Global Suicide
Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2005 9:15 am
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publi ... 7578.shtml
From AxisofLogic.com
United States
DU: A Scientific Perspective/ An Interview With LEUREN MORET, Geoscientist
By W. Leon Smith/Nathan Diebenow
May 13, 2005, 07:20
Interview Conducted
By W. Leon Smith
and Nathan Diebenow
Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who works almost around the clock educating
citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other officials
on radiation issues. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore
Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project.
She is currently working as an independent citizen scientist and radiation
specialist in communities around the world, and contributed to the U.N.
subcommission investigating depleted uranium. According to Wikipedia online
encyclopedia, Moret testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for
Afghanistan in Japan in 2003, presented at the World Depleted Uranium
Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and spoke at the World Court of
Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India, in January 2004.
THE INTERVIEW
ICONOCLAST: What are the latest developments with reducing depleted uranium
exposures on U.S. troops?
MORET: A young veteran named Melissa Sterry of Connecticut has introduced a
bill into the Connecticut Legislature requiring independent testing of
returning Afghan and Gulf War veterans going back to 2001. She said that she
did it because she¹s sick, and her friends are dead, and that¹s from serving
in the 2003 conflict. I have been following the bill and talking to her.
Yesterday, she testified twice at the United Nations. I said, ³Why don¹t we
get this bill all over the U.S. in state legislatures because it informs the
public and get the local media to cover it.²
The U.S. has blocked any accountability at international and national
levels. There¹s a total cover-up just like with Agent Orange, the atomic
veterans, MKULTRA, the mind control experiments the CIA did. This is more of
the same, but the issue is much, much worse because the genetic future of
all those contaminated is effected. Now vast regions around our world, as
well as our atmosphere, are contaminated with the depleted uranium. They¹ve
used so much. It¹s the equivalent number of atoms, as the Japanese professor
calculated it, to over 400,000 Nagasaki bombs that has been released into
the atmosphere. That¹s really an underestimate.
I went to Louisiana in April. I was invited to speak at the University of
New Orleans for three days. One of the veterans asked me to be in their
April 19 protest and rally through the City of New Orleans. He took the
Connecticut bill straight to the Legislature, and he got two legislators to
sponsor it, and he said, ³Just whiteout the name ŒConnecticut¹ and write in
ŒLouisiana¹ on the bill.² You¹re not going to believe it. It passed 101 to 0
yesterday in the Louisiana House.
I want you to write about it because we want it (the DU testing bill) in
Texas. Nevada is going to introduce it. Congressman Jim McDermott is going
to put it into the Washington legislature. We want to get the governor of
Montana to do it because he¹s the first governor to demand his National
Guard be returned. I think half of them are back. He said, ³I need them in
the state.²
The DU issue is just really, really, really, really so awful. I don¹t think
there¹s any greater tragedy in the history of the world in what they¹ve
done.
ICONOCLAST: Is there a danger of depleted uranium, being used in weaponry
over there, spreading by air over here?
MORET: The atmosphere globally is contaminated with it. It¹s completely
mixed in one year. I¹m an expert on atmospheric dust. I¹m a geoscientist, a
geologist, and that¹s what I studied and did my research on. It¹s really a
fascinating subject. We have huge dust storms that are a million square
miles and transport millions of tons of dust and sand every year around the
world.
The main centers of these dust storms are the Gobi Desert in China, which is
where the Chinese did atmospheric testing, so that¹s all contaminated with
radiation, and it gets transported right over Japan, and it comes straight
across the Pacific and dumps all its sand and dust on the U.S., North
America. It¹s loaded with radioactive isotopes, soot, pesticides, chemicals,
pollution ‹ everything is in it ‹ fungi, bacteria, viruses.
The Sahara Desert is another huge dust center, and it goes up all over
Europe and straight across the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, and up the East
Coast. Of course, you get it in Texas with those hurricanes. They all
originate in the Sahara Desert.
The third region is the Western United States, which is where the Nevada
test site is located. We did 1,200 nuclear weapons tests there, so all this
radiation that is already there, which is bad enough, has caused a global
cancer epidemic since 1945. All of that radiation was the equivalent of
40,000 Nagasaki bombs. We¹re talking about 10 times more.
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.
When the U.S. and Russia signed the partial test ban treaty in 1963, the
infant mortality rate started dropping again, which is normal.
Now they are going up again. It¹s the global pollution with this radiation.
ICONOCLAST: I had one of our correspondents send me a series of photographs
of the Al-Asad dust storm in Iraq on April 28.
MORET: That dust is what I¹m talking about.
ICONOCLAST: In the picture you can see a gigantic wall of sand.
MORET: I have 16 pictures of that storm. They¹re posted with photos from
Iraqi doctors of the children of people with cancer and leukemia. So what
did you think of that dust storm?
ICONOCLAST: I thought it was really dramatic.
MORET: It remobilizes all the radiation, but those are the larger chunks.
The DU burns at such high temperatures. It¹s a pyroforic metal which means
it burns. The bullets and big caliber shells are actually on fire when they
come out of the gun barrel because they are ignited by the friction in the
gun barrel. Seventy percent of the DU metal becomes a metal vapor. It¹s
actually a radioactive gas weapon and a terrain contaminant.
I¹ll email you the URL of the 1943 memo to General Leslie Grove under the
Manhattan Project. It¹s the blueprint for depleted uranium. They dropped the
atomic bombs, but they did not use the DU weapons because they thought they
were too horrific.
I¹ve toured and gone all over Japan 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
he¹s treating, and this is just from Gulf War I. They¹ve used much, much,
much more in 2003. All over the whole country.
ICONOCLAST: What can soldiers expect when they come home?
MORET: If they were in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, they¹re coming home with
rectal cancer from sitting on ammunition boxes. The young women are
reporting terrible problems with endometriosis. That¹s the lining of the
uterus malfunctioning, and they just bleed and bleed and bleed. Some of them
have uterine cancer ‹ 18 and 19 and 20 year olds.
The Army will not even diagnose it. They send them back to the battlefields.
They won¹t treat them or diagnose them. A group of 20 soldiers pushed from
Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003 in all the fighting. Eight of those 20 soldiers
have malignancies.
ICONOCLAST: Does exposure to depleted uranium effect their psychological
background when they come home?
MORET: Depleted uranium are these particles that form at very high
temperatures. They are uranium oxides that are insoluble. They are at least
100 times smaller than a white blood cell, so when the soldiers breathe,
they inhale them. The particles go through the nose, go through the
olfactory and into the brain, and it messes up their cognitive abilities,
thought processes.
It damages their mood-control mechanism in the brain. Four soldiers at Fort
Bragg came back from Afghanistan, and within two months, those four had
murdered their wives. This is part of the damage to the brain from the
radiation and the particles.
The soldiers from Gulf War I in a group of 67 soldiers who came back, they
had DU in their equipment, in their clothes, in their bodies, in their
semen, and they had normal babies before they went over there to war. They
came back, and the VA did a study. Of 251 Gulf War I veterans in
Mississippi, in 67 percent of them, their babies born after the war were
deemed to have severe birth defects. They had brains missing, arms and legs
missing, organs missing. They were born without eyes. They had horrible
blood diseases. It¹s horrific.
If you want to look at something, Life magazine did a photo essay which is
still on the Internet. It¹s called ³The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm.² You
should look at that ‹ oh, my God, the post-Gulf War babies playing with
their brothers and sisters who are normal.
Basically, it¹s like smoking crack, only you¹re smoking radioactive crack.
