Veterans for Common Sense

For those who make war instruments, war is very good business indeed, and, while the rest of the economy may be tanking, things that go “bang” and kill people are on a roll.

Boeing, for instance, recently doubled its production of JDAM kits ($25,000 a pop), which make dumb bombs smart. Raytheon added a shift to produce its Paveway laser guided bombs ($55,600 apiece), while Alliant Techsystems is churning out 265 million rounds of small arms ammunition ( $92 million).

This is the era of high tech war, which is good news for General Atomics Aeronauticals Systems and its unmanned surveillance and attack craft, the Predator. The going rate is $25 million for four. So, too, for Northrop Grumman, with its $20 million Global Hawk, the Cadillac of robot aircraft. Northrop, which recently swallowed TRW for $7.8 billion, is projected to earn $26 billion in revenues this year.

To keep all these machines talking to their operators, Boeing is pitching its Wideband Gap satellite ($1.3 billion per unit) and Lockheed Martin, Hughes and TRW are pushing their EHF Advanced Wideband satellites for $2.7 billion a shot.

And if you’re Admiral Crowe Jr., you are cashing in on a real smart investment. Back in 1998 the state of Michigan sold the vaccine company, Bioport, to a group of private investors. At the time, the company was under fire from the Federal Drug Administration for poor quality control of its smallpox vaccine. Crowe Jr. and company brought the place for a song and, shortly thereafter, landed a $60 million contract from the Department of Defense.

You don’t have to kill people to make money. Take Kellogg Brown & Root, owned by Vice-President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton. The construction company has been building bases since World War II and had a virtual lock on military construction during the Vietnam War. It made $2.5 billion from the DOD during the ‘90s and is presently building bases in Afghanistan (the costs are classified).

Other bases are being constructed in Yemen, Pakistan, Turkey, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyregyszstan, India and the Philippines. Kellogg also built bases for — you guessed it — Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. They make money from both sides.

No need to go to uncomfortable places to make money from all this, however. The Homeland Security budget is $37.7 billion, and the military industrial types are already thundering toward the trough.

Boeing wants to fit commercial airplanes with its missile-tracking device, the same one that keeps missing its targets in the Administration’s billion-dollar missile defense boondoggle.

Lockheed Martin wants to sell its military simulators to train emergency fire and medical teams.

General Dynamics is pushing armored vehicles to local police (a bargain at $200,000 plus) and also wants the military to use its Gulfstream Executive jets as early warning radar systems. Smart move. With the economy a disaster, and the Iraq War likely to worsen things, Executive jets are a slow sell these days.

Northrop Grumman, builder of the $2 billion B-2 Stealth Bomber, and co-contractor with Lockheed Martin on the $400 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, is pushing its telecommunication systems as a way to fight bioterrorism.

All of this, of course, is done in the spirit of patriotism. “The attacks on Sept. 11 are a very personal things for us,” says Boeing Vice-President John Stammreich. He did not, on the other hand, offer any of his company’s whiz-bangs at cost.

If one adds up all the supplementary costs of war beyond the $355.5 billion military budget–Homeland Security, $30 billion in supplementary funds, $25.5 billion for foreign military assistance, $16 billion for nuclear weapons, etc–the U.S. spends in excess of $465 billion each year, or $1.2 billion a day.

A month of military spending would wipe out California’s catastrophic budget deficit. Instead, Californians are going to cough up $10.1 billion in income taxes just to pay for the upcoming $100 billion plus Gulf War.

U.S. military spending not only dwarfs the combined military budgets of the “Evil Axis” ($11.4 billion), all potential enemies ($116.4 billion), but every single nation in the world, from Russia to Luxembourg ($423 billion).

War is a bad business? Not for everyone.

Scientists believe nasal and respiratory irritation caused by desert sand storms and oil field fires during Operation Desert Storm, may have weakened the nose/brain barrier and allowed depleted uranium to enter the central nervous system of soldiers in the field resulting in slowly developing neurotoxic responses.

