Veterans for Common Sense

When the Bush Administration totals up the cost of the Iraq War it had best be prepared to tack on billions more to clean up the toxic residue of how this country wages war, specifically its widespread use of cluster weapons and Depleted Uranium (DU).

While the shooting may be winding down, the consequences of using these controversial weapons will be around for a long time to come, with clusters taking a steady toll on the unwary and the young, and DU poisoning the air and water.

Cluster munitions-bombs, shells and rockets that release highly explosive canisters that shred everything from people to tanks-have been an environmental nightmare since the war in Southeast Asia. Of the 90 million cluster munitions dropped on tiny Laos from 1964 to 1973, 30 percent failed to explode.

The result is a national minefield that has killed and maimed more than 12,000 people and which continues to exact a yearly toll of 100 to 200. In one 20 square kilometer area, the British Mines Advisory Group, the world’s leading bomb clearing organization, recently found 376,000 unexploded weapons, the vast majority of them cluster munitions.

More than 50 million clusters were used in the 1991 Gulf War. In the two years following the war, they killed 1,400 Kuwaiti civilians and, as late as last year, 200 cluster weapons were found there each month.

According to Colin King, the author of Jane’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal Guide and a disposal expert in Gulf War I, clusters caused “massive problems” in Kosovo, the Gulf and Afghanistan, and they are “going to cause massive problems in the Gulf again.”

The most notorious cluster is the Vietnam era “Rockeye,” the CBU-99, armed with MK-118 bomblets, which have a failure rate as high as 30 percent. A U.S. company hired to clear cluster weapons from Kuwait found 95,700 unexploded MK-118 submunitions in one small area.

More recent cluster weapons, like the CBU-103, 104, 105, and AGM-154 A and B, have better track records, but even these can fail anywhere from 5 to 23 percent of the time.

Children are particularly in danger because some of the canisters are yellow, like the American emergency food packs.

Depleted Uranium is ubiquitous on any recent American battlefield. The U.S. used 320 tons of it during the first Gulf War, and 10 tons of it in Kosovo. Its resistance to enemy projectiles and its ability to turn hardened armor into margarine gives the U.S. an enormous advantage over any opponent who lacks it.

It is, however, illegal. In August of last year, a United Nations subcommittee found that the use of DU violated seven international agreements, including the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

Used in 120 mm tank shells and 30 mm cannon ammunition, DU has an ignition threshhold of only 1132 degrees, one-third that of tungsten. It can punch through four inches of steel, roasting the inside of tanks and armored vehicles with a 10,000-degree fireball.

Anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent of DU turns into tiny dust particles, which may travel as far as 40 kilometers. DU is not very radioactive-about the same as naturally occurring uranium-but if ingested, according to the U.S. Environmental Policy Institute, it “has the potential to generate significant medical consequences.”

DU has long been a suspect in Gulf War Syndrome, the melange of physical woes afflicting up to 30 percent of the veterans from the 1991 conflict. The Department of Defense doesn’t consider low level radiation a threat, but a recent study by the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute may force a reevaluation of that conclusion.

“People have always assumed low doses are not much of a problem,” Alexandra Miller of the Institute told The Guardian (British), “but they can cause more damage than people think.” The study indicates that DU damages bone marrow chromosomes.

The effects of low level radiation are hard to track, because many “solid” cancers don’t show up for 16 to 24 years. However, Iraqi medical authorities claim the cancer rate in the Basra area has jumped ten-fold. The area was saturated with DU during the 1991 war.

Besides being radioactive, DU is also a toxic metal that can damage kidneys and livers.

Another worry are DU “misses,” where the enormous weight and speed of DUs drive them as deep as 24 inches into the ground. “A major concern of the potential environmental effects by intact [DU] penetrators or large penetrator fragments,” notes the World Health Organization, ‘is the potential contamination of ground water after weathering.”

Cluster bomb and DU cleanup is likely to be enormously expensive, and who pays for it will be a major question. The Bush Administration is depending on Iraqi oil sales to foot most of the bill. But the figures don’t add up.

At most, Iraqi oil could bring in $18 billion a year, barely enough to feed the 60 percent of the population dependent on food handouts. Nor does this even address rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, ravaged by 12 years of sanctions and the recent war, a price tag that, according to PFC Energy, a Washington consulting firm, will probably run in excess of $300 billion.

Iraq also has a debt burden that may be as high as $383 billion, and no seems to be stepping forward to write it off. Indeed, the Financial Times called Deputy of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s call for debt cancellation, “mischievous.” As Russian Foreign Alexei Kudrin pointed out, no one forgave his country’s enormous debts.

Unlike in Gulf War I, where the allies picked up most the tab, the Bush Administration’s “Coalition of the Willing” is flat broke, and the White House has only allotted $2.4 billion to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

On top of that, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have been hesitant to step in without United Nations authority.

In part, the IMF is nervous about getting into the business of cleaning up after the American military. “I don’t see that for the long term future you can keep together a world of peace and prosperity just based on military might,” IMF Managing Director Horst Kohler told the Financial Times.

In the end it will likely be Iraqi civilians and U.S. occupation troops who will pay the price for the way we choose to wage war.

Details of the document have emerged only days before the US and China are due to meet North Korea to try to convince it to abandon its nuclear weapons program.

It argues that Washington’s goal should be the collapse of Kim Jong Il’s Government, but this seems at odds with the US State Department’s approach of convincing Kim, in the words of one senior administration official, “that we’re not trying to take him out”.

Hardliners in the Pentagon – and some at the White House – say the US should use its speedy victory in Iraq to drive home to North Korea that it could meet the same fate if it ignores President George Bush’s demands: that it dismantle its nuclear weapons program, ship its spent nuclear fuel out of the country and open up to intrusive inspections.

Just days before Mr Bush approved the negotiations with North Korea, scheduled for tomorrow, Mr Rumsfeld circulated the Pentagon memo to some members of the Administration.

