By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand
pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store
nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or
thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could
cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other
hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most
dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and
putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned
all across the landscape?

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15,
could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted
uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300
tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban,
populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan
War.

By Dave Lindorff

On Oct. 13, the New York Times ran a news story headlined
“Door Opens to Health Claims Tied to Agent Orange,” which was sure to
be good news to many American veterans of the Indochina War. It
reported that 38 years after the Pentagon ceased spreading the deadly
dioxin-laced herbicide/defoliant over much of South Vietnam, it was
acknowledging what veterans have long claimed: in addition to 13
ailments already traced to exposure to the chemical, it was also
responsible for three more dread diseases—Parkinson’s, ischemic heart
disease and hairy-cell leukemia.

Under a new policy adopted by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, the VA
will now start providing free care to any of the 2.1 million
Vietnam-era veterans who can show that they might have been hurt by
exposure to Agent Orange.

By Dave Lindorff

I don’t normally bother commenting on the writings of columnists like David Brooks, but today I can’t help myself.

Brooks earlier this week wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times elaborating on a blog on the site Marginal Revolution,
in which that site’s two economists speculated on what would happen if
a solar event instantly sterilized everyone, male and female, on the
side of the earth that was facing the sun at that moment, and if that
side happened to include both the US and Europe.

By Dave Lindorff

Agent Orange, the herbicide used as a weapon by US military forces
in Vietnam for nearly a decade to defoliate vast stretches of inhabited
forest and jungle in an effort to deprive the Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese forces of both cover and a supportive populace, has long
been known to have caused a large number of serious and debilitating
diseases, many of them passed on to children of those exposed. But now
it also appears to cause a peculiar blindness among American
journalists.

By Dave Lindorff

    I found myself listing to a talk radio show on NPR’s Philadelphia affiliate WHYY today, which focused in part on the agonies suffered by families of American troops killed or seriously maimed in Iraq.

    Left unsaid—and this I think is the case in nearly all the reporting that gets done on the costs of the Iraq War that are being borne here in the US by relatives of troops—is the terrible reality that we’re talking about the relatives of just 4500 American servicemen and women killed, and perhaps 30,000 seriously wounded (not counting the hundreds of thousands suffering mental damage).  Not to diminish that suffering, it needs to be pointed out that by some accounts, well over 1 million Iraqis have died in this illegal, uncalled-for and criminal war.

The lack of oversight characterizing both the Bush administration and crony capitalism have bankrupted the U.S. and created the need for perpetual war. With Cheney stirring up trouble over Iran, we can't wait until November 2008 to fight back.

Toxic economy

Take the Fed's recent $30 billion bailout of Bear Sterns. Why throw taxpayer dollars at a company with massive amounts of "toxic waste" on its books, created largely through reckless behavior chasing short-term profits?

“It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”
---Pentagon official

 

Missing Nukes--Treason of the Highest Order

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7158

By David Swanson

A former member of U.S. military intelligence has decided to reveal what she knows about warrantless spying on Americans and about the fixing of intelligence in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq.