TORA BORA

Part 2.

TORA BORA

William Thomas

with Jim Brown

ON TUESDAY EVENING, November 12, 2001, Babrak Khan, a Jalalabad resident and former guard at a nearby Islamic militants bas, recognized the distinctly bearded and emaciated Osama bin Laden outside a guesthouse in that city. The next day, Osama and his al-Qaeda and Taliban followers headed into the nearby Tora Bora mastiffs.

American bombing of the region intensified. The 11th day of Ramadan on November 26 found bin Laden deep within a Tora Bora cave complex warming himself with a glass of green tea. A week later, Mohammed Akram, who occasionally cooked for bin Laden, was fixing dinner near another cave when a powerful blast blew him some 30 feet into the mouth of the grotto. Two of his colleagues were killed. Mohammed, along with another Saudi and a Kurdish fighter, fled.

Less than two months after the 9/11 terror attacks, pursuing Osama bin through the granite caves of Afghanistan’s rugged Tora Bora region presented “one of the more difficult operational challenges to confront US military forces,” complained Lt. Colonel Eric Seppo. While precision-guided weapons doom above-ground facilities, “difficult to locate” buried bunkers “are often beyond the reach of most conventional weapons” unable to penetrate tens of meters of rock. [Deeply Buried Facilities Implications for Military Operations, USAF Air War College May 2000; Air Force Times Apr 14/97]

But help was on the way.

DAISY CUTTERS

In 1972, Melvin Cook, a professor of metallurgy at the University of Utah and author whose books linked high explosives with Creationism, sought to undo the Creator’s handiwork by borrowing the aluminized slurry used in mining to heat, fracture and pulverize extremely hard rock for use in the world’s most powerful chemical bomb. [workingforchange.com Nov 8/01; globalsecurity.org]

First “field tested” during the slaughter that poisoned the ecology for generations and killed two-million people in Vietnam, Lasos and Cambodia — before being deployed against Iraqi armor and terrified barefoot conscripts in the 1991 Gulf Slaughter — 15,000 pound BLU-82 “Daisy-Cutters” were shoved out the back of C-130 transport planes to seal Tora Bora’s cave entrances.

Detonating meters underground, the resulting explosive energy “coupled” with bedrock, creating a seismic shock wave capable of crushing underground bunkers. And the internal organs of anyone caught in the “overpressure” from a blast wave 20-times stronger than the explosion itself. [ucsusa.org May/05]

ISIS fighters enjoy bleachers seats as Tora Bora rocks -Getty

London Daily Mail reporter David Williams witnessed a daisy-cutter attack: “The sound split the air. It was like a thunder clap directly overhead at the height of a ferocious storm. I could see the massive oily black cloud of the explosion as it rolled across the hillside, a mixture of thick smoke, chunks of earth and debris.” [workingforchange.com Nov 8/01; commondreams.org]

“The effect of the BLU-82 is astonishing, and rare film shows a detonation, shock wave and subsequent mushroom cloud very similar to a small nuclear weapon,” wrote Paul Rogers in The Mother Of All Bombs. Eye-witnesses reported “scenes of extraordinary devastation” from a firestorm that sucked all the oxygen from the air, crushed human organs and incinerated an area the size of five football fields in a single mighty blast. [openDemocracy.net Mar 7/03]

By December 13, 2001, US forces had detonated at least four 17-foot-long Fuel Air Bombs on tunnel complexes and Taliban concentrations in Afghanistan. [globalsecurity.org; commondreams.org]

GBU-28 Earth Penetrator first field test, Tora Bora -reddit.com

DIRTY BOMBS

Meanwhile, B-1 Stealth bombers and eight-engine B-52s were also field testing GBU-28 Depleted Uranium “penetrators” against rock and reinforced concrete. Shaped like spears, these 2 1/2 ton dirty bombs were tipped with radioactive material nearly twice as dense as lead. Atomizing Uranium-238 waste left over from making nuclear bombs and the spent fuel from nuclear power plants, each GBU-28 blast scatters 3,300 pounds of radioactive particles to the winds. [Le Monde March 2002]

Eager to try out their B61-11 Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator in Afghanistan, the Pentagon believed that the signature blast effects and resulting heavy metal and radioactive fallout from their DU-tipped Daisy-Cutters would mask underground “low-yield” B61-11 detonations in Tora Bora, just as they had outside Basra in Iraq. [smh.com.au Sept 7/02]

They were nearly proven correct.

