|
by Felicity Arbuthnot
August 13, 2013
from
GlobalResearch Website
" … war in our time is always
indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against
children."
(Howard Zinn, 1922-2010.)
On 22nd July two babies were
born - in different worlds. Prince
George Alexander Louis, son of
Britain’s Prince William and his wife Catherine, arrived in the
£5,000 a night Lindo Wing of London’s St. Mary’s Hospital, weighing
a super healthy 8lbs 6 oz.
According to the hospital’s website:
"The Lindo Wing offers private en
suite rooms, designed to provide you with comfort and privacy
during your stay. Deluxe rooms or a suite are available on
request. Each room has a satellite TV with major international
channels, a radio, a safe, a bedside phone and a fridge.
You and your visitors can access the
internet and… a daily newspaper is delivered to your room each
morning throughout your stay. Toiletries are also provided."
Also on hand is a:
"Comprehensive wine list, should you
wish to enjoy a glass of champagne and toast your baby’s
arrival."
Moments away, are also some of the
world’s finest medical facilities and specialists, in the event of
complications.
To mark the birth, the band of the Scots Guards played at Buckingham
Palace, the fountains in Central London’s Trafalgar Square were lit
with blue lights for six days and the King’s Troop Royal Horse
Artillery and the Honorable Artillery Company staged a forty one gun
royal salute.
At least, breaking the habits of the
centuries, and recent decades, this time they didn’t kill anyone.
On the same day, a universe away,
in Falluja, Iraq - poisoned by
weapons armed with uranium, chemically and radiologically toxic, and
white phosphorous, a chemical weapon, and other so far unidentified
"exotic weapons" - baby Humam was born.
In a city relentlessly bombarded in 1991
and again in two further criminal, inhuman US decimations in 2004.
Humam was born with
Retrognathia, a congenital heart
disease, Omphalocele and Polydactyly of upper and lower limbs.
Omphalocele is an abnormality that
develops as the the fetus is forming. Some of the abdominal organs
protrude through an opening in the abdominal muscles in the area of
the umbilical cord.
Polydactyly is the manifestation of
extra digits on the hands or feet, in Humam’s case, both.
Humam translates as: "Brave, noble, generous."
Dr Chris Busby, whose appointments have included sitting on
the UK Ministry of Defence Oversight Committee on Depleted Uranium,
and is a visiting Professor in Biomedical Sciences at the University
of Ulster, has made extensive studies in Falluja.
He tested parents of :
"children with congenital anomalies
and measured the concentration of 52 elements in the hair of the
mothers and fathers. We also looked at the surface soil, river
water and drinking water.
We used a very powerful (mass
spectroscopy) technique called ICPMS… the only substance we
found that could explain the high levels of genetic damage was
the radioactive element uranium." (1)
Much has rightly been made of the
use of depleted uranium (DU)
in Iraq in 1991 and the subsequent decade-plus illegal bombing of
the country by the US and UK, then the 2003 and subsequent
onslaughts, but, says Busby:
"Astonishingly, it was not depleted
uranium. It was slightly enriched uranium, the kind that
is used in nuclear reactors or atomic bombs.
We found it in the hair and also in
the soil. We concentrated the soil chemically so there could be
no mistake. Results showed slightly enriched uranium - manmade."
This enriched uranium was found in
Falluja’s:
"soil, water and in the hair of
parents whose children had anomalies."
Relating to the near Dresden-like
bombardment of November 2004, Busby is convinced of a connection
between cancers, deformities and the uranium weapons:
"Uranium is excreted into hair and
hair grows at a known rate: one centimeter per month. We
obtained very long hair samples… and measured the uranium along
the lengths of the hair, which gave us historic levels back as
far as 2005.
In one woman, whose hair was 80
centimeters, the uranium concentration went up toward the tip of
the hair, showing very high exposures in the past (and) 'the
uranium was manmade, it was enriched uranium…'," he stressed.
Busby believes:
"…these results prove the existence
of a new secret uranium weapon. We have found some US patents
for thermobaric and directed charge warheads which employ
uranium… to increase their effect …"
His team also:
" investigated bomb craters in
Lebanon in 2006 after the Israeli attacks and found one which
was radioactive and containing enriched uranium. We found
enriched uranium in car air filters from Lebanon and also from
Gaza.
