Being from Puerto Rico, this issue hits close to
home. I haven't seen as much coverage as I would like in reports about the health problems facing returning war veterans (which doesn't mean it is non-existent). Somewhere down the line the issue is going to have to be dealt with not only in relation to our veterans but with regard to the overall conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A couple of years ago an international tribunal that met in Japan, made up of five judges - all professors of international law - concluded that President Bush was guilty of war crimes for indiscriminately attacking civilians in the Afghan war. Robert Akroyd, one of the judges and a former head of legal studies at Aston University in Britain noted the U.S. military's use of "
indiscriminate weapons such as the Daisy Cutter, cluster bombs and depleted uranium shells," According to the
Japan Times,
Civilians and experts who have supported the tribunal movement agreed to work for creation of an international treaty that would prohibit the production, stockpile and use of depleted uranium rounds, like the Ottawa process that succeeded in 1997 in outlawing antipersonnel land mines.
In what he terms a
public health disaster for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, Doug Westerman points out that:
The Japanese began studying DU effects in the southern Iraq in the summer of 2003. They had a Geiger counter which they watched go off the scale on many occasions. During their visit,a local hospital was treating upwards of 600 children per day, many of which suffered symptoms of internal poisoning by radiation.
Although there are other concerns now, in the aftermath of the war this subject is inevitably going to come to the fore. We need to bring this subject out into the
open now, especially given the deliberate attempt by US military authorities to suppress the issue altogether. Westerman adds that:
Not only are we poisoning the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, but we are making a concerted effort to keep out specialists from other countries who can help. The U.S. Military doesn't want the rest of the world to find out what we have done.