The award for most overlooked major news story of recent memory goes to the Christian Science Monitor's smash-up expose of the radioactive legacy left by the United States' "Depleted" Uranium munitions.
Just a few days after the Pentagon insisted, of the DU remains, that, "There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq," and that, "If somebody needs to go into a tank that's been hit with depleted uranium, a dust mask, a handkerchief is adequate to protect them -- washing their hands afterward;" the Monitor found "significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad," even while it "saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away."
The story paints a grim picture of the environmental and public health horrors awaiting the brave people of Iraq (as well as "coalition" forces), and should have landed on the front page of every major paper in the country.
Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you ask? The Monitor has found the smoking gun, all right. Yet four days later, a search of Google News finds that only Common Dreams has picked up the story.
Gotta love that free press...
The other nominees? How about Martin Luther King III's and Greg Palast's "Jim Crow Revived In Cyberspace", the LA Times' survey of hospitals finding that the war killed at least 1,700 civilians in Baghdad alone (which dovetails with the jump of Iraq Body Count's running total to over 4,000), and the UN's recent warnings that Iraqi agriculture is "on the brink of collapse" and that more than twice as many children -- to 300,000 -- as before the invasion "face death from acute malnutrition".
eddie, I think you have overlooked this story yourself. This was a story well before Iraq II came on the scene, as a handful of people reported the birth defects in the area and whether the US troops would be affected. The stories also mentioned that US troops were warned in Iraq I to stay at least 50 ft (or yards, don't recall which) away from the burned out hulls of DU damaged tanks.
Posted by: triple-e on May 22, 2003 09:09 AMI agree with triple-e. DU was a college project I did a # of years ago. Info all over. First few results in google:
Campaign Against Depleted Uranium
A particularly bad looking DU site
Posted by: Anon on May 23, 2003 05:39 PMOh, I've been following the issue for some time -- and first wrote about it no later than 1999.
The point I was trying (perhaps poorly) to make is twofold: first, that the Christian Science Monitor is one of the more important newspapers in the country, so it ought to have been "safe" for other media to pick up its story; and second, that the Monitor's story offers, amid the Bush Administration's daily bleats of its harmlessness, cold, hard proof of the effects of our radiological weapons.
You raised a good point and I missed it. Perhaps the reason I missed it is that I am becoming numb to government assertions that contradict the hard proof. I agree that DU is not discussed enough and I did not mean to imply that you have not discussed it enough.
Posted by: Anon on May 23, 2003 07:32 PMApologies as well, now I understand your point. And as usual, agree with you on the issue.
Posted by: triple-e on May 27, 2003 08:33 AMThe lie is repeated over and over. There is NOT SUCH THING AS "DEPLETED URANIUM". This is a Pentagon fiction. This is purifed U-238. While it cannot be used to make an bomb or used in a reactor directly, it can be used in an reactor to make plutoium. And it IS radioactive, for billions of years. In fact, U-238 has used to determine that the earth is about 5.5 billion years old.
While it does not glow in the dark and is no where as radioactive as say, radium or the cobalt used in radiomedicine, it is still "a little bit pregnant" with
raditiation and will cause pain and misery for years and years to come.
And god help us, if some of it winds up in an Iranian or North Korean reactor and becomes plutonium.
Thank you so much, Pentagon!!!
Posted by: Rachel Corrie on June 3, 2003 08:35 AM