DIAL-A-DETONATION

Calling for the development of tactical nuclear weapons and a resumption of nuclear tests, the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review included "options for variable and reduced yields” that could be “dialed-in” for use against those annoying Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Libyans, Iraqis, Iranians and Syrians.

“The White House and US DOD spoke frequently about the development and use of fission, low-yield and non-fission, seismic bunker- and cave-busters,” reported MA and PhD Mohammed Daud Miraki of the Afghan DU & Recovery Fund. “The US Strategic Military Plan and US Nuclear Posture Review expresses intentions to use new classes of weapons in Afghanistan and other states. This program was known to be accelerating its weapons development and experiments in readiness for a possible Iraqi incursion.”

Submitted to Congress on December 31, 2001, CONPLAN 8022 called for “low yield” Nagasaki-size nuclear bombs to obliterate “time-urgent targets” anywhere in the world.

This reversal of decades-old U.S. prohibitions against “first use” of nuclear weapons saw the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists move the minute hand of their “Doomsday Clock” forward to seven minutes to midnight. [People's Weekly World Newspaper Mar 16/02]

We would never be so comfortable again.

U.S. airstrikes are followed by confusion and outrage -NPR

NUCLEAR WEAPONS WANT TO BE USED

Soon after American attacks on Afghanistan commenced, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld told the press that “he did not rule out the eventual use of nuclear weapons.” [Houston Chronicle Oct 20/01]

The reason nuclear weapons must be used, Americans were told, is that only a nuclear blast can vaporize caches of chemical, nuclear or biological weapons not authorized by the “good” government — which of course retained bioweapons and 5,045 nuclear warheads in its own American and NATO stockpiles. [AP June 11/07]

Blowing up stockpiled chemical-biological weapons is a spectacularly bad idea, as coalition forces downwind of exploding Iraqi CBW stocks at Kamisiyah learned to their cost during the first Persian Gulf War. [Bringing The War Home by William Thomas]

Besides, Benjamin Phelan pointed out, “A well-designed granite bunker could withstand four times the shock produced by” a conventional bunker buster.[Harper's Dec 1/04]

Another risk, cautioned my primary source, US military insider, Jim Brown: “If you nuke something that’s already [in a fissile pile], you’ll get a cook-off you didn’t expect.” Even doing “a flash bang” over an area with scattered Depleted Uranium debris from previously dropped daisy cutters, “could cause those pieces to reciprocate” — by absorbing and releasing Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma and X-rays.

Dangers are compounded when countries facing American willingness to use 4th generation “low yield” nuclear weapons respond with nuclear weapons of their own. “The concern is that countries are starting to see these weapons as useable, whereas during the Cold War they were seen as a deterrent,” worried nuclear expert Ian Anthony, at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. [AP June 11/07]

POINT TOWARD ENEMY

“Adjustable” nuclear bunker busters between 0.3 to 340 kilotons — equivalent of 300 to 340,000 tons of highly radioactive TNT — included 150 B61-11s in the U.S. arsenal. [Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists May/June 1997; Wired Oct 8/01]

Designed to penetrate deep into the earth before detonating, a shaped “lens” in each B61 warhead directs a blast hotter than a thousand suns downward, destroying everything buried beneath it in a "shock-coupling effect” to a depth reaching several hundred meters.” [Defense News Mar 2/97]

According to senior staff scientists at the Union of Concerned Scientists, detonating “just a few meters underground… increases the underground destructive effects by more than a factor of twenty.” [ucsusa.org May/05]

Or as Brown put it with GI directness, “Do an overpressure wave in a cave, everything in there is squished.”

