James van
Luik
Publisher & Editor
& Compiler
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Thursday, March 31st,
2005
Volume 4, No. 6
6
Articles, 13 Pages
1. How George W. Bush Won Second-Term U. S. Presidency
in 2004
3. MoveOn.org Makes Peace With War
4. How Good is Good Enough & Medical Testing for
DU
5. We Don't Have to Wait for a Catastrophic Meltdown
to be Harmed
6. Impeachment More Urgent Than Ever
1. HOW GEORGE W. BUSH WON SECOND-TERM U.S. PRESIDENCY
IN 2004
BY
NOAM
CHOMSKY
Of the people who
voted for candidate George Bush, the major categories were people
who were concerned about terror and about national security. It's
claimed that people who were concerned about values voted for
Bush, but that's mostly a statistical artifact. When you asked
the further question, "What values do you have in
mind?" it turned out that the major values were things like,
"I don't like this society because it's too
materialistic," and "There's too much oppression."
Those are the values. Is that what Bush stands for? Getting rid
of that? As far as terrorism is concerned, the administration
very consciously chose actions that it was expected would
increase the threat of terror and, in fact, did. It's not because
they want terror, it's just not much of a priority for them.
People who voted
for Bush tended to assume that he was in favor of their views,
even if the Republican Party platform was diametrically opposed
to them. The same was largely true of Kerry voters.
The reason for
this is that the parties try to exclude the population from
participation. So they don't present issues, policies, agendas,
and so on. They project imagery, and people either don't bother
or they vote for the image. The Gallup Poll regularly asks,
"Why are you voting?" One of the choices is, "I'm
voting for the candidate's stand on issues." That was 6% for
Bush, and 13% for Kerry—and most of those voters were
deluded about the positions of the candidates. So what you have
is essentially flipping a coin. Each candidate got approximately
30% of the electorate. Bush got 31% and Kerry got 29%.
The party
managers know where the public stands on a whole list of issues.
Their funders just don't support them; the interests they
represent don't support them. So they project a different
kind of image.
If you listen to
the presidential debates, you can't figure out what they're
saying, and that's on purpose. The last debate was supposed to be
about domestic issues. The New York Times commented that
Kerry didn't make any hint about possible government involvement
in health care programs because that position has, in their
words, "no political support" Well, according to the
most recent polls, 80% of the population thinks that the
government ought to guarantee health care for everyone and
furthermore regard it as a moral obligation. That tells you
something about people's values. But there's "no political
support."
Why? Because the
pharmaceutical industry is opposed, the financial institutions
are opposed, the insurance industry is opposed, so there's
"no political support." It doesn’t matter if 80%
of the population regard it as a moral obligation: That
doesn't count as political support. It tells you something about
the elite conception. You're supposed to vote for the image
they're projecting. That's not surprising really. Just ask
yourself, "Who runs the elections?"
The elections are
run by the same guys who sell toothpaste. They show you an image
of a sports hero, or a sexy model, or a car going up a sheer
cliff or something, which has nothing to do with the commodity,
but it's intended to delude you into picking this one rather than
another one. Same when they run elections. But they're assigned
that task in order to marginalize the public, and furthermore,
people are pretty well aware of it.
For many years,
election campaigns here have been run by the public relations
industry and each time it's with increasing sophistication. Quite
naturally, the industry uses the same techniques to sell
candidates that it uses to sell tooth paste or lifestyle drugs.
The point is to undermine markets by projecting imagery to delude
and suppressing information—and similarly, to undermine
democracy by the same method.
In the year 2000,
there was a huge fuss afterwards about the stolen election, with
the Florida chads and the Supreme Court. But ask yourself who was
exorcised about it? It was all among a small group of
intellectuals. They were the ones who were upset about it. There
was never any public resonance for this. In the current election
it's being reiterated. There's a big fuss among intellectuals
about the vote in Ohio, how the voting machines didn't work, and
other things. But the interesting thing is that nobody cares.
Why don't people
care if the election is stolen? The reason is that they don't
take the election seriously in the first place. They reacted
about the way that people react to television ads. It's a mode of
delusion. If the Democrats want to succeed in that game, they’re
just going to have to figure out better ways of delusion.
There is an
alternative, and that is to try to run a program that's
committed to developing a democratic society in which people's
opinions matter.
