Showing posts with label DU. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DU. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Another Chapter in the Saga of Depleted Uranium

The official story is that depleted uranium, or DU as it’s commonly called by the military, is harmless to humans that are exposed to it. Well now there is a story about DU that flies in the face of the Pentagon’s lies.
Contaminated sand from Gulf War to pass through Longview
Tuesday, April 15, 2008 2:44 AM PDT
By Erik Olson

A ship carrying 6,700 tons of sand contaminated with low levels of hazardous waste at a U.S. Army base in Kuwait during the first Gulf War will be unloaded at the Port of Longview on April 22.
The vessel BBC Alabama is delivering 306 containers of the sand, which contains low levels of uranium, to the port, which will then be loaded onto trains bound for a disposal site in Grand View, Idaho, said Doug Averett, the port’s director of operations.
A cleanup contractor packaged the contaminated sand in bags designed to hold hazardous waste and then placed them in a container, said Chad Hyslop, project manager for Idaho-based American Ecology, the company responsible for disposing of the material.
Longshoremen will not directly handle contaminated material — only the containers holding it, according to the port.
The shipment is safe, Hyslop said, because the concentration of uranium in the sand is so low — about 10 parts per trillion. That concentration — about 0.00000000001 percent — is about five to 10 times higher than the concentration of uranium found in concrete or wall board, he said.
This is being shipped from Kuwait to the US because it was a health hazard to leave it where it was. No matter what the government “spin” says, this country would not have spent the money to remove it and send it over here if the situation didn’t warrant it. This is breaking news and should be on the front page of every newspaper and on every television channel in the United States.
This is news, not only because of the sand being relocated, but because the lies that this government has been telling about the “harmless depleted uranium” being used in Iraq and Afghanistan are now admitted by this very act of removing this sand. The United States would not be shipping sand halfway across the globe to placate the concerns of some soldiers that were exposed to it. They have proven time and time again that they don’t care about exposing our sons and daughters to DU, or poisoning the country of Iraq for the rest of time, so why should they care about some soldiers in Kuwait?
The truth is that America is responsible for perhaps the greatest war crime in history, the poisoning of entire nations and exposing hundreds of thousands of US military personnel to the effects on ionized radiation in the form of vaporized depleted uranium. The military continues to argue that this sand they are transporting is not a danger to anyone. If this is the case, why are they shipping it here to eventually be unloaded in a desolate area in Idaho?
The question we must all ask ourselves at this particular time is a different version of what “Dirty Harry” asked the criminal at the beginning of the movie that had the same name;
“You don’t know if this “sand” is radioactive or not. You don’t know if it will kill you or cause mutations of your offspring or not. The question you have to answer for yourself is do you feel lucky now punk?”
“Well do you?”
Be careful how you answer that question folks. It could put this country on the list of terrorist nations and state supporters of terrorism.