With the resulting hard radiation supposedly sequestered underground, the 1,200-pound B61 was enthusiastically hailed by nuclear war enthusiasts as a “relatively safe” atomic bomb that would not kill too many innocent bystanders. Or freak out other superpowers into an all-out thermonuclear response. [Philadelphia Inquirer Oct 16/00]

PINGING

Detonating a tactical “nuke” deep underground would also allow satellites to locate features buried 300-feet under rock — “similar to the approach used by a submarine when it emits a sound (or ‘ping’) and listens for an echo,” enthuses the U.S. Air Force. Except the “pings” in Afghanistan were nuclear detonations.[USAF Air War College May 2000]

“You get a 3-D map of the area,” Hank explained in one of our frequent calls. After a nuclear blast “rings the mountains like a bell, you know where the holes are, where the people are. Our guys went in there in NBC [Nuclear, Biological, Chemical] suits.”

FALLOUT

Still, the air force was worried. Three months before 9/11, its precedent-busting study concluded: “The political repercussions of employing nuclear weapon may be greater than the United States would want to contemplate, and the environmental consequences of potentially spreading a warehouse full of potentially deadly biological or chemical agents would be unacceptable.” [USAF Air War College May 2000]

The political fallout from the first use of nuclear weapons against another country since the 1991 "demo" outside Basra could exceed the “large area of lethal fallout" scientists warned would accompany “the large amount of radioactive dirt thrown out in the explosion” from a 5-kiloton weapon (equivalent to 50,000 tons of radioactive TNT). [Philadelphia Inquirer Oct 16/00]

Osama bin Laden flees to safety in Tora Bora -theglobeandmail.com

OSAMA ALLOWED TO ESCAPE

Osama bin Laden fled Tora Bora around December 1, heading for Pakistan’s Parachinar region. Pir Baksh Bardiwal, the intelligence chief for eastern Afghanistan, was astounded when Pentagon planners decided against using readily available helicopter Landing Zones to insert U.S. forces to block the exit routes.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Bin Laden's talk with his followers in Tora Bora just a few days after his departure may explain why US intelligence officials said that they thought they heard his voice on December 10, probably on a short-wave transmission.” [Christian Science Monitor Mar 4/02]

Early the previous day, a four-engine USAF C-130 transport had dropped a conventional 15,000 pound daisy-cutter over Tora Bora. [London Times Dec 10/01]

THERMOBARBARIIANS

Rushed into production after 9/11, at least eight BLU-118s were quickly deployed into the Afghan theater. The Global Security website reported: “On or about March 3, 2002 a single 2,000-pound fuel-air bomb was used for the first time in combat against cave complexes in which al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters had taken refuge in the Gardez region of Afghanistan.” [globalsecurity.org]

Guided by U.S. Special Forces “lasing” cave complexes with invisible laser pointers, the Navy’s new shock-proof, polymer-bonded BLU-118B thermobaric bomb chad become a “thermobarbaric” terror weapon.

“It works as a combination of a shock wave and a fuel explosion," explained U.S. Central Command’s Cmdr. Matthew Klee. "The first explosion spreads flammable aerosols through the underground complex. Then, the second ignites the fuel” — unpleasantly crushing the internal organs of everyone in the blast zone.

“Instead of boom, this bomb goes BOOOOOOOM!” exulted Air Force spokesman Captain Joe Della Vedova. “This thing kills the earthworms.” [Las Vegas Review Jan 21/02]

Over the March 1, 2002 weekend, the Pentagon field-tested a pair of 2,000-pound BLU-118b “penetrators” during Operation Anaconda in eastern Afghanistan. Was this Mother Of All Bombs also the Mother Of All Deceptions?

