Dick
Cheney's Time-Release Poison
By Irving Wesley
Hall
09 March, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Did
you read the story about 1st Lt. William “Eddie” Rebrook
IV whose arm was shattered and artery severed by a roadside bomb in
Iraq? The Army discharged him because of his injuries. But the Pentagon
refused to allow him to go home until he paid $700 for his blood-soaked
body armor discarded on the battlefield by the evacuating medics.
The Charleston Gazette quoted
his mother as saying, “It’s outrageous, ridiculous and unconscionable.
I wanted to stand on a street corner and yell through a megaphone about
this.”
That's how I feel after
researching this series about Dick Cheney, deadly depleted uranium,
and its effects on our troops. In 1991, then Secretary of Defense Cheney
authorized the first massive use of depleted uranium munitions by our
forces. As a consequence the lives of almost 2/3rds of the men and women
who served in the Gulf War have been destroyed. Their families have
been ripped apart, and their children are being born with tragic deformities.
Does the same fate await most of the one million troops who served in
Afghanistan and Iraq? Read on and judge for yourself.
This series was inspired
by National Guard Major Matt Tully, a local attorney, whom I've never
met but deeply respect. On 9/11, he was working as a brokerage firm
paralegal in the World Trade Center and was almost killed. He changed
into uniform and served for three days as the No. 2 National Guardsman
providing security for the crash site. He subsequently returned to law
school and set up practice in our area of central New York.
Despite the post 9/11 anti-Arab
hysteria, Tully defended Joe Mansour, a Lebanese American working in
a federal prison. Mansour began receiving derogatory e-mails and death
threats after 9/11. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
awarded Matt Tully its 2005 Pro-Bono Attorney of the Year. Tully also
spoke out against the looming war in Iraq that the Bush Administration
was hyping on a false connection between 9/11 and the government of
Iraq.
Matt Tully is an active member
of the American Bar Association, Fraternal Order of Police, Knights
of Columbus, National Rifle Association, Reserve Officers Association,
American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Given Tully's 9/11 experience,
pro bono work, and earlier opposition to the war, I was troubled to
read last year that Tully had been called to duty in Iraq. Tully was
quoted as saying, "I was very vocal in my opposition to the war
in Iraq," and adding that he believed President Bush's policy of
pre-emptive strikes to be un-American and that the United States should
not invade another country unless it commits an act of war upon America.
Unlike the young draftees
of the Vietnam War era, 40% of those serving in Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's
war are National Guard, and Army Reserves. They’re our neighbors.
They leave behind families, mortgage payments, and vital jobs serving
our community.
As a former professor of political science I completely agreed with
Tully on the illegality of a war of aggression against a country that
posed no threat to the United States. I cannot imagine a lawyer and
member of the American Bar Association taking any other position. After
all, American jurists played a key role in the Nuremberg trials of Nazi
war criminals that began in October 1945. The German defendants were
charged not only with the systematic murder of millions of people, but
also with planning and carrying out the war in Europe. The court sentenced
twelve Nazi officials to be hanged, three to life in prison, and four
to serve prison sentences of 10-20 years.
The Nuremberg Tribunal prompted
subsequent expansion of international law that condemns the waging of
aggressive war as the "supreme" war crime that inevitably
leads to crimes such as the slaughter of civilians and mistreatment
and torture of prisoners.
Mr. Tully's opposition to
the war also struck a personal chord. I was a draft counselor during
the Vietnam War. Like Mr. Tully's legal position against the Iraq War,
my opposition to the Vietnam War was not only moral. It was political.
As a high school teacher at the time, I had studied the disastrous Japanese
and later French colonial wars against the Vietnamese.
I knew that the American
war against a popular guerrilla resistance was not winnable. It would
turn out to be a meat grinder for America's youth and all Vietnamese.
And it would waste billions of dollars needed at home for education,
health care, and eradicating poverty.
For years after the war
ended, men would approach me on the street to thank me for saving their
lives, and, equally important, for empowering them to refuse to serve
in a war of aggression against a people who posed to no threat to the
United States.
I agonized over Major Tully's
particular dilemma when his National Guard division was called. Unlike
the individual civilians I counseled in the 1960s, Tully was a commissioned
officer with loyalty to his unit, the famous Rainbow Division of the
New York State National Guard.
The heroic life of a man I didn't know prompted me to set aside a few
days a week from the comic novel, We're Not In Kansas Anymore! I've
almost finished about Pat Robertson-type Christianity. I wanted to learn
about the men and women of the Rainbow Division stationed in Forward
Operating Base Camp Danger in Saddam Hussein's former palace in Tikrit
on the desert banks of the Tigris River.