It goes straight into the blood stream. It¹s carried all throughout the body
into the bones, the bone marrow, the brain. It goes into the fetus. It¹s a
systemic poison and a radiological poison.
ICONOCLAST: What about the people in the United States that are here? You
say that DU is being mixed and spread globally?
MORET: Yes, it¹s being mixed globally. We¹re getting secondary smoke. It¹s
the secondary smoke effect. You know the people who inhabit a room with
smokers? They are getting that secondary smoke, and so are we.
ICONOCLAST: Is that secondary smoke getting thicker as we speak?
MORET: Yeah, the concentration of the depleted uranium particles in the
atmosphere all around the globe is increasing. There are indications that
the U.S. will go in June and bomb the heck out of Iran. We¹re monitoring the
U.S. Army ammunition factories. They have very large orders for those huge
bunker buster bombs that have 5,000 lbs. of DU in the warhead.
ICONOCLAST: So the prognosis for America isn¹t really good?
MORET: No, it¹s really bad.
ICONOCLAST: And if this continues then?
MORET: It¹s going to kill off the world¹s population. It already is, and it
doesn¹t just effect people. It effects all living systems. The plants, the
animals, the bacteria. It effects everything.
ICONOCLAST: So the things that we eat for instance, if they have DU in them,
then we¹ll just get it in our systems, and so we¹re polluting the oceans, so
that could effect all marine life?
MORET: Yes, it¹s in the air, water, and soil. The half-life of DU, Uranium
238, is 4.5 billion years the age of the Earth.
ICONOCLAST: With the damage that¹s been done to this point, can we turn
back? We can¹t clean it up?
MORET: There¹s no way to clean it up. What happens is these tiny particles
float around the Earth. There are still plutonium and uranium floating
around the Earth from bomb testing. These particles are so tiny that
molecules bumping into them keep them lofted in the air, and so the only way
for them to get out of the atmosphere is rain, snow, fog, pollution, which
will clear them out of the air and deposit them in the environment. What
happens is the surface of these particles gets wetted by the moisture in the
air. They come down and land on stuff and stick to it like a glue. You can¹t
ever get the particles off whatever they¹re sticking to because have you
ever put a drop of water on a microscope slide and then put another one on
top of it? Can you pull those apart?
ICONOCLAST: No.
MORET: Okay, that¹s the same effect that happens to radioactive particles.
Once they are removed from the atmosphere, they stick to any surfaces they
land on. In a way they are removed from circulation from the atmosphere. You
can¹t wash them off. If it keeps raining or they¹re in a creek, you know, if
they¹re on rocks or stones or something in a creek, they won¹t even wash
off.
You didn¹t know it was this bad, did you?
ICONOCLAST: No, I knew it was bad, but I thought it was fairly isolated.
MORET: No. What is over there (in Iraq) is over here in about four days. I
don¹t know if you followed Chernobyl. That big bubble of radiation went
around and around the world, but this is dust. It becomes a part of
atmospheric dust. Like the dust storm you saw in that photo, it goes
everywhere.
ICONOCLAST: Is it in the upper levels of the atmosphere or the lower levels?
MORET: It¹s in lower orbital space.
They brought the Mir spacecraft back down to Earth when they got done using
it, and there was something called a space midge which covered the
electronics on the outside of the spacecraft and protected it from radiation
that comes from the sun because electronics are real vulnerable to
radiation. They analyzed the surface of that space net and found uranium and
uranium decayed products which they said came from atmospheric testing or
burned up spacecraft with nuclear materials or nuclear reactors on board.
Uranium can also come from supernovas, but they thought that the most likely
sources were atmospheric testing and the nuclear materials we put in space.
ICONOCLAST: Essentially then, you¹re saying that we¹re conducting a nuclear
war.
MORET: Yes, and that¹s exactly what it is. We¹ve conducted four nuclear wars
since 1991. Yeah, these are nuclear wars. DU is a nuclear weapon.
ICONOCLAST: From the point of view of a scientist, what needs to happen to
correct this?
MORET: Well, we need to stop the use of it. We¹ve built an international
movement to stop the use, the manufacture, the storage, the sales, and the
deployment of depleted uranium weapons.
ICONOCLAST: Are the munitions we sell to other countries contained with
depleted uranium?
MORET: We have. In 1968 the first depleted uranium weapons systems that we
found a patent for suddenly appeared in the U.S. patent office. It was for
the Navy. It was sort of a Gatling gun style weapon system that you mounted
on ships. It rapidly fires like 2,500 bullets a minute. It¹s over 3,000 now.
They¹ve improved the design. Then in 1973, we gave depleted uranium weapons
systems to the Israelis and supervised their use. They used them in the
Arab-Israeli war and completely wiped out the Arabs in five days. Then the
show was on the road. That was the first actual battlefield demonstration of
this new weapon system.
Hughes Aircraft developed the full-length system which is for the Navy.
That¹s the Gatling gun system. They still use it. That was produced in 1974
and tested. Within six months the U.S. government had sold the DU weapons
system to 12 entities which included many branches of the U.S. military and
other counties. We¹ve sold DU weapons systems to about ‹ we don¹t know
exactly for sure ‹ it¹s been about 12 or 17 countries. The good news is that
normally such a weapons system that effective would have been sold to 80,
100, or 120 countries by now. But because of the radiological, biological,
and environmental hazard, countries were not only afraid to buy it, the ones
who did buy it are afraid to use it. The only countries we know that have
used DU are Britain, the U.S., and Israel.
The United Nations in 1996 passed a resolution that depleted uranium weapons
are weapons of mass destruction, and they are illegal under all
international laws and treaties.
In 2001, the European Parliament passed a resolution on DU. What happened is
that the NATO forces went into Yugoslavia in 1998 and ¹99 and flew 39,000
bombing runs and completely bombed Yugoslavia into radioactive rubble.
Germany and the U.S. made the most money on the destruction of Yugoslavia,
and they made sure that countries that didn¹t know about the DU, that the
peacekeepers from those countries like from Italy and Portugal, were sent to
the most contaminated regions in Yugoslavia. Germans and Americans didn¹t
send their own troops into those areas. They were in the least contaminated
areas. These poor soldiers from other countries came back and died within
weeks or in a couple of days or months. The parents in Portugal and Italy
are furious and went to the Parliament and media, and there was just a huge
media storm of articles about DU.
The cat was out of the bag because of the 1998 NATO invasion of Yugoslavia.
The cat was out of the bag, but Japanese troops have been sent into Somawa.
They¹re self-defense forces. It was the most contaminated area where the
heaviest fighting happened in Iraq. We can expect those soldiers to be
really, really sick.
ICONOCLAST: What about Iraq itself? What¹s been done thus far?
MORET: It¹s uninhabitable. The whole country. Yugoslavia, Iraq, and
Afghanistan are completely uninhabitable.
ICONOCLAST: But people live there, so they¹re going to live there suffering?
MORET: Well, you can see from the birth defects and the illnesses that it is
pretty severe. Each year the number of birth defects and illnesses will rise
because of the total contamination levels in all living things will increase
because they are breathing that air and drinking water and eating the food
from contaminated soils. It¹s just a slow death sentence. The same with
Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.
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.
Of course, once you cause mutation in the DNA, that damage is passed on to
future generations of that affected person or animal or plant. DNA does not
repair itself.
ICONOCLAST: So the mutations would be probably destructive moreso than
constructive.
MORET: Oh, the mutations are causing those birth defects.
ICONOCLAST: They¹re not evolutionary diseases?
