On January 10, 2007, President Bush unveiled his “New Way Forward in Iraq.” [1] He admitted that the American people find the present situation in Iraq unacceptable. Yet, in spite of it all, he has committed another 21,000 plus U.S. troops who will march off to Iraq to fight a corporate war that many Americans now perceive as being driven by big oil profits and industrial war profiteers. Bush’s “New Way Forward” will unavoidably translate to an “Old Way Backward” for soldiers deployed to the Persian Gulf. By sending additional soldiers to Iraq, the President of the United States is adding 21,000 names to the list of those afflicted with depleted uranium poisoning due to simple environmental contamination. Americans must come to understand that the Pentagon’s use of radioactive weaponry on the battlefield over the past two decades is tantamount to officially sponsored involuntary human experimentation.

Human experimentation by the United States military complex is nothing new. Declassified documents dating back six decades have exposed hundreds of questionable and illegal programs sponsored by the Department of Defense. It wasn’t until the summer of 1975 that congressional hearings revealed to the public, for the first time, that the C.I.A. and the D.o.D. had conducted experiments on both consenting and unwitting human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs. MKULTRA was just one of about 160 mind control programs that the United States government was sponsoring in the late 1950’s [2]. These projects were only the tip of the iceberg. The public would later learn of atomic vets exposed to radioactive atomic blasts [3]; the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which 64% of the men “studied” died from syphilis or complications arising thereof [4]; and open air testing, where U.S. military were allowed to spray large U.S. cities with biological agents for the purpose of studying infection delivery patterns.

However, in 1991 the Department of Defense would take mass experimentation to a whole new level with the introduction of depleted uranium (DU) munitions on the battlefield. This bold decision would forever change the meaning of the term “nuclear war.” It is important to understand that the Department of Defense was aware of the deadly effects of radioactive weaponry and clearly recommended its development as a “poison gas warfare weapon” in a 1943 declassified Army memo to Brigadier General L. R. Groves, known now simply as the "Groves Memorandum." This is the earliest known reference to the weapons that would later become the military’s number one choice for killing tanks in the theatre of war. [5,6]

For almost two decades, on the rolling sand dunes of Iraq, among the many strewn and shattered remnants of destroyed enemy tanks, our troops have continually inhaled air contaminated with microscopic radioactive dust particles from the reckless and open use of depleted uranium munitions. Dr. Doug Rokke, a US Army Health Physicist and Nuclear Medicine Sciences Officer, whose team was in charge of battlefield decontamination during the first Gulf War, states that his team received direct memorandums from the Department of the Army and other Department of Defense Officials, which plainly verified his own research; depleted uranium munitions were a serious health threat due to contamination. [7]

Because of the Department of Defense's direct concern over the health and environmental effects of DU, Dr. Rokke discloses that he was asked to misrepresent his research and falsify an official report so that uranium munitions could always be used on the battlefield by U.S. forces. According to his own research, and that performed by the Army Environmental Policy Institute [8], uranium munitions cannot be cleaned up. In fact, the United Nations Sub-Commission on Human Rights ruled that uranium munitions are an illegal weapon because they kill indiscriminately, they cannot be cleaned up, and they contaminate the environment for 4.5 billion years. [9]

The intentions of our military leaders, past and present, are becoming all too clear for those who take the effort to observe these atrocities with unfiltered eyes, yet Gulf War exposures do not stop there. On the battlefield of Iraq our service personnel were exposed to chemical and biological weapons supplied to the Iraqis by the U.S. military with the full blessing of our Congress. Little known to most Americans, and almost completely unreported in the mainstream press, is that chemical and biological exposures from the 1992 demolition of Khamisiyah and similar massive bunker sites in Iraq have now been determined to have caused permanent neurological damage in over 300,000 Gulf War veterans, who are now classified as permanently disabled by the VA. [10]

During the Khamisiyah event, thousands of U.S. troops were tasked with rigging hundreds of "Wal-Mart sized" ammunitions bunkers with explosives in order to destroy physical evidence that countries such as Great Britain, Russia, Jordan, and the United States had illegally sold weapons of mass destruction to the Iraqis. U.S. servicemen working inside the bunkers during the initial engineering phase captured footage of these illegal weapons on videotape. This footage appears in the award-winning documentary "Beyond Treason" [11] along with an impressive number of other incriminating documents obtained from the Pentagon under the Freedom of Information Act, which effectively describe the unlawful mindset and treasonous actions of some of our highest military leaders.