BY
NEAL
GABLER
It has been
scarcely eight months since rumpled provocateur Michael Moore
took the podium at the Oscarcast to accept his trophy for a
documentary feature and then proceeded to excoriate President
Bush for dragging the country ever closer to war with Iraq.
Attendees were
clearly flummoxed that night. Despite the industry's
liberal proclivities, they were in no mood to attack what
promised to be a popular war, and Moore's rant got a surprisingly
cool reception.
Even by Hollywood
standards, Moore had gone too far. He was out of the mainstream.
The impending war, after all was supposed to be good, simple and
quick --- a pay back for 9/11.
What a difference
a year makes!
The good and
simple war has turned out arguably not to be as good and
inarguably not as simple as the Bush administration said it would
be. Many Iraqis, who, we were told, would greet us as liberators,
see us as occupiers. The country's infrastructure which, we were
told, would quickly be repaired using Iraqi oil money, remains in
shambles, and as for the oil money, there is none. Casualties
mount while security declines. Meanwhile, no weapons of mass
destruction have been found and no evidence of ties between
Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda has been unearthed. All of which
leaves Hollywood, like the rest of America, far more skeptical
today than it was in March.
In retrospect, it
would be tempting to view Hollywood's support for – or at
least its less than whole-hearted opposition to – the war as
a brief aberration and to look for signs of resurgent anti-war
sentiment. Is the enthusiasm over "Mystic River," for
example an expression of a new cynicism? But the film industry
isn't just reacting to events; it helped define them by providing
narratives that the politicians, the public and the media could
use to frame the conflict. Public policy had been deliberately
"cinematized" or turned into a movie. Understanding
that process is critical in understanding how Hollywood's
political consciousness has changed since the last Oscar
telecast. What detractors see as the film industry's reflexive
return to anti-war liberalism now that the Iraqi conflict hasn't
gone according to plan may actually be something much deeper: a
realization that public policy framed in cinematic terms is
dishonest and dangerous.
Still, it has
been an irresistible impulse. The Sept 11 attacks were themselves
a kind of "movie," and it was imagined cinematically.
The devastation of the World Trade Center was right out of a
special effects blockbuster and so was the subsequent expectation
that the arch-villain, Osama bin Laden, would be captured. This
is exactly what the president promised, even invoking the
language of a sheriff from some old Western –"dead or
alive."
When the
administration realized that events wouldn't conform to the movie
they had plotted and that bin Laden would not be captured so
easily, it changed the narrative to one whose expectations they
thought would be much easier to fulfill – from an
antiterrorist thriller to a war movie. They would catch Saddam
Hussein and free Iraq.
Certainly among
the reasons why the Iraq war initially elicited such widespread
support across the political spectrum – and led to Moore's
Oscar rebuke – was that it was proposed with such perfect
cinematic contours. Saddam was an ideal villain. He looked
sinister, and the footage of him firing his rifle in the air
didn't help soften his image. More, the idea of this madman
having a nuclear or biological capability was a familiar and
frightening plot element from just about every James Bond movie,
every Jack Ryan thriller and scores of genre pictures where an
intrepid hero must stop a nefarious scheme. Similarly, the idea
of a criminal cabal, Saddam and Osama, was familiar from
"Superman," "Batman" and dozens of other
comic book spectacles where bad guys team up to commit
mayhem. In the end , the war was conceptualized aesthetically
rather than politically. It was made audience-friendly.
If the narrative
contours of the war were cinematic so too was its prosecution.
This wasn't going to be any bloody Vietnam picture with our
soldiers ambushed and blown apart. The Bush administration
encouraged the public to visualize a hyper techno epic where
America's superior gadgetry would immediately dismantle the Iraqi
hierarchy and win the day. Even the term "shock and
awe," which the Pentagon circulated to describe the initial
days of the battle, could have been cribbed from the ad campaign
of any teen blockbuster or videogame. And at the end of it all,
we would have the president in his flight suit – anyone
remember "Independence Day"? – landing on an
aircraft carrier and appearing before cheering troops and a
banner that read "Mission Accomplished." The
hostilities were over and America had won. Mission Accomplished.
Fade to black. Cue music. Roll credits.