MORET: No, they are evolutionary. They are inherited by all future
generations and passed on. It¹s like if you have red hair and all of your
future generations will have that gene.
ICONOCLAST: So if I had a precondition to heart disease because of the
radiation, then the generation that would come after me would have the same
problem?
MORET: Well, if you damage the cell or parts of the cell or functioning of
cells, that doesn¹t necessarily damage the DNA. There are two kinds of
damage: one damages the cells of the living organism, and that may not be
passed on, but if you damage the DNA in the egg or the sperm, that is passed
on to all future generations.
ICONOCLAST: So the guys coming back from the war, their sperm is probably
going to be ‹
MORET: Damaged. Yes. They also have depleted uranium in their semen. When
they¹re intimate with their partners, they internally contaminate them with
depleted uranium. The women become sick themselves. They have depleted
uranium in their bodies, and there is something called burning syndrome.
Just absolutely horrible. You can read about it in an article by David Rose
in the December Vanity Fair. It¹s on the Internet.
A friend of mine is the widow of a Canadian Gulf War veteran. David Rose
interviewed her, and she griped about the burning semen. She said, ³I had 20
condoms full of frozen peas in my freezer at all times, and after we were
intimate, I would insert one into my vagina, and that is the only way I
could bear the pain from the burning semen.² And it goes through condoms,
too.
ICONOCLAST: Gosh, durn!
MORET: Yeah, you should see the high school classes when I talk about the
burning semen and the internal contamination. The girls¹ mouths go into
little round Os, and the boys start panicking because they¹re like, ³I¹ll
never get sick!² (laughs) The name of this article is ³Weapons of
Self-Destruction.²
ICONOCLAST: How much DU will it take to kill off all known life on this
planet?
MORET: The amount of radiation released is certainly going to have a very,
very profound global impact, and we¹re already seeing infant mortality
increasing globally. The fetus is the most susceptible to radiation damage
because all the cells are rapidly dividing, the limbs and the bodies
developing, so when you start introducing toxic chemicals and radiation, it
really damages the natural process of fetal development.
The reason they were able to convince the Senate to sign the partial test
ban treaty in 1963 was because of the increase in infant mortality. It had
been dropping and declining two or three percent for quite a long time each
year because of better prenatal care and educating mothers.
Infant mortality started going up after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, especially in the Œ50s when the big bomb testing started.
By 1963, it was really obvious that the bomb testing globally was having a
real impact on the unborn. They signed the partial test ban treaty. Russia
and the U.S. stopped atmospheric testing, and the infant mortality rate
started going down right away. They¹re going up again now. This is global
radioactive pollution, and how long it would take to eliminate all life is
something nobody knows, but the depleted uranium is a very, very effective
biological weapon.
There are two purposes for the military use of weapons. One is to destroy
the enemy soldiers, and the other, which is just as important, is to destroy
the enemy civilian population. By causing illnesses and disease, long
lingering illnesses really impact the productivity and the economy of a
country. It was Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters that actually
destroyed the Soviet Union because the former Soviet Union is very, very
sick from all the radiation that was released. They were much more sloppy
than we were.
I have a World Health Organization world health survey which they published
in the Journal of American Medical Association last June. The impact of
atmospheric testing is very, very apparent by the percentage of population
in each country they investigated for some form of mental illness. For
instance, Japan is 8.8 percent. Nigeria is very low ‹ 4.7 percent. They have
almost no radiation in Nigeria. In the Ukraine where they had the Chernobyl
accident, it is 20.4 percent. Spain is at 9.2 percent. Italy is 8.2 percent.
It¹s pretty low because they don¹t have nuke plants. France is 75 percent
reliant on nuclear power, so you have mental illness in 18.4 percent of the
population. Mexico is at 12.2 percent, and the United States is at 26.3
percent ‹ the highest rate of mental illness in the world.
And George Bush and his siblings were all exposed in utero to bomb testing
fallout in the United States. He had a toddler sister who died of leukemia
when she was about three.
I worked with a group called the Radiation And Public Health Project. Their
website is . We are all radiation specialists, well-known
scientists, and independent scientists. We¹ve collected 6,000 baby teeth
around nuclear power plants and measured the radiation in them, and one of
our members is the neighbor of the women who worked with all of the Bush
children, including President Bush himself, because they had severe learning
disabilities.
ICONOCLAST: How do we know that the Bush children were exposed?
MORET: By the year of their birth. The year they were carried by their
mother. You have to look at how much bomb testing material was released into
the atmosphere, and there¹s a direct correlation to the decline in SAT
scores for all teenagers in the U.S. to the amount of radiation that was
released into the atmosphere the year their mother was carrying them. These
are delayed effects of radiation exposure in utero.
ICONOCLAST: So they were living in Connecticut, but they were still feeling
the effects of the radiation in Nevada?
MORET: Two years ago the U.S. government admitted that every single person
living in the United States between 1957 and 1963 was internally exposed to
radiation. So for any pregnant woman during those years, her fetus was
exposed.
ICONOCLAST: What type of radiation levels are we talking about?
MORET: It¹s low levels, and the main pathways are drinking water and dairy
products. It even killed the baby fish in the Atlantic. Strontium-90 is a
man-made isotope that comes out of nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors. They
measured the levels of strontium-90 in milk in Norway from the 1950s up
until the 1970s, and they measured the decline in the fishing catch in that
same period, and as the strontium-90 increased in the milk in Norway,
fishing catches declined.
By 1963, when the U.S. tested a nuclear bomb almost every day (they did 250
tests in one year because the treaty was going to be signed), the fishing
catch declined by 50 percent. In the Pacific, it declined 60 percent because
there was Russian, Chinese, French, and U.S. testing in the Pacific.
ICONOCLAST: So we¹re still eating those contaminated fish today. Has the
genetic code been changed?
MORET: The oceans are getting whatever is getting rained down, snowed down,
or fogged down from the atmosphere. It¹s getting into the oceans. This big
frog die-off, which is global, is certainly related to the radiation in the
rainwater. It¹s a global nuclear holocaust. It effects all living things.
That¹s why they call it ³omnicide,² which means it kills all living things ‹
the plants, the animals, the bacteria. Everything.
ICONOCLAST: You think we ought to have the Weather Channel report on the
current sand storm conditions in Iraq so we can prepare four days in advance
for the radiation?
MORET: I¹ll tell you what I did when 9/11 happened.
I called all the doctors with Radiation And Public Health Project, and I
said, ³Get out of town, and don¹t come back until it has rained three
times.² One lived 12 miles downwind from the Pentagon. She went out on her
balcony with her geiger counter. I said, ³Get that geiger counter out of
your purse.² We had just done a press conference in San Francisco, and I
knew she had it in her purse. Well, the radiation levels were 8-10 times
higher than background.
We called the EPA, HAZMAT, FBI, and said, ³Get all those emergency response
workers suited up. They need to be protected.² Two days after 9/11, the EPA
radiation expert for that region called back and said, ³Yup, the Pentagon
crash rubble was radioactive, and we believe it¹s depleted uranium, but
we¹re not worried about that. It¹s only harmful if it¹s inhaled.²
He said, ³We¹re worried about the lead solder in the plane.² Well, you know
what¹s in Tomahawk missiles? They have depleted uranium warheads. The
radioactive crash rubble contaminated with DU is evidence of a DU warhead.
ICONOCLAST: I did not think about that, but going back to my original
question: Should the Weather Channel report for us on the toxic dust storms
in Iraq?
