "Ordinary soldiers with no
protection just came along and used chains to load them onto flatbeds, towing
them away just as they might your car if it broke down on the highway. They
took them to bases with British and American troops and left them in the open."
Time after time, Weyman recorded high levels of contamination-so high that on
his return to Canada he was found to have 4.5 times the normal level of uranium
in his own urine.
A Pentagon memo, signed on May 30, 2003, by Dr. William Winkenwerder, an
assistant defense secretary, says that any American personnel "who were in, on,
or near combat vehicles at the time they were struck by DU rounds," or who
entered such vehicles or fought fires involving DU munitions, should be
assessed for possible exposure and receive appropriate health care. This
category could be said to include any soldier who fought in, or cleaned up
after, battles with Iraqi armor.
Still, the Pentagon insists that the risks remain acceptably small. "There
isn't any recognized disease from exposure to natural or depleted uranium," Dr.
Kilpatrick says. He tells me that America will mount a thorough cleanup in
Iraq, disposing of any DU fragments and burying damaged vehicles in unpopulated
locations, but that, for the time being, such an operation is impossible. "We
really can't begin any environmental assessment or cleanup while there's
ongoing combat." Nevertheless, he says, there's no cause for concern. "I think
we can be very confident that what is in the environment does not create a
hazard for those living in the environment and working in it."
As this article was going to press, the Pentagon published the findings of
a new study that, according to Dr. Kilpatrick, shows DU to be a "lethal but
safe weapons system."
In his Pentagon briefing in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick said that even if
DU weapons did generate toxic dust, it would not spread. "It falls to the
ground very quickly-usually within about a 50-meter range," he said. "It's
heavy. It's 1.7 times as heavy as lead. So even if it's a small dust particle
... it stays on the ground." Evidence that this is not the case comes from
somewhere much closer than Iraq-an abandoned DU-weapons factory in Colonie, New
York, a few miles from Albany, the state capital.
In 1958, a corporation called National Lead began making depleted-uranium
products at a plant on Central Avenue, surrounded by houses and an Amtrak line.
In 1979, just as the plant was increasing its production of DU ammunition to
meet a new Pentagon contract, a whistle-blower from inside the plant told the
county health department that N.L. was releasing large amounts of DU oxide into
the environment.
Over the next two years, he and other workers testified before both the
New York State Assembly and a local residents' campaign group. They painted a
picture of reckless neglect. DU chips and shavings were simply incinerated, and
the resulting oxide dust passed into the atmosphere through the chimneys. "I
used to do a lot of burning," William Luther told the governor's task force in
1982. "They told me to do it at night so the black smoke wouldn't be seen."
Later, many of the workers were found to have inhaled huge doses into their
lungs, and some developed cancers and other illnesses at relatively young ages.
In January 1980 the state forced N.L. to agree to limit its radioactive
emissions to 500 microcuries per year. The following month, the state shut the
plant down. In January alone, the DU-chip burner had released 2,000
microcuries. An official environmental survey produced horrifying results. Soil
in the gardens of homes near the plant was emitting radiation at up to 300
times the normal background level for upstate New York. Inside the 11-acre
factory site, readings were up to five times higher.
The federal government has been spending tax dollars to clean up the
Colonie site for the past 19 years, under a program called fusrap-the Formerly
Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Today, all that is left of the Colonie
plant are enormous piles of earth, constantly moistened with hoses and secured
by giant tarpaulins to prevent dispersal, and a few deep pits. In its autumn
2004 bulletin to residents, the fusrap team disclosed that it had so far
removed 125,242 tons of contaminated soil from the area, all of which have been
buried at radioactive-waste sites in Utah and Idaho. In some places, the
excavations are more than 10 feet deep. fusrap had also discovered
contamination in the neighboring Patroon Creek, where children used to play,
and in the reservoir it feeds, and had treated 23.5 million gallons of
contaminated water. The cost so far has been about $155 million, and the
earliest forecast for the work's completion is 2008.
Years before fusrap began to dig, there were data to suggest that DU
particles-and those emitted at Colonie are approximately the same size as those
produced by weapons-can travel much farther than 50 meters. In 1979, nuclear
physicist Len Dietz was working at a lab operated by General Electric in
Schenectady, 10 miles west of Colonie. "We had air filters all around our
perimeter fence," he recalls. "One day our radiological manager told me we had
a problem: one of the filters was showing abnormally high alpha radiation. Much
to our surprise, we found DU in it. There could only be one source: the N.L.
plant." Dietz had other filters checked both in Schenectady and at other G.E.
sites. The three that were farthest away were in West Milton, 26 miles
northwest, and upwind, of Colonie. All the filters contained pure Colonie DU
"Effectively," says Dietz, "the particles' range is unlimited."
