BATTLEFIELD RADIATION - DU vet: 'My days are numbered'

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20051120x1.htm

Gerard Matthew has broad shoulders and beefy hands. He's built like a bear. Yet as sturdy as this 31-year-old may look, he is a very sick man.

Matthew suffers, for example, from facial swelling, double and triple vision, muscle weakness, bouts of extreme anger that sometimes cause him to lash out at his wife, erectile dysfunction and, most serious of all, a tumor in the pituitary gland at the base of his brain.

"And these are just the big ones," he told the audience at the Foreign Correspondents' Club Japan in Tokyo earlier this month.

At home in New York, he said, he's got "a pharmacy" of medication -- and he worries both for himself and his family that his "days are numbered."

should be mandatory veiwing for anyone thinking about enlisting. It itemizes the many ways the government has poisoned those in its employ.

And what is worse is that this is just the beginning. DU is the "gift" that keeps on giving and giving and giving. It makes Agent Orange look like Kool Aid.

Americans don't have a magic shield that protects them.

And when depleted uranium was used as an offensive weapon, I know this would come back to haunt us. (thx to the Christian Science Monitor for telling everyone that the U.S. was using D.U....)

Sad.

On the plus side, if it is radiation poisoning, for him to breed would create offspring that would not wish TO be alive.

:cry:



<snip>

Matthew believes the dust from spent depleted-uranium (DU) ammunition in his cargo accumulated in his lungs, irradiating his body and causing most of the ailments that trouble him today. Urine tests taken as part of a New York Daily News story investigation in 2004 showed that DU levels in his sample were up to eight times higher than in control samples from Daily News journalists. Matthew showed reporters a letter from the Department of the Army that rejected this claim.

Most pertinent to his audience at the FCCJ: Matthew worries that radiological contamination may be afflicting Japanese troops posted to Iraq -- not to mention local Iraqis.

"I came all the way to Japan to convey the message," said Matthew, who, with his wife Janise was the guest of Tokyo-based activist group Campaign for Abolition of Depleted Uranium Japan. In other words, he believes that Japanese troops should be warned: "They may be susceptible to it."

With Janise, also 31, seated beside him on the dais, the couple together held up glossy photographs of their 1-year-old daughter Victoria, who was born without a right hand. It is a birth defect they both blame on DU.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs257/en/

Has this guy been exposed to other toxins?

Repugs love getting into wars and love cutting benefits for those that fight in them.

We will have created a 100 Tim McVeigh clones by the time 2008 rolls around. And you can bet the Repugs will continue cutting benefits for veterans.

And of course I'm referring to our heartless government.

What next? "Support the troops" is an empty slogan until the troops are actually supported by protecting them in the first place.

It's hard to tell what they'll come up with next!

The Campaign Against Depleted Uranium (CADU) was launched in 1999 to focus specifically on trying to achieve a global ban on the manufacture, testing, and use of depleted uranium weapons.

We also have a strong interest in identifying the extent of its civilian use and achieving as much limitation of this as possible.
Please take a moment to sign the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapon's online petition by clicking on the image below, we currently have in excess of 190,000 signatures worldwide - make your's count too.
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http://www.bandepleteduranium.org/modules.php?name=ePetitions&op=more_info&ePetitionId=3
http://www.cadu.org.uk/

Depleted Uranium at War
DU Kills & Keeps On Killing



In the 1950's the United States Department of Defense became interested in using depleted uranium metal in weapons because of its extremely dense, pyrophoric qualities and because it was cheap and available in huge quantities. It is now given practically free of charge to the military and arms manufacturers and is used both as tank armour, and in armour-piercing shells known as depleted uranium penetrators. Over 15 countries are known to have depleted uranium weapons in their militaray arsenals - UK, US, France, Russia, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Pakistan, Thailand, Iraq and Taiwan - with depleted uranium rapidly spreading to other countries.

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http://www.cadu.org.uk/intro.htm

http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/nucs2004.htm
http://www.csmonitor.com/atcsmonitor/specials/uranium/

is testing for it standard upon leaving the theater of combat? I'm surpriused there has been so little coverage of this issue. This guy should go on KO and tell his story

Louisana is one, and the other is in New England, CT if I am not mistaken.

And I have heard that the Feds are pissed and are going to challenge it.

Depleted Uranium: A Scientific Perspective

An Interview With LEUREN MORET, Geoscientist; She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project.
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=6232
ICONOCLAST: What about Iraq itself? What’s been done thus far?
MORET: It’s uninhabitable. The whole country. I’ve toured and gone all over Iraq with a pediatrician in Basra and an oncologist, a cancer specialist. These poor doctors -- their whole families are dying of cancer. He has 10 members of his family with cancer now that he’s treating, and this is just from Gulf War I. They’ve used much, much, much more in 2003. All over the whole country.
Much of Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan are also completely uninhabitable.
In April of 2003, the World Health Organization said they expect global cancer rates to increase 50 percent by the year 2020.
Infant mortality is going up again all over the world. This is an indicator of the level of radioactive pollution.
Depleted uranium is a very, very, very effective biological weapon. This is the primary purpose for using it. Marion Falk (a retired chemical physicist who built nuclear bombs for more than 20 years at Lawrence Livermore lab), who is the Manhattan Project scientist I work with, taught me pretty much everything about radiation and particles and DU. He said the purpose of weapons used by the military is not only to injure and kill the enemy soldiers, but the purpose is to kill, maim, and disease the civilian population because it reduces the productivity of a country and pretty soon a lot of their resources are going to be used for taking care of sick people. They will have fewer and fewer healthy workers.
(article also notes very high cancer rates and other chronic conditions in Gulf War I and II U.S. veterans)

A Military Perspective
Interview with Major Doug Rokke, Ph.D, former Director
of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project
http://www.lonestaricon.com/News/2005/11-20/19news04.htm


A Survivor's Perpsective
Interview with Melissa Sterry, Gulf War Veteran who is
surviving the effects of depleted uranium. Here's a quote from this interview:
"The usage of this material is war on generations not yet born.
It wages war on children long after military conflict has ended.
It's not just children of Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
It's the children of American soldiers because we bring this
radioactive poisoning back to our families in our genetic
material. It's inside our bodies. We have to stop using it."
-- Melissa Sterry
Gulf War Veteran who served in Kuwait
http://www.lonestaricon.com/News/2005/11-20/19news05.htm

one of the worst. It's hard to get the US to focus on DU...the general public seems to be completely unaware. Congress knows about it, it was being discussed right before 9/11. Agent Orange, DU, the military will deny...all soldier's need to know this and its effects on their children.

exposure. We always send our young to war (and in this case our middle and older because we've deployed the National Guard) and in the end what they suffer afterwards is worse than we ever will honor them to take care of.

It's the extra cost of war that never is figured into the "Budget" or the "Case for Going." It's the cost that stays with us. And, here we are again in Vietnam II within many of our lifetimes that we thought we'd NEVER SEE...and Chris Matthews is there talking about "shouldn't we torture like the Mob Does?" Like the jerk has seen too many movies and never sought to enlighten himself about War, Torture, or the effects it has on our whole society.

It gets one crazy thinking about it all. But, most Americans will never deal with it. It doesn't go into their daily lives as they concern themselves with whatever they need to do to live here today. They won't see the cripled and the Veterans Day Holiday as usual will be given to shopping in the malls because we don't see these people and if we do, we will turn away. As the Right Wingers say...they were "volunteers." :-(