Preliminary investigations with depleted uranium shrapnel have shown that the brain is one of the target organs for deposition of depleted uranium dissolved from shrapnel. The follow-up medical exams of 29 Gulf War veterans with retained DU shrapnel have shown subtle neurocognitive losses that show a statistical relationship between uranium levels and performance on computerized tests of performance efficiency (McDiarmid et al., 2000).

During Operation Desert Storm, American M1A1, M1, and M60 tanks and British Challenger tanks fired thousands of large caliber depleted uranium armor penetrators. American A-10 and AV-8B aircraft shot hundreds of thousands of small caliber depleted uranium rounds. In addition, one-third of the American tanks used in the war were equipped with DU armor.

The extensive use of depleted uranium during the war could have resulted in substantial inhalation exposure. Although depleted uranium is considered toxic to the kidney because of its properties as a heavy metal, recent data have linked systemic exposure to depleted uranium to neurotoxic effects as well (Pellmar et al, 1999 a,b; McDiarmid et al, 2000).

Following the Gulf War, veterans began to report a variety of symptoms that have become known “Gulf War Illness.” Given the complexity of environmental exposures that occurred during the war, the level of stress involved in battlefield situations and the presence of several potentially toxic agents, the most practical assumption is to believe that Gulf War illness is the result of several factors acting in synergy. But in addition to being possible, the proposed causes must be unique to the Gulf War, as similar symptoms had not been observed prior to that operation.

The exposure to depleted uranium combined with the exposure to extensive combustion products from oil fires and blowing sand from the desert environment, however, is unique and the extent of exposure to respiratory irritants during this war was probably greater than in previous wars.

This combination of respiratory irritants could result in a sensitization or alteration of the response to other toxic chemicals such as depleted uranium. Irritation of the respiratory tract could result in increased amounts of depleted uranium being taken in, creating more intense responses. It could also result in uranium reaching other targets in the body, such as the brain, which could produce a different pattern of responses.

Personnel have emphasized that air quality during the war was a major difficulty due not only to the high levels of dust generated from blowing desert sands, but also to the extensive oil field fires that contributed extensive hydrocarbon smoke plumes.

Therefore, the occurrence of the first potentially substantial inhalation exposures to DU during the Gulf War and the occurrence of an illness which includes a high frequency of symptoms of neurologic origin suggests that the relationship of DU exposures to these symptoms deserves additional attention. The presence of coexposures likely to result in inflammation of the upper respiratory tract provides a plausible mechanism for enhancing the entry of inhaled DU directly to the Central Nervous System through weakening of the nose-brain barrier.

Scientists working on this study will investigate the potential for inhaled DU aerosols to penetrate the nose-brain barrier in conditions modeling Gulf War exposures. They will examine whether it can then spread within the Central Nervous System and result in slowly developing neurotoxic responses.

Hypotheses:

I. Inhalation of uranium aerosols during the Gulf War from combustion of DU-containing weapons resulted in CNS deposition and subsequent neurodegeneration in a subset of those exposed.

II. Transient conditions such as inflammation will compromise the olfactory epithelium (nose/brain barrier) and enhance the entry of uranium and the subsequent development of neurodegeneration.

III: Markers of neurodegeneration will be correlated with the concentration and pattern of deposition of uranium within the CNS following inhalation exposure.

IV: The degree and time-course of neurodegeneration will be dose and exposure duration dependent.

Technical Objectives:

To determine whether uranium enters the CNS via penetration of the nose-brain barrier using exposure atmospheres that model environmental exposures encountered in the Gulf war.

To determine whether uranium uptake into the CNS causes progressive neurodegeneration with increasing time post-exposure.

To examine potential alterations in susceptibility as a result of nasal inflammation which was likely to occur in soldiers during the war as a result of high concentrations of blowing sand and smoke from oil-field fires.

Inhalation data will be cross referenced to data arising from DU implant studies and to determine whether the more commonly associated nephrotoxic and pulmonary effects occur at levels where CNS deposition and/or toxicity occur.

The results obtained from the studies should provide a realistic assessment of the neurotoxic, nephrotoxic and pulmonary effects posed by inhalation of uranium oxide aerosols during the Gulf war.