“This sort of cover-story makes it easy for, say, reporters, to believe they have witnessed a fuel-air explosion, when in fact it was a very small, low-yield, nuclear weapon,” pointed out George Paxinos at the Information Clearing House. Why would this “intense propaganda effort” to alert Americans and the world to Washington’s new Massive Ordnance Air Burst weapon emphasize that the resulting blast “produces a fireball and a mushroom-cloud almost indistinguishable from that of a small tactical nuclear weapon?” Paxinos prophsized.

Indeed, CNN reported that “Officials suggest perhaps the Iraqis might even mistake a MOAB blast for a nuclear detonation." [CNN Mar 11/03]

“SPINNING A NUCLEAR ATTACK”

“This is a cover-story,” Paxinos asserted. Two decades before the current “going nuclear” hysteria over Ukraine, CNN reported that we were “being prepared for the preemptive use of tactical nuclear weapons.”

Issued in March 2002, George Bush's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) pledged to “test” Nuclear Penetrator Missiles. “That's my hunch,” DU expert Tedd Weyman believes. “We tested the prototypes there.”

According to Desert Storm veteran Jim Brown, beginning in March 2002 and masked by thunderous DU-tipped fuel-air bombs, four 5-kiloton GBU-400 nuclear bombs were detonated by American forces in Afghanistan's mountainous regions, raising mushroom clouds that sent radioactive fallout over Jalalabad and nearby villages.

“Coupling” the energy of a nuclear blast to the kinetic energy implicit in a mountain of rock under severe compression would carry the shockwave down and outwards in a “3-D bubble,” as Brown described it, collapsing any open cavity — whether cave or human organs — in the vicinity.

To obtain a seismographic 3-D “snapshot” of Tora Bora’s honeycomb caverns, at least one of these four nuclear detonations took place amidst those craggy karsts in the open air.

Jim Brown’s GI buddies on scene told him what happened far from media eyes in the remote mountains of northern Afghanistan. My informant paraphrased their reports: “Back our guys away from the general area — ‘Don’t look that way for two or three seconds’ — and oops! we blew that up.”

With the initial shockwave rippling through the mountains — and radioactivity wafting through mountain passes — Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters knew that something momentous had occurred. But killing a few of the enemy in collapsing rock and nuclear fire actually proved counterproductive, Brown related. “It drove others deeper into less accessible areas. It backfired.”

JUMPING NEEDLES

Wouldn’t seismographic needles jump on distant dials, I wondered aloud?

They did, Hank replied. “But you would not be able to designate it, because there was too much else going on.” A major conventional explosion, such as a gigantic C5 Galaxy transport plane auguring in, he claimed, “would give you the same seismographical signature.”

Seismologist Keith Nakanishi and others at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear bomb labs agreed that detecting, locating, and identifying a clandestine nuclear explosion is particularly challenging in the Middle East, where unusual seismic spikes picked up by a few, widely scattered seismic monitoring stations would be drowned out by constant earthquakes, waves of cruise missiles, and massive bombs delivered by American warplanes.

Nevertheless, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory claimed that among these “thousands of seismic signals annually, some [are] quite similar to the signals that would be generated by a small underground nuclear blast.”

If megaton-size nuclear weapons tests caused earthquakes, could a “baby nuke” cause the earth to move? Pooh poohiing that possibility, the U.S. Geological Survey admitted that even “deep mining can cause small to moderate quakes and nuclear testing has caused small earthquakes in the immediate area surrounding the test site.” [earthquake.usgs.gov]

The Livermore seismologists agreed, noting that a conventional 1,000 pound explosion set off by Israel on the Dead Sea shores on November 8, 1999 resulted in a quake of magnitude of 2.6 on the Richter scale. A 2,000-kilogram explosive detonated two days later, caused a 3.5 ‘quake. [llnl.gov]

Each of the four nuclear weapons dropped on Afghanistan set off a bedrock-amplified explosive force of 10,000 tons.