In August 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease
Registry published a short report on Colonie. On the one hand, it declared that
the pollution produced when the plant was operating could have increased the
risks of kidney disease and lung cancer. Because the source of the danger had
shut down, however, there was now "no apparent public health hazard." Thus
there was no need to conduct a full epidemiological study of those who had
lived near and worked at the factory-the one way to produce hard scientific
data on what the health consequences of measurable DU contamination actually
are.
The people of Colonie have been trying to collect health data of their
own. Sharon Herr, 45, lived near the plant for nine years. She used to work 60
hours a week at two jobs-as a clerk in the state government and as a
real-estate agent. Now she too is sick, and suffers symptoms which sound like a
textbook case of Gulf War syndrome: "Fourteen years ago, I lost my grip to the
point where I can't turn keys. I'm stiff, with bad joint and muscle pain, which
has got progressively worse. I can't go upstairs without getting out of breath.
I get fatigue so intense there are days I just can't do much. And I fall
down-I'll be out walking and suddenly I fall." Together with her friend Anne
Rabe, 49, a campaigner against N.L. since the 1980s, she has sent
questionnaires to as many of the people who lived on the streets close to the
plant as possible. So far, they have almost 400 replies.
Among those who responded were people with rare cancers or cancers that
appeared at an unusually young age, and families whose children had birth
defects. There were 17 cases of kidney problems, 15 of lung cancer, and 11 of
leukemia. There were also five thyroid cancers and 16 examples of other thyroid
problems-all conditions associated with radiation. Other people described
symptoms similar to Herr's. Altogether, 174 of those in the sample had been
diagnosed with one kind of cancer or another. American women have about a 33
percent chance of getting cancer in their lifetimes, mostly after the age of
60. (For men, it's nearly 50 percent.) Some of the Colonie cancer victims are
two decades younger. "We have what look like possible suspicious clusters,"
says Rabe. "A health study here is a perfect opportunity to see how harmful
this stuff really is."
On June 14, 2004, the army's Physical Evaluation Board, the body that
decides whether a soldier should get sickness pay, convened to evaluate the
case of Raymond Ramos of the 442nd Military Police company. It followed the
Pentagon's approach, not Dr. Durakovic's. The board examined his Walter Reed
medical-file summary, which describes his symptoms in detail, suggests that
they may have been caused by serving in Iraq, and accepts that "achieving a
cure is not a realistic treatment objective." But the summary mentions no
physical reason for them at all, let alone depleted uranium.
Like many veterans of the first Gulf War, Ramos was told by the board that
his disability had been caused primarily by post-traumatic stress. It did not
derive "from injury or disease received in the line of duty as a direct result
of armed conflict." Instead, his record says, he got "scared in the midst of a
riot" and was "emotionally upset by reports of battle casualties." Although he
was too sick to go back to work as a narcotics cop, he would get a disability
benefit fixed at $1,197 a month, just 30 percent of his basic military pay.
On the day we meet, in September 2004, his symptoms are hardly alleviated.
"I'm in lots of pain in my joints. I'm constantly fatigued-I can fall asleep at
the drop of a dime. My wife tells me things and I just forget. It's not fair to
my family."
For the time being, the case against DU appears to remain unproved. But if
Asaf Durakovic, Doug Rokke, and their many allies around the world are right,
and the Pentagon wrong, the costs-human, legal, and financial-will be
incalculable. They may also be widespread. In October, the regional health
authority of Sardinia, Italy, began hearings to investigate illnesses suffered
by people who live near a US firing range there that tests DU weapons.
In 2002 the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection
of Human Rights declared that depleted uranium was a weapon of mass
destruction, and its use a breach of international law. But the difference
between DU and the W.M.D. that formed the rationale for the Iraqi invasion is
that depleted uranium may have a boomerang effect, afflicting the soldiers of
the army that fires it as well as the enemy victims of "lethality overmatch."
The four members of the 442nd who tested positive all say they have met
soldiers from other units during their medical treatment who complain of
similar ailments, and fear that they too may have been exposed. "It's bad
enough being sent out there knowing you could be killed in combat," Raymond
Ramos says. "But people are at risk of bringing something back that might kill
them slowly. That's not right."
David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His book Guantánamo: The
War on Human Rights is an in-depth investigation of the atrocities taking place
at the Cuban prison.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
THIRD WORLD TRAVELLER
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/TWTwebsite_INDEX.html
"Four sorrows ... are certain to be visited on the United States. Their
cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country
outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual
war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a
spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward
off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional
rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a
co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the
replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of
war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the
United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military
projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens."
Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire
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