ILL WINDS
Part 1.
ILL WINDS
by
William Thomas
with Jim Brown
On Aug. 9, 1945, an experimental 21-kiloton plutonium bomb killed 40,000 human beings instantaneously in the city of Nagasaki. Over the next four horrific months, another 30,000 Japanese civilians — mostly children, women and old men — died in unspeakable agony from melted flesh and radiation sickness.
“Never again!” the world vowed. Despite increasingly bellicose brinksmanship by appallingly incompetent Western elites over the pending defeat of their NATO “advisers” and illegitimate Banderite regime in Ukraine, most people continue to believe that ethical and international prohibitions will prevent the first aggressive use of nuclear weapons since the U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
But with a waning Washington actively preparing for direct conflict with both Moscow and Beijing — and with Russia preparing tactical nuclear weapons to defend its western border from threatened NATO attack — assuring ourselves that detonating nuclear bombs on the soil of other nations is too abhorrent to ever happen again... is dangerously obsolete.
According to a US Army Gulf War veteran with impeccable “intel” — from grunts on the ground to concerned generals and military intelligence officers — the United States Government has already detonated “low yield” nuclear bombs against Afghanistan and Iraq.
And gotten away with it.
Additionally, two separate nuclear airstrikes launched by the Israeli Government against Iran were turned back by American air defenses before they could exit occupied Iraqi airspace.
A third Israeli attempt — this time to fry everything electronic across Iran through a nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse — was allegedly intercepted by Russian fighter jets in in April 2024. Instead of alarm, veteran journalist Pepe Escobar’s sparse report of the IDF’s most recent attempted nuclear strike has been met by widespread derision and disbelief.
I broke the other stories two decades ago. Instantly going viral and attracting attention in Tel Aviv , Teheran, Washington and Rome. I am reposting this series as a final warning. There really are ideologically-blinded maniacs in the US and Israel prepared to launch nuclear "demonstration" strikes against other countries.
Because they already have.
PART I
ILL WINDS
In late February 1991, the fabled home of Sinbad the Sailor was receiving a great deal of American attention. Founded by the order of Caliph Omar in 636 AD, and soon to be carpet bombed with cluster munitions by formations of eight-engine American “Stratofortress” bombers, Basra stands astride the main highway linking neighboring Iran.
American commanders were keen to stop nighttime convoys of uranium “yellow cake” being trucked over the Iraqi border into Iran. The American generals knew that late in 1990, as war clouds massed on Iraq’s western border, Hussein Kamel — Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law and second cousin — had supervised Iraq's WMD programs.
Six years later, Hussein would be assassinated after defecting to assist UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection teams in locating and destroying Iraq’s remaining weapons of mass destruction. [answers.com]
But i n 1990, Saddam Hussein still trusted his military industrial head. Hussein Kamal was able to arrange a convoy of six transport trucks for loading at the heavily guarded al-Jesira factory near Mosul.
Already targeted by allied war planners, al-Jesira produced the uranium hexaflouride used in the difficult technical task of turning low grade uranium “yellow cake” into highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium. Mined at Akashat, Iraq’s yellow cake” had been manufactured at the remote and heavily guarded al-Qaim facility since 1984. Located near the Syrian border some 380 kilometers west-northwest of Baghdad, the Swiss-built all-time plant had by 1990 produced at least 170 tons of yellow cake for Saddam’s nuclear weapons program.
Camouflaged with mud-caked license plates and traveling blacked out at night, the convoy made its way south to a second loading stop in Baghdad. But instead of heading for an in-country destination, the trucks turned east toward the Iranian border. According to US intelligence assets tracking their movements, the drivers were not told the contents of their cargos.
Scania S520 transport van -tractorfan.nl (file photo)
DRIVE TIME
Included in the first convoy racing south to beat a Desert Storm were a 1983 red-and-white Scania transport van, a 1985 Scania with white cab and red box, an orange 1975 MAC truck, an orange 1986 Scania, a brown-and- white Volvo truck, and another Scania truck of unknown vintage sporting an orange cab and red box.
Still traveling only at night, the colorful convoy was waved through the border of Sunni Saddam’s sworn enemy into Shiite Iran. Civilian Iranian drivers and trucks were waiting for them. After exchanging passwords and manifests, the heavy cargo boxes were quickly transferred into waiting Iranian transport trucks. The crates were clearly labeled in Arabic: “Tularemia,” “Anthrax,” “Botulinum” and “Plague”.
