While it is sometimes doubtful that the President knows what he's talking
about, there's no question that the people who write his speeches do. So,
what's behind the attack on "frivolous law suits?"
I know the explanation is that such suits against medical providers are
resulting in an increase in insurance rates which are then passed on to
whoever pays for the patients. But every objective study has shown that the
number of lawsuits is actually very small and the number of big awards few.
Not to mention that most could be avoided if the medical community were
better at weeding out the incompetent and negligent.
So, maybe there's another reason that the government is concerned about law
suits from damaged individuals. Maybe what it's really about is
pre-empting the posssibility that a whole lot of veterans and civilians are
going to come back and sue the government for failing to protect them from
the health problems they develop after breathing in the fall out from
depleted uranium weapons in Afghanistan and Iraq.
While the veterans of the Gulf War might not have a good case, because the
adverse consequences of breathing in uranium oxides was not yet well known,
there's now been an accumulation of information by the Europeans, the World
Health Organization and NATO from which, however vigorously it's denied by
the Pentagon, the liability of the American government could be established
pretty easily.
The effort to suppress the information and to delay proper investigation
might be enough to demonstrate a pattern of fraud and make any number of
officials subject to the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946.
Objective DU reports from US and UK governments do not say differently. Read after years of information warfare on the DU topic, they prove that USA and the world knew about the health and environmental consequences of DU weapon use. They documents have been warning about toxic-radioactive effects of DU, as follows,
- In 1984, US Federal Aviation Agency document cautioned the investigators of aircraft crashes against the hazard from DU in counterweights of civilian airplanes: particles inhaled or ingested are toxic and can cause long-term irradiation of the internal tissue.
- Six months before the Gulf War, a Science Applications International Corporation report wrote, "Short-term effects of high doses can result in death, while long-term effects of low doses have been implicated in cancer."
- In the early nineties, UK Atomic Energy Authority warned that if all of the DU fired by tanks in the Gulf War was inhaled, "there could be half a million deaths as a result by 2000." Tanks fired only about 8% of all DU used in that war.
- 1993 US General Accounting Office report GAO/NSIAD-93-90 stated, "Inhaled insoluble [DU] oxides stay in the lungs longer and pose a potential cancer risk due to radiation. Ingested DU dust can also pose both a radioactive and toxicity risk."
- 1995 US Army Environmental Policy Institute report warned, "Toxicologically, DU poses a health risk when internalized. Radiologically, the radiation emitted by DU results in health risks from both external and internal exposures [...] If DU enters the body, it has the potential to generate significant medical consequences &8220;
- In 1999, a Los Alamos Laboratory memo said that there were concerns about the environmental consequences of DU. Thus, in order to protect the DU weapons from becoming politically unacceptable and removed from the arsenals, reports from the Gulf War should be edited accordingly. Another memo stated that alpha particles emitted from DU dust created from exploded DU ammunition pose a health risk, but beta particles from DU shrapnel and from intact DU bullets are a serious hazard to health.
- January 2001, leak: UK Ministry of Defense was secretly testing for radiation poisoning among British soldiers just months before it sent troops to Kosovo. At the time the ministry was refusing screening for Gulf War veterans. The disclosure went much further than an earlier leak that showed only that officers knew 4 years earlier about the risk of developing lung, lymph and brain cancers from DU shells.
- In January 2001, a leak implicated former Republican Senator Warren Rudman and retired Rear Admiral Paul Steinman who biased and censored a serious inquiry into Pentagon's handling of Gulf War illness, run by Dr. Bernard Rostker.
Posted by Hannah at September 27, 2004 09:55 AM