Others have found evidence of its
use in Afghanistan and possibly also in the Balkans… an
astonishing discovery with many global implications."
Dr Busby claims that:
"It is clear that the military has a
secret uranium weapon of some sort.
It causes widespread and terrifying
genetic defects, causing cancer and birth anomalies and
poisoning the gene pool of whole populations. This is a war
crime and must be properly investigated.
"This material… is slowly contaminating the whole planet. It is
poisoning the human gene pool, leading to increases in cancer,
congenital anomalies, miscarriages and infertility…
It has probably been employed in
Libya, so we must wait and see what levels of cancer and
congenital disease appears there."
Further, Dr Busby’s report, compiled
with Malak Hamdan and Entesar Ariabi, found infant
mortality in Falluja in eighty of every thousand births, in
neighboring Jordan it is seventeen.
Robert Fisk describes a visit to Falluja General Hospital
last year:
"The pictures flash up on a screen
on an upper floor of the Fallujah General Hospital. And all at
once, Nadhem Shokr al-Hadidi’s administration office becomes a
little chamber of horrors.
A baby with a hugely deformed mouth.
A child with a defect of the spinal cord, material from the
spine outside the body. A baby with a terrible, vast Cyclopean
eye.
Another baby with only half a head,
stillborn like the rest… a tiny child with half a right arm, no
left leg, no genitalia… a dead baby with just one leg and a head
four times the size of its body." (2)
One British trained obstetrician somehow
raised funds for a £79,000 scanner, for detection of congenital
abnormalities.
Why, she asked, would Iraqi’s Ministry
of Health not hold a full investigation into Falluja’s birth defect
epidemic?
Answer, surely: because the cause would be weapons used by the
U.S. - to whom the government of Iraq owe their positions and
their mega money accumulating enterprises.
Note: Ironically
the Ministry of Health under Saddam Hussein moved mountains, under
the uniquely difficult circumstances of the embargo, to collect
statistics from throughout the country and to press the relevant
world bodies for widespread investigation into the cancers and
abnormalities, to no avail.
Dr Samira Allani talks of:
"the increased frequency (of
congenital abnormalities) that is alarming."
Congenital heart defects, a research
paper she has written states, had reached "unprecedented numbers" by
2010. Still births and premature births also continue in an upward
spiral.
Falluja lacks even laboratory equipment to facilitate the treatment
of fetal infections which are curable. But this is an Iraq-wide
phenomenon, ongoing since the 1991 bombings and simply multiply
escalating.
In the southern holy city of Najav, Dr Sundus Nsaif says:
"After the start of the Iraq war,
rates of cancer, leukemia and birth defects rose dramatically in
Najaf. The areas affected by American attacks saw the biggest
increases… When you visit the hospital here you see that cancer
is more common than the flu." (3)
Dr Nsaif comments on an active push by
the government not to talk about the issue, speculating the reason
is perhaps in an effort not to embarrass coalition forces.
Never mind embarrassment, the
implications for claims for compensation could be a world first in
the potential size of damages, where ever these weapons have been
used.
In Basra it is reported that birth defects increased seventeen fold
in under a decade after the 2003 invasion and, as Falluja, over half
of all babies conceived since are "born with heart defects."
"The Pentagon and the UN estimate
that US and British forces used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of
armor-piercing shells" made of depleted uranium during attacks
in Iraq in just two months, March and April 2003.
Enriched uranium is not mentioned of
course.
That added to the up to 900 tons in
1991, the subsequent illegal bombings and the bombardments including
Falluja, March 2003-December 2011, when the US forces slunk out of
their killing fields under cover of darkness.
The warning after 1991 by none other than the UK Atomic Energy
Agency must never be forgotten:
"If fifty tonnes of the residual
(depleted uranium) dust is left in the region, there will be an
estimated half million cancer deaths by the end of the century"
(2000.)
The further horror of enriched uranium
was not, seemingly, a known factor then.
There is surely a vast cover up on the effects of these weapons.