Mr Rumsfeld’s team, Administration officials say, was urging diplomatic pressure for changing the Government, not a military solution. But the memo highlights the internal struggle over how to pursue Mr Bush’s determination to stop the spread of nuclear arms and unconventional weapons.

North Korea is the critical next case in his policy of zero tolerance for “rogue states” because, unlike Iraq, it has active nuclear programs. The CIA believes Pyongyang is selling missiles to Iran, Syria, Pakistan and other nations.

The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is believed to have offered North Korea assurances that the US is not trying to undermine its Government – but has made it clear the country will get no aid and investment until the nuclear programs are dismantled.

He received final approval for his approach in a meeting with Mr Bush last week, a session Mr Rumsfeld did not attend. “There’s a sense in the Pentagon that Powell got this arranged while everyone was distracted with Iraq,” said one intelligence official. “And now there is a race over who will control the next steps.”

On Friday, in its first explicit comment on the Iraq war, North Korea said it had learned something from the fall of Saddam Hussein: “In order to prevent a war and defend the security of a country and the sovereignty of a nation, it is necessary to have a powerful physical deterrent.”

But this week’s talks were nearly scuttled when North Korea issued a statement that appeared to suggest it had already begun reprocessing its spent nuclear fuel into bomb-grade plutonium. Yesterday it quietly issued a correction saying it was moving towards this but had not already done so.

On the weekend, Mr Bush said China’s willingness to intervene in the negotiations contributed to “a good chance of convincing North Korea to abandon her ambitions to develop nuclear arsenals”.

However, few in the Administration believe it will work.

Nevertheless, White House officials say a change of government in North Korea is not official Administration policy – and some suggest the secret memo was circulated for discussion among high-level officials, including the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and may not represent Mr Rumsfeld’s view. His spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, said he supported the President’s diplomatic strategy for disarming North Korea.

Several officials who have seen it say it is ludicrous to think China would join in any US-led effort to bring about the fall of the North Korean Government. “The last thing the Chinese want,” one official said, “is a collapse of North Korea that will create a flood of refugees into China and put Western allies on the Chinese border.”

The beefy Army drill sergeant has been a soldier since he was a teenager. Now 35, he was eager to go to war with the Third Infantry Division and do for real what he had been teaching recruits. But after at least five confirmed kills, he discovered combat was different than he had expected.

“I didn’t think it would be like this, killing people,” Staff Sgt. Thomas Slago reflected, not long after squeezing the trigger on his assault rifle to stop an approaching Iraqi guerrilla, then watching the gruesome result through his scope.

“He exploded like a watermelon,” Slago said.

In numbers not seen since the Vietnam War, trauma experts say, soldiers soon will return home from battle forever changed by what they’ve seen and done.

War in Iraq has meant machine-gunning guerrillas intent on suicide charges. It has meant gunplay in neighborhoods, building corridors and desert bunkers.

Marine Cpl. Clint Begley of Shreveport, La., approached a bunker thinking, “I don’t know if there are three or 30 in there. Oh my God, am I going to have to shoot that guy?”

He did. So did his platoon mate in the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, Cpl. Juan B. Elenes, 21, of Portland, Ore. In another bunker, Elenes shot off the top of an attacker’s head. Then a second man. “I didn’t want to get shot, so I shot him first,” Elenes explained.

Afterward, he said, “OK, I’m done. I’m ready to go back to Kuwait now.”

The presence of Iraqi villagers and irregulars in civilian disguises added to the stress and confusion.

“I didn’t expect the whole civilian thing,” said Lance Cpl. Jack Self, never taking his finger off the trigger of his grenade launcher. He watched a woman tugging two heavily laden donkeys away from a stone house that could provide cover to snipers. He had blasted other buildings like it and found bodies in the rubble.

“Part of me wants to kill everything I see. You just can’t trust anybody,” he said. “I hope there’s nobody in that building when I destroy it.”

Veterans centers are posting trauma advice on Web sites for both soldiers and their families. They are expanding treatment programs for that fraction of soldiers who need special help.

“There will be a lot of work to do when the men and women come back from Iraq,” said psychiatrist Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and a researcher at Dartmouth College. “We’ve had killing and we’ve had death and injuries. We’ve had civilians killed. There was a fragging.”

How many soldiers will require mental health treatment? Past conflicts offer clues.

A nationwide, long-term study of Vietnam veterans — now entering its third phase — concluded that one-third of combat soldiers returned emotionally wounded. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, about 10 percent of the troops suffered distress from a conflict that was much briefer and less intense.

Given the confusing, urban ambush-style fighting in this Iraq campaign, experts predict trauma levels closer to Vietnam’s.

Counselors say most soldiers reconcile disturbing memories with the support of family and veterans’ groups. Reflections on good deeds — rescuing wounded comrades, liberating an oppressed nation, distributing humanitarian aid — can help protect soldiers’ fragile psyches.

But, psychologists agree, a portion of combatants will develop disabling psychiatric illnesses as episodes of fear and violence imprint on their memories, triggering biological and chemical changes that change how their brain cells function.

Fifteen years after being discharged, the post-Vietnam study shows, 15 percent of veterans still suffered from PTSD, the most serious of trauma reactions.

Former West Point psychologist Dave Grossman said soldiers must be trained intensively to overcome the natural reluctance to kill other people.

“When faced with a living, breathing opponent, a significant majority of soldiers revert to a posturing mode in which they fire over their enemy’s heads,” Grossman, a retired lieutenant colonel and former Army Ranger, wrote in his book, “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.”

Traumatized soldiers relive their horrors through flashbacks and nightmares, often followed by depression or fury.

One Vietnam vet told Boston psychiatrist Jonathan Shay: “I really haven’t slept in 20 years. I’m always watching the door, the window. I get up at least five times to walk my perimeter, sometimes 10 or 15 times.”

The brains of PTSD patients show shrinkage of the hippocampus and abnormal activity in the amygdala, small structures associated with memory. The sympathetic nervous system — which is centered in the spinal cord and controls the fight-or-flight response — works overtime years after the danger has passed. PTSD patients continue to produce abnormal levels of key stress hormones and high levels of natural opiates that the brain produces to calm itself.

