GULF WAR SYNDROME/DU/VACCINE THREAD

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Open Letter To The CDC On Depleted Uranium

By Jon Rappoport



From: P Dalton | [e-mail]

From: Jon Rappoport | nomorefakenews.com

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL

April 7. You probably don't remember me. No reason you should. We crossed swords a lot of years ago when I was covering the subject of AIDS on a regular basis.

These days, I notice you're very busy delving into the "mystery of SARS." I suggest you turn your attention to something a lot more serious:

What is happening in the Gulf. I just had a long talk with the Pentagon's former chief medical man on the depleted uranium investigation, Dr. Doug Rokke.

Doug is suffering from uranium poisoning. He was there. He knows the score. So does David Hackworth, if he'll talk to you about it. These days, David works for FOX, and you can observe the jitters in his smiles. He is aware that DU is being spread and inhaled everywhere in Iraq. DU from Gulf 1, DU from today.

Rokke wore a respiratory protector when he went to Iraq. It didn't help. The smallest and most dangerous uranium particles slipped through. They are still slipping through.

You could have doctors out there taking samples, in the desert. Reporting back. If indeed, the prevention of cancers and kidney and liver destruction is on your radar screen.

You could make a stand against what modern war has become.

You could let the public know that ANY bombing that explodes synthetic materials, like plastics, blows huge clouds of multiple poisons into the landscape.

You could go to the old site of the WTC and work out from there, and you would find the same thing.

I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. So your decision to skip the war is a conscious one. I hope that families of US soldiers come to realize that. Because their sons and daughters are starting to die right now.

You are a case of doctors forsaking their oath to heal and do no harm. You are a case of betrayal and treason.

You have used up any vestige of credibility you might once have possessed. You are now an outlaw agency.

Whoever trusts you now is simply responding to the PR you turn out every day, which is reported dutifully in the press. You are nothing more than a propaganda agency.

Whereas, a man like Doug Rokke (see my article on him immediately below), well, he is another breed. He retains a sense of duty, a sense of mission, even though the Pentagon has discarded him at the side of the road. He stands up. You stand down.

Whether you know it or not, it is a cold day for you. You are outside the human community. You could, if you had the guts, declare a medical emergency in Iraq. You could declare that the whole war zone is not fit for human or any other kind of life. But we all know you will not do that. That would be ridiculous. That would immediately create a crisis of government, at the highest levels.

You would never, for a flicker of a second, consider it is your duty to bring about exactly such a crisis.

But it is.

I hope that some other medical organization takes a cue and does, in fact, make such a declaration.

The truth may set us free, but during the process it also can bring down the shithouse roof on our heads.

People like Doug Rokke are ready for that. They have already experienced it. You, on the other hand, have settled for your own favorite perversions. Deception is at the top of the list.

You are the lost, the craven. You should be considered pariahs by your own families and cast out into the bad night, set loose to wander and fumble around with the little pathetic gold buttons of your former reputations, peddling them for scraps.

I would trade one good emergency-room physician for the lot of you.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

WHAT WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS WAR

WHAT HAVE THEY WROUGHT?

---an open letter to Christopher Hitchens, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Martin Sheen, the VFW, Ted Turner, David Hackworth, Madonna, Michael Moore, Robert Byrd, Rush Limbaugh, Dan Rather, Richard Perle, Ariel Sharon, the Pope, David Rockefeller, Amnesty International, and the King of Siam---

April 7. Yesterday, in an attempt to find out more about the death of NBC reporter, David Bloom, I spoke with the former head of the Pentagon Depleted Uranium Investigation Team, Dr. Doug Rokke.

Rokke was the man who went to Iraq a decade ago on a mission to report on depleted uranium (DU). What he found was so horrifying the Pentagon scuttled his work and tried to make him an invisible man.

Rokke suffered uranium poisoning himself. But his medical records, and those of who knows how many thousands of other soldiers, do not reflect that. History has been suppressed, has been re-written.

Our conversation began with me asking Rokke if he thought that the announced cause of David Bloom's death, pulmonary embolism, could have resulted from DU.

But Rokke stopped me short. He said, "This was the diagnosis they immediately gave out? I don't see how. You can't diagnose that from the battlefield. You really need an autopsy to discover whether that's the cause..."

Which opened up new questions.

Rokke began to talk about conditions in the Gulf now.

He said that the PR about the US limiting civilian casualties is absurd, because, for example, the Pentagon admits to losing 700 cruise missiles that have been fired at Baghdad in the current campaign. In other words, those missiles strayed off course and no one really knows where they landed and exploded. "700 missiles, each one loaded with DU, is 700,000 pounds of explosives," he said.

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700,000 pounds of explosives going off, spreading cancer-causing uranium in all directions.

Rokke then informed me that, since 1990, and up to the beginning of Gulf War 2, some 260,000 US soldiers have been granted disability. 10,000 have died.