It was a
pulse-racing, patriotic climax, but it had a problem. While it is
easy to rally support by casting a conflict as a movie, war as
genre piece only works if the war abides by narrative
conventions. This one obviously hasn't, which even then might not
have undermined support for it if the administration hadn't
insisted on bumping up our expectations in the first place or
tacked on its phony ending. We did get the stirring penultimate
image of the statues of Saddam being hauled down, but we never
got the image of the Iraqis rushing to embrace our soldiers and
handing them flowers as the liberated did in World War II
pictures.
Instead the war
has defied those conventions and come very close to the narrative
entropy that defined Vietnam films like "Apocalypse
Now" and "Platoon." Even the heroic subplots of
Iraq proved hollow. Jessica Lynch is a decent and brave woman,
but one doubts whether she was heroic as well. In losing its
frame, the Iraq War is also in danger of losing its sense. Or put
a another way, he who lives by movie conventions may also die by
movie conventions.
If anything,
this, as much as the mess in Iraq, explains Hollywood's
disillusionment with the war now. Having a special responsibility
for providing the "plot" for the war, the entertainment
community seems to have recognized sooner than anyone else that
entertainment and politics don't really mix. That also helps
explain Hollywood's tepid response to the gubernatorial candidacy
of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was, after all, one of their own.
It wasn't because Schwarzenegger was a Republican in a Democratic
community. By any measure, he was a moderate. It was because he
turned his campaign into a movie just as President Bush had done
with the war, and Hollywood had come to appreciate the difference
between fiction and reality, even if California's voters didn't .
Schwarzenegger had no policies, but he did have a narrative: He
would single-handedly make things work in Sacramento the way he
did in his movies.
When he made his
Oscar speech, Moore seemed like the loudmouth in the theater who
shouts during the movie that it's all fake. In the months since,
the loudmouth seems to have become a prophet. That's what
Hollywood has discovered with a vengeance about the war in Iraq.
It's not a movie. Unfortunately, it's life.
3. MOVEON.ORG MAKES PEACE WITH WAR
BY
NORMAN
SOLOMON
Sadly, it has
come to this. Two years after the invasion of Iraq, the online
powerhouse MoveOn.Org – which built most of its member base
with a strong antiwar message – is not pushing for
withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
With a network of
more than 3 million "online activists," the MoveOn
leadership has decided against opposing the American occupation
of Iraq. During the recent bloody months, none of MoveOn's action
alerts have addressed what Americans can do to help get the US
military out of that country. Likewise, the MoveOn.org Web site
has continued to bypass the issue – even after Rep. Lynn
Woolsey and two dozen co-sponsors in the House of Representatives
introduced a resolution in late January calling for swift removal
of all US troops from Iraq.
That resolution
would seem to be a natural peg for the kind of kinetic activism
that established MoveOn's reputation. A movement serious about
ending US military activities in Iraq could use the resolution as
a way to cut through political tap dances and pressure members of
Congress to take a stand. Down the road, generating grassroots
support for a get-out-of-Iraq resolution has potential to clear a
congressional pathway for measures cutting off funds for the war.
But, tragically,
MoveOn's leadership is having none of it. Over a period of recent
weeks, the word "Iraq" appeared on the MoveOn.org home
page only in a plug for a documentary released last year. Inches
away, a blurb has been telling the Web site's visitors:
"Support Our Troops: Contribute your frequent –flyer
miles so that American troops can get home." (But not stay
home.) Many soldiers are returning to the killing grounds of
Iraq, while a growing number are vocally opposed to this war.
Why won't
MoveOn "support our troops" by supporting a pullout of
our troops from Iraq? "We believe that there are no good
options in Iraq," MoveOn.org's executive director, Eli
Pariser, told me. "We're seeing a broad difference of
opinion among our members in how quickly the US should get out of
Iraq. As a grassroots-directed organization, we won't be taking
any position which a large portion of our members disagree
with."
In sharp
contrast, early in the 2004 primary campaign, MoveOn committed
itself to endorsing any Democratic presidential candidate
receiving more than 50 percent of the Internet ballots cast by
its activists. (Howard Dean fell shy of a majority, so there was
no MoveOn endorsement.) But now, evidently , a majority of Move
On members in favor of swift withdrawal from Iraq would be
insufficient if a "large portion" disagreed.
