| 4th February 2001 |
Depleted Rationality
Piotr Bein, piotr.bein@imag.net,
Vancouver, Canada
Resembling a criminal who's wriggling like a rat caught in a net, NATO is showing the first signs of terminal defeat on the infamous subject of lethal contamination: Of its own troops and local civilians alike on battlefields polluted with residue from depleted uranium (DU) weapons. Military spokesmen don't make sense any more, even to those most ignorant of scientific matters and lacking in basic common sense. Serious military and scientific reports are at odds with Pentagon and NATO statements - disclaimers, largely - on all scores.
On a special NATO website that was recently rigged up in a hurry, "reports" and "scientific" spin abound, instead of hard science and facts. The site has become another piece of evidence against the total corruption of psychopaths, war-mongers and their servants at the UN, just as with NATO's "humanitarian" attacks on Iraq and Yugoslavia since 1991.
The
NATO website
features
apologists from and like the RAND "research" corporation, NATO's Swiss
contractor ACLS in Spiez, professors and "institute" directors greased
with NATO grants, editors of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (yes, the same
one that carried a story about how 'smart' NATO bombs are good for targeting
Serb civilians), and yes, you guessed it - UNEP and the World Health
Organization!
While
one could laugh at NATO's attempted display of objectivity, a war crimes
tribunal could and perhaps will draw profusely from this NATO website. Hopefully
it will not miss the small detail that the maps of DU weapons used in Kosovo
appeared 19 and a half months after refugees started returning home following
NATO's bombing.
Another significant date that can be read on the NATO list of DU targetting in Kosovo is that of June 11th, 1999. A ceasefire and peace agreement were effective as of June 9th, 1999. The A-10 flyers in Aviano must have been impatient if the commanders could not stop them from punishing "Milosevic" after that date. Many Serbs know that NATO bombers other than the A-10s, and NATO weapons other than DU, were still used after June 9th. Perhaps NATO wanted to save on transportation costs and dumped whatever they could before leaving the "theatre", as the Cohens, Rubins and Clarks euphemistically called the war-torn region.
The
map of DU sites, located just a page down from a "high quality photo"
of the chief war criminal Lord Robertson beside the titles of a few speeches,
was still not operational when I visited the site on January 31st, 2001,
Vancouver time. Same with the map of DU sites in Bosnia. That one was several
years overdue! Both must still be secrets. Iraq? Iraqis are "Saddams".
Bosnian Serbs were "Milosevic operatives" and they deserved every bit
of misery they've received as a punishment for their atrocities, to use
Madeleine Albright's rhetoric.
NATO
Acting Spokesman Mark Laity, Lt. Col. Scott Bethel, Dr. Michael Kilpatrick and
Col. Eric Daxon figure as authors of speeches listed beside their Lord
Robertson's. There are contributions from legions of other propagandists and
information bandits in every NATO country. They will make a deplorable bunch in
the court of war crimes.
Agreeable
Words
Most
amazing are the attempts to play with words in the DU deception and cover-up
campaign, which anti-war publicist George Szamuely fittingly calls "an orgy
of lying". The vocabularies of all the NATO member countries' languages
acquire new meanings. Linguists will have updating work to do after this
campaign is over. "Depleted" is the codeword used to describe
allegedly "neutral" DU that every encyclopedia says is toxic and
radioactive, therefore "dangerous at
any speed".
Truly
comic statements appeared recently from the military, hopefully indicative of
the first signs of strain on the its PsyOp machine currently working in
overdrive. US Defense Secretary William Cohen said in January 2001 that DU was
no more dangerous than "leaded paint," and a US Army briefer assured
reporters it was safe enough to eat!
On
January 29th, 2001, Denise Nichols, a Gulf War veteran nurse, and US
National Vietnam and Gulf War Veterans Coalition vice chairman, wrote to the
Internet, “I have just gotten confirmation that I have isotopes of DU in my
urine [...] This morning on Washington Journal Dr Kilpatrick of the DoD said it
was in water where we live [...] If we have DU in the water then Rocky Mountain
arsenal must have contaminated our water or else Gulf War vets that came back
hot from the Gulf war must have contaminated our sewer and water supply.”