This will better enable DOD to assess potentially toxic effects resulting from the deployment of uranium containing weapons and equipment in battlefield conditions. Inclusion of tantalum oxide controls will provide a more complete information base for consideration of these factors in future weapons design initiatives.

Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute

2425 Ridgecrest Drive SE

Albuquerque, NM 87108

(505) 348-9400

Well under half of that force is in the gulf region now. But three large deployment orders signed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — two in the last 24 hours for a total of 62,000 troops and one on Dec. 24 for about 25,000 — have set in motion crucial reinforcements of troops, armor, warships and combat aircraft.

The latest order, sent out overnight, directs 27,000 additional personnel to the gulf, including thousands of marines, an Army airborne infantry brigade, a squadron of Air Force F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters, and two squadrons of F-16CJ radar-jamming fighters. An order late Friday sent 35,000 troops, half of them marines, to the region.

Until recently, the buildup had focused on bringing in equipment, ammunition and supplies and on putting logistics and command-and-control specialists in the region to receive and direct major ground forces. This week, the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., sent the vanguard of a 1,000-member battle staff to operate what would be its wartime headquarters in Qatar.

But the recent orders signal a new and important phase in the campaign: the flow of the main battle force that is intended to put pressure on President Saddam Hussein to disarm, and, on Mr. Bush’s command, to oust Mr. Hussein if he does not.

Assembling that large force in countries like Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and perhaps Turkey will still take several weeks, although the troops in the region now could attack if they had to, officials said. About 15,000 marines at Camp Pendleton, Calif., and Camp Lejeune, N.C., recently received authorization to embark on Navy ships destined for the Persian Gulf. In the next few days, ships bound for the gulf will begin loading Army tanks in Savannah, Ga., and Patriot antimissile batteries in Beaumont, Tex.

“By mid- to late February, we’ll be in the best position to provide the president immediate flexible options to respond,” a senior military official said.

Even as signs emerged this week that some allies were seeking to forestall any possible offensive to give United Nations weapons inspectors more time to complete their work, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander of American forces in the gulf, briefed Mr. Bush at the White House on Thursday on the impending movement of troops and the military’s Iraq strategy.

Earlier in the week, before the White House meeting, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We’re going to continue a steady, deliberate buildup to provide the president the flexibility he needs to do what he thinks he needs to do.”

Privately, though, military officials said starting an offensive before mid-February would pose problems. Much of the main combat force may arrive by late this month, but newly arriving commanders prefer some time to prepare their units in their new desert positions.

Diplomatic hurdles remain. Turkey has yet to agree to stage tens of thousands of American ground troops from its bases, jeopardizing Pentagon plans for a northern thrust that would allow an attack on Iraq’s overstretched forces from several directions. Such an American force would also secure northern oil fields and prevent confrontation between the Turkish Army and Kurds.

American officials expressed confidence that they would eventually gain the access they need for American forces, although they acknowledged that the delays had been frustrating. “I’m confident that the president and his team will be able to gain and maintain the access they need for an operation,” said Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who is the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and who met with Mr. Rumsfeld this week.

Another complicating factor for an early offensive would be the hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Two million Muslims are expected to travel for the ceremonies, which culminate in mid-February. Although Mecca is far from any potential war zone, American officials fear a public-relations disaster if the United States began an offensive during the pilgrimage.

But military experts said the optimum time for waging any war in Iraq is a relatively narrow window between mid-February and early April. “If you go past March, you get into some really hot weather,” said Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired marine whom General Franks succeeded as the head of the Central Command. “How long do you keep them there before it begins to affect training, morale and rotation schedules? It’s very costly.”

Pentagon officials have said that if Mr. Bush orders an attack, a force of about 250,000 troops would be needed — about half the number who fought the gulf war in 1991. But the initial “rolling start” of the assault would begin with a smaller force, with the rest held in reserve.

Although the buildup in the gulf has been visible for weeks, the shape of the specific force to be marshaled there has become evident in the United States only in recent days.