MORET: But how could people get away from them? These dust storms are a
million square miles. They¹re huge, and they come right across the Atlantic,
the Caribbean, and Texas coast line, and right up the East Coast. There are
people who are going to leave the state every time there¹s a hurricane It¹s
in the food, drinking water, dairy products, and then the problem with
Uranium 238, which is 99.39 percent DU, is that it decays in over 20 steps
into other radioactive isotopes.
That¹s why I call it the ³Trojan Horse.² It¹s the weapon that keeps giving.
It keeps killing. This is like smoking radioactive crack. It goes right in
your nose. It crosses the olfactory bulb into your brain. It¹s a systemic
poison. It goes everywhere. These particles that form at very high
temperatures ‹ 5,000-10,000 degrees C ‹ are nanoparticles. They are a 10th
of a micron or smaller. A 10th of a micron is 100 times smaller than a white
blood cell. They get picked up in the lipids and probably the cholesterol
and go right through the cell membranes of the cell. They screw up the cell
processes. They screw up the signaling between the cells because the cells
all talk to each other and coordinate what they¹re doing. It messes up brain
function.
ICONOCLAST: Do you know what Iraq was like before the first Gulf War?
MORET: Iraq prior to the 1991 Gulf War was the most advanced in the entire
Middle East. They had scrupulous databases of the health problems and
disease rates, which is why the U.S. bombed all of the offices in the
Ministry of Health. We destroyed all those records so that a pre-Gulf War
health base could not be established to show how much these diseases have
increased. This would concern the U.S. in terms of compensation for war
crimes.
In these horrible U.N. sanctions, they (the Iraqis) could never get all of
the protocol medicine for the treatment of leukemia. They (the U.N.) would
say, ³These steps of the leukemia treatment were components in weapons, so
you can¹t have that.² They never gave the people the full proper protocols
in the areas of treatment they needed to get rid of the leukemia. It hid the
effects of the depleted uranium because the children were starving. They had
malnutrition. They had the healthiest population in the Middle East (prior
to Gulf War I).
ICONOCLAST: Let¹s talk about the children of Iraq.
MORET: After the Gulf War, they had maybe one baby a week born with birth
defects in the hospitals in Basra. Now they are having 10-12 a day. The
levels of uranium are increasing in the population every year. Every day,
people are eating and drinking while the whole environment is contaminated.
Just what you¹d expect. There are more babies born with birth defects, and
the birth defects are getting more and more severe.
An Iraqi doctor told me that babies are being born now that are lumps of
flesh. She said that they don¹t have heads or legs or arms. It¹s just a lump
of flesh. This also happened to populations that were not removed from
islands in the Pacific when the bomb tests occurred. Basically, governments
were using them as guinea pigs.
ICONOCLAST: So all the countries that were equipped with nuclear weapons are
guilty of those atrocities.
MORET: They were all doing it. France, Russia. China, and the U.S. And I¹m
not sure if Britain did bomb testing. They were real low key about it.
ICONOCLAST: Where are the radiation hot spots in the United States?
MORET: In the United States, it would be within a 100 miles of nuclear power
plants. We have 110 nuclear power plants in the U.S. We have the most of any
country in the world, but only a 103 are operating. Almost all of the entire
East Coast.
What we did was we took government data from the Centers of Disease Control
on breast cancer deaths between 1985 and 1989. Anywhere from within a 100
miles of a nuclear power plant is where two-thirds of all breast cancer
deaths occurred in the U.S. between 1985 and 1989.
It¹s also around the nuclear weapons laboratories. That would be Los Alamos
in New Mexico, the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Lab in Idaho, and Hanford in
Washington State, which is where they got the plutonium for all the bombs.
They contaminated the entire Columbia River watershed and almost the whole
state of Washington.
It gets into the water and into the plants and into the vegetation. If you
eat clams or mussels or crabs or things like that, even certain kinds of
fish that eat off of the mud at the bottom of the river, you have much
higher levels of radiation in your tissues. It depends on each person and on
how healthy they are, but this man from Washington State died suddenly. He
was in his late 40s. They did an autopsy, and he was full of radioactive
zinc. They went, ³Where in the world did he get this? It only comes from
nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors.² They studied his diet and discovered he
loved to eat oysters. They found out where he bought his oysters and found
the oyster beds. They were 200 miles off shore, from Washington State. The
radiation was being carried off out to sea from the coastline. It was
passing over this oyster bed. The oysters were just gobbling them up.
ICONOCLAST: What are the symptoms of DU poisoning?
MORET: Soldiers on the battlefield have reported a metallic taste in their
mouth. That¹s the actual taste of the uranium metal. Then within 24-48
hours, soldiers on the battlefield have reported that they felt sick. They
start getting muscle aches, and they lose energy. Some of them came back
incontinent. In other words, in adult diapers.
One woman reported that the first night home, she wanted to be intimate with
her husband, but she had absolutely no feeling. She couldn¹t feel anything
from the waist down. This particulate matter damages the neuromuscular
system, the nerves; it just goes everywhere. And there¹s no treatment for
it. These particles are very, very insoluble, so they can¹t even dissolve in
body fluids, so they can be excreted from the body. Then they keep
releasing. Even when uranium decays, it turns into another radioactive
isotope. So it¹s a particle that just sits there shooting bullets until you
die.
Another problem is that soldiers have crumbling teeth. Teeth just start
falling apart. The uranium replaces calcium in the calcium-phosphate
structure of the teeth. Some have complained about grand mal seizures,
cerebral palsy. Some diseases reported at very high rates in Air Force and
Army soldiers are Parkinson¹s disease, Lou Gehrig¹s disease, and Hodgkin¹s
disease. This is damage to the mitochondria in the cells and the nerves. The
mitochondria make all the energy for the body, so when you damage
mitochondria, another symptom is chronic fatigue syndrome. There¹s just not
enough energy produced by the body to function normally.
I found a study in the SanDia Nuclear Weapons Laboratory employee newsletter
in September 2003. They are doing major studies in mitochondrial disfunction
related to Lou Gehrig¹s, Hodgkin¹s, and Parkinson¹s diseases for veterans.
Since it¹s at a nuclear weapon¹s lab, they are fully aware of the health
damage.
ICONOCLAST: Tell me about the tests that detect for DU in the body.
MORET: The chromosome test in the best indicator. It¹s $5,000. The urine
test is a $1,000. If you test positive with the urine test, you know you¹re
contaminated. If you test negative, it does not mean that you¹re not
contaminated. It just means that you may or may not be contaminated but
enough hasn¹t dissolved in your blood stream to go through your kidneys to
be excreted in your urine. Anyone who goes now cannot avoid being
contaminated. Anyone. Anyone. Anyone. Everyone who goes to the Middle East
and Afghanistan will be contaminated.
The DU issue affects every single living thing on this planet. What else has
that impact? They have altered the genome for the entire planet forever with
this DU. The Pentagon people say, ³You¹re exaggerating or you use the
uranium word to scare people.² I don¹t care if people believe me or not. All
I can say is that over time what I am saying will actually be an
underestimation of the long term effects.
What Is Depleted Uranium?
A Scientific Perspective
Interview with Leuren Moret, Geo-Scientist
A Military Perspective
Interview with Dr. Doug Rokke, Ph.D, former Director of the U.S. Army
Depleted Uranium Project
A Survivor¹s Perpsective
Interview with Melissa Sterry, Gulf War Veteran who is surviving the effects
of depleted uranium
http://www.iconoclast-texas.com/News/19news03.htm
From AxisofLogic.com
United States
DU: A Scientific Perspective/ An Interview With LEUREN MORET, Geoscientist
By W. Leon Smith/Nathan Diebenow
May 13, 2005, 07:20
Interview Conducted
By W. Leon Smith
and Nathan Diebenow
Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who works almost around the clock educating
citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other officials
on radiation issues. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore
Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project.
