In and Out of the News

Blister gas, an illegal weapon which ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein said he had destroyed, was extensively used against the Iranians during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

Although it can kill if it enters the lungs, it is used mainly to weaken infantry by making the skin break out in excruciatingly painful blisters.

What the normalizers don’t want you to know is the nature and scale of the “coalition” crime in Iraq – which Kettle calls a “misjudgment” – and the true source of the worldwide threat. Outside the work of a few outstanding journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the extent of the human carnage and material devastation is barely acknowledged. For example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American and British forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not to approach contaminated sites. Readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in British-controlled Basra are so high that a British army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. With nothing to warn them, Iraqi children play on and around the tanks.

Of the 10,000 Americans evacuated sick from Iraq, many have “mystery illnesses” not unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war. By mid-April last year, the US air force had deployed more than 19,000 guided weapons and 311,000 rounds of uranium A10 shells. According to a November 2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Center, witnesses living next to Baghdad airport reported a huge death toll following one morning’s attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since then, a vast area has been “landscaped” by US earth movers, and fenced. Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad, has documented a catalogue of miscarriages, hair loss, and horrific eye, skin and respiratory problems among people living near the area. Yet the US and Britain steadfastly refuse to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct systematic monitoring tests for uranium contamination in Iraq. The Ministry of Defense, which has admitted that British tanks fired depleted uranium in and around Basra, says that British troops “will have access to biological monitoring.” Iraqis have no such access and receive no specialist medical help.

According to the non-governmental organization Medact, between 21,700 and 55,000 Iraqis died between 20 March and 20 October last year. This includes up to 9,600 civilians. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. These are conservative estimates; the ripples of trauma throughout the society cannot be imagined. Neither the US nor Britain counts its Iraqi victims, whose epic suffering is “not relevant,” according to a US State Department official – just as the slaughter of more than 200,000 Iraqis during and immediately after the 1991 Gulf war, calculated in a Medical Education Trust study, was “not relevant” and not news.

In a letter sent this week to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Dave Gorman, executive director of Disabled American Veterans, complained that the DAV is being blocked from carrying out its congressionally chartered mission.

Gorman questioned measures that require hospital pre-screening and approval of all visits, and full-time escorts during those visits, according to the letter a copy of which CNN obtained. Gorman said because of those escorts there is a lack of privacy over matters the counselors discuss with patients and their families at Walter Reed.

He said the monitoring of these conversations “is particularly unnerving and inappropriate as all conversations between a representative and client are confidential in nature.”