QUAKES

The initial nuclear explosion(s) were immediately followed by a severe earthquake that “struck northern Afghanistan and was felt as far away as India,” the People’s Weekly World reported. Even in this earthquake-prone region, the long-lasting and powerful tremors were unprecedented, with 150 people killed and 500 houses destroyed.

“It is not unlikely that the use of powerful bombs led to the quake,” one geophysicist said.

Moscow thought so, too. An ITAR-TASS report speculated that the 7.2 Richter-scale ‘quake that struck northern Afghanistan may have been caused by the powerful fuel-air and bunker-penetrating bombs used in earlier US air strikes in that same region. [whatmatters.nu]

So did Kamran Ahmed. Reporting from Karachi, he wrote: “When bombs such as Daisy Cutters and other sophisticated bombs are dropped on the ground, stresses are induced in the earth’s crust. These stresses are released at weaker locations of the fault sooner or later. The bombings also increase the seismic activity in the area or areas that are connected below the earth through dense rock. The severe earthquakes that struck Afghanistan in March can be attributed to these bombings.”

Dr. Gary Whiteford, a Canadian Professor of Geography at the University of New Brunswick, is renowned for his exhaustive study correlating nuclear tests and earthquakes. Looking at “killer earthquakes” that ended the lives of at least 1,000 people, Dr. Whiteford found that 63% of those earthquakes occurred within one to three days after a nuclear blast test. [dawn.com]

In the half-century before atomic testing began, 68 easily detectable earthquakes of more than Richter 5.8 occurred every year. When hundreds of atomic bombs started going off in what can only be described as a large-scale nuclear war against planet Earth, the ‘quake rate rose "suddenly and dramatically” — nearly doubling, to an average 127 per year.

The U.S. military still called the cumulative health damage from “low level” radioactive fallout a “coincidence”. But Whiteford disagreed. “The geographical patterns in the data, with a clustering of earthquakes in specific regions matched to specific test dates and sites do not support the easy and comforting explanation of `pure coincidence’,” the professor said. On the contrary, “It is a dangerous coincidence."

“Abnormal meteorological phenomena, earthquakes and fluctuations of the earth's axis are related in a direct cause-and-effect to testing of nuclear devices,” concluded Shigeyoshi Matsumae, President of Tokai University, and Yoshio Kato, Head of the University's Department of Aerospace Science.

As Matsumae and Kato sensais pointed out: “On June 19, 1992, the United States conducted an underground nuclear bomb test in Nevada. Another test was conducted only four days afterwards. Three days later, a series of heavy earthquakes as high as 7.6 on the Richter scale rocked the Mojave desert 176 miles to the south. They were the biggest earthquakes to hit California this century.

Only 22 hours later, an “unrelated” earthquake of 5.6 struck less than 20 miles from the Nevada test site. The biggest earthquake ever recorded near the Trinity site caused one-million dollars of damage to buildings in an area designated for permanent disposal of highly radioactive nuclear wastes only fifteen miles from the epicenter of the earthquake.”

With more than one million people dead in earthquakes possibly related to nuclear tests, the US Energy Department continued to insist that even the biggest underground nuclear blasts have no impact beyond a radius of 15 miles. [ratical.org]

Unless their reverberations were merely the first ripples of an ever-expanding wave

DIRTY DEEDS

“You might be able to drill down with a low-yield weapon, but [not far] enough to contain the blast,” cautioned Union of Concerned Scientists' Robert Nelson. "There's no such thing as a clean surgical strike. It's dirty."

Given the drastic reaction of the world community if the use of nuclear weapons by the United States against Afghanistan were discovered, the White House gambled that the blast effects from each 5-kiloton nuclear blast among the rugged mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border would be largely contained within those granite barriers. But even as each telltale atomic detonation was absorbed by solid rock and masked by conventional MOAB detonations releasing mushroom clouds of debris — radioactive fallout would drift downwind over travelers, villages and larger population centers.