As Mozhgan Savabieasfahani has
written:
"The joint (World Health
Organization) and Iraqi Ministry of Health Report on cancers and
birth defect in Iraq was originally due to be released in
November 2012. It has been delayed repeatedly and now has no
release date whatsoever." (4)
He writes:
"The back-breaking burden of cancers
and birth defects continues to weigh heavily on the Iraqi
people", in an article which draws attention to the fact that
fifty four eminent academics from a number of countries have
written to the WHO demanding the release of the Report.
He adds that in November 2006:
"The British Medical Journal
published an article entitled ‘WHO
suppressed evidence on effects of depleted uranium, expert says.’
It suggested that earlier WHO reports were compromised by the
omission of a full account of depleted uranium genotoxicity.
"Additionally, recent revelations by Hans von Sponeck, the
former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations,
suggest that WHO may be susceptible to pressure from its member
states.
"Mr. von Sponeck has said that ‘The US government sought to
prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted
uranium had been used and caused serious health and
environmental dangers.’ "
Further, adding fuel to radioactive
fire, there are reports that the latest WHO Report does not even
touch on depleted uranium (yet alone enriched.)
We will have to wait and see - and wait
and wait… The WHO of course is an arm of
the UN, so read US.
One of the first people arrested in Iraq on the asinine US playing
cards of the "most wanted" in 2003, was Dr Huda Ammash. Dean
of Baghdad University, and internationally renowned environmental
biologist, who earned her PhD at the University of Missouri.
She extensively researched and wrote papers on the effects of DU and
other pollutants after the 1991 war and cited the International
Treaties outlawing such weapons and stressed depleted uranium
weapons not being "depleted" but a "radioactive waste", the all in
minutely detailed, careful, hard hitting, scientific,
incontrovertible fact.
"DU is radiologically and chemically
toxic to humans and other forms of life." (5)
She was way ahead in what she had
detected.
Her contribution to the widely acclaimed "Iraq
Under Siege - the Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War"
(Pluto Press, 2000, updated 2003) was a wake-up call on the
environmental Armageddon wrought on Iraq by the toxic weapons of
1991.
Her introduction read:
"The Gulf war ended in 1991, but the
massive destruction linked to it continues.
An unprecedented catastrophe
resulting from a mixture of toxic, radiological, chemical and
electromagnetic exposure is still causing substantial
consequences to health and the environment... much of Iraq has
been turned into a polluted and radioactive environment."
The highly publicized book surely made
her a marked woman. She was one of the first arrests of the Iraq
invasion, dubbed "Dr Anthrax" in US disinformation, remaining in US
custody until November 2005.
Robert Fisk, in his graphic article, cited above, writes:
"This is too much. These photographs
are too awful… They simply cannot be published."
He cites the pain of the parents, many
who wanted to talk to him and the world to know.
The facts, the pictures, should be on the front page of news outlets
across the globe until these obscene weapons are outlawed. Iraq’s
plight is being, and will be replicated where ever they have been
and are again used.
They are the new Hiroshimas and Nagasakis, with the genetic
burden loaded on future generations for possibly millennia.
If the WHO Report ever comes out, it will anyway be no good to baby
Humam and uncounted others.
The birth was "very emotional" said Prince William’s wife,
Catherine, of that of Prince George Alexander Louis. Imagine being
Humam’s mother, or any mother in Iraq, who has no idea what horrors
her precious offspring may present with.
The little Prince is to be feted from the day of his birth
onwards - uncounted children of Iraq and where ever these weapons
have been used, are fated from the day of theirs.
Ironically the Prince’s father and uncle, Prince Harry, both belong
to the UK armed forces, with America, partners in crime in these
horrors.
References
-
http://rt.com/news/uranium-birth-defects-fallujah-729/
-
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-children-of-fallujah–the-hospital-of-horrors-7679168.html
-
http://www.countercurrents.org/cc230713B.htm
-
http://www.globalresearch.ca/rise-of-cancers-and-birth-defects-in-iraq-world-health-organization-refuses-to-release-data/5344530
-
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1220-31.htm
See also:
Pentagon admits used white phosphorous against
Iraqis in Falluja.
|