She is currently working as an independent citizen scientist and radiation
specialist in communities around the world, and contributed to the U.N.
subcommission investigating depleted uranium. According to Wikipedia online
encyclopedia, Moret testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for
Afghanistan in Japan in 2003, presented at the World Depleted Uranium
Weapons Conference in Hamburg, Germany, and spoke at the World Court of
Women at the World Social Forum in Bombay, India, in January 2004.
THE INTERVIEW
ICONOCLAST: What are the latest developments with reducing depleted uranium
exposures on U.S. troops?
MORET: A young veteran named Melissa Sterry of Connecticut has introduced a
bill into the Connecticut Legislature requiring independent testing of
returning Afghan and Gulf War veterans going back to 2001. She said that she
did it because she¹s sick, and her friends are dead, and that¹s from serving
in the 2003 conflict. I have been following the bill and talking to her.
Yesterday, she testified twice at the United Nations. I said, ³Why don¹t we
get this bill all over the U.S. in state legislatures because it informs the
public and get the local media to cover it.²
The U.S. has blocked any accountability at international and national
levels. There¹s a total cover-up just like with Agent Orange, the atomic
veterans, MKULTRA, the mind control experiments the CIA did. This is more of
the same, but the issue is much, much worse because the genetic future of
all those contaminated is effected. Now vast regions around our world, as
well as our atmosphere, are contaminated with the depleted uranium. They¹ve
used so much. It¹s the equivalent number of atoms, as the Japanese professor
calculated it, to over 400,000 Nagasaki bombs that has been released into
the atmosphere. That¹s really an underestimate.
I went to Louisiana in April. I was invited to speak at the University of
New Orleans for three days. One of the veterans asked me to be in their
April 19 protest and rally through the City of New Orleans. He took the
Connecticut bill straight to the Legislature, and he got two legislators to
sponsor it, and he said, ³Just whiteout the name ŒConnecticut¹ and write in
ŒLouisiana¹ on the bill.² You¹re not going to believe it. It passed 101 to 0
yesterday in the Louisiana House.
I want you to write about it because we want it (the DU testing bill) in
Texas. Nevada is going to introduce it. Congressman Jim McDermott is going
to put it into the Washington legislature. We want to get the governor of
Montana to do it because he¹s the first governor to demand his National
Guard be returned. I think half of them are back. He said, ³I need them in
the state.²
The DU issue is just really, really, really, really so awful. I don¹t think
there¹s any greater tragedy in the history of the world in what they¹ve
done.
ICONOCLAST: Is there a danger of depleted uranium, being used in weaponry
over there, spreading by air over here?
MORET: The atmosphere globally is contaminated with it. It¹s completely
mixed in one year. I¹m an expert on atmospheric dust. I¹m a geoscientist, a
geologist, and that¹s what I studied and did my research on. It¹s really a
fascinating subject. We have huge dust storms that are a million square
miles and transport millions of tons of dust and sand every year around the
world.
The main centers of these dust storms are the Gobi Desert in China, which is
where the Chinese did atmospheric testing, so that¹s all contaminated with
radiation, and it gets transported right over Japan, and it comes straight
across the Pacific and dumps all its sand and dust on the U.S., North
America. It¹s loaded with radioactive isotopes, soot, pesticides, chemicals,
pollution ‹ everything is in it ‹ fungi, bacteria, viruses.
The Sahara Desert is another huge dust center, and it goes up all over
Europe and straight across the Atlantic, to the Caribbean, and up the East
Coast. Of course, you get it in Texas with those hurricanes. They all
originate in the Sahara Desert.
The third region is the Western United States, which is where the Nevada
test site is located. We did 1,200 nuclear weapons tests there, so all this
radiation that is already there, which is bad enough, has caused a global
cancer epidemic since 1945. All of that radiation was the equivalent of
40,000 Nagasaki bombs. We¹re talking about 10 times more.
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.
When the U.S. and Russia signed the partial test ban treaty in 1963, the
infant mortality rate started dropping again, which is normal.
Now they are going up again. It¹s the global pollution with this radiation.
ICONOCLAST: I had one of our correspondents send me a series of photographs
of the Al-Asad dust storm in Iraq on April 28.
MORET: That dust is what I¹m talking about.
ICONOCLAST: In the picture you can see a gigantic wall of sand.
MORET: I have 16 pictures of that storm. They¹re posted with photos from
Iraqi doctors of the children of people with cancer and leukemia. So what
did you think of that dust storm?
ICONOCLAST: I thought it was really dramatic.
MORET: It remobilizes all the radiation, but those are the larger chunks.
The DU burns at such high temperatures. It¹s a pyroforic metal which means
it burns. The bullets and big caliber shells are actually on fire when they
come out of the gun barrel because they are ignited by the friction in the
gun barrel. Seventy percent of the DU metal becomes a metal vapor. It¹s
actually a radioactive gas weapon and a terrain contaminant.
I¹ll email you the URL of the 1943 memo to General Leslie Grove under the
Manhattan Project. It¹s the blueprint for depleted uranium. They dropped the
atomic bombs, but they did not use the DU weapons because they thought they
were too horrific.
I¹ve toured and gone all over Japan 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
he¹s treating, and this is just from Gulf War I. They¹ve used much, much,
much more in 2003. All over the whole country.
ICONOCLAST: What can soldiers expect when they come home?
MORET: If they were in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, they¹re coming home with
rectal cancer from sitting on ammunition boxes. The young women are
reporting terrible problems with endometriosis. That¹s the lining of the
uterus malfunctioning, and they just bleed and bleed and bleed. Some of them
have uterine cancer ‹ 18 and 19 and 20 year olds.
The Army will not even diagnose it. They send them back to the battlefields.
They won¹t treat them or diagnose them. A group of 20 soldiers pushed from
Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003 in all the fighting. Eight of those 20 soldiers
have malignancies.
ICONOCLAST: Does exposure to depleted uranium effect their psychological
background when they come home?
MORET: Depleted uranium are these particles that form at very high
temperatures. They are uranium oxides that are insoluble. They are at least
100 times smaller than a white blood cell, so when the soldiers breathe,
they inhale them. The particles go through the nose, go through the
olfactory and into the brain, and it messes up their cognitive abilities,
thought processes.
It damages their mood-control mechanism in the brain. Four soldiers at Fort
Bragg came back from Afghanistan, and within two months, those four had
murdered their wives. This is part of the damage to the brain from the
radiation and the particles.
The soldiers from Gulf War I in a group of 67 soldiers who came back, they
had DU in their equipment, in their clothes, in their bodies, in their
semen, and they had normal babies before they went over there to war. They
came back, and the VA did a study. Of 251 Gulf War I veterans in
Mississippi, in 67 percent of them, their babies born after the war were
deemed to have severe birth defects. They had brains missing, arms and legs
missing, organs missing. They were born without eyes. They had horrible
blood diseases. It¹s horrific.
If you want to look at something, Life magazine did a photo essay which is
still on the Internet. It¹s called ³The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm.² You
should look at that ‹ oh, my God, the post-Gulf War babies playing with
their brothers and sisters who are normal.
Basically, it¹s like smoking crack, only you¹re smoking radioactive crack.