A recent study at Fort Bragg, N.C., shows PTSD patients have lower levels of a neurotransmitter produced in the hippocampus called neuropeptide Y.

Now the Army wants to know if it can select more resilient soldiers by measuring neuropeptide levels. Future soldiers might get NP-Y booster shots to vaccinate their brains against PTSD.

PTSD treatment includes counseling and exposure therapy, in which patients repeatedly recall their frightening memories to become less sensitive to them. Drug treatments include depression medications. Israeli researchers are testing a drug to regulate the protein AChE, which protects brain cells from becoming hypersensitive after stress.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has modified training and certain battlefield practices to address PTSD.

Units remain together longer and drill in realistic war games. In Iraq, soldiers conducted battlefield rites for fallen comrades. After battle, commanders encouraged troops to openly discuss their fears. During combat, more psychologists and social workers helicopter to forward lines.

More help awaits back home for those soldiers who need it.

Al Batres, who administers the VA’s 206 veteran centers nationwide, says, “The Iraq war has high-tech weapons like the Persian Gulf War. It has street warfare like Somalia and combat like Vietnam. But this war has more controversy and protests like Vietnam, too.”

As vets return home, he says, “They need to know that it’s OK to talk about your experiences in battle. It’s therapeutic.”

VA’s Vet Center Directory: http://www.va.gov/rcs/VetCenterDirectory.htm

VA’s National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: http://www.ncptsd.org/

Baghdad, Iraq – A man staggers from his exploding car after running a checkpoint but returns for the limp body of a woman.

A mother and 6-year-old child lie curled up in the cab of a civilian truck, riddled with bullets.

A major trudges toward the body of what appears to be a fallen Iraqi soldier, only to find a U.S. captain cut down by fire the senior officer commanded.

These are the enduring images of war. They’re what remains after all the tales of sophisticated machinery and well-wrought plans are told, after combat patches fade. They’re what soldiers of Cyclone Company, and those who led them, will carry home from the war in Iraq.

Cyclone Company, part of the U.S. Army’s 4th Battalion, 64th Armor Regiment, came into Iraq with 77 soldiers. Some were barely out of boot camp. Others had more than a decade of service. Some joined because there weren’t any other jobs. Others joined because it was a family tradition.

They weathered a brutal 48-hour convoy through untracked desert and were greeted in the small Euphrates River city of Najaf, in central Iraq, by a withering mortar attack and snipers. They fought their way out of an ambush south of Baghdad and fended off rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, to take the entrance to one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces.

The 14 tanks of Cyclone Company logged an average of 800 miles and moved farther in two days than most tank units did in months during World War II. They blew up 40 tanks, 59 armored personnel carriers, 21 artillery pieces and more than 40 trucks, and took 32 prisoners, according to tentative tallies.

Everyone from Cyclone’s mechanics to its tank commanders will get a combat patch when they get back to Ft. Stewart, Ga., home to the 3rd Infantry Division. Three Cyclone soldiers are under consideration for bronze stars with a “V” for valor, an uncommon medal in any war. The company’s commander is up for a silver star.

The Cyclone Company that is settling into routine policing work in Baghdad’s restive streets is not the same Cyclone Company that Capt. Steven T. Barry inherited in October and commanded through drill after drill in the deserts of Kuwait before leading it into Iraq.

“You definitely see some changes,” said Barry, 29, a former high school athlete from central New Jersey who graduated from West Point as the top-ranking history major. “I think for some, it hasn’t sunk in yet,” he added. “Now, we’ll have time to think about it.”

Spc. Jarrid Lott, a 28-year-old tank driver, has been doing some thinking already. “I’ve seen a car blow up and then a guy run back and grab his wife from the seat and we couldn’t do anything about it,” Lott said. “I saw people taking pictures of dead people. I thought: That’s disgusting. I asked my tank commander, ‘Why are you doing that?’ He said, ‘If my son says he wants to join the Army, I’ll show him this [photograph] and tell him this is what the Army does.’ “

Lott, a native of Redding, Calif., who joined the Army to pay off $32,000 in student loans for his bachelor’s degrees in psychology and social science, sat on a tank nicknamed “Cycho” and declared that his killing days are over. He won’t reenlist after serving three more years. His wife, Sheri, a graduate student in Portland, Ore., is expecting their first child this summer. While he was gone, Sheri found out she’s having a girl. The baby is kicking. They’ll name her Kara Lyn.

Sgt. 1st Class Jeff Lujan, a hard-laughing and hard-driving platoon sergeant, will take home a Republican Guard uniform, some Iraqi dinars and two indelible memories. One is the arduous trek across the desert into battle. The other: “Some of the people I killed who I didn’t know if they were innocent or not. That won’t leave me,” he said.

Last week, on a dark bridge across the Tigris River, Lujan gave the order to shoot the cab of a truck that looked like a military vehicle and whose driver was not heeding warning shots at the checkpoint. When first light came, Lujan, a father of two girls, found a woman and child dead in the cab. Everyone else who had been in the truck — mostly men — had fled.

Lujan doesn’t know what happened to the victims’ bodies. “Who picked them up? Who buried them?” he wonders.

“I’ve reconciled myself,” Lujan said. “We did the right thing, even though it was wrong.”

Lujan, 36, is under consideration for a bronze star for destroying three Iraqi armored vehicles that were tearing into his platoon two weeks ago at an ambush on Highway 1 south of Baghdad. Barry said intelligence later showed that the rout of the ambushers prevented the Republican Guard’s Medina Division from following orders to move up to Baghdad to protect the capital, which was taken by U.S. troops several days later.

Maj. Kent Rideout, 39, executive officer for the 4th Battalion, worked on the documentation for Cyclone Company’s awards Wednesday. But his mind was on the worst day of his career.

Rideout gave the orders that killed Capt. Ed Korn, 31, of Savannah, Ga., who had strayed across enemy lines without Rideout’s knowledge. “I’ve replayed it over in my mind a hundred times, and I still would do it the same way,” Rideout said.