Mr. Rumsfeld’s directive on Dec. 24 led the Army last week to order more than 11,000 soldiers from the Third Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., to join a brigade of 4,000 troops from the division already in Kuwait. On Tuesday, the Army will begin loading M1 Abrams tanks, Apache helicopter gunships and other equipment on two landing ships, the Mendonca and the Gilliland, in Savannah.

Another military cargo ship, the Seay, is set to leave Beaumont by week’s end, loaded with Patriot antimissile batteries and wheeled vehicles from Fort Bliss, Tex., a military official said.

The Third Infantry Division is the first of perhaps three or four heavy Army divisions that could be sent, along with a lighter division, like the 101st Airborne, officials said.

The Army has summoned 3,000 officers and civilian planners to Germany for an exercise this month called Victory Scrimmage. Commanders will conduct computer simulations of Iraq war plans, officials said. The units include the First Infantry and First Armored divisions, which are based in Germany, as well as the 101st Airborne Division and the First Cavalry Division, an armored unit at Fort Hood, Tex.

Under Mr. Rumsfeld’s order on Friday, about 17,500 marines, including the amphibious task forces loading up at Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton, will leave soon for the gulf. They will join a headquarters element of more than 1,000 marines from the First Marine Expeditionary Force already in Kuwait.

For the first time in the current buildup, Marine Corps officials are preparing to tap heavy equipment and other matériel that is stored on ships in the Mediterranean Sea and at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The first ships are expected to begin unloading in gulf ports, probably Kuwait, as early as next week, a military official said.

In an unusual move, the Marine Corps this week barred virtually all marines from leaving the service. The order, the first service-wide freeze on discharges since the Persian Gulf war, prohibits the nearly 175,000 active-duty marines and tens of thousands of reservists from leaving or changing assignments, starting Jan. 15. Exceptions will be made for some people who had already filed to retire by April 1 and in a few other cases.

Gen. James L. Jones, who is leaving his post as Marine Corps commandant to become the NATO supreme commander in Europe, said this week that 65,000 to 75,000 marines would probably be involved in any military action against Iraq.

The Navy now has one aircraft carrier, the Constellation, in the Persian Gulf, and another, the Harry S. Truman, in the Mediterranean. Each carrier has about 40 fighter jets on board, including F/A-18 Hornets and F-14 Tomcats, and about 40 other aircraft. The Navy is also keeping at least two more aircraft carriers ready to be set out to the Persian Gulf on 96-hour notice.

This week, the 1,000-bed hospital ship Comfort left Baltimore for Diego Garcia, where it will await orders.

A formidable air armada is also taking shape. B-1 bombers have been leaving in pairs this week from Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D., bound for Oman. Within the next week or so, more Air Force units are expected to send combat aircraft to bases in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region, officials said.

These units include the First Fighter Wing, an F-15C fighter unit based at Langley Air Force Base, Va.; F-15E Strike Eagles from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C.; the 28th Bomb Wing, a B-1B unit at Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D.; AC-130 gunships from Hurlburt Field, Fla.; E-8C Joint Stars ground surveillance aircraft from Robins Air Force Base, Ga.; and Predator pilotless reconnaissance aircraft from Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.

That is the conclusion of researchers at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina whose study based on animal experiments will be published today in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health.

Mohamed Abou-Donia, professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke and one of the study’s authors, said some cells responsible for the production and maintenance of sperm were damaged or killed by exposure to the three substances when combined: the insect repellent DEET, the insecticide permethrin and an anti-nerve gas drug known as pyridostigmine bromide, or PB.

“It appears moderate stress, combined with the three chemicals, caused the most severe deterioration in testicular structure and sperm production, and these conditions were likely experienced by some Gulf War soldiers in the combat environment,” Abou-Donia said.

He said the Department of Defense had funded the study because Gulf War veterans had expressed concern about infertility and sexual dysfunction.

The study is one of many investigating the causes of Gulf War illnesses, the puzzling array of medical problems that plague men and women who served in the Persian Gulf.

According to epidemiological studies, about 200,000 Gulf War veterans — out of 700,000 deployed — have suffered illnesses since the war.

During the war, troops were exposed to pesticides, chemical warfare agents, biological warfare agents, vaccines, PB (pyridostigmine bromide), infectious diseases, depleted uranium, oil well fires and smoke and petroleum products.