It goes straight into the blood stream. It¹s carried all throughout the body
into the bones, the bone marrow, the brain. It goes into the fetus. It¹s a
systemic poison and a radiological poison.
ICONOCLAST: What about the people in the United States that are here? You
say that DU is being mixed and spread globally?
MORET: Yes, it¹s being mixed globally. We¹re getting secondary smoke. It¹s
the secondary smoke effect. You know the people who inhabit a room with
smokers? They are getting that secondary smoke, and so are we.
ICONOCLAST: Is that secondary smoke getting thicker as we speak?
MORET: Yeah, the concentration of the depleted uranium particles in the
atmosphere all around the globe is increasing. There are indications that
the U.S. will go in June and bomb the heck out of Iran. We¹re monitoring the
U.S. Army ammunition factories. They have very large orders for those huge
bunker buster bombs that have 5,000 lbs. of DU in the warhead.
ICONOCLAST: So the prognosis for America isn¹t really good?
MORET: No, it¹s really bad.
ICONOCLAST: And if this continues then?
MORET: It¹s going to kill off the world¹s population. It already is, and it
doesn¹t just effect people. It effects all living systems. The plants, the
animals, the bacteria. It effects everything.
ICONOCLAST: So the things that we eat for instance, if they have DU in them,
then we¹ll just get it in our systems, and so we¹re polluting the oceans, so
that could effect all marine life?
MORET: Yes, it¹s in the air, water, and soil. The half-life of DU, Uranium
238, is 4.5 billion years the age of the Earth.
ICONOCLAST: With the damage that¹s been done to this point, can we turn
back? We can¹t clean it up?
MORET: There¹s no way to clean it up. What happens is these tiny particles
float around the Earth. There are still plutonium and uranium floating
around the Earth from bomb testing. These particles are so tiny that
molecules bumping into them keep them lofted in the air, and so the only way
for them to get out of the atmosphere is rain, snow, fog, pollution, which
will clear them out of the air and deposit them in the environment. What
happens is the surface of these particles gets wetted by the moisture in the
air. They come down and land on stuff and stick to it like a glue. You can¹t
ever get the particles off whatever they¹re sticking to because have you
ever put a drop of water on a microscope slide and then put another one on
top of it? Can you pull those apart?
ICONOCLAST: No.
MORET: Okay, that¹s the same effect that happens to radioactive particles.
Once they are removed from the atmosphere, they stick to any surfaces they
land on. In a way they are removed from circulation from the atmosphere. You
can¹t wash them off. If it keeps raining or they¹re in a creek, you know, if
they¹re on rocks or stones or something in a creek, they won¹t even wash
off.
You didn¹t know it was this bad, did you?
ICONOCLAST: No, I knew it was bad, but I thought it was fairly isolated.
MORET: No. What is over there (in Iraq) is over here in about four days. I
don¹t know if you followed Chernobyl. That big bubble of radiation went
around and around the world, but this is dust. It becomes a part of
atmospheric dust. Like the dust storm you saw in that photo, it goes
everywhere.
ICONOCLAST: Is it in the upper levels of the atmosphere or the lower levels?
MORET: It¹s in lower orbital space.
They brought the Mir spacecraft back down to Earth when they got done using
it, and there was something called a space midge which covered the
electronics on the outside of the spacecraft and protected it from radiation
that comes from the sun because electronics are real vulnerable to
radiation. They analyzed the surface of that space net and found uranium and
uranium decayed products which they said came from atmospheric testing or
burned up spacecraft with nuclear materials or nuclear reactors on board.
Uranium can also come from supernovas, but they thought that the most likely
sources were atmospheric testing and the nuclear materials we put in space.
ICONOCLAST: Essentially then, you¹re saying that we¹re conducting a nuclear
war.
MORET: Yes, and that¹s exactly what it is. We¹ve conducted four nuclear wars
since 1991. Yeah, these are nuclear wars. DU is a nuclear weapon.
ICONOCLAST: From the point of view of a scientist, what needs to happen to
correct this?
MORET: Well, we need to stop the use of it. We¹ve built an international
movement to stop the use, the manufacture, the storage, the sales, and the
deployment of depleted uranium weapons.
ICONOCLAST: Are the munitions we sell to other countries contained with
depleted uranium?
MORET: We have. In 1968 the first depleted uranium weapons systems that we
found a patent for suddenly appeared in the U.S. patent office. It was for
the Navy. It was sort of a Gatling gun style weapon system that you mounted
on ships. It rapidly fires like 2,500 bullets a minute. It¹s over 3,000 now.
They¹ve improved the design. Then in 1973, we gave depleted uranium weapons
systems to the Israelis and supervised their use. They used them in the
Arab-Israeli war and completely wiped out the Arabs in five days. Then the
show was on the road. That was the first actual battlefield demonstration of
this new weapon system.
Hughes Aircraft developed the full-length system which is for the Navy.
That¹s the Gatling gun system. They still use it. That was produced in 1974
and tested. Within six months the U.S. government had sold the DU weapons
system to 12 entities which included many branches of the U.S. military and
other counties. We¹ve sold DU weapons systems to about ‹ we don¹t know
exactly for sure ‹ it¹s been about 12 or 17 countries. The good news is that
normally such a weapons system that effective would have been sold to 80,
100, or 120 countries by now. But because of the radiological, biological,
and environmental hazard, countries were not only afraid to buy it, the ones
who did buy it are afraid to use it. The only countries we know that have
used DU are Britain, the U.S., and Israel.
The United Nations in 1996 passed a resolution that depleted uranium weapons
are weapons of mass destruction, and they are illegal under all
international laws and treaties.
In 2001, the European Parliament passed a resolution on DU. What happened is
that the NATO forces went into Yugoslavia in 1998 and ¹99 and flew 39,000
bombing runs and completely bombed Yugoslavia into radioactive rubble.
Germany and the U.S. made the most money on the destruction of Yugoslavia,
and they made sure that countries that didn¹t know about the DU, that the
peacekeepers from those countries like from Italy and Portugal, were sent to
the most contaminated regions in Yugoslavia. Germans and Americans didn¹t
send their own troops into those areas. They were in the least contaminated
areas. These poor soldiers from other countries came back and died within
weeks or in a couple of days or months. The parents in Portugal and Italy
are furious and went to the Parliament and media, and there was just a huge
media storm of articles about DU.
The cat was out of the bag because of the 1998 NATO invasion of Yugoslavia.
The cat was out of the bag, but Japanese troops have been sent into Somawa.
They¹re self-defense forces. It was the most contaminated area where the
heaviest fighting happened in Iraq. We can expect those soldiers to be
really, really sick.
ICONOCLAST: What about Iraq itself? What¹s been done thus far?
MORET: It¹s uninhabitable. The whole country. Yugoslavia, Iraq, and
Afghanistan are completely uninhabitable.
ICONOCLAST: But people live there, so they¹re going to live there suffering?
MORET: Well, you can see from the birth defects and the illnesses that it is
pretty severe. Each year the number of birth defects and illnesses will rise
because of the total contamination levels in all living things will increase
because they are breathing that air and drinking water and eating the food
from contaminated soils. It¹s just a slow death sentence. The same with
Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.
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.
Of course, once you cause mutation in the DNA, that damage is passed on to
future generations of that affected person or animal or plant. DNA does not
repair itself.
ICONOCLAST: So the mutations would be probably destructive moreso than
constructive.
MORET: Oh, the mutations are causing those birth defects.
ICONOCLAST: They¹re not evolutionary diseases?