The incident occurred April 4 as Rideout’s unit and others were attacking Iraqi positions on a two-lane road about 15 miles southeast of Baghdad. The convoy of American tanks and armored vehicles was stopped on the road when Rideout and others spotted an Iraqi tank, a Russian-made T-72, apparently missed by other U.S. units that had driven through. They fired and blew it up.

While the vehicle was exploding and burning, Korn and a sergeant apparently dismounted and walked to the tree line near the tank, searching for Iraqi positions, Rideout said.

At some point, Korn spotted a second tank and sent the sergeant back for an antitank rocket before going on alone. Korn had on a brown T-shirt, a flak vest that was left open, and no helmet, according to Rideout, who was scanning the tree line for more Iraqi positions.

“Out of the corner of my eyes I saw behind the tank what looked to be an old campfire,” Rideout said. “I could see tea or coffee steaming, sleeping bags, chickens. It had all the hallmarks of a place where people were living. I put two and two together that this was a place a tank crew was living. All of a sudden we saw movement. Someone dropped down, like he was going to fire, and then stood up and got behind another T-72.”

A Bradley fighting vehicle commander spotted the same movement and signaled it to Rideout. “I looked that way, and he nods like he sees it too,” Rideout said. Rideout’s driver, Spc. John Durst, 24, of Grantsville, Md., poked his head out of the tank’s hatch and leveled his M-16, telling his commander he saw an enemy.

“I said, ‘Yeah, I see it too, engage,’ ” Rideout recalled. “He fired one shot. I’ll never get over it. It was 200 to 250 yards away. He dropped him. I slapped him on the head and said, ‘That’s the greatest shot I’ve ever seen.’ “

The greatest shot Rideout had ever seen hit Korn, a Desert Storm veteran who left Ft. Knox, Ky., to volunteer for war duty in March and had impressed Rideout with his battlefield knowledge.

A Bradley from Korn’s unit then opened fire on the second Iraqi tank. Some of those 25-millimeter rounds apparently hit Korn directly or ricocheted off the tank, Rideout said. They cut the young captain in half.

When someone came to Rideout to say Korn was in the tree line, Rideout ordered a cease-fire and led a search party. He headed toward what he assumed was the body of an Iraqi soldier. He told himself that Korn was fine and had made it back.

“As we got closer, we realized it was Ed Korn,” Rideout said. “It was gruesome. You look at that and you say, I don’t know if I could’ve done anything different. He had no appearance to us that he was an American soldier.

“This was the worst day of my Army career. No doubt, the worst day. I get to go home with that. I get to live with that the rest of my life.”

For some of the younger men of Cyclone Company, it is hard to piece together war memories into a coherent story. “Did this look like a war to you?” asked Spc. Royce Arcay, 26. “I’ve never been to a war, but it sure didn’t seem like what they put on TV…. It’s just kind of weird looking at dead bodies. They don’t look real. I never thought I’d see dead bodies like that, or body parts.”

Bodies killed by the powerful 120-millimeter main guns of an Abrams M-1A1 tank, or its mounted machine guns, don’t lie in quiet repose with neat red circles for wounds. They are mangled, blown apart and burned beyond recognition.

Tank crews often could not escape their handiwork. Some of the Iraqis they killed lay pinned in blasted vehicles that the Americans used as roadblocks. Day and night, tank crews stood guard just yards away. On one bridge in Baghdad, a dead Iraqi soldier pinned in a jeep became known as “Mr. Bubble-Guts,” a macabre nickname that seemed to help some get by the horror of his daily decay.

It didn’t work for Lott. “I’m going to have nightmares,” he said. “Last night I kept dreaming that I wanted to wake up, but I went from dream to dream to dream. When we’re getting on that plane, do you know how that’s going to feel? Just getting on the plane, going home?”

Cyclone Company will be in Iraq for weeks before Lott’s question can be answered.

In the meantime, the soldiers take a measure of war and plan for their future as combat veterans.

Staff Sgt. Charles Wooten, 36, of Meridian, Miss., who is up for a Purple Heart, will leave the Army after 15 years and two wars in the Persian Gulf. He’ll hunt raccoons with his hounds and show pictures of the fist-size dents and confetti punctures left in his tank and point to the eye that took shrapnel but is now healed.

“I thought there were going to be more casualties,” Wooten said. “I was scared of RPGs, but I didn’t think it would be this bad.”

Barry will get command of a headquarters company, then he has a full-ride graduate scholarship to either Harvard, Yale, Duke or the University of Pennsylvania. He’ll probably choose Pennsylvania because it’s closer to his hometown and his girlfriend. After that, he’ll finish a dissertation at West Point, where he’ll teach military history.

Lujan will go to the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, Calif., where he’ll critique training exercises. He said he’ll put in seven more years to reach retirement, then settle down anywhere but his hometown of Albuquerque.

Arcay, who joined the Army when he became depressed over a broken romance, has had enough of war. He’ll leave the military after his hitch is up.

Rideout will take a job as a ground liaison officer to the Navy in San Diego. When he gets back to Ft. Stewart, he’ll look up Korn’s mother and explain what happened, and hope she’ll understand.

Like much of the rest of Cyclone Company, Sgt. Arnoldo Spangaro, 29, a native of Cape Coral, Fla., has a simpler short-term plan.

He’ll start the process of moving his family to Ft. Stewart from Colorado. He’ll watch his 8-year-old stepson, Taylor, play soccer. He’ll push his 4-year-old daughter, Madison, on a swing.

“She doesn’t like to stop on the swing,” Spangaro said. “I’ll probably be there for four hours.”

The trick, he says, is to switch arms so you don’t get tired. Even a gunner’s arm needs to rest.

VA’s Vet Center Directory: http://www.va.gov/rcs/VetCenterDirectory.htm

VA’s National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: http://www.ncptsd.org/

“It’s going to be very embarrassing when it turns out they have nothing
to declare,” said Eugene Betit, a former defense intelligence analyst who
belongs to Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), formed in
January to speak out on the use of intelligence to justify the war.