Also included in this first of two clandestine WMD convoys to Iran were an advanced Hewlett Packard computer and a Linatron X-ray machine marked “pbg”. Both had been shipped from Iraq’s nuclear weapons facility at Mosul, along with sealed containers of uranium hexafluoride.
The Iranians drove their classified cargo into the town of Hamadan, where Revolutionary Guards assumed control of the convoy. Following the road between the towns of Shariyar and Robate Karim, the Guards delivered their special freight to the Shahid Mostafa Khomeini Revolutionary Corps Barracks at Pasdaran, about 30 kilometers southwest of Teheran. Used by the Guards as a military training facility, the barracks included storerooms and warehouses.
Uranium "Yellow Cake" -ibankcoin.com
The yellow cake was sent to the Fasa/Rudan Research Center for conversion into uranium hexafluoride. There, the Mo’allem Kalayeh facility could use the Iraqi raw material from the Akashat mine to manufacture enriched uranium fuel rods for civilian reactors.
Though Iran’s theocratic Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei would subsequently issue a fatwa forbidding the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons under Islamic law, if needed in an emergency, uranium-hexaflouride could also be used to make atomic bombs.
Sometime after the commencement of hostilities between the UN coalition forces and Iraq, a second blacked out convoy consisting of 1987 Volvo with red cab, a 1988 Volvo with black cab, a 1987 Scania with white cab, a 1985 MAC truck with brown cab, and a 1987 Scania with a red cabin transferred similar chemical-bioweapons materials. [“Shell Game: How Saddam’s Dissident Shiite Commanders Sent WMD To Iran by William Thomas, based on US Defense Department Report: IIR 2 201 0744 91/Filename:22010744.91r. Message SERIAL: (U) IIR 2 201 0744 91 “TRANSFER OF NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, AND CHEMICAL (NBC) MATERIEL DURING DESERT STORM” May 4/95]
Alarmed by these intelligence reports, U.S. military commanders placed a high priority on interdicting this clandestine WMD supply route into Shiite Iran in an operation that would also deter Teheran from (conventionally) intervening against the coming U.S. attack on largely Shiite Iraq.
Would newly developed fuel-air bombs achieve these mission objectives?
“Everybody within three miles of the drop will be bleeding from every orifice of his body,” exclaimed Colonel George Gray, Commander of the 1st Special Operations Wing. General Calvin Waller reportedly ad-libbed with a wide grin, “Oh God, how many do we have?”
At least 11 BLU-82 would be subsequently dropped on Iraqi positions. But in Afghanistan these Vietnam War-era “Daisy Cutters” were ineffective against the Taliban in the Tora Bora mountains bordering Pakistan. “The caves they were targeting are likely too deep for something like that to have any effect,” stated A. J. Clark, a former military intelligence analyst and president of a company providing geospatial intelligence tech. [psywarrior.com]
MOAB fuel-air bomb -Getty
The standard military response: Use Something Bigger. Something like the MOAB, “Mother of All Bombs”. Shoved out the rear ramp of a C-130 military transport, the first 22,000 pound GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb was dropped on a cave complex in the Achin District of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province in April 2017.
“When they blow up, they blast fuel into the air,” explained former Air Force Special Operations combat controller, Edward Priest. “That fuel atomizes. Then there’s a secondary explosion that lights the fuel that’s been atomized.”
Think of touching off an 11-ton propane tank over a selected target. “You’d overpressure the people hiding in the caves there,” Priest enthused. “You’d never find them — it just blows your lungs out of your mouth. It kind of turns you inside out.”
If a $16 million MOAB doesn’t fill Afghan tunnels with human tissue, why not try mopping them up with a 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator? Like the MOAB, the MOP’s conventional detonation produces a scary mushroom cloud. But no fallout.
Perfect.
1954, Bikini Atoll 15-megaton hydrogen bomb test -reddit.com
KLICK 5
As I reported in Bringing the War Home after my return from the Gulf Eco War, where I served with a three-man Environmental Emergency Response Team, Jim Brown — aka “Hank” — advanced with the American invasion force heading into Kuwait.
“Our guys got told left and right that if things got a little cranky and stupid, we could end up in a short shooting war,” Brown told me. “But we had a bigger bullet. We had stuff that could come off the navy ships or could be dropped.” That “stuff” he later learned, included a “Klick 5”. A 5-kiloton nuclear bomb.