I'm relaying these facts to you in a sober way, but of course I was staggered as Rokke talked. He painted a picture of the Iraqi landscape as a toxic soup. DU, yes. But also many other toxins, because as he explained, when bombs and missiles rip up ANY material that is composite or synthetic, like plastics, you get all sorts of poisonous byproducts.

And that, for example, is what happened at the WTC on 9/11. Rokke said, "I trained a lot of those first health responders. They're dead now."

Rokke, over the years, together with colleagues, has issued report after report describing what, in essence, are the inevitable consequences of modern warfare as it is carried out. A lingering toxic landscape that kills over time.

When Rokke was in the Gulf a decade ago, one of his fears was confirmed: the masks worn to protect against DU don't work. They can't filter out the smallest and deadliest particles of uranium. "We could taste the stuff [uranium]," he said.

Rokke states that the Pentagon is completely aware of the dangers to US solders and combatants, and just doesn't care.

I asked him why DU is used in projectile shells and missiles. He told me it was because uranium is so dense the weight of impact on a target causes a lot more damage. And, he said, these shells are not merely coated or tipped with uranium, as some Pentagon people have stated. They are packed with it. Rokke likened the situation to having uranium rods in your backyard.

He went on to explain that the PB pills US soldiers have been taking, as protection against nerve gas, are themselves nerve agents. If taken immediately before a nerve-gas attack---and then followed up with two other medicines---the soldier might get protection from nerve gas. But the PB pills are being swallowed long in advance of any possible contact with nerve gas. In essence, soldiers are getting "nerve gas" attacks FROM THE POISON PILLS.

Rokke mentioned a number of sites around the world---Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia, and places in the US---where DU is a major problem right now.

By this point in our conversation, Rokke was piecing together an emerging picture of modern war as both murder and suicide.

He predicted the consequences of the Iraq war are going to be worse than Gulf War 1.

Worse, in terms of damage and death to US troops and the Iraqi people.

I hung up the phone stunned. I can only ask that you get this information out to as many people as possible.

To give the widest possible benefit of the doubt to mainstream news reporters, THEY JUST DON'T KNOW. They have no idea what they are supporting when they allow the picture of this war to be painted as a careful and controlled campaign. All those maps and arrows and targets---they need to be enveloped in a cloud of MULTIPLE POISONS. Then we would have some concept of what is really going on---and what is going to happen when it's over.

Rokke mentioned that, between Gulf War 1 and the start of Gulf 2, the Iraqis tried to build new water treatment facilities in Basra. To clean up their horrible, illness-causing contaminated water. Each time they tried, he said, those emerging facilities were destroyed...

What is happening in the Gulf is not merely the result of ignorance. It is not only depraved indifference. It is a plan to depopulate and destroy. US soldiers will be sacrificed, in huge numbers, to forward the larger goal. The depopulation and debilitation of Iraq.

Yet, the news networks still display that graphic: OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. And DOD spokesmen keep saying the protection of the Iraqi oil fields is being done to preserve "the future wealth of the Iraqi people." That sick joke takes on a new and very ominous meaning.

If 260,000 US vets now on disability from Gulf 1 can be hidden from the stupefied American people, what else can be hidden, here and in Iraq, in the coming months and years? How many cases of cancer? How many birth defects? How many kidney and liver failures? How many immune-system destructions? How many American families who support their children now doing time in the Gulf will later watch those sons and daughters waste away, while the Pentagon claims it's all post-traumatic stress?

How far do all the toxic clouds drift? How many cases of illness are being misdiagnosed as the result of germs?

We are in a time of madness. I can't fault prayer or the distractions of television or even the desperate accoutrements of so-called patriotism. But somehow we have to live beyond cliches and summon up the outrage equal to the destruction. Equal to the moment.

The wretched hairless generals are striding through the Pentagon thinking they are on a course of victory, thinking whatever they have to think to avoid the truth that is chasing them like a snake.

Let the cardboard floors of lies give way and collapse. Let the voices of the intelligent pro-war advocates incorporate this news. Let them, finally, arrive at a further shore of conscience that compels them to take a stand. They are viewing old images, they are seeing a fantasy of war, they are imagining situations that no longer exist.

War is now different. It is a sword you always fall on.

WAKE UP.

WAKE UP.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

THE DEATH OF NBC NEWS REPORTER DAVID BLOOM

April 6. The diagnosis is pulmonary embolism. Bloom was traveling across the Iraqi desert in a tank. Many questions could be raised. Was the fatal clot---if that is really what killed him---caused by clumped tumor cells brought on by depleted uranium dust? Or would the effect of the uranium take longer to register?

A release of a nerve gas like phosgene could also have been a cause of death.