Another, former CIA station chief Ray Close, said: “I’m hoping they will
be embarrassed into acknowledging a role for some independent body. And who
could it be but the UN?”

As the “smoking gun” continued to elude US sleuths in Iraq, chief UN
weapons inspector Hans Blix called for experts to return to the country to
determine whether the weapons allegations — the main justification for
going to war — had any foundation.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday he was “reasonably sure”
that proof will be found.

“We are quite confident of our intelligence,” he told Jim Lehrer of PBS
public television.

“There was a huge intelligence collection effort with all of our agencies
working together to come up with the body of knowledge that we took to the
UN, and that we had been presenting before the world for a long period of
time,” he said.

Adding to the pressure, Russia, a veto-wielding member of the UN Security
Council, said it would not support the lifting of UN sanctions against Iraq
unless UN inspectors confirmed the absence of weapons of mass destruction.

But Washington has so far rejected such calls, and US Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld on Thursday sought to deflect concerns that evidence could
be planted.

“The (US search) teams have been trained in chain of control, really like
a crime scene,” Rumsfeld told Pentagon staff.

He said: “They will have people with them who will validate things, they
will have the ability to take pictures, and to make sure that the control
over any piece of evidence is as clear as it possibly can be.”

Rumsfeld warned however: “That will not stop certain countries, and
certain types of people from claiming, inaccurately, that it was planted.”

Retired CIA intelligence analyst and VIPS member Ray McGovern told AFP:
“Some of my colleagues are virtually certain that there will be some weapons
of mass destruction found, even though they might have to be planted.

“I’m just as sure that some few will be found, but not in an amount that
by any stretch would justify the charge of a threat against the US or anyone
else.”

He added: “Even if the planting were discovered by and by, they’ll say,
‘ok, the weapons were planted — fine.'”

McGovern said he was alluding to a remark by Powell after it emerged that
a letter purporting to show that Iraq had sought to procure uranium from
Niger — a key argument in the case for war and cited in President George W.
Bush’s January 28 State of the Union address — was a forgery.

Powell told NBC: “It was the information that we had. We provided it. If
that information is inaccurate, fine.”

VIPS, made up of 25 former intelligence officials in the CIA, State and
Defense Departments, Army Intelligence and FBI, made their first public
statement on February 5, critiquing Powell’s presentation before the UN
Security Council seeking an international mandate for the war.

“Never before has a group of veteran CIA graduates — all cum laude —
gotten together to critique the government,” McGovern said.

CIA spokesman Tom Crispell, asked for comment on the former officials’
remarks Thursday, said: “They’re criticizing policy, not intelligence.”

Among the signers are several senior members of the administration of President George W Bush, including the chief Middle East aide on the National Security Council, Elliott Abrams; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith; Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky, and Michael Rubin and David Wurmser, senior consultants to both the State Department and the Pentagon on Iraq policy.

Also signing were Richard Perle, the powerful former chairman of the Defense Policy Board; former United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick; Frank Gaffney, a former Perle aide who heads the Center for Defense Policy; Michael Ledeen, another close Perle collaborator at the American Enterprise Institute; and David Steinmann, chairman of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

The study, “Ending Syria’s Occupation of Lebanon: The US Role”, was co-authored by Daniel Pipes, who has just been nominated by Bush to a post at the US Institute of Peace, and Ziad Abdelnour, who heads a group founded by him called the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL). The study was released by Pipes’ group, the Middle East Forum.

The USCFL, whose 67 “Golden Circle” members include virtually all of the 31 signatories of the report, has been a major force behind the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act that was just reintroduced in the House of Representatives last week by Representatives Eliot Engel, a USCFL member, and Ileana Ros Lehtinen.

The legislation, which had 150 co-sponsors in the House last year, would impose far-reaching economic and diplomatic sanctions against Syria until the president certified that that it had stopped all support to Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia and other groups that Washington considers terrorist, and the government withdraws its estimated 20,000 troops from Lebanon, and takes other measures long demanded by Washington.

“Now that Saddam Hussein’s regime is defeated,” Engel said, “it is time for America to get serious about Syria. The United States must not tolerate [its] continued support of the most deadly terrorist organizations in the world, its development of weapons of mass destruction, and its occupation of Lebanon.”

He said a companion measure, co-sponsored by Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and Republic Senator Rick Santorum, will soon be introduced in the Senate.

The action comes amid a two-week-old flurry of threats by top administration officials against Syria over its alleged failure to cooperate with Washington’s military campaign against Baghdad. Those threats culminated on Sunday when Bush himself accused Syria of having chemical weapons, although he did not specify whether they were home-grown or received from Iraq for safe-keeping, as alleged by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon earlier this year and repeated by senior Pentagon officials.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has accused Syria of harboring members of Saddam’s regime, and asked, whether Damascus was “next” after Iraq, replied that “it depends on people’s behavior”. Intelligence officials told reporters that Rumsfeld had ordered the drawing up of contingency plans for a possible invasion of Syria and that Feith, the Pentagon’s number three official, had begun work on a policy paper about Syria’s support of terrorist groups.

“There’s got to be a change in Syria,” said Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz on a TV network news program. “It is a strange regime, one of extreme ruthlessness.” At the same time, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director James Woolsey, a favorite of Wolfowitz and Perle, who may be tapped to play a top political role in post-war Iraq, declared that Washington was fighting enemies in a “World War IV” that includes “fascists of Iraq and Syria”, a reference to Syria’s ruling Ba’ath Party.

These statements have contributed to the growing impression that administration hawks do indeed consider Syria next on the list, although some have also made clear that if President Bashar Assad – whom CIA sources have said has generally cooperated with US efforts against al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden – meets a number of demands, possibly including turning over Iraqi officials who may have entered Syria, he is unlikely to face the full force of US military power, at least for now.