Veterans have long wondered what role exposure to that “cocktail” of substances has played in their ailments.

EXPOSURE AFFECTED FAMILY LIFE

Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center,

a Washington, D.C., advocacy group for ailing veterans and their families, said no one kept statistics on how many Gulf War veterans suffered from infertility.

But Robinson said he had seen the emotional — and financial — devastation those problems had caused in their families.

“I know families who have spent their life savings trying to have children and have gone under,” he said. “I’ve seen marriages crumble. It’s a big deal.”

Barbara Goodno, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s Deployment Health Support office, which advises the agency on protecting the health of troops, declined comment, saying the office had not seen the study.

Professor Abou-Donia said soldiers had sprayed DEET on their skin, and several thousand of them wore uniforms impregnated with the pesticide permethrin.

In addition, 250,000 men and women took PB pills as a “pretreatment” to enhance the antidote effects of two other drugs used to protect against nerve agent poisoning.

RATS SHOW NO OUTWARD SIGNS

Abou-Donia said researchers mimicked conditions found during the Gulf War by exposing rats to a scaled-down dosage of the same three chemicals.

“Interestingly, the chemically treated rats don’t look or behave any differently than normal rats, just as the soldiers don’t show any outward signs of disease,” he said. “But under a microscope, you can see clear and well-defined damage to a variety of testicular structures.”

In a study published last year, Abou-Donia and fellow researchers found that rats exposed to the same trio of chemicals and stress suffered significant damage to the areas of the brain that control muscle strength and movement, balance and coordination, and memory and emotions.

Abou-Donia noted that veterans had complained of problems in those very same functions for more than a decade.

E-mail Kathleen Sullivan at ksullivan@sfchronicle.com.

Let’s be perfectly clear. You cannot have a war when the so-called enemy has done nothing to provoke you and is absolutely no threat to your national safety and has no significant military force and has negligible chance of even setting off a firecracker near your own overwhelming death machines, and whose only weapons of minimal destruction are the rusty short-range warheads and biochemical agents we sold him 20 years ago, and kept selling to him, even after we knew he was gassing his own people.

You cannot have a war when there is nothing to fight against, when it’s essentially going to be a huge U.S. military stomping/bombing exercise, when, just like Afghanistan, we stand to suffer zero U.S. casualties (except for those we seem to kill ourselves), and we just bomb and bomb and kill and kill and shrug.

Let us look closer: The U.S. buildup for war with Iraq is the biggest in decades. The Iraq operation, in the words of Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, will be “the most massive precision air campaign in history,” because, well, because we can. Because we want to annihilate everything as fast and ruthlessly as possible, simply because the longer such an operation takes and the more expensive and obviously pointless it becomes, the more everyday citizens snap out of it and begin to say, wait, why are we doing this again?

Saddam’s meager military, let us be reminded, is a tiny quivering fraction of what it was 10 years ago during Desert Storm, and even then it took U.S. forces less than four days to almost completely annihilate it.

Now it’s even weaker, due to ongoing sanctions and U.N. oversight and a decade of continuous U.S.-led bombing raids on Iraqi targets you never read about. Hell, this time we should have those thousands of pesky Iraqi soldiers and innocent civilians dead and slaughtered in a weekend.

This is a Mack truck versus a Pinto. This is an F-16 versus a paper airplane, a Tomahawk missile versus a spit wad. There is no contest. “War” is exactly the wrong term. The U.S. attack on Iraq will be, of course, a massacre. Go team.

Now let’s say you sense this all to be true. Let’s say you have a queasy feeling deep in your gut as you realize no one is talking about exactly why we need to launch a second simultaneous war to go along with the unwinnable assault we’re still running in Afghanistan.

Remember Afghanistan? Yes, we’re still there, warring away. Bombing and attacking and killing. Haven’t caught a single al Qaeda leader of note yet. That looks bad for Dubya. Killed a few thousand civilians though. Shrug.