Conceivably, the largest experiment of all was requiring our servicemen and women to receive the experimental anthrax vaccine. During the first Gulf War, our service personnel were inoculated with experimental vaccines containing aluminum hydroxide, mercury, and squalene. It was done in hast and without proper approval from the F.D.A.

U.S. Army Reserve Spc. Rachael Lacy, 22, is a casualty of the Pentagon’s compulsory anthrax vaccination program. She died in 2003 after receiving the anthrax and smallpox inoculations. After a coroner ruled that the shots contributed to her death, the Defense Department was finally forced to admit that two independent panels of medical experts had concluded that the vaccinations could very well have caused the illness that killed Specialist Lacy. According to the “Vaccine Risk Awareness Network,” adverse reactions to the anthrax vaccine range from 40% in men to 70% in women and symptoms can range from severe bone and joint pain, to loss of vision, severe skin problems, blackouts and loss of consciousness, grand mal seizures, internal organ problems, ALS, multiple sclerosis -- and death. [12]

Perhaps the most damaging law pertaining to experimentation on soldiers without informed consent comes under the Clinton administration in the form of E.O. 13139. [13] This Executive Order requires military personnel to receive experimental vaccines not approved by the F.D.A. and denies soldiers the right to refuse experimental vaccines. This law treats U.S. servicemen as if they were experimental guinea pigs with no more rights than the average lab rat. Past experiments conducted at Fort Detrick chemical and biological warfare center in Maryland, showed that nine of the twenty-seven anthrax strains tested killed 50 percent of the vaccinated subjects. [14] With those kinds of odds, would you join the military these days?

To summarize, the U.S. Department of Defense paid for the development and manufacture of DU weapons, which through their own research was known to be deadly to the very troops using them on the battlefield. Our troops were knowingly exposed to deadly chemical and biological weapons in the theatre of operations during Operation Desert Storm. They are inoculated with drugs that are known to have serious and deadly side effects, none of which have been approved by the F.D.A. They are told by the V.A. that they suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder and prescribed medications that deal solely with the symptoms and offer no valid treatments for their illnesses. Their spouses and children are stricken by many of the same debilitating symptoms and health problems, yet the Department of Defense continues to stonewall and deny.

Now that we have a good understanding of all the facts, what can we do? Whether we scream this from the rooftops for all to hear or bury our heads further in the sand is the test by which all Americans will be measured. Americans must take leadership roles in transforming this government into one that holds its leaders accountable for the crimes that they have committed against the people of the United States and the global community at large. How much longer will the citizens of this country tolerate the clear and present danger of our U.S. service personnel at the hands of the U.S. military establishment? One thing is clear. Officials at the Department of Defense are guilty of no less than treason and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law to serve as a warning to all future generations. These actions will not be tolerated.

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." – Declaration of Independence


Endnotes:

[1] www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html
[2] www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/history/e1950/mkultra/index.htm
[3] www.naav.com/
[4] www.cdc.gov/nchstp/od/tuskegee/time.htm
[5] www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/small/mb03.htm
[6] www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Trinity/Groves.shtml
[7] www.traprockpeace.org/depleteduranium.html
[8] www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/docs/du.html
[9]  http://nucnews.net/2000/du/99du/990831dw.htm
[10] www.gulflink.osd.mil/khamisiyah_ii/
[11] www.bridgestonemediagroup.com/beyondtreason.html
[12] www.vran.org
[13] www.anthraxvaccine.org/Testimony.pdf
[14] www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_42_15/ai_57770428