Still, there is no question that the hawks, boosted by the easier-than-expected victory in Baghdad, are eager to throw their weight around, particularly in Syria’s direction. This is especially true of the neoconservatives closest to the right-wing Likud Party in Israel which, 19 years after US Marines completed a humiliating withdrawal from Beirut in the wake of a series of deadly bombings committed by the Syria-backed Hezbollah, appears itching to get revenge.

Indeed, it was Assad’s father Hafez who single-handedly frustrated US efforts to convert the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon into a major strategic advance in the region. At the time, Abrams, Perle, Kirkpatrick, Gaffney and Ledeen were all serving in the Ronald Reagan administration.

Syria intervened in Lebanon’s civil war in 1975 and has kept tens of thousands of troops there since, although they have become increasingly inconspicuous over the past decade. Except for the 18 months that followed Israel’s 1982 invasion (which was led by Sharon), Damascus’ influence has been decisive in Beirut’s foreign and defense policy.

The 2000 study by Pipes’ Middle East Forum stressed that “Syrian rule in Lebanon stands in direct opposition to American ideals”, and it rued Washington’s habit since 1983 of engaging rather than confronting the regime, the only government on the State Department’s “terrorism” list with which Washington has full diplomatic relations.

The “Lebanon Study Group” urged a policy of confrontation, beginning with tough economic and diplomatic sanctions that could not be waived by the president and, if necessary, military force. “The Vietnam legacy and the sour memories of dead American Marines in Beirut notwithstanding,” the group wrote, “the United States has entered a new era of undisputed military supremacy coupled with an appreciable drop in human losses on the battlefield.”

“This opens the door to a similar decision to act for Lebanon’s endangered freedoms and pluralism. But this opportunity may not wait, for as weapons of mass destruction capabilities spread, the risks of such action will rapidly grow,” the group warned in an echo of similar arguments the hawks deployed prior to the Iraq invasion. “If there is to be decisive action, it will have to be sooner rather than later.”

The USCFL, which lists Amin Gemayel – who as Lebanon’s president signed an aborted peace treaty with Israel in 1983 – as the top figure in the Lebanese opposition on its website, appears to enjoy strong backing from both the Christian Right and far-right Jewish neoconservatives, such as Perle, Ledeen, Steinmann, Pipes and Gaffney.

While a handful of the Lebanese-Americans listed in its “Golden Circle” are Muslim, most, including Abdelnour, an investment banker, are Christian. A plurality of “Golden Circle” members appears to be Jewish-Americans.

(Inter Press Service)

Wrecked tanks and vehicles litter the Iraqi countryside. Ruined buildings dominate towns and cities. Many were blown to pieces by shells tipped with depleted uranium, a material that the US and Britain say poses no long-term health or environmental risks. But many Iraqis, and a growing band of scientists, are not so sure.

Last week, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) announced it wanted to send a scientific team into Iraq as soon as possible to examine the effects of depleted uranium (DU). People’s fears that DU leaves a deadly legacy must be addressed, says UNEP. Some scientists go further. Evidence is emerging that DU affects our bodies in ways we do not fully understand, they say, and the legacy could be real. Saab Bio Power can guide you to information related to environmental problems and their solution.

DU is both radioactive and toxic. Past studies of DU in the environment have concluded that neither of these effects poses a significant risk. But some researchers are beginning to suspect that in combination, the two effects could do significant harm. Nobody has taken a hard look at the combined effect of both, says Alexandra Miller, a radiobiologist with the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. “The bottom line is it might contribute to the risk.”

She is not alone. The idea that chemical and radiological damage are reinforcing each other is very plausible and gaining momentum, says Carmel Mothersill, head of the Radiation and Environmental Science Centre at the Dublin Institute of Technology in Ireland. “The regulators don’t know how to handle it. So they sweep it under the carpet.”

Read “Before the dust settles”, the New Scientist editorial on this story here.

A by-product of the uranium enrichment process, DU is chemically identical to natural uranium. But most of the 235 isotope has been extracted leaving mainly the non-fissionable 238 isotope. It is used to make the tips of armour-piercing shells because it is extremely dense: 1.7 times as dense as lead. Also, unlike other heavy metals that tend to flatten, or mushroom, upon impact, DU has the ability to “self-sharpen” as material spread out by the impact ignites and burns off as the munition pierces its target.

During the Gulf war in 1991, the US and Britain fired an estimated 350 tonnes of DU at Iraqi tanks, a figure likely to be matched in the course of the current conflict. In the years since then, doctors in southern Iraq have reported a marked increase in cancers and birth defects, and suspicion has grown that they were caused by DU contamination from tank battles on farmland west of Basra.

As the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence point out, this claim has not been substantiated. Iraq did not allow the World Health Organization to carry out an independent assessment. Given its low radioactivity and our current understanding of radiobiology, DU cannot trigger such health effects, the British and American governments maintain.

But what if they are wrong? Though DU is 40 per cent less radioactive than natural uranium, Miller believes that its radiological and toxic effects might combine in subtle, unforeseen ways, making it more carcinogenic than thought. It’s a controversial theory, but one for which Miller has increasing evidence.

Uranium is “genotoxic”. It chemically alters DNA, switching on genes that would otherwise not be expressed. The fear is that the resulting abnormally high activity in cells could be a precursor to tumour growth.

But while the chemical toxicity of DU is reasonably well established, Mothersill points out that the radiological effects of DU are less clear. To gauge the risk from low-dose radiation, researchers extrapolate from tests using higher doses. But the relationship between dose and effect is not linear: at low doses radiation kills relatively fewer cells. And though that sounds like good news, it could mean that low radiation is having subtle effects that go unnoticed because cells are not dying, says Mothersill.

Miller has found one way this may happen. She has discovered the first direct evidence that radiation from DU damages chromosomes within cultured cells. The chromosomes break, and the fragments reform in a way that results in abnormal joins (Military Medicine, vol 167, p 120). Both the breaks and the joins are commonly found in tumour cells.