It seemed like a great idea at the time. An 18,000-pound conventional MOAB detonates with the equivalent blast of a .009-kiloton nuclear weapon. Without releasing any radiation.
“WMDs were running back and forth. Those guys were doing this from October, November 1990 to about the time we went to the H airfield [and engaged in] a little smash and grab,” Brown recalled.
“Those guys” were Karmel’s dissidents driving WMD past Basra into Iran. As Hank explained American nuclear targeting in Iraq, “You have to do it where you can get away with it. It has to be something out in the hinterlands and still be worth being discovered. Baghdad — nooo. Salman Pak, producing and storing biological stuff — nooo. Basra, which was the direct [WMD] pipeline between Iran and Iraq — yeah!”
It was risky. If Saddam Hussein confirmed that a low-level nuclear attack had taken place, he might choose to respond by blowing up the key Darbandikhan dam. Located near the ill-fated town of Halabja, seized by Iranian forces during the recently concluded eight-year war with Iraq, control of that key dam was regained when Iraq massacred Halabja’s inhabitants using chemical weapons supplied by a smiling Donald Rumsfeld after shaking hands with Saddam in a widely publicized photo-op.
As Stephen Pelletiere wrote in the New York Times, through its Baghdad proxy, “America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades — not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water.” [New York Times Jan 31/03]
Darbandikhan Dam in the Tigris Basin -researchgate.net But if Saddam took exception to a nuclear strike on his nation and blew the Darbandikhan dam, not only would Israelis and Palestinians go thirsty in the perpetually parched occupied territories — US troops would need rubber rafts to occupy Baghdad. “The thing they held over us was a reality-based threat,” Jim Brown told me in a series of interviews that would soon go viral. “Light off a nuke and we’re going to pop that dam, and in three days you’re going to be under three feet of water.”
On the other hand, detonating an underground nuclear bomb in the desert outside of Basra would be “serving notice on the Iranians not to intervene,” Brown explained. “We needed to make a clear sign: If we see a human body wave, or even a Ryder truck coming our way, this is what you’re going to get.”
Ground zero for this sub-surface demonstration was carefully chosen, my informant continued. “This was a really good spot to make a point to everybody — far enough from Saddam that he would not respond with the NBC [Nuclear, Biological, Chemical] that he was known to have amassed with assistance from the West to smash Iran. The nuclear message to Teheran would be clear: “Carry on cranky, and we’re going to give you a really bad day.”
Dick Cheney and other war planners, Brown added, “were taking a heckuva chance.” Because if truckloads of yellow cake were “excited” by a nearby nuclear detonation — or if a rumored laboratory “way station” was hit in the Basra area — the resulting blast could be amplified beyond low yield. “Can you say cook-off?” Brown asked.
High suicide rate among British soldiers returning from Afghanistan -tasnimnews.com
“THE BLOKES HAVE JUST NUKED KUWAIT”
A 15,000-pound, fuel-air detonation on February 7, 1991 created an immense fireball. Outside the mile-square blast zone, oxygen consumed by the aerosolized fuel-air explosion from this mini-MOAB created a vacuum that imploded the lungs of every living creature within two square miles. As one website pointed out: “Usage of the BLU-82 is the precursor to the next weapon that may be used... the bunker-busting nuclear weapons.” [casi.org.uk]
A British Special Air Service (SAS) Commando team on a classified reconnaissance mission saw a distinctive mushroom cloud from 110 miles away and radioed in, “Sir, the blokes have just nuked Kuwait.” [indymedia.nl; psywarrior.com]
GOING NUCLEAR
In fact, the blokes had just nuked Iraq. The first detonation of a nuclear weapon against another country since the atomic deletion of the city of Nagasaki took place approximately 11 miles east of Basra sometime between February 2 and February 5, 1991.
"America's military entertainment" -wearethemighty.com
By then, Iraq’s third largest city had been declared a “free fire zone” — a term used during the industrial-scale slaughter in Vietnam to designate areas eligible for carpet-bombing by nearly invulnerable formations of gigantic B-52s. As US military spokesman General Richard Neal disingenuously declared, there were no civilians left in Basra, only military targets.