JON RAPPOPORT www.nomorefakenews.com

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Get Ready For More American Deaths

From The Infamous 'Gulf Syndrome'

From Joy Rae Freeman



From: Bonnie | [e-mail]

From: "Joy Rae Freeman" <[e-mail]>

WE MUST ALL CONTRIBUTE TO EXPOSE THIS CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY - AND AMERICAN SOLDIERS!

Get Ready For More American Deaths From the Infamous 'Gulf Syndrome' Douglas Rokke has a PhD in health physics and was originally trained as a forensic scientist. When the Gulf War started, he was assigned by the US military to prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, and sent to the Gulf. What he experienced has made him a passionate voice for peace, traveling the US to speak out. The following interview was conducted by the director of the Traprock Peace Center, Sunny Miller:

Sunny Miller (SM): Any viewer who saw the war on television had the impression this was an easy war, fought from a distance and soldiers coming back relatively unharmed. Is this an accurate picture? Douglas Rokke (DR): At the completion of the Gulf War, when we came back to the United States in the fall of 1991, we had a total casualty count of 760: 294 dead, a little over 400 wounded or ill. But the casualty rate now for Gulf War veterans is approximately 30 percent. Of those stationed in the theater, including after the conflict, 221,000 have been awarded disability, according to a Veterans Affairs (VA) report issued September 10, 2002.

Many of the US casualties died as a direct result of uranium munitions friendly fire. US forces killed and wounded US forces. We recommended care for anybody downwind of any uranium dust, anybody working in and around uranium contamination, and anyone within a vehicle, structure, or building that's struck with uranium munitions. That's thousands upon thousands of individuals, but not only US troops.

You should provide medical care not only for the enemy soldiers, but for the Iraqi women and children affected, and clean up all of the contamination in Iraq. And it's not just children in Iraq. It's children born to soldiers after they came back home. The military admitted that they were finding uranium excreted in the semen of the soldiers. If you've got uranium in the semen, the genetics are messed up. So when the children were conceived -- the alpha particles cause such tremendous cell damage and genetics damage that everything goes bad. Studies have found that male soldiers who served in the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to have a child with a birth defect, and female soldiers almost three times as likely.

SM: You have been a military man for over 35 years. You served in Vietnam as a bombardier and you are still in the US Army Reserves. Now you're going around the country speaking about the dangers of depleted uranium (DU). What made you decide you had to speak publicly about DU?

DR: Everybody on my team was getting sick. My best friend John Sitton was dying. The military refused him medical care, and he died. John set up the medical evacuation communication system for the entire theater. Then he got contaminated doing the work. John and Rolla Dolph and I were best friends in the civilian world, the military world, forever. Rolla got sick. I personally got the order that sent him to war. We were both activated together. I was given the assignment to teach nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare and make sure soldiers came back alive and safe. I take it seriously. I was sent to the Gulf with this instruction: Bring 'em back alive. Clear as could be. But when I got all the training together, all the environmental cleanup procedures together all the medical directives, nothing happened.

More than 100 American soldiers were exposed to DU in friendly fire accidents, plus untold numbers of soldiers who climbed on and entered tanks that had been hit with DU, taking photos and gathering souvenirs to take home. They didn't know about the hazards.

DU is an extremely effective weapon. Each tank round is 10 pounds of solid uranium-238 contaminated with plutonium, neptunium, americium. It is pyrophoric, generating intense heat on impact, penetrating a tank because of the heavy weight of its metal. When uranium munitions hit, it's like a firestorm inside any vehicle or structure, and so we saw tremendous burns, tremendous injuries. It was devastating.

The US military decided to blow up Saddam's chemical, biological, and radiological stockpiles in place, which released the contamination back on the US troops and on everybody in the whole region. The chemical agent detectors and radiological monitors were going off all over the place. We had all of the various nerve agents. We think there were biological agents, and there were destroyed nuclear reactor facilities. It was a toxic wasteland. And we had DU added to this whole mess.

When we first got assigned to clean up the DU and arrived in northern Saudi Arabia, we started getting sick within 72 hours. Respiratory problems, rashes, bleeding, open sores started almost immediately. When you have a mass dose of radioactive particulates and you start breathing that in, the deposit sits in the back of the pharynx, where the cancer started initially on the first guy. It doesn't take a lot of time. I had a father and son working with me. The father is already dead from lung cancer, and the sick son is still denied medical care.

SM: Did you suspect what was happening?

DR: We didn't know anything about DU when the Gulf War started. As a warrior, you're listening to your leaders, and they're saying there are no health effects from the DU. But, as we started to study this, to go back to what we learned in physics and our engineering -- I was a professor of environmental science and engineering -- you learn rapidly that what they're telling you doesn't agree with what you know and observe. In June of 1991, when I got back to the States, I was sick. Respiratory problems and the rashes and neurological things were starting to show up.

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SM: Why didn't you go to the VA with a medical complaint?