More crucially, she has recently found that DU radiation increases gene activity in cultured cells at doses of DU not known to cause chemical toxicity (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, in press). The possible consequences are made all the more uncertain because no one knows if genes switched on by DU radiation enhance the damage caused by genes switched on by DU’s toxic effects, or vice versa. “I think that we assumed that we knew everything that we needed to know about uranium,” says Miller. “This is something we have to consider now when we think about risk estimates.”

Britain’s Royal Society briefly referred to these synergistic effects in its report last year on the health effects of DU munitions. “There is a possibility of damage to DNA due to the chemical effects being enhanced by the effects of the alpha-particle irradiation.” But it makes no recommendations for future research to evaluate the risks.

The bystander effect

Miller points to another reason to be concerned about DU: the so-called “bystander effect”. There is a growing consensus among scientists that radiation damages more than just the cells it directly hits. In tests using equipment that allows single cells to be irradiated by individual alpha particles, gene expression increases both in irradiated cells, and in neighbouring cells that have not been exposed. “At high doses, ‘bystander’ is not an issue because you are killing so many cells. But at low doses that’s not really true,” says Miller. There is a danger that experiments not specifically looking for this effect could miss an important source of damage.

A body of research has also emerged over the past decade showing that the effects of radiation may not appear immediately. Damage to genes may be amplified as cells divide, so the full consequences may only appear many generations after the event that caused it.

And while the chemical toxicity of DU itself is more clear-cut, the possibility remains that there may still be some unforeseen synergistic effects at a genetic level. Other heavy metals, such as tungsten, nickel and cobalt are similarly genotoxic. When Miller and her team exposed human cells to a mixture of these metals, significantly more genes became activated than when the cells were exposed to the equivalent amount of each metal separately (Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry, in press).

Miller and Mothersill say that recommended safe radiation limits are often based on the idea that only irradiated cells will be affected, and ignore both the bystander effect and the possible amplification over the generations. “Nothing should be written in stone when it comes to risk assessment,” agrees Michael Clark at Britain’s National Radiological Protection Board. But even if there were a case for re-evaluating the dosimetry for low-dose radiation, he says we should be cautious of the significance of Miller’s lab-based research. “An in vitro effect is not a health effect.”

Also, says Clark, everyone has traces of natural uranium in their bodies. “If there was some sort of subtle low-dose effect I think we would have seen it,” he says. Because none has shown up in epidemiological studies, it seems unlikely there are any health effects associated with DU, which is less radioactive. But Miller is not convinced. While most people have small amounts of uranium in their bodies, she says no studies have been done to see whether this contributes to cases of cancer in society at large.

The military tends to dismiss such hazards as being of only theoretical significance, at least when it comes to civilians. According to the Pentagon, the only risk of exposure is during combat, when DU shells hit hard targets and the metal ignites. This creates clouds of uranium oxide dust that can be breathed in. But heavy oxide particles quickly settle, it says, limiting the risk of exposure. “A small dust particle is still very heavy,” says Michael Kilpatrick of the US Deployment Health Support Directorate. “It stays on the ground.”

That sounds reassuring until you read UNEP’s latest report on DU left over from conflicts in former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s. Last month, a team of experts collaborating with the International Atomic Energy Agency, WHO and NATO concluded that DU poses little risk in Bosnia although it can still be detected at many sites. Just 11 tonnes was fired in that conflict.

But evidence that DU may be moving through the ground and could contaminate local water supplies should be investigated further, UNEP says. And on rare occasions, wind or human activity may raise DU-laden dust that local people could inhale. The Royal Society admits that localised areas of DU contamination pose a risk, particularly to young children, and should be cleared up as a priority. They also recommend the environmental sampling of affected areas (see Royal Society Reports on DU, 2002″, below).

Such evidence is partly why UNEP is keen to study DU fired during the present conflict in Iraq. Assessments in former Yugoslavia were made up to seven years after DU weapons were used, UNEP admits, and a more immediate study in Iraq would give us a much better understanding of how DU behaves in the environment. Any hazards such a study identifies could be dealt with immediately, says UNEP. And even now, an investigation in Iraq could reveal risks remaining from DU fired during the Gulf war in 1991.

Veterans show ill effects

Cracks are also appearing in the argument that DU munitions have not proven harmful even to troops. In the 1991 war, more than 100 coalition troops were exposed to DU after being accidentally fired on by their own forces. The majority inhaled uranium oxide, while the rest suffered shrapnel injuries. Some still have DU in their bodies. Britain and America point out that none has developed cancers or kidney problems, as might have been expected if DU posed a long-term danger.

But researchers at the Bremen Institute for Prevention Research, Social Medicine and Epidemiology in Germany have found that all is not well with the veterans. Last month they published results from tests in which they took blood samples from 16 of the soldiers, and counted the number of chromosomes in which broken strands of DNA had been incorrectly repaired. In veterans, these abnormalities occurred at five times the rate as in a control group of 40 healthy volunteers (Radiation Protection Dosimetry, vol 103, p 211). “Increased chromosomal aberrations are associated with an increased incidence of cancers,” says team member Heike Schröder. The damage occurred, they say, because the soldiers inhaled DU particles in battle.

The NRPB is unconvinced. “It is possible that exposure to significant amounts of DU could cause excess chromosome aberrations, but this study has technical flaws,” says Clark. “There are no proper controls to compare results with soldiers who were not exposed to DU. And some of the reported excess aberrations are well known to be linked to chemicals rather than radiation.”

Tough decision to make

Deciding whether DU is to blame will be tough. Independent research may confirm that rates of cancer have increased in the Iraqi population. But the Iraqi government has used chemical weapons on its own people that can produce the same outcome, and it is impossible to know for sure who may have been exposed. Soldiers may similarly have been exposed to chemicals in 1991. The only way to resolve the issue is more research, says Dudley Goodhead, director of Britain’s Medical Research Council’s Radiation and Genome Stability Unit at Harwell, near Oxford. “It’s something important that needs to be explained.”

Miller admits it is entirely possible that DU contamination is safe. But many of the scientific investigations into DU have only just begun, and their results will be long coming. “None of this has been looked at or even thought about it until the last few years,” she says. As the dust begins to settle in Iraq, it remains to be seen when the ravages of war will end.