So, let’s boil it down: Why go to war with Iraq? Can’t find Osama, is one reason. That looks bad. Really, really want to steal all that delicious oil for ShrubCo, is another. Saddam is clearly a very bad guy who kills his own people and snickers in America’s general direction, is a third. But then again, so are at least a half-dozen other vile tyrants of the world. Volatile, nuke-ready North Korea? Let’s open some talks. Feeble, oil-ready Iraq? Let’s massacre. Hmm.

Perhaps you wonder why no one is asking any of these questions, making similar points.

Perhaps you wonder just where in the hell is the spineless major media in all this, as they watch the chicken-hawk Shrubster himself, between golf swings, announce how tens of thousands of American troops are being sent to the Gulf alongside an enormous billion-dollar military buildup and imminent gobs of heaping death raining down upon a paltry oppressed nation and coming up next on CNN, we interview that dumb guy from “Joe Millionaire.” Perfect.

Perhaps you wonder where is the national TV coverage of all those huge anti-war protests, hundreds of thousands of people, all over the world, from Spain to Berlin to New York to San Francisco.

Perhaps you wonder where are all the “serious” journalists, the risk-taking news agencies pointing up the absurdity of it all, the imminent horror, the outrage. Could it be these news agencies are owned by major conservative corporations? Could it be they’re all terrified of losing ratings, of saying something unpopular, of invoking Cheney’s wrath, of losing advertiser dollars and that ever-precious, ever-dwindling dumbed-down audience? One guess.

And besides, who needs a reason for a massacre anymore? This is the age of the preemptive-strike, screw-you Bush regime. Who needs, for example, the Monroe Doctrine, that crusty old rag stating how America will go to war only as a last resort, as a defensive measure, and won’t become embroiled in unwinnable foreign wars that are none of our business?

Who needs every precedent ever set by international law? Who needs the U.N. Charter? Who needs confused congressional approval? Who needs ethical integrity?

Screw it all, says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his black eyes gleaming like the devil’s own golf balls. Let us become an ever-more-hated rogue nation, attack whomever we want, whenever we want, with no international support and much international disgust. Let us squander, childishly, within months, the generous and compassionate goodwill afforded our country by our international allies in the wake of 9/11.

Let us wantonly kill innocent civilians and children and thousands of Iraqi soldiers who, let us repeat, did nothing to provoke us. Shall we? Yes let’s. Why? Shhh.

Let us be clear. Saddam is not a threat to the U.S., and never has been. He is merely yet another cowardly and murderous thug, much like the countless other despots and autocrats, from Marcos to King Fahd to Ariel Sharon, the U.S. has added to its payroll when it served our needs, and whom we then backhand when we need economic stimulus, or when the president needs a boost to his approval ratings, or when the corporate pals of the Bush WASP mafia need more billion-dollar petrochemical and defense contracts. Aha. Perhaps this is why.

We are, in short, going to attack and massacre Iraq for the oil reserves, to protect America’s corporate interests, to feed the gaping maw of the military-industrial complex. Same as it ever was.

But let us be perfectly clear: We are most definitely not cranking up the appalling war machine for your sake, or for the country’s protection, or for our commendable standing among our humanitarian allies.

We are not doing it to defeat terrorism (it will have the exact opposite effect), or to make the streets safer for our children, or because they’ve found big scary WMDs (they haven’t — not a one) — or even for Iraq’s own good. And to believe we are is, quite simply, to be wholly misinformed and openly, flagrantly, deliberately deceived.

The deployment will begin next week with movement of the 3rd Brigade from Fort Benning, Ga., through Robins Air Force Base, Ga., officials said. The rest of the division is expected to follow in a deployment from Hunter Army Airfield, Ga., and that is expected to continue throughout the month, officials said.

The 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) has four fighting brigades. The 1st and 2nd Brigades are based at Fort Stewart, the 3d Brigade at Fort Benning and the 4th Brigade has units located at both Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Ga., and Fort Stewart. The division has an Engineer Brigade, a brigade-size Division Artillery, or DIVARTY, and a brigade-size Division Support Command, or DISCOM. The division also includes the 103rd Military Intelligence Battalion, the 123rd Signal Battalion, and the 1st Battalion, 3rd Air Defense. Also deploying will be the headquarters and units of the 24th Corps Support Group, a brigade-size logistics unit.