A
physicist and professor of public and international affairs at Princeton
University, Frank von Hippel, was cited in the January 15th, 2001, edition of
the New York Times News Service as saying "depleted uranium" is not
much of a radiation hazard because much of its radioactivity has been removed,
giving it its name. Is this "public and international affairs"
connection to NATO Public
Affairs coincidental?
The
high density of DU is exploited to assert that the dust is too heavy to go
anywhere. Many military spokesmen maintain that a DU bullet
"vaporizes" or "disappears" upon impact. Did the physics law
of conservation of mass change since I went to school? It is also a fact that
some DU metal melts when the DU dart burns through the steel or concrete of a
target. Holes punctured in armour typically have molten DU around them. DU
bullets that hit soft objects or the ground don't burn and can be recovered from
the soil.
Some Polish Newspeak artists tried to introduce the term "disarmed uranium," but the silver metal is more than "neutral": soldiers are safer against radiation from space in a tank made of DU than outside, on the battlefield, while DU ammunition "saves lives" of soldiers, because it knocks out enemy armour from a "safe" distance.
"There is more natural radioactivity in homes in many parts of the US (and Europe) than inside an M1 tank," wrote Edward Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, on January 16th, 2001 in the Los Angeles Times.
What
is Luttwak mumbling about? The exposure of dead or sick Gulf War soldiers and
civilians to the intact armour of M1A1 tanks is a non-issue. When the armour is
pierced by friendly fire and the DU sandwiched between the steel of armour burns
and disintegrates, then NATO has a big problem. Of course the tank crews didn't
need to be informed. The crews of tanks hit by DU ammunition, touring soldiers
and children playing around contaminated tanks got sick from the dust particles
of spent ammunition, from shrapnel and empty shells, not from external radiation
coming from a DU armour plate.
Of
Watches and Baths
The scene of A-10 crash in Remscheid in Germany on December 8th, 1988, One witness recalls a guard by the crash area saying: "Staying in the area may be risky. Children should not come here to play, it is too dangerous." A US officer stepped out and interrupted the soldier. Several people in the neighbourhood have died of cancer, including a journalist who spent a full day reporting from the crash site, and also a child.
According to one NATO spokesman, DU poses only a "negligible hazard." Madelaine Albright at least was original, "There's absolutely no proof that there's a connection" between DU and cancer, so she does not need to answer if the who-knows-how-many children dying of DU exposure in Iraq's city of Basra and its surroundings was "worth it."
Lord
Robertson defended the "proven [DU] technology that has been
independently tested": "We cannot possibly act on the
perceptions of people or on the view of a word such as 'uranium'." For
the relevance of "perceptions" to information warfare, see another
article. It is comforting to know that the Lord of the Most Democratic
Military Alliance on Earth is familiar with NATO PsyOp manuals.
Comparisons
with everyday objects abound. NATO spokesman Major Dan Baggio compared DU’s
benign nature to “glow-in-the-dark type of watch.” Major Baggio, why don’t
you smear a pinch of DU dust on your wrist every morning? Make sure to sniff it,
too.
German
defence minister Scharping trivialized radioactivity of one gram of DU with that
present in “ten litres of bath water.” He previously labelled Balkan
syndrome a “hysteria syndrome.” Herr Minister Scharping, why don’t you add
a teaspoon of DU dust into your next bath. That would certainly improve
relations of Serbs, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks with Germany.
German
Defence Minister Rudolph Scharping trivialized the radioactivity contained in
one gram of DU by comparing it with that present in "ten litres of bath
water." He had previously labelled Balkan Syndrome a "hysteria
syndrome." Herr Minister Scharping, why don't you add a teaspoon of DU dust
into your next bath? That would certainly improve the relations of Serbs, Poles,
Czechs and Slovaks with Germany. Most frequently, however, the mundane
"dirt" that everyone walks on is invoked in NATO motherly statements
about DU. Why don't you, Mr. NATO Spokesman, sprinkle DU dust on the lawns you
walk by, or better still, in your garden. Don't forget to add a cup of DU
shrapnel to your kids' sandbox. Throw in a few shells too. They are fun to play
with! (If you don't intend to live long.)