Truth was, this viciously smashed city was still home to 800,000 civilian residents. In direct violation of Article 51 of the Geneva Protocols, which prohibits area bombing, saturation “grid-bombing” by B-52s mixed high-explosives and fuel-air bombs with cluster bomblets to spray fire, pressure waves and shrapnel through densely populated neighborhoods. Entire city blocks were leveled, the LA Times reported, leaving “bomb craters the size of football fields and an untold number of casualties. [Washington Post Feb 2/91; Los Angeles Times Feb 5/91]
So an underground “low-yield” nuclear explosion in empty desert 11 miles west of Basra would not have been noticed in a city reported by the Los Angeles Times to be already engulfed by American weapons of mass destruction in “a hellish nighttime of fires and smoke so dense that witnesses say the sun hasn't been clearly visible for several days at a time.” [deoxy.org]
Who gave the order to go nuclear?
Under the Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1995 during the Clinton administration, using nuclear weapons preemptively “to demonstrate U.S. intent and capability to use nuclear weapons to deter adversary use of WMD” — must be authorized by the National Command Authority. In this case: either Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney or Commander In Chief, George Herbert Walker Bush.
At the time of this subsurface detonation of a “small” 5-kiloton GB-400 “penetrator” in hard-packed sand, Iraq’s sharkay (daytime wind) was blowing from NW to SE, away from Basra toward Iran.
But the wind shifted 180-degrees during the nighttime shamal, “so everybody gets a taste,” as Hank put it. “We had FOX [Nuclear Biological Chemical ‘sniffer’] vehicles sitting on the Kuwaiti side of the border to make sure the thing went the way it was supposed to.”
According to Hank, about “400 to 500 meters” of subterranean sands were “cleaned out”.
Was the bomb’s message received? After all, Hank explained, “You use a tactical nuke of one to 5 kilotons to stop somebody from doing something, or to contaminate an area — area denial. But you’ve got to notify folks you’ve done it with an overt [booom!] or covert [phone call] warning: ‘Look what we just made disappear. Are you sure you want to keep doing what you’re doing?’”
Grunts on the ground, as well as highly placed intelligence sources, confirmed that the seismic disturbance from ground zero radiating out from a half-mile to one-mile was “pretty devastating,” Brown stated. Besides flipping vehicles over, causing alarms to go off, and knocking people off their feet at that distance — as an unexpected bonus, the earth-shaking blast detonated every explosive mine in the area.
As for Washington’s intent to halt the WMD transfers and deter Iranian intervention, “It made their point,” my informant said.
The immediate “spike” in airborne radiation would drop quickly, Brown went on. This meant that two weeks later, US or British Special Forces teams transiting the area would not “start glowing immediately when we drive through it.”
A Desert Storm scheduled to assault Kuwait on February 25, would have left coalition forces in the clear, as well.
But the Union of Concerned Scientists (USC) was less sanguine. Those nuclear scientists pointed to the atomic detonations at the Nevada Test Site, which showed “the minimum burial depth to ensure containment… is roughly 100 meters for a one-kiloton explosion.”
The level of resulting fallout will also depend on the local weather conditions, such as wind and rain.” [ucsusa.org May/05]
Basra dust storm -kurdistan24.net
Beleaguered Basra was initially spared, as light steady winds dispersed any sand-borne fallout into Iran and beyond. Until nightfall, when the day breeze reversed towards Basra and Kuwait. This way, Brown continued, atomized radioactive sand would “cover everybody with a low dose, instead of a few somebodies with a high dose.”
But…
“Any of that dirt that got churned up again would distribute that stuff for a long time. You’re okay to drive through. The people living there, you would start to see the residual effects — short- term, long-term — depending on your level and type of exposure.”
Just like in Afghanistan.
GETTING DEAD
Wafted on the gentlest breezes, radioactive nanoparticles 100-times smaller than a white blood cell, deposit “straight into the blood stream,” explained former Lawrence Livermore nuclear lab scientist, Leuren Moret. “It’s carried all throughout the body into the bones, the bone marrow, the brain. It goes into the fetus. [It] gets 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.” [Project Censored Feb 21/05; iconoclast-texas.com May 9/05]
This includes fallout from Depleted Uranium cannon shells fired from Abrams tanks and A-10 ground attack jets. For there is nothing “depleted” about atomized uranium or plutonium particles that can kill any organism ingesting or inhaling them over the next 4.5 billion years. [Daily Star (Beirut) Sept 14/04; Tribune Media Services June 29/06]
Lodged anywhere in the body, just one gram of U-238 from Depleted Uranium dust or a “low yield” subsurface nuclear detonation emits 12,000 alpha particles per second. According to Eric Wright, Professor of Experimental Hematology at Dundee University, even a living cell that seems unharmed by radiation can produce cells with diverse mutations, resulting in cancer and birth defects several cell generations later. [American Free Press Aug 27/04]
Pentagon studies prior to widespread American DU weapons fire during a Desert Storm warned that aerosol uranium exposure under battlefield conditions could lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, non-malignant lung disease, neurocognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects. [San Francisco Chronicle Oct 10/02]
Canadian, British, Australian, and American GIs exposed to “cocktails” of fast-tracked experimental vaccines, DU and chemical weapons — along with their spouses invisibly contaminated through welcome home lovemaking — were deemed as expendable as the “ragheads” and “sand niggers” targeted in this latest race war.