When I asked Eli
for clarification, he replied: "We've been talking with our
membership in January and in December, and surveyed our whole
membership last spring. That's how we know there's a breadth of
opinion out there."
But last spring
was a year ago. And any surveying of "slices of our
membership in January and in December" came before the
Woolsey resolution offered an opportunity to find out how the
MoveOn base views the measure. In any event, there will always be
"a breadth of opinion" about his war – a fact that
does not trump the crucial need for clarity of purpose.
If MoveOn leaders
were willing to submit the House get-out-of-Iraq resolution to
MoveOn's rank-and-file in an up-or-down vote, the chances of a
substantial majority would be excellent. Too bad the leadership
of MoveOn.org is currently unwilling to find out.
The 29 members of
the House now sponsoring the resolution are hardly radicals. They
recognize the kind of grisly consequences of equivocation that
occurred during the Vietnam War: refusal to speak forthrightly
about the urgent need to end military involvement only fuels the
war's deadly momentum.
It's all well and
good for MoveOn.org to excoriate President Bush for his many big
lies in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. But such activities
don't make up for going along with the basics of the present-day
Iraq war.
When a large
progressive organization takes the easy way and makes peace with
war, the abdication of responsibility creates a vacuum.
Ironically a group that became an Internet phenomena by
recognizing and filling a void is now creating one. And other
groups are bound to emerge to fill it.
Among the
emerging organizations is Progressive Democrats of America, a
fledgling national group with an activist focus on the Iraq war
that is laudably straightforward. "We're organizing a new
campaign in every congressional district we can to call for the
end of funding for war and occupation, and for the transfer of
reconstruction assistant to Iraqis themselves," says Tim
Carpenter of PDA. He contends the "public pressure can
awaken Congress to an opposition role."
War in Iraq
requires continual funding, of course, so President Bush's new
supplemental boost of $80 billion in war appropriations has been
moving though Congress in recent days. Tacitly accepting the
war's continuation, MoveOn declined to take a stand against the
essence of congressional backing for the war – the money
that keeps paying for it. Meanwhile, PDA launched an effort
against the $80 billion; the organizing included a National
Call-In Day aimed at members of Congress on March 10th.
MoveOn.org
pioneered the use of email and Web technologies as creative tools
to further its political agenda. Now that the MoveOn agenda on
the Iraq war has tumbled into the shallow depths of the Potomac,
some similar online activism will be needed if MoveOn's dive is
going to be merely temporary. So, to help get the cyber-ball
rolling, please forward this article around the Internet and post
it where appropriate.
Friends don't let
friends drive drunk, and peace advocates do a lot more than shrug
when a previously great antiwar organization starts to get lost.
If MoveOn
continues to abandon its antiwar base, that base will get the
picture – and move on.
4. HOW GOOD IS GOOD ENOUGH & MEDICAL TESTING FOR DU
BY
BOB
EVANS
In Great Britain,
veterans of the 1991 Gulf War are signing up to take the world's
most precise test for determining exposure to depleted uranium.
The U.S. government advertises a test for its veterans of that
war too. But the test that it offers can't detect uranium in low
amounts, has a high error rate and uses equipment that's less
sensitive and accurate than the machines the British are using.
U.S. vets and soldiers who've had this test say they've been told
they weren't exposed when, in fact, the tests were simply
incapable of detecting whether depleted uranium was present.
Members of Congress have asked the Pentagon to look into testing
programs in other countries. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff promised to do that in April. But after that promise was
made, the officer in charge of U.S. testing said he had no reason
to gather such data because his test was good enough.
"Our labs would easily detect depleted uranium levels
approaching U.S. peacetime safety standards," says Lt. Col.
Mark Melanson, who runs the health physics program at the Army
Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine.
One of those labs handles all depleted uranium testing for the
Department of Veterans Affairs.
Randall Parrish, a scientist who played a big role in developing
the British test, says he can't understand why the United States
is satisfied with an inferior test.
"It is incorrect to assume that a low concentration of
uranium in urine means there is no contamination," he says,
because there's no good data to support that conclusion.
The U.S. government's refusal to adopt a state-of-the art test
also prevents researchers from finding out why tens of thousands
of veterans of the Gulf War have debilitating illnesses, says
Mohammad B. Abou-Donia, a researcher at Duke University.
