meehawl

So I keep seeing all these stories about how the US invaders in Iraq will, apparently, have to deal with those nefarious Iraqis who might dare, dare!, to use chemical weapons (apparently a notoriously ineffective battlefield weapon). Then I read about how the region is still suffering from the radiological pollution from the dirty bullets of poisonous and radioactive Uranium that the Pentagon scattered around the last time it went adventuring. Everyone seems so concerned about some “dirty bomb” threat, but nobody seems to care that the US will soon be scattering dirty bullets all over Iraq. In a country where half the population are children under 15, the mutagenic effects will have a long time to warp their DNA and breed a new generation of embittered super-mutant Jihad warriors.

Depleted uranium is essentially the same as natural uranium, which is considered to be chemically toxic and radioactive … When heated in air at 500 degrees Centigrade it oxidizes slowly, sustaining combustion and forming respirable aerosols. These aerosols of uranium are very light and can travel more than 42 kilometers (26 miles) from the release point … During the Gulf War an estimated 300 metric tons of DU were fired. The friction on reaching target causes it to aerosolize. Using a conservative estimate that only 1% aerosolized, this would have produced 3 million to 6 million grams of DU aerosol … The expected health effects of chronic lung burdens of depleted uranium include fibrosis of the irradiated lung tissue, lung cancer, eventual entry of the DU into blood over the subsequent years, with effects on liver and kidney, together with incorporation of DU into bone. When in bone, the uranium can irradiate the sensitive stem cells which form the white blood cells, especially the monocytes. Clinical manifestations of this toxicity and irradiation include kidney and liver damage, anemia, depressed cellular immune system and general heavy metal poisoning. Uranium can pass the placenta, causing congenital malformations, and can be carried to the infant in Mother’s milk. It can damage the ovum and sperm, causing genetic damage to offspring.

Using “depleted Uranium” in a battle in Iraq is just a clever, more directed way of using chemical-radiological weapons in the battlefield. Thanks to the notable lack of any progress in the Geneva Conventions since the mid-part of the 20th century, the old-fashioned and discredited gaseous agents are explicitly proscribed whereas radiological warfare has not been explicitly proscribed. I suspect that this lack of multilateral progress in restricting these new weapons has much to do with the influence of the main country that possesses the raw material and the will to engage in radiological warfare: the US.

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David sent me two analyses of the new Patriot Act that grants the US Executive Branch eerily similar emergency powers as were granted the Office of the Chancellor in Germany to combat domestic terrorism following the Reichstag Fire.

Title V � Stripping Americans of All Their Rights as U.S. Citizens; Unfairly Targeting Immigrants Under the Pretext of Fighting Terrorism: Stripping even native-born Americans of all of the rights of United States citizenship if they provide support for �terrorism,� allowing them to be indefinitely imprisoned in their own country as undocumented aliens. (Section 501). This section would permit the government to punish certain criminal activity by stripping even native-born Americans of U.S. citizenship, thereby depriving them of any nationality at all and potentially relegating them forever to imprisonment as undocumented immigrants in their own country.

SECTION 501 (Expatriation of Terrorists) expands the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” definition to all American citizens who “may” have violated any provision of Section 802 of the first Patriot Act. (Section 802 is the new definition of domestic terrorism, and the definition is “any action that endangers human life that is a violation of any Federal or State law.”) … Under Section 501 a US citizen engaging in lawful activities can be grabbed off the street and thrown into a van never to be seen again. The Justice Department states that they can do this because the person “had inferred from conduct” that they were not a US citizen … SECTION 201 of the second Patriot Act makes it a criminal act for any member of the government or any citizen to release any information concerning the incarceration or whereabouts of detainees. It also states that law enforcement does not even have to tell the press who they have arrested and they never have to release the names.

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