What about the moms? Yet another Pentagon-funded study concluded: “Fetal exposure to uranium during critical prenatal development may adversely impact the future behavioral and neurological development of offspring.” [Vanity Fair Nov/04]
As Hank summarized, “The word, ‘catastrophic’ does not even come close.”
THIRSTY
But this was only the beginning of an undeclared nuclear disaster that afflicts southern Iraq to this day. As Hank went on, a low-yield nuclear bunker buster that explodes from 20 to 160 feet underground “is more than enough to contaminate every water source in the region. The aquifer would be contaminated. And that wouldn’t go away in a week.”
The people who gave the order to detonate a “small” nuclear bomb outside Iraq’s third largest city “know that “ground contamination on the surface will make it to the water supply and make it undrinkable,” he added. “But they considered it ‘low level’ radiation. No big deal.”
Except, of course, for everyone using that water for the rest of their pregnancies. And agonizingly abbreviated lives.
“Everything you do, from washing dishes to taking a shower — everything you do…” Hank’s voice trailed off as we both considered how much water we use every day of our own lives. “You can’t filter this out if you don’t know it’s there. And you don’t see a lot of people running around over there with a Brita.”
RADIOACTIVE IRAQ
Or with Geiger counters. In the heart of Baghdad, Christian Science Monitor reporter Scott Peterson waved a sensitive wand over a small pile of jet-black dirt near a group of playing children — only to step back in alarm when the instrument registered 1,900 times normal background radiation. [Christian Science Monitor May 15/03; The Daily Star (Beirut) Sept 14/04; WSWS May 10/05]
Never forget that more than 200 uranium-tipped Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from American warships and submarines during the initial made-for-media “shock and awe” bombardment of Iraqi cities. Hundreds more would follow. By war's end, more than 3,000 bombs and sea-launched cruise missiles had impacted metropolitan Baghdad’s six million human inhabitants. Never mind the myriad other species comprising this planet’s intricate web of life.
In that initial aerial blitz, allied forced dropped 250,000 bombs on a country the size of California. With DU dust blowing everywhere, sanitation knocked out by U.S.-led airstrikes, and epidemics rife — “catastrophic” does not begin to describe the legacy of permanent low-level radioactivity and heavy metal poisoning throughout a country whose leader had courted destruction by announcing that he would only accept only dinar and gold for Iraq’s oil. [deoxy.org]
ROKKE
While Jim Brown’s 40-ton tank transporter headed into Kuwait through DU-laced sandstorms for an eventual rendezvous with the debilitating illness later known as Gulf War Syndrome, Major Dr. Doug Rokke was also arriving in-country. This forensic scientist, Vietnam veteran and US Army doctor was to head the army's Depleted Uranium Assessment team.
“The US Army made me their expert,” Rokke subsequently recounted. “I went into the project with the total intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in war, because I'm a warrior. What I saw as director of the project led me to one conclusion: uranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for eternity, and medical care must be provided for everyone” — whether they had fired these diabolical munitions, or were fired upon.
Major MD Rokke won two medals for his work. One citation 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." [Vanity Fair Nov/04]
But no one prepared the children, infants and fetuses in Iraq for such nuclear “hazards”. Never mind their parents.
Dr. Souad chronicles what happened next: “Many in Rokke's Gulf team are now dead. He himself suffers from serious health problems including brain lesions and lung and kidney damage. When government doctors finally agreed to test him in November 1994, three-and-a-half years after he fell ill, while he was director of the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project, he was found to have 5,000 times the permissible level of radiation in his body — enough to light up a small village.”
