Baghdad: radiation levels 1,900 times higher than normal

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Baghdad: radiation levels 1,900 times higher than normal

Postby Rigorous Intuition » Mon May 29, 2006 2:20 pm

<br><br>OSAKA -- An Iraqi journalist and a Japanese human rights activist said the public has a poor idea of the situation in Iraq and warned of an impending health catastrophe as more Iraqis contract cancer from exposure to depleted uranium shells used by the U.S. and Britain.<br><br>...<br><br>Rasheed told the story of one 12-year-old boy he interviewed who began playing in a field contaminated with depleted uranium at the age of 10. Shortly after he began showing signs of illness and was eventually diagnosed with leukemia.<br><br>Despite extensive evidence and a growing international consensus that the depleted uranium shells are responsible for the rise of cancer in Iraq, the United States continues to deny any connection.<br><br>Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment ordering a comprehensive study on the effects of exposure to depleted uranium. The study, however, will only be conducted on U.S. soldiers.<br><br>Journalists have discovered that since 2003, parts of Baghdad have radiation levels 1,900 times higher than normal.<br><br>During the first year of the war, starting in March 2003, the U.S. Army and Air Force used ammunition containing about 115 metric tons of depleted uranium.<br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20060527a8.html">Japan Times</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Baghdad: radiation levels 1,900 times higher than normal

Postby Gouda » Mon May 29, 2006 2:46 pm

The security council might want to take a look at this. <br><br>Oh, but first things first. Iran's non-nukes are on the agenda. Never mind. Iran ought better realize how dangerous it is to play with nuclear things. Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. <p></p><i></i>
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Afghanistan too

Postby jingofever » Mon May 29, 2006 3:26 pm

<!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3050317.stm">news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/scien...050317.stm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> He said they had the same symptoms as some veterans of the 1991 Gulf war.<br><br>But he found no trace of the depleted uranium (DU) some scientists believe is implicated in Gulf War syndrome.<br><br>Other researchers suggest new types of radioactive weapons may have been used in Afghanistan.<br><br>The scientist is Dr Asaf Durakovic, of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC), based in Canada.<br><br>Dr Durakovic, a former US army adviser who is now a professor of medicine, said in 2000 he had found "significant" DU levels in two-thirds of the 17 Gulf veterans he had tested.<br><br>In May 2002, he sent a team to Afghanistan to interview and examine civilians there.<br><br>The UMRC says: "Independent monitoring of the weapon types and delivery systems indicate that radioactive, toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads were being used by the coalition forces." There is no official support for its claims, or backing from other scientists.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>He told BBC News Online: "In Afghanistan there were no oil fires, no pesticides, nobody had been vaccinated - all explanations suggested for the Gulf veterans' condition.<br><br>"But people had exactly the same symptoms. I'm certainly not saying Afghanistan was a vast experiment with new uranium weapons. But use your common sense."<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>There is something odd going on in that region. Do you all think it could be contamination from Iran's nuclear weapons program? <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=jingofever>jingofever</A> at: 5/29/06 1:26 pm<br></i>
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Re: Afghanistan too

Postby AlicetheCurious » Mon May 29, 2006 3:33 pm

JingoFever, excuse me for asking, but, you ARE joking, right? <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=alicethecurious>AlicetheCurious</A> at: 5/29/06 1:33 pm<br></i>
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radiation

Postby friend catcher » Mon May 29, 2006 3:34 pm

The idea of a normal level of radiation is an interesting one, although there was once such a thing as a natural background level that could be measured and quantified that is no longer the case. <br> Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland used to host the British Fleet untill the end of WW2, but also till this day hosts the sunken remains of the German High Seas Fleet that scuttled itself in 1919. The ships being made of a very pure German steel are the only source of steel that can be guaranteed as uncontaminated by post 1945 radiation and is used for calibration and other super specific purposes. <br> Since Chernobyl which sprayed all of Western Europe with caesium 147 we have no such thing as a normal background count to measure peculiarities against. A count of 1900 times previous background levels equates to living in the outflow of a nuclear power station and aside from longterm damage would literally burn the skin off you. Perhaps it does as there have been many reports of skin lesions that do not heal on US troops, officially caused by sand flies etc.<br> The balkans turkey shoot used large quantities of DU but very little research is available. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: radiation