MORET: No, they are evolutionary. They are inherited by all future
generations and passed on. It¹s like if you have red hair and all of your
future generations will have that gene.
ICONOCLAST: So if I had a precondition to heart disease because of the
radiation, then the generation that would come after me would have the same
problem?
MORET: Well, if you damage the cell or parts of the cell or functioning of
cells, that doesn¹t necessarily damage the DNA. There are two kinds of
damage: one damages the cells of the living organism, and that may not be
passed on, but if you damage the DNA in the egg or the sperm, that is passed
on to all future generations.
ICONOCLAST: So the guys coming back from the war, their sperm is probably
going to be ‹
MORET: Damaged. Yes. They also have depleted uranium in their semen. When
they¹re intimate with their partners, they internally contaminate them with
depleted uranium. The women become sick themselves. They have depleted
uranium in their bodies, and there is something called burning syndrome.
Just absolutely horrible. You can read about it in an article by David Rose
in the December Vanity Fair. It¹s on the Internet.
A friend of mine is the widow of a Canadian Gulf War veteran. David Rose
interviewed her, and she griped about the burning semen. She said, ³I had 20
condoms full of frozen peas in my freezer at all times, and after we were
intimate, I would insert one into my vagina, and that is the only way I
could bear the pain from the burning semen.² And it goes through condoms,
too.
ICONOCLAST: Gosh, durn!
MORET: Yeah, you should see the high school classes when I talk about the
burning semen and the internal contamination. The girls¹ mouths go into
little round Os, and the boys start panicking because they¹re like, ³I¹ll
never get sick!² (laughs) The name of this article is ³Weapons of
Self-Destruction.²
ICONOCLAST: How much DU will it take to kill off all known life on this
planet?
MORET: The amount of radiation released is certainly going to have a very,
very profound global impact, and we¹re already seeing infant mortality
increasing globally. The fetus is the most susceptible to radiation damage
because all the cells are rapidly dividing, the limbs and the bodies
developing, so when you start introducing toxic chemicals and radiation, it
really damages the natural process of fetal development.
The reason they were able to convince the Senate to sign the partial test
ban treaty in 1963 was because of the increase in infant mortality. It had
been dropping and declining two or three percent for quite a long time each
year because of better prenatal care and educating mothers.
Infant mortality started going up after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, especially in the Œ50s when the big bomb testing started.
By 1963, it was really obvious that the bomb testing globally was having a
real impact on the unborn. They signed the partial test ban treaty. Russia
and the U.S. stopped atmospheric testing, and the infant mortality rate
started going down right away. They¹re going up again now. This is global
radioactive pollution, and how long it would take to eliminate all life is
something nobody knows, but the depleted uranium is a very, very effective
biological weapon.
There are two purposes for the military use of weapons. One is to destroy
the enemy soldiers, and the other, which is just as important, is to destroy
the enemy civilian population. By causing illnesses and disease, long
lingering illnesses really impact the productivity and the economy of a
country. It was Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters that actually
destroyed the Soviet Union because the former Soviet Union is very, very
sick from all the radiation that was released. They were much more sloppy
than we were.
I have a World Health Organization world health survey which they published
in the Journal of American Medical Association last June. The impact of
atmospheric testing is very, very apparent by the percentage of population
in each country they investigated for some form of mental illness. For
instance, Japan is 8.8 percent. Nigeria is very low ‹ 4.7 percent. They have
almost no radiation in Nigeria. In the Ukraine where they had the Chernobyl
accident, it is 20.4 percent. Spain is at 9.2 percent. Italy is 8.2 percent.
It¹s pretty low because they don¹t have nuke plants. France is 75 percent
reliant on nuclear power, so you have mental illness in 18.4 percent of the
population. Mexico is at 12.2 percent, and the United States is at 26.3
percent ‹ the highest rate of mental illness in the world.
And George Bush and his siblings were all exposed in utero to bomb testing
fallout in the United States. He had a toddler sister who died of leukemia
when she was about three.
I worked with a group called the Radiation And Public Health Project. Their
website is . We are all radiation specialists, well-known
scientists, and independent scientists. We¹ve collected 6,000 baby teeth
around nuclear power plants and measured the radiation in them, and one of
our members is the neighbor of the women who worked with all of the Bush
children, including President Bush himself, because they had severe learning
disabilities.
ICONOCLAST: How do we know that the Bush children were exposed?
MORET: By the year of their birth. The year they were carried by their
mother. You have to look at how much bomb testing material was released into
the atmosphere, and there¹s a direct correlation to the decline in SAT
scores for all teenagers in the U.S. to the amount of radiation that was
released into the atmosphere the year their mother was carrying them. These
are delayed effects of radiation exposure in utero.
ICONOCLAST: So they were living in Connecticut, but they were still feeling
the effects of the radiation in Nevada?
MORET: Two years ago the U.S. government admitted that every single person
living in the United States between 1957 and 1963 was internally exposed to
radiation. So for any pregnant woman during those years, her fetus was
exposed.
ICONOCLAST: What type of radiation levels are we talking about?
MORET: It¹s low levels, and the main pathways are drinking water and dairy
products. It even killed the baby fish in the Atlantic. Strontium-90 is a
man-made isotope that comes out of nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors. They
measured the levels of strontium-90 in milk in Norway from the 1950s up
until the 1970s, and they measured the decline in the fishing catch in that
same period, and as the strontium-90 increased in the milk in Norway,
fishing catches declined.
By 1963, when the U.S. tested a nuclear bomb almost every day (they did 250
tests in one year because the treaty was going to be signed), the fishing
catch declined by 50 percent. In the Pacific, it declined 60 percent because
there was Russian, Chinese, French, and U.S. testing in the Pacific.
ICONOCLAST: So we¹re still eating those contaminated fish today. Has the
genetic code been changed?
MORET: The oceans are getting whatever is getting rained down, snowed down,
or fogged down from the atmosphere. It¹s getting into the oceans. This big
frog die-off, which is global, is certainly related to the radiation in the
rainwater. It¹s a global nuclear holocaust. It effects all living things.
That¹s why they call it ³omnicide,² which means it kills all living things ‹
the plants, the animals, the bacteria. Everything.
ICONOCLAST: You think we ought to have the Weather Channel report on the
current sand storm conditions in Iraq so we can prepare four days in advance
for the radiation?
MORET: I¹ll tell you what I did when 9/11 happened.
I called all the doctors with Radiation And Public Health Project, and I
said, ³Get out of town, and don¹t come back until it has rained three
times.² One lived 12 miles downwind from the Pentagon. She went out on her
balcony with her geiger counter. I said, ³Get that geiger counter out of
your purse.² We had just done a press conference in San Francisco, and I
knew she had it in her purse. Well, the radiation levels were 8-10 times
higher than background.
We called the EPA, HAZMAT, FBI, and said, ³Get all those emergency response
workers suited up. They need to be protected.² Two days after 9/11, the EPA
radiation expert for that region called back and said, ³Yup, the Pentagon
crash rubble was radioactive, and we believe it¹s depleted uranium, but
we¹re not worried about that. It¹s only harmful if it¹s inhaled.²
He said, ³We¹re worried about the lead solder in the plane.² Well, you know
what¹s in Tomahawk missiles? They have depleted uranium warheads. The
radioactive crash rubble contaminated with DU is evidence of a DU warhead.
ICONOCLAST: I did not think about that, but going back to my original
question: Should the Weather Channel report for us on the toxic dust storms
in Iraq?