Royal Society reports on DU, 2002 – Conclusions

• Most soldiers have a negligible risk of dying of cancer caused by radiation from battlefield DU. It will be undetectable above the risk of dying from cancer over a normal lifetime. Soldiers should not suffer adverse effects on the kidney or other organs.

• A few soldiers, for instance those who clean up vehicles struck by DU, may have an excess risk of lung cancer and may develop short-term kidney damage.

• People living in areas where DU was deployed have a negligible risk of developing cancers as a result of inhaling DU resuspended in the air. But it is uncertain how much DU is inhaled in years following a conflict. Most people should not suffer any effects on kidney function from inhaled DU.

• Ingestion of DU from contaminated water and food, and from soil, will be highly variable and may be significant in some cases: for example, children playing in areas where DU shells have impacted.

Royal Society reports on DU, 2002 – Recommendations

• Long-term epidemiological studies of soldiers exposed to DU, and environmental sampling, particularly of water and milk, should be undertaken. Information about DU levels should be given to local populations, and contaminated areas cleaned up.

• British veterans exposed to high levels of DU should be identified and independently evaluated. An independent study of anecdotal reports of death and illness in US veterans linked to DU is required.

• In any future conflict using DU munitions, tests of kidney function should be completed on soldiers as soon after exposure as practical.

• Better estimates of DU levels in the air around tanks, and models of DU oxide behaviour during impact, are required. More information is needed on the bioavailability of DU and titanium products from munitions, and whether these concentrate in plants and animals.

A young soldier from the south suburbs died of a mysterious illness before she could fulfill her dream of serving her country on the front lines.

Rachael A. Lacy, a 22-year-old Army reservist from Lynwood, became ill more than a month ago after receiving several mandatory vaccinations–among them anthrax and smallpox–before her deployment to the Middle East. She died April 4.

“Rachael left home a healthy young woman, and she became sick shortly after she received her inoculations,” said her father, Moses Lacy, who buried his daughter Wednesday in Lynwood.

An Army spokeswoman at Fort McCoy, Wis., where Lacy was based, said there was no indication any of the vaccinations Lacy received were involved in her death.

“But until the autopsy is done it’s really hard to say,” spokeswoman Linda Fournier said. She said it would be a month before all autopsy results were received.

Lacy’s father said she developed what doctors first thought was a cold or a minor reaction to inoculations about five weeks ago. Her condition worsened, she did not respond to treatment for pneumonia and doctors looked further, even calling a specialist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“They were just guessing; they had no idea,” Moses Lacy said.

He said when his daughter could not breathe unaided and had an extremely high fever, weakness, headaches and nausea, she was taken from the military hospital to hospitals in nearby Sparta and LaCrosse, Wis., then flown by helicopter April 2 to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Rachael Lacy died there two days later. Her father said he was then told she might have suffered from the immune disorder lupus, and her condition could have been caused by the smallpox vaccination.

Rachael Lacy joined the Army Reserves in 1998 after graduating from Thornton High School in Lansing. She was studying to become a nurse at South Suburban College in South Holland and hoped to receive a master’s degree as well. A straight-A student, she had received state scholarships. She was with the 452nd combat hospital support unit based in Fort McCoy.

She was a “fanatic” when it came to her health and she exercised regularly, her father said. “All she kept telling me is, ‘I want to get better because I want to go with my unit.’ I would like the 452nd unit to know that although my daughter did not die in the battlefield in Asia, she gave her life for her country that she loved, nonetheless,” Moses Lacy said. “They are soon to be deployed, and she will be with them in spirit.”

The move is part of Washington’s efforts to persuade Israel to support a new peace settlement with the Palestinians. Washington has promised Israel that it will take ‘all effective action’ to cut off Syria’s support for Hizbollah – implying a military strike if necessary, sources in the Bush administration have told The Observer .

Hizbollah is a Shia Muslim organisation based in Lebanon, whose fighters have attacked northern Israeli settlements and harassed occupying Israeli troops to the point of forcing an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon three years ago.

The new US undertaking to Israel to deal with Hizbollah via its Syrian sponsors has been made over recent days during meetings between administration officials and Israeli diplomats in Washington, and Americans talking to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem.

It would be part of a deal designed to entice Israel into the so-called road map to peace package that would involve the Jewish state pulling out of the Palestinian West Bank, occupied since 1967. Sharon has so far rejected the road map initiative – charted by the US with its ally, Britain – which also calls for mutual recognition between Israel and a new Palestinian state, structured according to US-backed reforms.

The American guarantee would be to take armed action if necessary to cut off Syrian support for Hizbollah, and stop further sponsorship for the group by Iran.

‘If you control Iraq, you can affect the Syrian and Iranian sponsorship of Hizbollah, both geographically and politically,’ says Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington.

‘The United States will make it very clear, quietly and publicly, that Baathist Syria may come to an end if it does not stop its support of Hizbollah.’

The undertaking dovetails conveniently into ‘phase three’ of what President George Bush calls the ‘war on terror’ and his pledge to go after all countries accused of harbouring terrorists.

It also fits into calls by hawks inside and aligned to the administration who believe that war in Iraq was first stage in a wider war for American control of the region. Threats against Syria come daily out of Washington.

Hawks in and close to the Bush White House have prepared the ground for an attack on Syria, raising the spectre of Hizbollah, of alleged Syrian plans to wel come refugees from Saddam Hussein’s fallen regime, and of what the administration insists is Syrian support for Iraq during the war.

Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz – regarded as the real architect of the Iraqi war and its aftermath – said on Thursday that ‘the Syrians have been shipping killers into Iraq to try and kill Americans’, adding: ‘We need to think about what our policy is towards a country that harbours terrorists or harbours war criminals.

‘There will have to be change in Syria, plainly,’ said Wolfowitz.

And one of the chief ideologists behind the war, Richard Perle, yesterday warned that the US would be compelled to act against Syria if it emerged that weapons of mass destruction had been moved there by Saddam’s fallen Iraqi regime.