Once in Kuwait the division will continue to train, officials said, honing its combat power and awaiting further orders.

(Information provided by the 3rd Infantry Division and Fort Stewart Public Affairs Office.)

January 10, 2003

Honorable Anthony Principi (00)

Secretary

Department of Veterans Affairs

810 Vermont Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20420

Dear Secretary Principi:

As a veteran and veterans’s advocate, I strongly encourage
you to investigate the conduct and utility of the VA study
of Gulf War veterans exposed to depleted uranium, known as
the Depleted Uranium Follow-Up Program (DU Program).

In the last few years, Pentagon officials have made false
statements about the health status of the veterans in the
DU Program in apparent attempts to reduce domestic and
international concerns about the use of DU munitions. The
DU Program has facilitated this deceit first through its
silence, and further through its ostensibly subjective and
selective presentation of facts concerning the development
of cancers, bone tumors and other health effects among the
few veterans in the study.

I strongly believe there is sufficient publicly available
evidence to justify a thorough audit of the DU Program.

This evidence also supports the creation of a new DU
study that will more effectively serve the interests of
Gulf War veterans and meet the needs of policymakers who
make decisions about veterans? service connected benefits.

I have outlined my findings and proposals in the attached
documents.

After serving in the Navy, I worked as a service
organization representative for six years with Swords to
Plowshares (San Francisco) and Vietnam Veterans of America
(Washington, DC). I know there were myriad problems with
federal research on Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent
Orange, and I am deeply concerned that history is
repeating itself with respect to research on Gulf War
veterans exposed to DU.

I respectfully request a response from your office to the
concerns I have raised. Thank you for your consideration
of the materials I have provided.

Sincerely,

Dan Fahey

cc: Senator Russell Feingold

Senator Jay Rockefeller

Representative Christopher Shays

Representative Lane Evans

Representative Bob Filner

Representative Chris Smith

Representative David Bonior

Representative Nancy Pelosi

Representative Barbara Lee

James Binns, VA Gulf War Illness Research Advisory Committee

Dear friends and veterans,

As many of you know, President Bush is expected to decide on war within weeks.

In your efforts to prevent this war, many of you have come into contact with military families who fear for their loved ones in the service and Gulf War veterans who fear that another generation of veterans will suffer from the same unexplained illnesses that they have.

If so, please forward this email to them, or email their contact pnone number to me by no later than Friday afternoon.

Veterans for Common Sense (VfCS) is seeking both Gulf War combat veterans and military families with loved ones in the service who have deployed to the Gulf or are preparing to deploy to participate in a major national press conference late next week in Washington, DC.

The event will raise legitimate unanswered questions as to why we are rushing to war.

Equally important, the event is intented to empower other war veterans and military families to speak out against this rush to war.

The message of the press conference will be:

(1) Veterans and military families want the President to win without war and adhere to the UN process.

(2) Given the risks involved, we could face U.S. casualties that we have not seen since Vietnam.

(3) Another generation of veterans are vulnerable to the same illnesses and disabilities suffered by U.S. veterans of the 1991 Gulf War.

(4) The chemical protection suits, gas masks, and detection alarms don’t work. Our service members deserve to be protected and should not be unnecessarily put in harm’s way.

(5) Without our allies or a clear justication, a U.S. invasion is wreckless and unnecessary. Military families are concerned that their loved ones will die.

(6) Americans feel the President has not made a case for war (December LA Times poll, MoveOn petition, city council resolutions, etc).

All correspondences should be emailed to charles@sheehanmiles.net or Egustafson@igc.org

December 27, 2002

When a nemesis such as Osama bin Laden speaks, one would expect his words to be of great interest. But this is apparently not the case. The latest audiotape of a voice purporting to be bin Laden’s prompted discussion principally of three issues: (1) Was it really him? (2) Why wasn’t it a videotape? (3) Where is he?

There was virtually no analysis of what the voice said. Could it be that bin Laden’s words contradict the official version of why al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Those attacks were monstrous crimes against innocent people.

