War crimes anyone?

Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US assault

The bombs that keep on killing

Long after they've exploded:

CAIRO — Iraq’s environment minister blamed Monday the use of depleted uranium weapons by U.S. forces during the 2003 Operation Shock and Awe for the current surge in cancer cases across the country.

As a result of “at least 350 sites in Iraq being contaminated during bombing” with depleted uranium (DU) weapons, Nermin Othman said, the nation is facing about 140,000 cases of cancer, with 7,000 to 8,000 new ones registered each year.

Speaking at a ministerial meeting of the Arab League, she also complained that many chemical plants and oil facilities had been destroyed during the two military campaigns since the 1990s, but the ecological consequences remain unclear.

“Our ministry is fledgling, and we need international support; notably, we need laboratories to better monitor air and water contamination,” she said.

The first major UN research on the consequences of the use of DU on the battlefield was conducted in 2003 in the wake of NATO operations in Kosovo, Bosnia, and Montenegro. The UN Environment Program (UNEP) said in its report after the research that DU poses little threat if spent munitions are cleared from the ground.

“Health risks primarily depend on the awareness of people coming into contact with DU,” UNEP writes in its 2004 brochure “Depleted Uranium Awareness.”

No major clean-up or public awareness campaigns have been reported in Iraq.

Oh, well done, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush! The hatred you have unleashed will last hundreds of years.

I hope the Veteran's administration is ready for this

Because this will go on for years. We are poisoning our own soldiers along with everyone else in Iraq:

Governments deny it, but many people have long suspected that depleted uranium weapons may cause cancer. It looks as if the suspicions were right.
Depleted uranium (DU) is a dense, weakly radioactive metal used in armour-piercing shells. Hundreds of tonnes of them were fired by US and UK forces in Iraq in 2003. Previous research at the US government's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico found that people exposed to DU dust were at little extra risk of developing cancers.
Now the first study of DU's effects on human lung cells suggests otherwise. Toxicologist John Wise and colleagues at the University of Southern Maine in Portland exposed cultures of human bronchial fibroblasts to particles of uranium oxide typically found in DU dust. Chromosomes in the cells mutated and the cells died, genotoxic effects that increased with the particle concentration. This may increase a person's risk of lung cancer, the team conclude.

Update 5/15: Didn't we force our troops to get these shots as well?

Some Israeli soldiers have reportedly developed tumours and suffered infections after being used in tests by the Israeli military to develop an anthrax vaccine.

The report televised on Israel's Channel 2 on Monday said that several of the 700 soldiers who volunteered to test the vaccine have since suffered medical problems.

Giora Martinovich, the former chief medical officer for the Israeli military, confirmed that the tests were conducted from 1998 to 2006 and that some of the volunteers had suffered side-effects.