I was in the middle of drafting
my first piece on the Rainbow Division when I watched George W. Bush's
October 13, 2005 choreographed teleconference on the eve of Iraq's constitutional
referendum. The Camp Danger base commander had ordered ten of his soldiers
to feed the president and the American citizens a fairy tale scripted
by chickenhawk Republican operatives in Washington.
I knew that the words the
troops had been ordered to mouth on camera were misleading, false, and
designed to present a rosy picture of the rapidly deteriorating military
and political situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
As an informed citizen I
was outraged. So I changed the focus of my piece to contrast the fictional
script concocted by Bush's stateside propagandists with the facts on
the ground, including quotations on the growing resistance to the occupation
by the base commander Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Taluto.
The Rainbow Division Guardsmen
have now served the first of three possible six-month tours of duty.
Most, including Matt Tully, have arrived home safely. When the local
paper reported his return last month, I was in for a second shock. On
his way home, Tully had been co-opted into a meeting with Vice-President
Dick Cheney.
I had been researching Gulf
War Illness for a decade so I knew about Cheney's responsibility for
the greatest tragedy to strike the United States military since the
Civil War. I knew that depleted uranium contamination was the wild card
in every returning vet's deck, one that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Pentagon
don’t want them or us to know about.
Dick Cheney and Matt
Tully!
Here was the man who helped
destroy one generation of American citizen soldiers enlisting a local
hero to help take down the next!
Depleted uranium is deadly. 697,00 men and women served in the 1991
Operation Desert Storm. The Gulf War on the ground lasted only 100 hours.
Few troops spent more than three months near the battle zone during
and after the war.
Nevertheless 518,000 Gulf
War era vets are now receiving medical disability according government
figures. That's more than 70% of all Army, Navy and Air Force veterans,
even though not all the disabled served in the Middle East. For purposes
of comparison, many more years after the wars in which they served,
the disabled from World War II total 8.6%; 5% from the Korean War, and
9.6% from the Vietnam War.
More than 320 tons of depleted
uranium munitions were used in the Gulf War. Ten times that tonnage
has so far been used in Afghanistan and Iraq. Depleted uranium has a
half-life of 4.5 billion years. Some of the radioactive particles are
as small as bacteria. They cannot be filtered so they permeate the air,
water, soil, vegetation, and animal life. Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan
are inhaling and ingesting them every day. They accumulate throughout
the body like time-release poison, so the symptoms often develop years
later.
The substance is so deadly
that, before the war, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Erik K.
Shenseki ordered the posting of elaborate regulations for handling contaminated
clothing, munitions, and equipment. But how many active duty soldiers
or vets reading this have even heard of those regulations?
320 tons in a 100-day war
in 1991 produced almost a 2/3rds casualty rate. Since 2003, more than
3000 tons have been used in this current war without end. The typical
tour of duty in the present conflict is six months. Many regular, National
Guard and Reserve troops are serving second and third tours.
What percentage of the million
troops who've served will eventually be stricken? You do the math. Iraq
War vets are already getting sick, dying, and producing children with
horrible birth deformities.
The Iraq War is Cheney's
war. He was the point man fabricating the string of lies that persuaded
Congress and the American people to support the unprovoked war on Iraq.
Even though he knew all his "intelligence" was phony, he created
and perpetuated the lie that linked Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attack
in order to manipulate our patriotism and mislead our troops.
Cheney is also the driving
force behind an unprovoked nuclear attack against Iran that, according
to all intelligence estimates, is years away from developing a nuclear
weapon and is abiding by international law. We now face the frightening
prospect of a nuclear attack on Iran that will send a radioactive cloud
over the Middle East.
This will doubly contaminate
the 136,000 American serving in the area as well as those who will have
to be deployed when all hell breaks loose after the attack on a third
Muslim country.
Depleted uranium contaminates
the air, soil, and water so that the men and women of the Rainbow Division
took radioactive showers during their six months in Camp Forward Danger,
but never knew it. D.U. attacks the body and the symptoms are diverse.
There is no treatment and no cure. However, there are practical tips
that troops can take in the field to avoid some of the exposure, and
there are some do's and don't's to lessen contaminating their homes
when they return.
This is an abridged version
of the first in a comprehensive series on depleted uranium to appear
on the website "We're Not in Kansas Anymore."
www.notinkansas.us.
Copyright 2006 Irving Wesley
Hall.