Postby bvonahsen » Mon May 29, 2006 4:05 pm

What is so insidiuos(sp?) about DU is that while the alpha radiation given off does not penetrate skin or cloth, once absorbed into the body it is deadly. This is why troops are required to use gas masks and other protective gear around it. Handling DU rounds is not dangerous either, it is only when a DU round burns that it becomes a problem. And DU starts to burn as soon as it is fired. It begins to burn in flight and sets the target on fire when it hits. Then the radiation is released and is mixed into the dust and in the air. <br><br>Children play in the dirt and inhale it. We do not tell the Iraqi people about this hazard. They are the walking dead. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Not</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> telling them is just another kind of murder in this hatefull war. <p></p><i></i>
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radiation

Postby friend catcher » Mon May 29, 2006 7:12 pm

Didn't know that DU shells burned as they flew, just presumed they were used for their extreme heaviness and resulting penetration. I do know that in the british army at least, the ammunition loaders wear gloves when stocking the magazines to prevent particles lodging in cuts and abrasions. Certainly sounds like a sensible precaution and I can't imagine many soldiers handling Uranium without at least a twinge of concern. Hard to fathom what sort of mind would accept the official conclusions that DU is in no way an environmental hazard which is the standard position of all governments that use it, when clearly the atomized debris is pervasive .<br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: radiation

Postby professorpan » Tue May 30, 2006 12:15 am

DU = time shifted nuclear warfare. <p></p><i></i>
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A note on precedents, presidents, end times, The Duke and DU

