Depleted Uranium is Safe

[tw]

From the Washington Post of 22 Mar 2005:

Soldier Feels Abandoned In His Courtroom Battle
So the 33-year-old says he can't understand why the military is refusing a routine subpoena that he believes could help him avoid a 13-year prison sentence.

McKibben goes on trial today in Howard County District Court on charges of assaulting a police officer during what he and his doctors believe was an epileptic seizure related to his now-removed brain tumor. But military officials will not allow his doctors to testify.

In Baghdad, McKibben said, his main job was fixing Bradley Fighting Vehicles, ... All the mechanics in his unit lived in a junkyard filled with damaged vehicles from the Iraqi army [contaminated with depleted uranium]. ...

Doctors soon diagnosed him with a tumor on the right lobe of his brain and nodules in his right lung. ...

"I know it was the uranium that caused the tumor. ... A lot of other guys in my units started developing cysts all over their bodies. One guy died." ...

Ann Johnson, a spokeswoman for Walter Reed, said the policy restricting testimony of military staff is designed to limit "the loss of duty time by Army personnel" and "to include strict impartiality where the Army does not have an interest in the litigation."

One additional factor. The DoD insists that deplete uranium is harmless.

[xoxoxoBruce]

"to include strict impartiality where the Army does not have an interest in the litigation."

I'd guess they have a huge interest in this guy not winning a court case based on that defense.

[busterb]

Bet ya butt on that. The VA treats a pile of vets for alcoholism, they will never admit to any blame for it. Because they might have to pay disability. You drink because you want to. Never mind that you were 16 years old when you went in USA and drank to be one of the bunch. Oh well.
This might be a repeat, but I've heard dr's talking in halls about we need to get so and so out today or he'll get 100%. Not to worry he's already on 100%
I was put in VA in New Orleans because they thought I had TB, So they put me in a ward, room with people who had just had major chest work. Smart
?

As we all know, if you are a low ranking soldier, poor, a member of an ethnic minority without the funding to interest Halliburten, Uranium of any sort can cause you no harm.. When I lived in the uranium mining devastated town of Nucla, Colorado, I myself noticed how radiation bounced right off me, and I never felt a thing. Heh! Stupid old uranium tailings! They can’t get ME! (Excuse me while I go cough up one of my lungs for a moment).

I have posted before about the horrors old uranium mines and tailings have unleased on Colorado’s far western slope and the triage of 3 small former uranium towns – Naturita, Nucla, and Uravan. At least no one has to worry about Uravan, anymore. The uranium outfits and the EPA plowed the whole town under. Uravan was no big loss. Its few remaining residents were a bunch of malingerers who claimed to have lung cancer or something stupid. You’ll be happy to know that Uncle Sam made short shift of these slackers and denied most of them their disability claims. I think they all crawled over the Utah state line and died in Monticello or something, saving the good Republican tax payers of Colorado the cost of indiginent burial fees.

Of course the only- good- Indian- is- a- dead- Indian Navajo have a slightly different take on things:

Miners, millers, truckers, and their families were exposed to radiation levels as much as 750 times the 1950 standards. By the 1950s, the first ghosts began to appear – ghosts of the victims of lung cancer, pulmonary fibrosis, pneumoconiosis, silicosis, tuberculosis, birth defects, kidney damage. Navajo called the ailments “red lungs” for the red they coughed up, or “uranium on the lungs” and “radiation around the heart.” (see Memories Come to Us in the Rain and the Wind: Oral Histories and Photographs of Navajo Uranium Miners and Their Families).

Leetso, the yellow monster, had released evil into Dinè'tah. The industry went bust in the ‘80s; the ghosts continue to congregate. A flood of eleven hundred tons of radioactive mill wastes and ninety million gallons of contaminated liquid poured down the Rio Puerco drainage at Church Rock, New Mexico, on July 16, 1979, thirty-four years to the day after Leetso’s birth.

http://www.cpluhna.nau.edu/Change/uranium.htm

Eh, what do they know? Buncha of aborgines!

As for alcoholism and the VA – there’s another fun story. For fifty years and more, the Army actively encouraged drinking among its rank and file. When I worked as an advocate for Gulf War Vets from Desert Storm, one of the young soldiers I tried to help had been confined to post. He was a former alcoholic trying to stay sober. For entertainment, the base where he was confined offered about a half dozen NCO clubs with neon signs flashing the names of various beers. Drinking was a common place in his barracks, and I’d often walk past groups of young soldiers carrying in cases of beer or throwing up in the parking lot outside the barracks when I came by to drop off legal paperwork for this young man. Many soldiers self medicate the symptoms of PTSD with alcohol which ends them up with TWO problems – PTSD and alcoholism. The Army mostly still throws soldiers with PTSD out onto the streets. The VA diagnoses their alcoholism, refuses to recognize that the condition is service related, so the vet ends up on a street corner with his “Homeless Vet, Please Help” sign while all those holier than thou Americans who have never been on a battlefield, much less inside a barracks, spit on him.