A US Energy official acknowledged, “some fallout” was inevitable. He did not add that concentrations of Depleted Uranium fallout in Kabul and Jalalabad exceeded levels found at Chernobyl. [FOX Feb 6/05]

WATCH THE BIRDIES

Taliban fighters concussed by fuel-air bombs were already dying from internal bleeding. Near Rish-Khor military base in the Afghan northern capitol, birds sat on tree branches with blood oozing from their beaks.

“We were amazed to see all these birds sitting quietly on branches,” one witness said. “But when we shook the tree the birds fell down and we saw blood coming out of their mouths. Then we climbed the trees to see those that were still stuck on tree branches, all of them had bled from their mouths. Two of the birds appeared to be partly melted into the trees branches.”

According to PhD Mohammed Daud Miraki, who collected many first-hand accounts on the after-effects of heavy US bombing, “many dead Taliban soldiers had severe discoloration of the skin, orange, without being burned, while others had their rifles melted in their hands.”

A medical doctor named Wazir added, “Most of the victims have had respiratory problems and internal bleeding for which there is no apparent cause.” (My emphasis) [khalifa.com Oct 30/01]

When American jets swooped in at daybreak to bomb Karam in the Surkhrod district of Nangarhar, the village was replaced by massive craters. Many residents died from what appeared to be internal concussive injuries.

Other victims of American field testing exhibited symptoms of radiation sickness. In describing “another bizarre, yet tragic scene,” Dr, Mohammed continued, “Many Taliban soldiers that survived the bombing in the north have died after returning to their native villages in the south and southeast of the country. They had no physical injury upon their death, however, died from internal bleeding and other bizarre symptoms including uncontrolled vomiting, diarrhea, and blood loss in urine and stool. Their families were shocked with disbelieves.” [Afghan DU & Recovery Fund]

Perplexed by so much “hot” material, medical teams and technical experts thought they were looking at “enhanced” Non-Depleted Uranium from America’s latest generation of radioactive cannon shells, bomb and missiles.

They were much more likely looking at severe contamination from "low-yield" nuclear weapons.

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

By May 2002, many critics of the indiscriminate bombardment of Afghan cities and villages suspected that new weapons were being tested. That month, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, founder and director of Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) here in Canada sent a team in-country to interview and examine civilians in Nangarhar province. This heavily bombed district was “a strategic target zone” reported the BBC, “for the deployment of a new generation of deep-penetrating ‘cave-busting’ and seismic shock warheads.”

Based on the “radioactive, toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads” used by the coalition forces," the UMRC started looking for radiation poisoning. What the team found was, in their words, “astonishing.”

NO EXCEPTIONS

Having identified “several hundred people suffering from illnesses and conditions similar to those of Gulf veterans,” the team administered tests. “Without exception, every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium internal contamination,” UMRC reported. These readings were off the scale of all previous known DU contamination.

“The results were astounding: the donors presented concentrations of toxic and radioactive uranium isotopes between 100 and 400 times greater than in the [DU-exposed] Gulf veterans tested in 1999.”

The average for 17 randomly selected patients Jalalabad, Kabul, Tora Bora and Mazar-i-Sharif was 315.5 nanograms of uranium per litre of urine. A 12-year-old boy living near Kabul displayed 2,031 nanograms. The maximum permissible level for members of the American public is 12 nanograms/litre.

When a follow-up UMRC team arrived in Afghanistan in September 2002, conditions were much worse, with “a potentially much broader area and larger population of contamination.”

Team leader, Professor Dr Asaf Durakovic told the BBC he was "stunned" by the results. “I'm certainly not saying Afghanistan was a vast experiment with new uranium weapons. But use your common sense."

WHAT IS NDU?