DR: Because I was still in the Army, and I was told I couldn't file. You have to have the information that connects your exposure to your service before you go to the VA. The VA obviously wasn't going to take care of me, so I went to my private physician. We had no idea what it was, but so many good people were coming back sick. They didn't do tests on me or my team members. According to the Department of Defense's own guidelines put out in 1992, any excretion level in the urine above 15 micrograms of uranium per day should result in immediate medical testing, and when you get up to 250 micrograms of total uranium excreted per day, you're supposed to be under continuous medical care.

Finally the US Department of Energy performed a radio-bio-essay on me in November 1994, while I was director of the Depleted Uranium Project for the Department of Defense. My excretion rate was approximately 1500 micrograms per day. My level was 5 to 6 times beyond the level that requires continuous medical care. But they didn't tell me for two and a half years.

SM: What are the symptoms of exposure to DU?

DR: Fibromyalgia. Eye cataracts from the radiation. When uranium impacts any type of vehicle or structure, uranium oxide dust and pieces of uranium explode all over the place. This can be breathed in or go into a wound. Once it gets in the body, a portion of this stuff is soluble, which means it goes into the blood stream and all of your organs. The insoluble fraction stays -- in the lungs, for example. The radiation damage and the particulates destroy the lungs.

SM: What kind of training have the troops had, who are getting called up right now -- the ones being shipped to the vicinity of what may be the next Gulf War?

DR: As the director of the Depleted Uranium Project, I developed a 40-hour block of training. All that curriculum has been shelved. They turned what I wrote into a 20-minute program that's full of distortions. It doesn't deal with the reality of uranium munitions. The equipment is defective. The General Accounting Office verified that the gas masks leak, the chemical protective suits leak. Unbelievably, Defense Department officials recently said the defects can be fixed with duct tape (AGAIN!).

SM: If my neighbors are being sent off to combat with equipment and training that is inadequate, and into battle with a toxic weapon, DU, who can speak up?

DR: Every husband and wife, son and daughter, grandparent, aunt and uncle needs to call their congressmen and cite these official government reports and force the military to ensure that our troops have adequate equipment and adequate training. If we don't take care of our American veterans after a war, as happened with the Gulf War, and now we're about ready to send them into a war again... we can't do it. We just can't do it. It's a crime against God.

It's a crime against humanity to use uranium munitions in a war, and it's devastating to ignore the consequences of war. These consequences last for eternity. The half life of uranium 238 is 4.5 billion years. And we left over 320 tons all over the place in Iraq.

We also bombarded Vieques, Puerto Rico, with DU in preparation for the war in Kosovo. That's affecting American citizens on American territory. When I tried to activate our team from the Department of Defense responsible for radiological safety and DU cleanup in Vieques, I was told no. When I tried to activate medical care, I was told no.

The US Army made me their expert. I went into the project with the total intent to ensure they could use uranium munitions in war, because I'm a warrior. What I saw as director of the project, doing the research and working with my own medical conditions and everybody else's, led me to one conclusion: uranium munitions must be banned from the planet, for eternity, and medical care must be provided for everyone, not just the US or the Canadians or the British or the Germans or the French but for the American citizens of Vieques, for the residents of Iraq, of Okinawa, of Scotland, of Indiana, of Maryland, and now Afghanistan and Kosovo.

SM: If your information got out widely, do you think there's a possibility that the families of those soldiers would beg them to refuse?

DR: If you're going to be sent into a toxic wasteland, and you know you are going to wear gas masks and chemical protective suits that leak, and you re not going to get any medical care after you're exposed to all of these things, would you go? Suppose they gave a war and nobody came. You've got to start peace sometime.

SM: It does sound remarkable for someone who has been in the military for 35 years to be talking about when peace should begin.

DR: When I do these talks, especially in churches, I'm reminded that these religions say, "And a child will lead us to peace". But if we contaminate the environment, where will the child come from? The children won't be there. War has become obsolete, because we can't deal with the consequences on our warriors or the environment, but more important, on the noncombatants. When you reach a point in war when the contamination and the health effects of war can't be cleaned up because of the weapons you use, and medical care can't be given to the soldiers who participated in the war on either side or to the civilians affected, then it's time for peace. This interview with Douglas Rokke is available for re-broadcast at www.traprockpeace.org


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For more information on DU, see:
The WISE Uranium Project
www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/
The National Gulf War Resource Center
www.ngwrc.org
Veterans for Common Sense
www.veteransforcommonsense.org
Silver Bullet: Depleted Uranium
www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/du/
Depleted Uranium: FAQ
cbc.ca/news/indepth/background/du.html
The Gulf War's New Casualties (July 1997)
www.thenation.com/issue/970714/0714mesl.htm
After effects of use of depleted uranium. Includes another interview with
Doug Rokke.
PLENTY MORE Depleted Uranium Links!
www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/du/links.html