The same year U.S. troops raced across radioactive battlefields, the U.S. Veterans Administration began finding “Persian War Veterans with Neoplasms”. A neoplasm is a tumor. The VA would go on to diagnose 680 cases of Hodgkin’s Disease, Leukemia Carcinomas, Malignant Lymphomas and Malignant Neoplasms of the Skin, Cervix, Brain Stem, Bone, Breast, Spleen, Lymph Nodes, Bladder, Major Salivary Glands, Colon, Rectum, Lung, Pancreas, Prostate, Kidney, Thyroid and Ventricles of the heart in the veterans of a brief, yet long-lingering War. [“Persian War Veterans with Neoplasms by DX and age group Fiscal Year 1991,” page 1.]
VA wants to extend Gulf War Syndrome filing deadline -retireenews.org
DURAKOVIC
Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a Colonel in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, was put in charge of Nuclear Medicine Service at the Dept. of Veterans Affairs Medical Center. After finding unusually high radiation levels in American veterans, as well as birth defects in the offspring of their spouses, he became convinced that DU exposure was not only slowly killing them, but also causing changes in the human gene pool that would ravage future generations in Iraq and the USA.
Asked to stop his research by Washington, he refused. When he requested that President Clinton initiate an inquiry into DU contamination, Dr. Durakovic was fired.
But denial is as useless against DU as it is against the experimental vaccine “cocktails” and anti-Sarin “PB” pills forced on American troops. By 2005, the Veterans Administration would count 15,000 dead Desert Storm soldiers, 250,000 permanently disabled, and nearly a half-million veterans slowly dying from degenerative diseases. [Arctic Beacon Aug 24/05]
What of the Iraqi families who never threatened a distant and seldom considered USA?
Dr. Durakovic revealed that soil samples from their neighborhoods displayed radiation levels 17-times higher than any readings that might be remotely acceptable — threatening, in his words, environmental “catastrophe.” Durakovic worried that DU contamination from the 1991 war may have exposed the entire population around the Persian Gulf, along with deluges of oil rain. [Depleted Uranium Radioactive Contamination In Iraq Aug/06; Scorched Earth and Bringing The War Home, by William Thomas]
US war planners figured that the estimated 300-800 tons of nuclear waste dumped on the inhabitants and ecologies of Iraq during a Desert Storm was expected to mask the radiation sickness from a nuclear “penetrator” exploded underground east of Basra. [Tribune Media Services June 29/06; byronchild.com]
They were right.
NUKING BASRA
Far to the south of Baghdad, nearly every family tested in Basra experienced extreme symptoms from so-called “low level” radiation exposure. [Vanity Fair Nov/04]
A subsequent study of cancer rates among Iraqi soldiers who fought in around Basra area in 1991 found “a statistically significant increase in the rate at which they were stricken with lymphomas, leukaemia, and lung, brain, gastrointestinal, bone and liver cancers, as compared to personnel who had not fought in the south.” [WSWS May 10/05]
Yet, Iraq’s formed capitol “is some 200 kilometers away from sites where large numbers of DU shells were fired,” reported David Rose.
"Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before,” testified Dr. Jawad Al-Ali before the 2003-2004 Citizen’s Tribunal in Japan. “The first is double and triple cancers in one patient. For example: leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient with two cancers — one in his stomach and kidney. Months later, primary cancer was developing in his other kidney. He had three different cancer types.
“The second is the clustering of cancer in families,” the British-educated MD continued. “We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer. Dr. Yasin, a general Surgeon here has two uncles, a sister and cousin affected with cancer. Dr Mazen, another specialist, has six family members suffering from cancer. My wife has nine members of her family with cancer.” [Tribune Media Services June 29/06; WSWS May 10/05]
“These multiple unrelated cancers in the same individual have been reported in Yugoslavia and Iraq in families that had no history of any cancer. This is unknown in the previous studies of cancer, a new phenomenon," commented Leuren Moret. [American Free Press Aug 27/04]
While interviewing Dr. Jawad al Ali at Basra's Talimi Teaching Hospital about his research into the effects of radiation and cancer cases “in Iraq's radioactive governorate of Basra,” reporter Ewa Jasiewicz learned that the hospital staff were also dying from radiation poisoning at rates rivaling emergency responders at Chernobyl.
“Thirteen doctors and nurses at Talimi have contracted cancer since 1990 — breast, testicular and lymphoma,” Ewa wrote. “In 1990 the hospital itself was the target of a US missile strike which saw its intensive care unit crushed by shells and rockets, killing four patients and burying a specialist doctor alive under a collapsed ceiling.”
With post-war cancer rates “skyrocketing,” Dr. Jawad added that water and food are the primary contaminated sources. As well as the “re-suspension” of radioactive particles by strong winds, digging up or vehicular disturbance of radioactive sands.