Abou-Donia has conducted many significant experiments into the
causes of illnesses suffered by Gulf War vets. He also recently
published a study that reviewed available scientific work on the
health effects of depleted uranium.
Knowing which veterans were definitely exposed to depleted
uranium - not just those who might have been exposed to huge
doses - would fill a huge gap in the research, he says.
But until a better test is adopted and used on a larger number of
vets, that data isn't available, he says.
So there's no certainty about who was exposed and who was not.
Until scientists can reliably determine who was exposed and who
was not, they can't prove or disprove links between depleted
uranium and individual veterans' health problems, Abou-Donia
says.
Veterans and scientists have questioned for several years whether
the use of depleted uranium weapons in the Gulf War is one of the
reasons that so many veterans of that war came home weak and full
of pain.
The weapons provided a decisive edge in tank warfare in the 1991
and 2003 battles in the Persian Gulf region. They also left
behind millions and millions of pieces of easily inhalable black
dust that's toxic and mildly radioactive. The dust is a necessary
result of using the weapons to hit and destroy hard targets.
In recent years, researchers have shown that laboratory animals
that inhaled depleted uranium dust developed cancerous tumors.
They've also found that a single particle of depleted uranium can
alter the genetic structure of nearby cells in ways consistent
with widely held scientific beliefs about the way cancer starts
in the human body. And they've found evidence that once depleted
uranium gets in the body, it migrates through the bloodstream to
the brain, testicles, lungs, kidneys and bones, where it can
reside for years.
But all that research constitutes preliminary steps toward
figuring out how big a problem the dust from depleted uranium
weapons might be, researchers say. Meanwhile, the military plans
to significantly reduce its investigations into possible health
effects resulting from depleted uranium, as well as other
possible causes of Gulf War-related illnesses.
IN BRITAIN, SAME COMPLAINTS PROMPTED DIFFERENT RESPONSE
The government's attitude toward critics of the weapon isn't much
different in Britain. British and U.S. troops are among the few
who actually used depleted uranium weapons in battles. A large
number of British vets have also been complaining about health
problems similar to those experienced by U.S. armed forces from
that war.
Parrish says his government paid to develop the more accurate
tests for veterans in part because of political pressure and in
part because of medical experts' suspicions that existing tests
yielded inconclusive and inadequate evidence of exposure.
Those tests were being used to dismiss the veterans' benefits
claims. Some British veterans went to independent labs and
received results that proved depleted uranium was in their urine.
Analysis of 24 hours' worth of urine is the commonly accepted
method of determining whether someone has been exposed to uranium
of any kind.
The British veterans' pleas for a better depleted uranium test
also got support from the British Royal Society, an
invitation-only group of prominent scientists. The Royal Society
carries clout in Britain: It dates to 1660, and its members are
readily acknowledged as among the best scientific minds in the
country. Society members decided to tackle the problem of Gulf
War illnesses independent of the government, and after several
years, they issued a series of findings.
While those findings didn't contradict the government's official
viewpoint in many ways, the society did call for a testing
program that could more accurately detect whether someone had
depleted uranium in their body. That, coupled with activism by
veterans groups, left the government little political choice.
It took about two years to develop the highly accurate tests,
says Parrish, a professor of isotope geology at the University of
Leicester.
In addition to his teaching, he runs a laboratory at the British
Geological Survey supported by Britain's Natural Environment
Research Council. The council is independent of the government
and is similar to the National Science Foundation in the United
States, Parrish says.
Parrish and David Coggon, a scientist and chairman of the board
that runs the testing program, say there are only four labs
(three in England, the other in Germany) that have adopted the
more rigorous testing regimen so far.
Part of the difficulty of testing for depleted uranium in
someone's body is that you can't cut up a person and look for the
uranium like you would if it were in a rock, soil sample or lab
rat. That's why scientists look for it in urine. While not a
perfect source, it's the best available right now, Parrish and
others say. Even the U.S. military agrees.
Finding depleted uranium in the body gets complicated. Natural
uranium is in everyone's body because it's in the food and water
we ingest. Therefore, there's natural uranium in everyone's
urine. It's difficult to accurately identify the depleted uranium
as opposed to the natural uranium, in part because the amounts of
both are so small.