The editor of Awakened Woman visited some of the six sites examined by the UMRC team in and around Kabul, where American bunker busters were detonated. While hundreds of tested Afghan people presented symptoms resembling those of DU-exposed Gulf War veterans, Stephanie Hiller reported, none of the civilians tested at Nangarhar showed any trace of Depleted Uranium.

With bioassays identifying uranium internal contamination in Spin Gar (Tora Bora) area, and Kabul up to 2,000% higher than an unexposed population, Hiller and the UMRC reported: “The isotopic ratios of the uranium contaminant measured in Afghan civilians show that it is not Depleted Uranium (DU). The isotopes of uranium found in the Afghan civilians’ urine is Non-Depleted Uranium."

The uranium in nuclear bombs is not depleted.

Field surveyors found that the bulk of the radioactive contamination occurred in the Tora Bora, Bagram frontline, as well as frontline north of Kabul, Shaikoot, Paktia, Paktika, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Kunduz, where massive bunker busters and fuel-air bombs were detonated.

Perhaps in part to mask telltale health effects.

"Aadil, those sure are interesting bomb signatures." -medium.com

BOMBARDMENTS

Other medical survey teams continued to report that in bombardments of the Tora Bora, Shaikoot and Bagram frontline, “large number of antiaircraft weapons and rifles had melted… Many Taliban soldiers were seen with blood coming out from their mouths, noses and ears.” Those who returned to their villages “started to vomit blood and had bloody stools. Subsequently, many have died from their conditions.”

After the bombardment in Khost, public health workers reported seeing some odd skin lesions. Anyone who developed these skin lesions died.

“Subsequent to the contamination, newborn children have physical deformities and those that do not have physical deformity are suffering from Mental Retardation. These cases are reported from Paktia, Nangarhar, Bagram, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz,” the UMRC stated.

In Pachir Wa Agam district near to Tora Bora targeted area, women started to suffer from a deadly condition. Several months after the unannounced atomic bombing, women of the area would become angry over petty issues. These upsets often turned to rage, before they collapsed and died. The UMRC team also reported many children born without eyes or — or with tumors protruding from their mouths and their eyes.

USA-inflicted radioactive contamination on families in Afghanistan -sott.net

The wife of Mohammed Daud Miraki Assadullah gave birth to a deformed child that hardly resembled an infant. In 2002, she told a medical survey team in Kabul that significant DU contamination was likely to migrate by air and water to wider and more populated areas. [European Parliament Verbatim Report of Proceedings Apr 9/02]

This observation was confirmed by a European Union report. [European Parliament Verbatim Report of Proceedings Apr 9/02]

"When I saw my little boy with those monstrous red tumors, I thought to myself, why is it difficult for Americans to understand that they are hated in our country?” Assadullah told the survey team in February 2003. “If I do this to the child of an American family, that family has the right to pull my eyes out of my eye sockets. I like to tell the Americans that they love to live their lives of luxury at the expense of our extermination."

  The father of another victim of U.S. bombing attacks on Kunduz told the team in December 2002: “My wife was pregnant and we were happily waiting for the moment to see our second child,” Zar Ghoon said. “When the baby was born, it was hardly a human… When my wife saw the baby, she went into shock and died after five hours."

Chatting with a field volunteers near Tora Bora in April 2003, Sa'yed Gharib lost it. Screaming in grief and rage he shouted, "What else do the Americans want? They killed us, they turned our newborns into horrific deformations, and they turned our farmlands into graveyards and destroyed our homes. On top of all that their planes fly over and spray us with bullets.

According to Mohammed Daud Miraki’s extensive public health survey, “Most of the people that developed various health problems have died; others suffer from conditions such as kidney disease/failure, confusion, and loss of immunity and painful joints.”