“The rate of cancer here has multiplied 15-times since the last Gulf war,” Dr. Jawad stated in Basra, blaming this ongoing genocide on DU.
“For Dr. Jawad, the constant cancer cases (many of which go unreported he stresses) are a spiraling emergency,” Ewa continued. As this Iraqi doctor explained, “For the past 13 years we were unable to test people properly, we didn't have sufficient or appropriate equipment. WHO teams were banned from visiting us and the US took away parts for our MRE machines and our computer systems, saying that they could be used for making weapons of mass destruction. We really need special sensitive tissue testing equipment, but under the sanctions, this was unavailable.” [“Uranium in Your Koolaid” Occupation Watch Jan 26/04]
USA! USA! USA!
Based on their experience in southern Iraq hospitals, MDs Ahmad Hardan, Abdul-Hafidh and al-Khazraji found that anyone exposed to Iraq’s nuclear environment could anticipate “a considerable increase in infectious diseases caused by most severe immunodeficiencies in a great part of the population; frequent occurrence of massive herpes and zoster afflictions in adults and children; AIDS-like syndrome; a hitherto unknown syndrome caused by renal and hepatic dysfunctions; leukemia, elaptic anemia and malignant neoplasms; congenital deformities caused by genetic defects (also to be found in animals)…”
… as well as “Down’s syndrome, skeletal and chromosomal abnormalities, hair loss, rare skin diseases, severe vertigo accompanied by nausea and loss of balance, distorted vision and loss of sight, severe migraine, sterility among both sexes, and an increase in the incidence of miscarriages and of still, premature and difficult births.” [Further Evidence on Relation between Depleted Uranium, Incidence of Malignancies among Children in Basra, Southern Iraq Dr. Alim Yacoup; Dr. Imad al-Sa’ doun; Dr. Genan G. Hassan College of Medicine, Basra University]
With more than half of all cancers in Iraq occurring among children under the age of five, Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, Director of Oncology Center at Basra’s biggest hospital warned that children throughout the country were especially susceptible to radiation poisoning. [Lifeboatnews.com May 27/03]
“Children in particular are susceptible to depleted uranium poisoning. They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used to build and nourish their bones and they have a lot of soft tissues. Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most. However, cancer of the lymph system, which can develop anywhere on the body, and has rarely been seen before the age of 12 is now also common," he added. [Tribune Media Services June 29/06; americanchronicle.com]
Doctors Hardan, Hafidh and al-Khazraji were also seeing “escalating numbers” of children wasting away from leukemia, lymphomas and Hodgkin’s disease.
By 2005, child leukemia in southern Iraq was up 400% since 1990. Breast cancer in young women age 30 and under was similarly “many times higher”; ovarian cancer in women had increased by 1,600%. [Junge Welt Oct 24/00; Further Evidence on Relation between Depleted Uranium, Incidence of Malignancies among Children in Basra, Southern Iraq - College of Medicine, Basra University]
CAN YOU SAY, HIROSHIMA? ["hero-sheema"]
When the Japanese began studying radiation effects in southern Iraq during the summer of 2003, their Geiger counter went “off the scale on many occasions. During their vista local hospital was treating upwards of 600 children per day.” [envirosagainstwar.org; americanchronicle.com Apr 17/06; WSWS May 10/05]
In March 2004, the Tokyo Citizen’s Tribunal found Bush Jr. and his administration, guilty of war crimes in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq for using illegal weapons. [Depleted Uranium Radioactive Contamination In Iraq: An Overview by Dr. Souad al-Azzawi Aug/06 Hiroshima]
BAGHDAD DIARIES
Basra’s beleaguered doctors knew they were facing something extreme. And they were not alone. Before her death from sudden-onset cancer, the much-loved Iraqi artist and Baghdad Diaries author, Nuha al-Radi wrote: “The carnage takes place in apocalyptic proportions… Everyone seems to be dying of cancer. Every day one hears about another acquaintance or friend of a friend dying. How many more die in hospitals that one does not know? Apparently, over thirty percent of Iraqis have cancer, and there are lots of kids with leukemia... [envirosagainstwar.org]
Nuha was convinced that DU was entering the water table and flowing into every corner of the country, poisoning everything.
And not just Depleted Uranium.