Postby Gouda » Tue May 30, 2006 6:31 am

A note on precedents, presidents, end times, The Duke and DU, taken from:<br><br>"Out of Order: A Few Thoughts Concerning Dangerous Precedents and Irreversibility" <br><br>by James (not william) Blum:<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>...The wars upon which today’s Republican Raw Dealers have embarked will not—of this I am sure—bring Jesus back to Jerusalem. They may however bring The End: “when the fire rains down from heaven and the blood shall fill the sea” in the chilling chiliasm of the Appalachian hymn; the metaphor is altogether too thinly transparent. <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Nuclear war has been waged, consistently if not quite constantly, upon the entire planet since 1945</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> (or before, choose your Manhattan Project date—in Chicago or Allamogordo—as you like). This is a New Deal legacy of far greater import than HUAC. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>A most dangerous precedent, upon which the Democrats—Truman, Kennedy, Carter, Clinton—were only too happy to build.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> As were French Socialists, the Soviet inheritors of Bolshevism and so on through the geopolitical spectrum of nuclear proliferators. “Those who sharpen the tooth of the Dog, meaning Death.” (3) The 1990-1 CNN Media Event, known also as Gulf War One (4) sharpened the tooth of the atomic dog in a new way, putting radioactive heavy metal in its bullets and bombs—uranium depleted not in radioactivity but only in fissionablility. This of course resulted in “Gulf War Syndrome” among American vets and cancer epidemics among Iraqis far surpassing those attendant upon the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>So far beyond, in fact, that the combined effects of the DU of 1991 and of 2003-4 has been said to equal a quarter million Hiroshimas. This syndrome and these epidemics have no prospect of an end, save that of humanity itself. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> For the pulverized dust of the DU ordnance will enter the lungs of every Mesopotamian as long as there are Mesopotamian lungs—and the lungs of those unfortunate enough to live wherever the wind may blow this dust. Mountains and high tableland predominate to the east of Mesopotamia, thus the dust may alight momentarily in places sparsely populated by humans, but, with a four-and-a-half billion year half-life, even this dust will have another chance at carcinogenesis. <br><br>The Clinton Administration did not view this dirtiest of its predecessor’s deeds as the abomination it so obviously is. Instead, its personnel champed at the bit to do as the predecessor had done. The chance came in the former Yugoslavia—and came often, in 1994, 1995 and in 1999, in Bosnia, in Croatia—the traditionally Serb areas of the two Kraijinas—and in the war ostensibly over Kosovo. Now these regions share the radioactivity given unto Iraq—as do those downwind and downstream. This means the entirety of the lower Danube watershed.<br><br>Dr. Helen McWhinnie, MD, PhD. of DePaul University told this writer and several dozen of his summer-term fellows back in the year of Stormin’ Norman that the graph showing the relationship between exposure to supravisible radiation and mutation within the human (animal) body is a straight forty-five degree angle—one for one. This means X-rays, this means tanning booths, this means the obviously unavoidable exposure to the sun and other natural sources (granite, anyone?) and the now equally unavoidable exposure to all the radiation for Uncle Sam’s bombs, including all those “tests” out in the Southwest and including all the DU and the radioactive waste seeping into the Columbia and Lake Michigan and wherever else radioactive waste is stored in rusting old drums. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong> It also includes all the tests conducted by the likes of the Soviets, French, British, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis and the rest of the proliferating crowd following the American leader.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> And it includes all the accidents we know of and all of those we don’t. (5) <br><br>Radioactivity and its effects are irreversible; our leaders appear to be unwilling to face this irreversibility just as they are unwilling to face other irreversibilities. One might have thought that it was the business of intellectuals to remind them. Some, to their credit, have—the Federation of American Scientists, for instance. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Others have chosen to learn that intellectuals who attend to this business of telling those in power what they manifestly do not want to hear gets one unheard. Thus the scum among intellectuals rise to the top—thus Paul Wolfowitz.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>But other intellectuals cannot be dismissed so easily as opportunists and sycophants. Some believe heartily in urging the powerful on in their insanities. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> Such a one was the “fusionist conservative” Frank S. Meyer, whose prose filled the early years of <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>National Review</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->. In a psychotic twist on “give me liberty or give me death,” Meyer actually advocated nuclear annihilation—better everything dead than some increased portion of humanity Red. Meyer considered it Our Duty to wipe out vertebrate and deciduous life (at least) rather than succumb to Communism, which I might, only slightly uncharitably, describe as anything not named Ayn Rand or James Burnham of which Mr. Meyer—an ex-commie himself—did not approve. Meyer, then, was a dangerous precedent to today’s warriors on terrorism in his own right.<br><br>He may have gotten his wish. Now the psychedelic visions of John of Patmos...are unlikely to come to pass in a literal fashion, but such things never impede the always allegorically inclined Biblical literalist. Among the musics of the American vernacular, two outstanding groups covered atomic annihilation in distinctly different ways. The Golden Gate Quartet, the superlative swing-gospel singing group performed a song entitled “Atom and Evil,” implicitly and obviously comparing nuclear warfare to original sin. None of that for your godfearin’ Appalachian white folk, no sir. The Louvin Brothers, a singing duo outstanding in their own right, look forward to nuclear megadeath as being the moment of The Rapture, of which we’ve all heard so much lately.