"Tell America, we are not fools. Your words and actions are those of evil. We do not have airplanes like you do, however, we have one thing that you do not have: principles and morals. We will never do anything remotely similar to American children what Americans have done to our children and families," said Nurullah Omar-Khail. [Afghan DU & Recovery Fund]

By October, 2002, Afghan doctors, citing rapid deaths from internal ailments, were accusing the coalition of using chemical and radioactive weapons. The symptoms they reported (hemorrhaging, pulmonary constriction and vomiting) could have resulted from radiation contamination. [LeMonde Diplomatique Mar/02]

But inhalation, ingestion or wound-contamination by Depleted Uranium particles does not lead to such acute radiation poisoning symptoms immediately after exposure.

Nor would “surface water, rice fields and catch-basins adjacent to and surrounding the bombsites have high values of uranium, up to 27 x normal,” as the UMRC found.

“If UMRC's Nangarhar findings are corroborated in other communities across Afghanistan, the country faces a severe public health disaster” Dr. Durakovic told the BBC, every subsequent generation is at risk.” [BBC May3/03]  

Brown believes that Afghanistan’s radioactive water table was further contaminated by fallout washing down from the mountains where four nuclear weapons were detonated. “Rain runs downhill,” he said.

Detecting DU Radiation in Kosovo, Nov 13, 2012

REMEMBERING KOSOVO

Three extensive field investigations by the UN Environmental Program calculated that 30,000 radioactive heavy metal projectiles were fired into Kosovo during NATO’s freelance attacks on Yugoslavia. The resulting explosions released thousands of tons of easily respirable and ingested uranium oxide, toxic nickel and related heavy metal dust particles, mostly under 1.5 microns in size. The diameter of a human hair is 100 microns. [European Parliament Verbatim Report of Proceedings Apr 9/02; Bundesforschungsanstalt für Landwirtschaft (FAL) Nov 8/05]

Medical doctors in Yugoslavia were soon reporting “multiple unrelated cancers” in families living in highly contaminated areas with no previous history of cancer. A previously unknown phenomenon, these “very rare and unusual cancers and birth defects have also been reported to be increasing… in neighbouring countries from transboundary contamination.” [Global Research July 8/04; American Free Press Aug 27/04]

What would happen if “Non-Depleted” radioactive uranium fallout dusted a populated region? Former Naval officer Daniel Fahey has conducted extensive research on DU. “You're talking about something that should be stored as a radioactive waste,” he said, “and spreading it around other countries.” [Mother Jones June 23/99]

As award-winning reporter Robert Fisk wrote in 2001 from the town of Hadjici, “Up to 300 out of 5,000 Serb refugees whose suburb of Sarajevo was heavily bombed by NATO jets in the late summer of 1995 have died of cancer.” According to Fisk, “all surviving refugees” from Hadjici believe that the cancers and leukemia that have affected this population were caused because the U.S. A-10 bombers that struck their factories were firing depleted-uranium weapons.” [Independent Jan. 13/01]

They were right.

Just as veterans of Desert Storm came to call their mysterious maladies “Gulf War Syndrome,” soldiers posted to Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s began referring to the “Balkans Syndrome.” By January 2001, more than a quarter of the 1,400-plus Greek troops stationed in Kosovo had pushed to leave because of the increased risk of cancer.

US law and US Army Regulations AR 700-48 and TB 9-1300-278 require the army to "Clean and Treat" all persons affected and all areas contaminated by the radioactive uranium munitions. But Lt. Col. Mike Milord confirmed that the Pentagon had zero plans to clean up radioactive contamination in Kosovo. Or anywhere else. [Vanity Fair Nov/04; Daily Telegraph Jan 15/01]

Including the cities and villages downslope from the Tora Bora mountains.

Just hope it doesn't go off -politifact.com

Cover Photo: The 'Mother of All Bombs' Is a psychological weapon -inverse.com

Part 3. ISRAEL'S ABORTED NUCLEAR STRIKES ON IRAQ & IRAN: 1991, 2006, 2024