“Before her death in Beirut, Nuha “believed her leukemia could have been caused by DU,” wrote Dr. Souad al-Azzawi. “And if not DU, then something else to which Iraqis were knowingly exposed.” (my emphasis). [Depleted Uranium Radioactive Contamination In Iraq: An Overview Aug/06 Hiroshima]
All this suffering to punish a dictator installed by the CIA. [The Independent 28 June 1997]
Iraqi child stricken by American Depleted Uranium -ar.inspiredpencil.com
"IS IT NORMAL, DOCTOR?”
The Pentagon’s disingenuous denial of “no known health problems” associated with DU munitions was curious. The US Army’s own training manuals require anyone coming within 25 yards of DU-contaminated homes, equipment or terrain to wear respiratory and skin protection. Otherwise, the manuals warned, “contamination will make food and water unsafe for consumption.”
Pentagon studies prior to Desert Storm warned that aerosol uranium exposure under battlefield conditions could lead to cancers of the lung and bone, kidney damage, non-malignant lung disease, neurocognitive disorders, chromosomal damage and birth defects. [San Francisco Chronicle Oct 10/02]
Another Pentagon-funded study concluded: "Fetal exposure to uranium during critical prenatal development may adversely impact the future behavioral and neurological development of offspring." [Vanity Fair Nov/04]
Add a low-yield nuclear detonation to chronic DU exposure and the result over successive generations can only be described as genocidal. As the American Indian Wars and Israeli’s current atrocities in Gaza have demonstrated, the only way to defeat “insurgents” defending their families, homes, land and culture is to turn most of the population into corpses, casualties or refugees.
"Depleted Uranium impacts on Children in Iraq" by Juliet Bonnay -julietbonnay.com
“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,” Moret reported. “The levels of uranium are increasing in the population every year. Every day, people are eating and drinking while the whole environment is contaminated. There are more babies born with birth defects, and the birth defects are getting more and more severe.”
In Afghanistan and Iraq, women who should be overjoyed by their pregnancies call their condition “jelly belly”. So many babies were being born with stubby limbs, with their intestines outside their bodies, with huge bulging tumors where their eyes should be, with a single Cyclopean eye, without eyes, or without limbs, or even without heads — new mothers were no longer asking, “Is it a girl or a boy?”
Instead, they anxiously inquired, “Is it normal, doctor?”
“SILENT GENOCIDE”
The result of going nuclear in Iraq, Moret reminds us, is a “Silent Genocide” that permanently contaminates the genetic future of every region its dust storms reach — from Switzerland to Florida. [Journal of International Issues July 1/04]
A decade before another 3,000 tons of aerosolized DU and heavy metal infiltrated the airways and bloodstreams of Iraq’s citizens, the UK Atomic Energy Authority estimated that the first round of DU contamination “could cause “500,000 potential deaths."
Asserted in a confidential April 30, 1991 memo to the privatized munitions company, Royal Ordnance, the AEA's calculation did not include deaths from fallout and water permanently poisoned by a nuclear weapon covertly detonated east of Basra in late 1990. [globalresearch.ca; envirosagainstwar.org; WSWS May 10/05]
As Ewa Jasiewicz saw with her own eyes: “War casualties continue to be hospitalized, expire… and pile up in the graveyards of Basra. Some of the alive are slowly dying already, from the first breath of heavily radiated air… Others are set to bring deformed babies into the world, with crownless skulls or fused fingers, while whole families watch listlessly as taut bed-bound members reel from the violence of the poison in their veins, in their flesh.
“There are weapons of mass destruction everywhere in Iraq,” she declares. “They were made in America, bombed over here, and lie left vitiating in the dessert, beside highways, in demolished homes, rubble buildings; a fine murder dust on the breeze, upon the water, inside the roasting tissues of a chicken on a spit in the street, inside the bodies of bone-eating cancer bearing children, or inside the wombs of women sick with dizziness — just pregnancy or poisoning? Their birth-days can only tell. But one thing is certain in occupied Iraq… the killing continues. The killing continues.” [Occupation Watch Jan 26/04]
Just before the second Gulf War kicked off, my OP Ed warning of DU’s dangers was accepted for publication in the Globe and Mail. Only to be spiked by the publishers.
Part 2. TORA BORA
Part 3. THE ABORTED ISRAELI NUCLEAR STRIKES ON IRAQ & IRAN: 1991, 2006, 2024
VETERAN'S ATOMIC ALLEGATIONS CONFIRMED BY SEISMIC DATA
A Reporter's Dilemma
Cover Photo: Nagasaki, 263,000 human beings erased in the blink of a melted eye, Aug 9, 1945 -Edward Lengel