Once obtained, the uranium in a 24-hour urine sample is typically
measured in nanograms. A nanogram is one-billionth of a gram or
one billion times lighter than a dollar bill. If a total of 1
nanogram of natural and depleted uranium are involved, the
quantities of each are even lower. It takes extremely
sophisticated machines to help find and identify the microscopic
bits of depleted uranium.
The British and U.S. governments have been giving veterans and
soldiers urine tests for depleted uranium for years. But unless
the soldiers had relatively large quantities of uranium in their
bodies, the tests couldn't detect depleted uranium apart from
natural uranium without a high margin of error, Parrish and other
scientists say.
LIMITATIONS ON TESTS CREATE QUESTIONABLE RESULTS
U.S. military testing officials say that unless a sample has a
relatively high total uranium level, no attempt is made to
determine how much uranium is natural and how much is depleted
uranium. The level is deemed safe, and there's no need to tell
the difference, they say.
As a result, U.S. and British veterans have been told for years
that they tested negative for depleted uranium, Parrish and
others say. Instead, all that had been demonstrated was that the
methods used in testing were incapable of detecting depleted
uranium in such small quantities.
Painstakingly careful methods to collect the urine and separate
the uranium from the liquid and other chemicals in the sample are
important, Parrish says.
Axel Gerdes, a German scientist who worked with Parrish to
develop the tests, says a crucial difference involves the methods
used to concentrate the uranium in urine before it's analyzed.
He says the labs used by the U.S. Army dilute the urine with
water, which makes it easier to examine, and take other shortcuts
that reduce the time and manpower to do the tests. That comes at
the cost of losing the ability to detect small quantities with
accuracy, he says, by a factor of about 1,000.
SUPERIOR SPECTROMETER USED BY BRITISH LABORATORIES
The British testing program also calls for using superior
hardware to aid the analysis, Gerdes and Parrish say.
Several machines are employed for that task, they say, including
a multicollector ICP mass spectrometer. A mass spectrometer is a
machine used to determine the contents of an unknown substance. A
multicollector ICP mass spectrometer is an even more
sophisticated version that's specially equipped to accurately
measure minute quantities of radioactive substances, including
the various forms of an element known as isotopes. The way that
scientists tell the difference between natural uranium and
depleted uranium in a sample is by counting these isotopes, a
process that at times involves tiny amounts of an element.
Scientists using the procedures and hardware developed for the
British test are now able to reliably identify the difference
between depleted uranium and regular uranium in samples with as
little as 0.1 nanogram of total uranium per liter of urine,
Parrish says. That's 10 billion times lighter than a dollar bill.
All this is done with a margin of error of less than 1 percent,
making it a very accurate test.
Lt. Col. Melanson, who oversees much of the Pentagon's scientific
research into the health hazards of depleted uranium, says the
most exacting lab test used on U.S. veterans and active-duty
military personnel must have at least 3 nanograms of total
uranium to examine per liter of urine. That's 30 times more than
the minimum for the new British test.
The most sophisticated U.S. testing labs use a quadruple ICP mass
spectrometer, Melanson says. Parrish and other experts in using
mass spectrometry to identify materials say that's a much less
capable machine than the multicollector type that the British are
using, a machine that's been available for about 10 years.
Gerdes now works at a university in Germany and does testing
there for privately financed groups. He has an even more
sensitive version of the machine than the British labs do. He
says it enables his lab to accurately detect even smaller
quantities of depleted uranium.
Earlier this year, nine soldiers from a New York-based National
Guard unit who had health problems after serving in Operation
Iraqi Freedom had their urine tested at Gerdes' lab at the
University of Frankfurt.
Gerdes says the nine veterans had anywhere from 1.6 to 5.7
nanograms per liter of uranium in their urine. Of those, five had
little or no depleted uranium in their samples, while the others'
samples contained 1.2 percent to 8.2 percent depleted uranium.
After publicity about the tests in the New York Daily News, those
veterans were tested by the labs used by the U.S. military, says
Michael J. Kilpatrick, deputy director for the Pentagon's office
of health protection for deployed troops. None had enough total
uranium in their urine to be concerned about, Kilpatrick says,
and the U.S. labs didn't find any depleted uranium. The cause of
the soldiers' illnesses remain undiagnosed.