MORET: But how could people get away from them? These dust storms are a
million square miles. They¹re huge, and they come right across the Atlantic,
the Caribbean, and Texas coast line, and right up the East Coast. There are
people who are going to leave the state every time there¹s a hurricane It¹s
in the food, drinking water, dairy products, and then the problem with
Uranium 238, which is 99.39 percent DU, is that it decays in over 20 steps
into other radioactive isotopes.
That¹s why I call it the ³Trojan Horse.² It¹s the weapon that keeps giving.
It keeps killing. This is like smoking radioactive crack. It goes right in
your nose. It crosses the olfactory bulb into your brain. It¹s a systemic
poison. It goes everywhere. These particles that form at very high
temperatures ‹ 5,000-10,000 degrees C ‹ are nanoparticles. They are a 10th
of a micron or smaller. A 10th of a micron is 100 times smaller than a white
blood cell. They get picked up in the lipids and probably the cholesterol
and go right through the cell membranes of the cell. They screw up the cell
processes. They screw up the signaling between the cells because the cells
all talk to each other and coordinate what they¹re doing. It messes up brain
function.
ICONOCLAST: Do you know what Iraq was like before the first Gulf War?
MORET: Iraq prior to the 1991 Gulf War was the most advanced in the entire
Middle East. They had scrupulous databases of the health problems and
disease rates, which is why the U.S. bombed all of the offices in the
Ministry of Health. We destroyed all those records so that a pre-Gulf War
health base could not be established to show how much these diseases have
increased. This would concern the U.S. in terms of compensation for war
crimes.
In these horrible U.N. sanctions, they (the Iraqis) could never get all of
the protocol medicine for the treatment of leukemia. They (the U.N.) would
say, ³These steps of the leukemia treatment were components in weapons, so
you can¹t have that.² They never gave the people the full proper protocols
in the areas of treatment they needed to get rid of the leukemia. It hid the
effects of the depleted uranium because the children were starving. They had
malnutrition. They had the healthiest population in the Middle East (prior
to Gulf War I).
ICONOCLAST: Let¹s talk about the children of Iraq.
MORET: After the Gulf War, they had maybe one baby a week born with birth
defects in the hospitals in Basra. Now they are having 10-12 a day. The
levels of uranium are increasing in the population every year. Every day,
people are eating and drinking while the whole environment is contaminated.
Just what you¹d expect. There are more babies born with birth defects, and
the birth defects are getting more and more severe.
An Iraqi doctor told me that babies are being born now that are lumps of
flesh. She said that they don¹t have heads or legs or arms. It¹s just a lump
of flesh. This also happened to populations that were not removed from
islands in the Pacific when the bomb tests occurred. Basically, governments
were using them as guinea pigs.
ICONOCLAST: So all the countries that were equipped with nuclear weapons are
guilty of those atrocities.
MORET: They were all doing it. France, Russia. China, and the U.S. And I¹m
not sure if Britain did bomb testing. They were real low key about it.
ICONOCLAST: Where are the radiation hot spots in the United States?
MORET: In the United States, it would be within a 100 miles of nuclear power
plants. We have 110 nuclear power plants in the U.S. We have the most of any
country in the world, but only a 103 are operating. Almost all of the entire
East Coast.
What we did was we took government data from the Centers of Disease Control
on breast cancer deaths between 1985 and 1989. Anywhere from within a 100
miles of a nuclear power plant is where two-thirds of all breast cancer
deaths occurred in the U.S. between 1985 and 1989.
It¹s also around the nuclear weapons laboratories. That would be Los Alamos
in New Mexico, the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Lab in Idaho, and Hanford in
Washington State, which is where they got the plutonium for all the bombs.
They contaminated the entire Columbia River watershed and almost the whole
state of Washington.
It gets into the water and into the plants and into the vegetation. If you
eat clams or mussels or crabs or things like that, even certain kinds of
fish that eat off of the mud at the bottom of the river, you have much
higher levels of radiation in your tissues. It depends on each person and on
how healthy they are, but this man from Washington State died suddenly. He
was in his late 40s. They did an autopsy, and he was full of radioactive
zinc. They went, ³Where in the world did he get this? It only comes from
nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors.² They studied his diet and discovered he
loved to eat oysters. They found out where he bought his oysters and found
the oyster beds. They were 200 miles off shore, from Washington State. The
radiation was being carried off out to sea from the coastline. It was
passing over this oyster bed. The oysters were just gobbling them up.
ICONOCLAST: What are the symptoms of DU poisoning?
MORET: Soldiers on the battlefield have reported a metallic taste in their
mouth. That¹s the actual taste of the uranium metal. Then within 24-48
hours, soldiers on the battlefield have reported that they felt sick. They
start getting muscle aches, and they lose energy. Some of them came back
incontinent. In other words, in adult diapers.
One woman reported that the first night home, she wanted to be intimate with
her husband, but she had absolutely no feeling. She couldn¹t feel anything
from the waist down. This particulate matter damages the neuromuscular
system, the nerves; it just goes everywhere. And there¹s no treatment for
it. These particles are very, very insoluble, so they can¹t even dissolve in
body fluids, so they can be excreted from the body. Then they keep
releasing. Even when uranium decays, it turns into another radioactive
isotope. So it¹s a particle that just sits there shooting bullets until you
die.
Another problem is that soldiers have crumbling teeth. Teeth just start
falling apart. The uranium replaces calcium in the calcium-phosphate
structure of the teeth. Some have complained about grand mal seizures,
cerebral palsy. Some diseases reported at very high rates in Air Force and
Army soldiers are Parkinson¹s disease, Lou Gehrig¹s disease, and Hodgkin¹s
disease. This is damage to the mitochondria in the cells and the nerves. The
mitochondria make all the energy for the body, so when you damage
mitochondria, another symptom is chronic fatigue syndrome. There¹s just not
enough energy produced by the body to function normally.
I found a study in the SanDia Nuclear Weapons Laboratory employee newsletter
in September 2003. They are doing major studies in mitochondrial disfunction
related to Lou Gehrig¹s, Hodgkin¹s, and Parkinson¹s diseases for veterans.
Since it¹s at a nuclear weapon¹s lab, they are fully aware of the health
damage.
ICONOCLAST: Tell me about the tests that detect for DU in the body.
MORET: The chromosome test in the best indicator. It¹s $5,000. The urine
test is a $1,000. If you test positive with the urine test, you know you¹re
contaminated. If you test negative, it does not mean that you¹re not
contaminated. It just means that you may or may not be contaminated but
enough hasn¹t dissolved in your blood stream to go through your kidneys to
be excreted in your urine. Anyone who goes now cannot avoid being
contaminated. Anyone. Anyone. Anyone. Everyone who goes to the Middle East
and Afghanistan will be contaminated.
The DU issue affects every single living thing on this planet. What else has
that impact? They have altered the genome for the entire planet forever with
this DU. The Pentagon people say, ³You¹re exaggerating or you use the
uranium word to scare people.² I don¹t care if people believe me or not. All
I can say is that over time what I am saying will actually be an
underestimation of the long term effects.
What Is Depleted Uranium?
A Scientific Perspective
Interview with Leuren Moret, Geo-Scientist
A Military Perspective
Interview with Dr. Doug Rokke, Ph.D, former Director of the U.S. Army
Depleted Uranium Project
A Survivor¹s Perpsective
Interview with Melissa Sterry, Gulf War Veteran who is surviving the effects
of depleted uranium
http://www.iconoclast-texas.com/News/19news03.htm