News & Politics > Briefs
edited by Lorna Tychostup

Deadly Depleted Uranium

With the war against Iraq in full swing on March 27, Washington, DC Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) introduced legislation, HR 1483, requiring studies on the health and environmental impact of depleted uranium (DU) munitions, as well as cleanup and mitigation of depleted uranium conta-mination at sites within the United States where DU has been used or produced.

McDermott, a me-dical doctor, has been con-cerned about this issue since veterans of the Gulf War started experiencing unexplained illnesses. His concern deepened, he said, after visiting Iraq, where Iraqi pediatricians told him that the incidence of severely deformed infants and childhood cancers has skyrocketed.
“Depleted uranium is toxic and carcinogenic and it may well be associated with elevated rates of birth defects in babies born to those exposed to it,” said McDermott. “We had troops coming home sick after the Gulf War, and depleted uranium may be one of the factors responsible.”

Depleted uranium is what is left over after ordinary uranium has been enriched for use either in nuclear weapons or in reactors. Denser than lead, it is used to coat shells, bullets, and other projectiles to increase their armor-piercing capacity. When a depleted uranium round strikes a solid object like a tank or rooftop, it goes straight through and erupts inside in a burning cloud of vapor. This settles as chemically poisonous and radioactive dust which is considered to be highly dangerous if inhaled or ingested. A report issued in 1990 by the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a company under contract to the US military, identified the hazards even more clearly. Because depleted uranium is a “low-level alpha radiation emitter” it could be “linked to cancer when exposures are internal.” It further warned, “Aerosol DU exposures to soldiers on the battlefield could be significant, with potential radiological and toxicological effects.”

This dust can remain on site for years, and is claimed to have caused disease in both soldiers using the munitions and in the local populations affected. In southern Iraq the desert is littered with carcasses of burned-out, old tanks and sprinkled with particles that give off low levels of radiation left behind by weapons tipped with DU. Iraqis blame soaring rates of cancer and birth defects on the more than 940,000 depleted uranium projectiles they claim were fired by US and British troops during the 1991 conflict. According to Rep. McDermott, “About three hundred metric tons of depleted uranium were fired in Iraq during the Gulf War, and many citizens of Iraq as well as veterans of the Gulf War have experienced increased rates of cancers, leukemia, and birth malformations, [which] are among the health problems that may be linked to DU.”

It is unknown how much DU ordnance was used in the current war on Iraq but it has been reported that there have been repeated attacks by US aircraft carrying DU weapons on high-rise buildings in Baghdad’s city center. According to a recent BBC Online report, “the US says it has no plans to remove the debris left over from DU weapons it is using there.” Despite a United Nations study released in March 2003, which found DU contaminating air and water seven years after it was used in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the US “says no clean-up in Iraq is needed because research shows DU has no long-term effects. Both the US and the UK acknowledge the dust can be dangerous if inhaled, though they say the danger is short-lived, localized, and much more likely to lead to chemical poisoning than to irradiation.”

The BBC report continues, “But a study prepared for the US Army in July 1990, a month before Iraq invaded Kuwait, says: “The health risks associated with internal and external DU exposure during combat conditions are certainly far less than other combat-related risks.
“Following combat, however, the condition of the battlefield and the long-term health risks to natives and combat veterans may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU.”

Lieutenant-Colonel David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, reportedly told BBC News Online, “It’s fair to say the 1990 study has been overtaken” by more recent studies by the UK’s Royal Society and the World Health Organization which show there are no long-term effects from DU. “And given that, I don’t believe we have any plans for a DU clean-up in Iraq.” A Defense Department report on DU by Alexandra Miller of the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland is due out next year. Miller’s preliminary findings show that tiny amounts of DU, previously thought too small to be harmful, can be extremely toxic. The interaction between the toxic effect due to DU’s chemical composition and the effect of radiation seem to reinforce one another, causing more genetic damage than thought possible by the simple effect of toxicity and radiation added together.
“You get more than an eight-fold greater effect than you’d expect,” says Miller. This means that eight times as many cells suffer genetic damage than predicted, indicating a gross underestimation of the risks of DU. “People have always assumed low doses are not much of a problem, but they can cause more damage than people think. None of these studies has yet impacted on the regulations.”

Yet according to McDermott, the Pentagon continues to send mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, at times claiming DU is not a health hazard, and at other times acknowledging the need for sophisticated protective gear and safety training regarding exposure to DU.

The most recent US Army guidelines recommend surgeons be “aggressive” in removing fragments of shrapnel from soldiers struck by shards of DU shells. This is a change in wording from the Army surgical mandate during the 1991 Gulf War, when surgeons were told to “do their best” to remove DU shrapnel, which, in practice meant that smaller pieces were often not removed at all, in an attempt to keep muscle and tissue damage to a minimum.

Some DU critics believe the change in wording is due to growing evidence of the health threats of DU. “The need for these studies is imperative and immediate,” says McDermott. “We cannot knowingly put the men and women of our armed forces in harm’s way.”