<br><br>The GGQ is altogether too charitable to atomics in their “Atoms for Peace” aspect:<br> <br> <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Now Atom was an honest, hard-working man<br> He wanted to help out the human clan.<br> But Miss Evil got him drunk on prejudice and hate<br> Lord, she taught him how to gamble with humanity’s fate.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>So true. Not until Clinton’s orgies of DU destruction what white Christians be nuked in anger. (6) It was hardly lost on America’s black folks that The Bomb was only dropped on non-whites. The GGQ see nuclear war as something to be strenuously avoided—“If we don’t break up that romance soon, they all fall down and go boom, boom.”<br><br>The Louvins, speaking for a great number of evangelical Protestants, look forward to nuclear war:<br><br> <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Are you ready for that great atomic power?<br> Will you rise and meet your savior in the air?<br> WIll you shout or will you cry when the fire rains from on high<br> Are you ready for that great atomic power?</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>The Biblical image of the fire from heaven is here specifically linked to the new mode of warfare. Thus it updates an older eschatological Appalachain hymn:<br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em><br> When the fire rains down from heaven<br> And the blood shall fill the sea<br> I’ll be carried home by Jesus<br> And forever with him be</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>Crimson tides have, of course, long been associated with the Louvins’ (nee Loudermilk) home state of Alabama. Hollywood and Denzel Washington have connected this image with nuclear annihilation. Charlie Louvin implies that fearing atomic death means either you are unshriven or not sufficiently up on your Scripture to find the prospect less than appealing. <br><br>I am reasonably up on my Scripture, but remain unshriven—and I find the prospect less than appealing. The Great Atomic Power comes like a thief in the night on a breeze over the Hindu Kush from Afganistan, or from Dresden Island near Joliet, in a wave of Great Lakes water from the Fermi reactor in Monroe, Michigan or from a leaking drum in the Indiana Harbor landfill. The fallout patterns from the tests in Nevada in the 1950s ruined film in Terre Haute and Rochester and lives in Albany and St. George. Those who advocate the hypothesis that the harm governments do is largely a function of stupidity and incompetence have their cases bolstered by the strange death of Marion Morrison, the Duke, John Wayne. In 1953, while filming in the Utah desert an awful movie for Howard Hughes in which he played the thinly mustachioed Genghis Khan, Marion and all those involved in the filming were subjected to a hydrogen bomb test which happened to be scheduled over the next ridge. Morrison would die twenty-seven years later of an aggressively metastatic melange of cancers against which the latest and greatest monoclonal antibodies at the UCLA Medical Center could do nothing. The US Government, under a Republican administration, killed the star of Test Pilot and the auteur of The Green Berets. Gallows humor. What is whirling is not right, but all wrong, at once old (uranium is an old old rock) and new (plutonium required human assistance to come into being). And our dancing days may prove few in breathing this noxious dust. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Any measure that restrains the powerful from even formulating atomic “solutions” to questions of either war or peace is a measure well taken. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> The combined effects of nuclear insanity, climate change of a catastrophic nature and the toxic bath we are all taking due to over two centuries of industrialism does indeed point to the world sinking with the weight of the human race—and of the latter drowning as a result, like yeast in your hootch, in its own waste.<br><br>NOTES: <br>...<br><br>3. Eliot, “Marina.” So many things mean Death, Eliot’s list (or litany) is hardly exhaustive, or even definitive.<br><br>4. Historians of a saner age, should there be one, will perhaps see Desert Shield and Norman’s Storm as only the first battle in the Iraqi-American War, whose ending date none now can foresee.<br><br>5. One fine late winter Sunday in 1987, the present writer and his namesake were travelling from Crystal Lake, Illinois to Rock Island, Illinois, to deposit the present writer back at his dorm at Augustana College. As soon as we turned west onto State Highway 176, we noticed ahead of us an oddly-shaped cloud, which only grew as we travelled on. It was still visible when we reached the northeastern outskirts of the metropolitan Quad Cities. It was steam, rising from the cooling towers of the Byron nuker plant. Unlike the steam which rises daily from the cooling tower which dominates one’s view from the outlet mall in Michigan City, this was not a normal occurrence. Inquiries were met—this was the Age of Ronnie, y’know—with polite dismissal. I be dog, though if there weren’t something in a steamcloud clearly visible—and huge at that—in a hundred-mile radius.<br><br>6. The key words are “in anger.” The white Christians (yes, including the LDS) of Utah, Nevada and New Mexico were nuked out of a combination of curiosity and indifference.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>The Calumet Review</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, volume two, number two, Spring, 2005 <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=gouda@rigorousintuition>Gouda</A> at: 5/30/06 4:42 am<br></i>
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WORD, Pan...fucking WORD

Postby AnnaLivia » Tue May 30, 2006 11:29 am

dare i point out that if we had already murdered the idea of having wealthpower giants, we'd not be discussing this? <p></p><i></i>
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