For
US Army medical expert Colonel David Lam, who said, "Smoking two cigarettes
a day or having a series of bowel X-rays can cause more radiation exposure than
an hour of deliberate handling of a depleted uranium penetrator round,"
let's recommend storing some DU shrapnel or several nice 120 mm DU rounds under
his bed. In fact, one US veteran has a child sick of the Gulf Syndrome since he
brought DU "souvenirs" from the Gulf War and stored them under his
child's bed.
Most
of the civilians and soldiers who have Gulf or Balkan syndrome did not handle
and did not come close to any rounds. They were often not even close to an A-10
plane or DU tank and their munitions, but they breathed the contaminated air or
ingested a tiny DU particle with water or food years after the tanks and planes
withdrew.
Those
who handled bullets, spent shells and shrapnel exposed themselves to some 300
milirems per hour on contact. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission allowable limit
is 100 milirems …per year.
Neo-scientists
and Miracles
Former
secretary-general of NATO and now the European Union's foreign and security
policy chief, Javier Solana, is heading NATO's ad hoc investigation into the
"safety" of DU. "Safety"? Solana states up front that there
is no evidence of a link between the illnesses reported by NATO personnel and
the use of DU ammunition. Even more remarkably, he states that "The
evidence points in the other direction". "Is Solana saying that DU is
a health benefit?", wondered Bob Vunovich in a January 22nd, 2001 letter to
the Washington Times.
A
meeting in Brussels of the ad hoc committee of top medical experts of NATO
included such medical science geniuses as Mark Laity, NATO's top spokesman who
upholds the traditions of the famous face of Jamie Shea that graced your TV
screen anno 1999. The Brussels orchestra played a tune: "We cannot identify
any increase in disease or mortality in soldiers who have deployed to the
Balkans as compared to those soldiers who have not been deployed."
The
propaganda plays with public ignorance of the complex properties of DU. A
nebulous "depleted, spent uranium" material is suddenly revealing its
highly radioactive and toxic content of uranium 234, 235, 236, plutonium and
other "impurities" that should not be there according to technical
specifications of the silver metal.
NATO
“scientists” calculate
DU dose over the area of the whole province, instead of several thousand
times smaller area that was actually contaminated by NATO. In order to prove
mathematically that there is no danger, NATO tricksters and nuclear industry
“epidemiologists” will, by calculation, distribute over the entire Earth’s
land and ocean bottom area the DU mass and radioactivity that was dumped
illegally in innocent people’s backyards.
They
perform similar magic when calculating the internal dose from a tiny uranium
particle in uranium miner’s lung or Gulf, SFOR, or KFOR soldier’s lymph
node, by relating the radioactivity to the whole organ or body mass. Actually
only one cell might be affected. Adjacent cells within a radius of 6 to 7 cells
copy the damage by biological code transfer. The microscopic but nasty DU
particles tend to collect in lymph nodes which then show something like ten
times the concentration of uranium that is found in the lungs if the contaminant
is inhaled as insoluble dust. The higher concentration in the lymph system
destroys the body’s immune resistance and disease starts.
Conspiracy theories are alive and well. Moderate Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova dismissed Europe's concerns about DU because he believed they were raised by people trying to chase KFOR out of Kosovo. "Milosevic" came back to haunt, first, in a rumour planted by the Hungarian special services about the former Yugoslav president setting radioactive and chemical DU bombs in Kosovo, Bosnia and, by teleportation, in Iraq in 1991. Then Portugal's leading military man bunched together reporters, whistler blowers and the anxious parents of DU-sick soldiers to a corner of his mind labelled "Milosevic agents."
This brief review would be incomplete without mentioning certain miraculous transformations. Chancellor Schroeder of Germany, who was convinced of his "healthy skepticism" toward the connection between cancer and DU, quite suddenly became "skeptical about the use of munitions that could lead to dangers" to German troops.
Similarly, from being victims of NATO attacks Yugoslavians have been unexpectedly transformed into valued sources of information; that is, when it came to setting up "channels of communication" about DU between Lord Robertson and the new Yugoslav foreign minister Svilanovic. The need for NATO's standardization of PsyOp among member states, and throughout friendly "democracies" lining up for membership, is understandable.
(copyleft: reproduce and acknowledge the source)
This page: http://www.stopnato.org.uk/du-watch/bein/rationality.htm
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