Gerdes says the use of total uranium as a guide to the level of
depleted uranium in someone's body is a mistake because there's
often no correlation between how much total uranium is in a
sample and what percentage of it was depleted uranium. That's an
important point that the U.S. military seems to overlook, he
says. The U.S. military says the only difference is that depleted
uranium is less radioactive and therefore less harmful.
After initial reports about the results from Gerdes' lab
involving the New York veterans, several members of Congress
questioned whether the U.S. military should be looking at more
rigorous testing. They directed the questions to Gen. Richard
Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a congressional
hearing April 20.
They specifically asked about tests being developed in other
countries, in light of the different results involving the New
York National Guard unit.
5. WE DON'T HAVE TO WAIT FOR A CATASTROPHIC MELTDOWN TO
BE HARMED
BY
SALLY
SHAW
History of the
Tooth Fairy Project
In the 1940's and
50's, the government became concerned about radiation exposure to
people due to nuclear fallout from bomb tests. Studies of
radioisotopes in teeth and bone were done around the world and in
the US. The Government's data on Sr 90 show that exposure levels
started going down in 1963 as a result of President Kennedy
signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. These studies continued
throughout the 60"s and 70's, ending in the late 70's and
early 80's, as radiation exposure rates due to bomb test fallout
showed a continuous decline, and before commercial nukes were
prevalent and running much of the time. When the government
studies ended in 1982 the exposures were still trending downward.
The downward
trend in Sr 90 exposure reversed as nuclear power reactors aged
and began operating at a much higher proportion of the time
– over 90% in the past few years.
In 1997, the
National Institute of Health (NIH) did a study that showed that
as many as 212,000 Americans developed thyroid cancer due to
radioactive iodine from nuclear bomb tests before the test ban
treaty halted above ground tests.
IN 2000, a US
Department of Energy report found that numerous studies showed
elevated cancer rates in workers at government run reactors
associated with nuclear weapons production; subsequently, federal
law made sick weapons workers eligible for compensation from the
government. (No such study has been done for commercial nuclear
workers because domestic nuclear reactors are privately owned.)
The Radiation
Public Health Project (RPHP) (www.radiation.org)
has published 21 articles in peer-reviewed medical and health
journals and 5 books on the subject of radiation exposures in
reactor communities. Since 1998, using the same techniques used
in federally funded studies of bomb test exposure, RPHP tested
4000 teeth near 7 commercial nuclear reactors. They found
unequivocally that
1. the counties
closest to the reactors had highest levels of Sr. 90.
2. In the 1990's,
Sr 90 went up 50% -- this is not attributable to bomb testing
(previous studies had shown that the exposures from residual bomb
test fallout was declining).
3. The increased
exposures appear to be due to reactors aging and being run much
more of the time than in their earlier years. (As late as 1986,
reactors were running 63% of the time. Now the average exceeds
90% of the time.)
The state of New
Jersey and Westchester County, NY have each supported the work of
RPHP to the tune of $20-25,000 for studies around the Oyster
Creek and Indian Point nukes respectively.
Now for the Good
News
In two of their
articles, the RPHP reported a decline in exposure rates (and
rates of infant death and childhood cancer) after commercial
reactors are closed. In studies of downwind counties within 40
miles of the reactors they found that
1. in 8 out of 8
such reactor communities, the infant death rate plunged after the
reactor was shut off.
2. The decline in
infant deaths near closed reactors was 3X the national average
decline for the same period.
3. The childhood
cancer rates (<5 yrs old) also plunged 25% within 5 years.
The RPHP is
interested in conducting a study of Sr 90 exposure rates and
correlations with health in the communities downwind of the VT
Yankee nuclear reactor. They already have 16 teeth from VT, 12
from NH and 45 from MA (from communities within and outside the
reactor EPZ and effluent plume.) With our help, by providing them
with baby teeth from our communities, we could establish the
actual levels of radiation we are exposed to, in terms that make
sense to us, and that will help us and our public representatives
make a case for protecting our health and safety.
We don't need a
catastrophic meltdown to be harmed by radiation exposure. But
what we do need to ask ourselves is this: if reactors are running
30% more of the time, and 100 uprates have been granted by the
NRC allowing them to run at a heat and pressure load above their
designed capacity, what is the increased likelihood of an
accident occurring?
