Depleted Uranium - A crime against humanity

"I'm horrified. The people out there - the Iraqis, the media and the troops - risk the most appalling ill health. And the radiation from depleted uranium can travel literally anywhere. It's going to destroy the lives of thousands of children, all over the world. We all know how far radiation can travel. Radiation from Chernobyl reached Wales and in Britain you sometimes get red dust from the Sahara on your car."
The speaker is not some alarmist doom-sayer. He is Dr. Chris Busby, the British radiation expert, Fellow of the University of Liverpool in the Faculty of Medicine and UK representative on the European Committee on Radiation Risk, talking about the best-kept secret of this war: the fact that, by illegally using hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) against Iraq, Britain and America have gravely endangered not only the Iraqis but the whole world. For these weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that-whipped up by sandstorms and carried on trade winds - there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate-including Britain. For the wind has no boundaries and time is on their side: the radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years and can cause cancer, leukemia, brain damage, kidney failure, and extreme birth defects - killing millions of every age for centuries to come. A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time.(...)"

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UK citizen tortured at Guantanamo

"(...)The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films ... Lying on the floor of the compound, all night I would hear the screams of others in the rooms above us, as they were tortured and interrogated. My number would be called out, and I would have to go to the gate. They chained me, and put a bag over my head, dragging me off for my own turn. They would force me to my knees for questioning. They would threaten me with more torture.(...)"

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New Bush's ally boils people alive

George W. Bush shacking hands with president Karimov of Uzbekistan

"(...)Actually, there is much that U.S. interrogators can learn from their counterparts in Uzbekistan on how to break down prisoners. One of the CIA's jet planes used to render purported terrorists to other countries—where information is extracted by any means necessary—made 10 trips to Uzbekistan. In a segment of CBS's 60 Minutes on these CIA torture missions (March 5), former British ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray told of the range of advanced techniques used by Uzbek interrogators:
'drowning and suffocation, rape was used . . . and also immersion of limbs in boiling liquid.'(...)"

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"(...)President Karimov government was awarded $500m in aid from the Bush administration in 2002. The SNB (Uzbekistan's security service) received $79m of this sum.

The U.S. State Department web site states "Uzbekistan is not a democracy and does not have a free press. Many opponents of the government have fled, and others have been arrested." and "The police force and the intelligence service use torture as a routine investigation technique.(...)"

Muzafar Avazov, body showed signs of burns on the legs, buttocks, lower back and arms. Sixty to seventy percent of the body was burnt, according to official sources. Doctors who saw the body reported that such burns could only have been caused by immersing Avazov in boiling water. Those who saw the body also reported that there was a large, bloody wound on the back of the head, heavy bruising on the forehead and side of the neck, and that his hands had no fingernails.














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"The United States is committed to the worldwide elimination of torture and we are leading this fight by example. I call on all governments to join with the United States . . . in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture."

George W. Bush, on the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 26, 2003)

Empire?

"By an American empire I mean 725 military bases in 138 foreign countries circling the globe from Greenland to Asia, from Japan to Latin America. This is a sort of base world — a secret, enclosed, separate world where our half-million troops, contractors and spies live quite comfortably around the world. I think that’s an empire. Granted, the unit of European imperialism was the colony. The unit of American imperialism is the military base."

Chalmers Johnson, Berkeley professor and sometimes consultant to the CIA

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list of some of the military bases
Base Structure Report FY 2002 Baseline

"Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace. It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him."

King Baudouin I, King of Belgium

Save the war children

Oil fields burning from the war.

Ameriya Shelter: A cruise missile with a DU warhead hit the shelter on February 13, 1991. The 1500 people, mostly children were burned alive inside the shelter. The shelter is being preserved as a memorial.

A young boy next to bombed apartment house where many residents were killed.

Falah Hussein (age 20): When a U.S. dud bomb suddenly exploded, he lost his right leg. Two years later, he contracted bone cancer that spread to his lung. His doctor predicted he wouldn't survive another two weeks.

Fadel, 7 years old, came from Basra, South of Iraq. Depleted uranium, with it metal toxicity and radiation, has damaged her liver and kidneys. A needle was injected into her body to draw out the abdominal dropsy. She died soon after the painful injection.

Mothers with children in their arms in leukemia ward of Mansool Children's Hospital in Baghdad.

8-year old Safaa at the entrance to Mansool Children's Hospital. She was leaving because they had run out of medicine. As a side effect of the anti-cancer medication she was taking to treat her leukemia, she had lost all of her hair.

Juwad has lost 550g in four month since his birth. His parents were unable to buy milk for him. He suffered from heavy diarrhea due to malnutrition. The hospital had almost no antibiotics available. Babies with low resistance are highly susceptible to infectious disease. Many fail to escape death.

Baby born with anencephaly. His shocked mother disappeared from the hospital.

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Canada’s Baby Seal Slaughter

This year, the Canadian government has given the go-ahead to hunters to bludgeon to death more than 300,000 baby harp seals—that's more than one-third of all those born. This is one of the biggest seal hunts in the country in decades.

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