Thus the search for an explanation is not an exercise in exoneration — there can be no exoneration.

It’s an exercise in comprehension so that such crimes can be averted in the future. It is in that spirit that bin Laden’s words should be scrutinized.

The official version of 9/11 is that Muslim radicals attacked America because they hate our way of life: freedom, democracy, secular affluence. President Bush has said this repeatedly. There were many indications at the time that this was not accurate.

Bin Laden’s own recruiting tapes, which were aired post-9/11, never showed him denouncing the American way of life. Rather, they routinely stuck to three grievances: the embargo against Iraq, the stationing of American troops on Islamic holy ground in Saudi Arabia, and the ill treatment of Palestinians by America’s ally Israel.

Despite this, the U.S. official position was that to acknowledge that bin Laden was motivated by anything other than blind hatred was to make excuses for him. That was a preposterous, even demagogic response to the efforts to understand Muslim anti-Americanism.

But it served a purpose: it averted a candid evaluation of U.S. policy in the Middle East. That response continues to this day. It can be seen in the refusal to discuss or even acknowledge what bin Laden said in his latest tape (and the one before that). As President Bush reacted, “Whoever put this tape out has put the world on notice yet again that we’re at war.”

But that is precisely what it does not do.

It is worthwhile to note that in the new tape, bin Laden, again, nowhere condemns the American people for their way of life. Rather, “the unjust government of the United States” is singled out for criticism. The governments of U.S. allies are similarly condemned.

Moreover, as bin Laden sees it, his past acts and threats of future acts are not unprovoked. They are responses to what he regards as acts of violence committed by the U.S. and Israeli governments: “[what] Bush…did by murdering our children in Iraq and what Israel, the ally of America, did in bombing houses of the elderly, women, and children in Palestine, using American planes.”

He goes on: “Why should fear, killing, destruction, displacement, orphaning, and widowing continue to be our lot, while security, stability and happiness be your lot? This is unfair. It is time that we get even. You will be killed just as you kill, and will be bombed just as you bomb… The road to safety starts with stopping aggression.”

His message is clear: if the U.S. government and Israeli governments stop their use of violence, so would his devotees. Maybe he is not to be believed. But why isn’t this message worthy of discussion?

Is U.S. policy so sacrosanct that it may not be questioned? Maybe it’s time we looked at it the way the people on the receiving end see it.

Americans do not like to hear it, but their government has behaved like an imperial power in the Middle East for more than 50 years. This has caused untold misery to innocent people, generated violent resentment, and spawned terrorism, the historical price of empire. In more ways than one, bin Laden is another in a series of Frankenstein’s monsters created by U.S. foreign-policy makers.

No, the American people did not deserve what happened on 9/11. But they neither did they deserve being put in harm’s way by their government’s policies. It’s time we returned to the foreign policy of our Founders: minding our own business.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Va., and editor of Ideas on Liberty magazine and author of “‘Ancient History’: U.S. Conduct in the Middle East since World War II and the Folly of Intervention.”

fff@fff.org

January 2, 2003

Tokyo, Japan — The government plans to draft a new law to pave the way for Tokyo to provide noncombatant support to the U.S. military in case of a U.S. attack on Iraq, a national newspaper said Wednesday.

The Mainichi Shimbun [newspaper] said the Japanese support is expected to focus on fuel supplies to U.S. Navy vessels and cargo shipment as in the case with Tokyo’s support to the U.S. military in the U.S.-led war against terrorism in Afghanistan.

“There is a need to demonstrate the Japan-U.S. alliance is strong,” a government official was quoted as saying.

The government intends to submit a related bill to the ordinary Diet session slated to be convened Jan 20, but there is a cautious view within the government and ruling parties about putting priority on Diet debate on the new law over that on the budget for fiscal 2003, the newspaper said.

Japan currently provides the U.S. military involved in the war against terrorism with logistic support under a law on support for antiterrorism activities, but a possible U.S. war against Iraq would not be covered under the law.

The Mainichi said the government is also considering mapping out a law to provide logistic support to U.S.-led forces to be stationed in Iraq after the war and supply assistance to refugees in neighboring countries.