—LORNA TYCHOSTUP

Sources: BBC, the Chugoku Shimbun , the Guardian

DynCorp—Privateering Paramilitary Police Force Colonizing Iraq with Cops?

Weeks before the $50 million contract was awarded on April 18, the multi-billion dollar military contractor Dyncorp was advertising the following on its Web site:
“On behalf of the United States Department of States, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, DynCorp Aerospace Operations (UK) Ltd. (DAOL), a CSC Company, is seeking individuals with appropriate experience and expertise to participate in an international effort to re-establish police, justice, and prison functions in post-conflict Iraq. Interested applicants must be active duty, retired, or recently separated sworn police officers, correctional officers, or experienced judicial experts. US citizenship is required. If interested, please call toll-free (866) 258-8770 or e-mail cops.recruiting@dyncorp.com or visit www.policemission.com.”
According to the New York Times, an unnamed Pentagon official stated, rather than rely on UN peacekeeping troops in Iraq to stem the looting and ransacking going on there, “We want something a little more corporate and more efficient with cleaner lines of authority and responsibility.”
On the job in several countries, DynCorp cops protect President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, make up the nucleus of the police force in Bosnia, and under the Plan Columbia contract, 307 DynCorp cops—139 of them American—fly a fleet of 88 planes on defoliation missions over coca crops in Columbia. In the US they oversee Mexican/American border posts, the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential planes and helicopters, and several of the Pentagon’s weapons-testing ranges. A virtual military force outside of the military, Dyncorp is also responsible for reviewing security clearance applications of military and civilian personnel for the Navy.
Ninety-eight percent of DynCorp’s sales come from the federal government. According to Wired magazine, “When the government hires DynCorp to oversee the withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo or guard the Afghan president or spray crops in Colombia, critics say the motivation is less a need for technical expertise than a desire to conduct operations Congress won’t let the military do, and to keep potentially messy foreign entanglements at arm’s length. In other words, DynCorp and its brethren exist to do Washington’s dirty work. Private contractors and subcontractors operating abroad are subject neither to US law nor to the military code of conduct. They don’t count under congressional limits on troop commitments, and they aren’t obliged to talk to the media. The government needn’t even discuss the details of the agreements: The Pentagon and State Department aren’t required to reveal to Congress contracts that are smaller than $50 million, and many of DynCorp’s are. All of which raises troubling questions of accountability.”
At the present time, 36 nations are participating in DynCorp international police programs with approximately 200 American police officers serving in Bosnia, 600 in Kosovo, and 80 in East Timor. According to their Web site, working 12-hour days with 30 days on and six days off brings in a salary ranging from $75,000 to $98,000. This policing is done in “emerging democracies” where “US involvement in international policing has been expanding since 1989. The first major project in Panama was followed by similar missions in El Salvador, Somalia, and Haiti. The involvement of American police personnel has been a critical component in each of these missions.”
The Web site also states that participation in their form of policing also “unites police officers from around the world in a common cause—the performance of modern, professional law enforcement. The bonds they create last a lifetime and benefit the officers, their agencies, their communities, and their profession.”
What the DynCorp Web site doesn’t state is that human rights violations and fraud accusations have been made by former employees and citizens groups from countries where DynCorp has operated. A group of Ecuadorian peasants filed a class action suit against the company back in 2001, which alleged herbicide drift from Dyncorp spraying in Columbia spread into Ecuador killing their crops, causing sickness in people and livestock, and in several cases killing children. Assistant Secretary of State Rand Beers told US District Judge Richard Roberts, who is overseeing the case, that it was “a grave risk to US national security and foreign policy objectives,” and linked al-Qaeda to the training of rebels in Columbia, stating the spraying was part of the war on terrorism. Beers later withdrew these claims and Roberts has not yet made a decision to let the case continue.
One of the lawsuits filed by employees claimed that DynCorp police trainers in Bosnia were paying for prostitutes and participating in sex trafficking. Under suspicion of illegal activity, yet immune from prosecution, several employees were forced to resign. Another lawsuit alleged payroll padding and billing the federal government for unnecessary repairs, and charged “coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.”
Democrat Janice Schakowsky from Chicago has been on the job keeping an eye on DynCorp since April 2001 when private military contractors flying for the CIA provided information to the Peruvian Air Force, which shot down a plane over Peru that was carrying missionaries. American Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter were killed due to the joint US-Peruvian “force-down” Intercept Program, which allows the US to employ private military contractors who have the authority to target any given plane as suspicious, leading to possible military action.
Authoring HR 1591, the Andean Region Contractor Accountability Act (ARCAA), legislation that would prohibit the federal government from funding private armies in the Andean region, Schakowsky stated, “With the blessing of our State Department and other agencies, private military contractors operate with little or no transparency or accountability to the American people. It is shameful that the United States is a willing participant in a policy that puts at grave risk the lives of innocent civilians. What is worse is that we use taxpayer dollars to hire private military companies to carry out this failed policy and refuse to take responsibility for our actions.”
—LORNA TYCHOSTUP
Sources: Corpwatch, New York Times, Wired