6. IMPEACHMENT MORE URGENT THAN EVER
BY
RAMSEY
CLARK
We
are urging all of those who are part of the impeachment movement
to participate and bring the message of impeachment with signs
and banners to the hundreds of local demonstrations that
will be taking place on March 19/20, the second
anniversary of the beginning of the criminal war against Iraq.
Between
March 19 and April 3, Congressional representatives are scheduled
to be back in their home district. It has never been more
important for all people of conscience to hold
demonstrations and rallies, and to lobby those representatives in
their home districts during the March 19 - April 3 period.
We are certain that impeachment activists from around the country
will join us in organizing activities in the March 19 - April 3
period. Please notify the VoteToImpeach / ImpeachBush.org
campaign about your local activity, and send in a report and
photos, to [email protected].
The
duty of the American People to compel the Impeachment of George
W. Bush and his principal aides becomes ever more urgent as his
mounting crimes take more lives daily, and threaten irreparable
injury to Constitutional government, irreconcilable division
within the nation and isolation of the U.S. in the community of
nations.
Two
years after the commencement of his War of Aggression, judged to
be the "Supreme International Crime" at Nuremberg, the
flow of blood in Iraq continues to rise and the threat of death
is omnipresent.
The
criminal policies of the Bush Administration which violate
fundamental human rights are etched in memory worldwide in names
like: Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as symbols of torture; Falluja
and Najaf as symbols of the indiscriminate destruction of
civilian life; Nicola Calipari, the Italian officer killed
shielding the Italian reporter, Giuliana Sgrena, with his body,
and scores of Iraqi families gunned down on highways as symbols
of summary execution; Unknown numbers of persons seized in the
U.S., Canada, anywhere in the world and victimized by
"Rendition" to abuse by foreign police as symbols of
kidnapping.
A
year after democratically elected President Jean Bertrand
Aristide of Haiti was told by President Bush he "has to
go" and was forced on to a U.S. plane and flown to Central
African Republic, violence continues to grow in Haiti and deaths
rise into the thousands as Aristide supporters are systematically
targeted and no relief is in sight for the people of Haiti.
Today
President Bush threatens Iran ("all options" are
available), North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, among others. He
tells Syria it must completely withdraw its troops from Lebanon
even as 500,000 Lebanese, 12 percent of the entire population,
take to the streets to protest U.S. intervention and a pro-Syrian
Lebanese leader is reelected Prime Minister by the Parliament of
Lebanon, which fears a U.S.-Israel occupation and wants Syria to
stay and maintain stability finally established after years of
Civil War and bedlam.
For
those who doubt President Bush's determination to continue his
criminal enterprise consider only his three most important recent
appointments: John Negroponte as director for
all foreign intelligence where he can control information about
foreign weapons of mass destruction and terrorist threats to the
U.S.; John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations to assure U.S. commitment to unilateral aggression
and weaken UN opposition to U.S. aggression; and Alberto
Gonzalez as Attorney General to validate violations of
international human rights, the rule of law and the Constitution
of the United States.
In
his determination to be above all law, President Bush insists on
U.S. power to continue violations of fundamental human rights in
his war on terrorism; to violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty by developing a new generation of extremely dangerous and
usable tactical nuclear weapons while threatening to attack Iran,
North Korea and others based on unverified claims that they are
developing nuclear weapons; by direct obstruction of justice
through bilateral agreements to refuse cooperation with the
International Criminal Court; and by the U.S. withdrawal in March
2005 from International Court of Justice jurisdiction following a
decision by that Court that State Courts in the U.S. must
individually review the death sentences of 51 Mexican citizens
following trials in which the U.S. violated rights of the accused
under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
The
continuing boastful commitment of the Bush Administration to
criminal aggression is a clear and present danger to the
Constitution of the United States and the security of its
peoples. The highest duty of the American people is to demand
faithful performance of Constitutional duty by their elected
representatives to assure that they uphold Article II, Section 4
of the Constitution which states "The President, Vice
President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be
removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of,
Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors."
We
must organize and act for the impeachment of George W. Bush and
his principal aides by the House of Representatives and their
trial by the Senate.
Vote
to Impeach Now. Contribute to this national campaign. Organize
meetings with your representative and present petitions from
voters in your Congressional District demanding impeachment.
Action
Now is Essential.