U.S. Firing Radioactive Ammo Kathleen Sullivan San Francisco Examiner, May 7, 1999

Depleted Uranium Contamination Poses Threat To Civilians, Troops In Balkans

The Pentagon has confirmed that U.S. Air Force jets are firing radioactive bullets in Yugoslavia, reigniting concerns raised after the Gulf War about the hazards the ammunition poses to soldiers, civilians and the environment.

At a Pentagon briefing earlier this week, Maj. Gen. Chuck Wald said Air Force A-10 "Warthog" jets are firing "depleted uranium" bullets at Yugoslav tanks.

The ammunition, which was fired for the first time in combat by U.S. jets and tanks during the 1991 Gulf War, leaves a trail of contaminated dust and debris on the battlefield.

During that war, the Pentagon didn't warn American soldiers about the health risks linked to the ammunition - a situation the agency admitted last year may have caused thousands of "unnecessary exposures."

Veterans' groups worry that history will be repeated in the Balkans, where thousands of soldiers have already been deployed and where ground and peacekeeping troops may arrive later.

"It's our impression that the Pentagon is not training soldiers about depleted uranium exposure," said Paul Sullivan, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a coalition of groups fighting for medical care for ailing Gulf War veterans. "Our troops are not prepared."

Sullivan said he was left with that impression after an April meeting with top Pentagon officials, in which he requested copies of training materials and records of classes.

"In basic training, drill sergeants have to sign off that soldiers have completed training tasks," Sullivan said. "We asked the Pentagon to provide verification that classes on depleted uranium hazards had taken place and to provide copies of the training materials. They said no."

However, Dee Morris, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said she watched an Army training video on depleted uranium hazards during a presentation at Fort McClellan in Alabama.

"The training videos are being used - with some caveats," Morris said. "We're concerned that the message the videos convey is a little bit heavy-handed."

The videos advise soldiers to minimize the time they spend around blast sites, maximize their distance from the wreckage, or wear protective clothing, including gas masks, if they know they will be exposed to its radioactive dust or debris for more than a few minutes. The video says contaminated dust can be ingested if gloves are not worn, and the dust is not washed off before eating, drinking or using the latrine.

Initially, Morris also said the newest edition of the Army's training manual is available and includes information on avoiding depleted uranium hazards on the battlefield. The book Soldier's Manual of Common Tasks lists dozens of duties soldiers must master in basic training - how to load an M-16 rifle, read a compass, put on a gas mask.

The Pentagon said last year that the new edition would include information on how soldiers should protect themselves from depleted uranium dust and debris.

"I've actually seen it," Morris said of the thick paperback book with its distinctive green camouflage cover.

Later she admitted, however, that she hadn't seen the manual, which has not been sent to the printer.

Guy Benson, an Army spokesman, said no publication date has been set for the manual. He said the Army has prepared materials for commanders and training officers that will be used in the interim, as a stopgap measure.

Dan Fahey, author of a 1998 report that criticized the decision not to train Gulf War troops or conduct medical screenings after the war, said it appears the Pentagon is trying to dodge its responsibilities once again.

"If American forces don't have radiation detection devices and protective clothing, and if they haven't been trained about the hazards of depleted uranium, they should not be sent to Kosovo or other areas where it has been shot," said Fahey, a staff member at Swords to Plowshares, a San Francisco veterans' rights group. "If they are exposed, they should be tested as soon as possible, in accordance with Army regulations."

Depleted uranium is a radioactive metal that is nearly twice as dense as lead.

Fahey said the United States should also keep track of where the ammunition is fired, so that the areas of contamination can be identified later and cleaned up.

In recent years, the Pentagon has downplayed the health risks of combat exposure to depleted uranium, contradicting the findings of reports published before the Gulf War.

A 1990 study by an Army contractor said health hazards linked to exposure - kidney damage and cancer - were manageable only with proper "industrial hygiene controls and monitoring, field practice . . . and medical surveillance."

When depleted uranium explodes, it aerosolizes, creating a fine mist of radioactive particles.

While Pentagon scientists now say there is little reason for concern about inhaling depleted uranium dust, independent experts say the substance can damage any part of the body in which it is stored, including the lungs, lymph nodes, liver, kidneys, muscle and bone.

Many Gulf War veterans worry that the illnesses that plague them today may be linked to their exposure to depleted uranium. Last year, Iraqi doctors said they feared a disturbing rise in leukemia and stomach cancer among civilians who live near the former war zone may be linked to depleted uranium contamination of Iraqi farmland.

    What are Cluster bombs? Excerpt from "Hearts and Minds Are Not Won Like This" by John Simpson The London Telegraph, 09 May 99.

Here, with only a few exceptions, the bombing has been carried out with remarkable precision. None of us staying in the Hyatt Hotel is likely to forget the whistling sound of the cruise missile that flew low over our roof two weeks ago and took out the radio mast on top of the Usce building opposite. The mast was about 10ft across at its base.

In Novi Sad and Nis, and several other places across Serbia and Kosovo where there are no foreign journalists, heavier bombing has brought more accidents. On Friday, cluster bombs intended to destroy the airfield at Nis went astray and hit the marketplace and hospital.

These bombs explode in the air and hurl shards of shrapnel over a wide radius. Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare - and Nato planes launched two of them into a busy town centre in broad daylight.

The result was deeply shocking. The Serbian propaganda machine has belatedly got into its stride now, and is now quite good at assembling groups of journalists, both foreign and local, and ferrying them to the scene of such disasters. The journalists and cameramen arrived in Nis within a few hours, and found the bodies still lying in the streets where they had fallen.

Saying sorry afterwards doesn't work. The contrast is simply too great between the horrific scenes of people cut in two by pieces of shrapnel eight inches across or stumbling dazed and half-blinded out of a burning embassy, and a neatly dressed official spokesman at a briefing in Brussels hurrying through a two-line pro-forma apology the following day. Every war nowadays is a hearts-and-minds campaign; and hearts and minds are not won in this fashion.

    NATO Bombs Said To Kill 100 In Kosovo

By Philippa Fletcher

BELGRADE (Reuters) - At least 100 ethnic Albanians were killed and dozens injured when NATO bombed a village in south-west Kosovo during the night, survivors and civil defense officials said Friday.

The allegation, if true, would mark one of the Western alliance's deadliest blunders so far in the Yugoslavia crisis.

The Civil Defense Information Center for the Kosovo region was quoted by Yugoslavia's state news agency Tanjug as saying 100 people were killed and some 50 injured. Ethnic Albanian Fehmi Ahmeta told reporters at the scene seven members of his family were among 100 dead.

NATO said it had conducted its heaviest night of raids on Yugoslavia since launching its air war on March 24, but could not confirm the bombing of Korisa village.

Ahmeta said Korisa was hit by six missiles at around 11:30 p.m. (5:30 p.m. EDT) Thursday. Dismembered bodies were scattered around, several of them badly charred and some still smoking.

Ahmeta said the village had been packed with some 500 refugees who had been hiding in the woods for the past 10 days and were spending the night there before returning home.

It was not immediately clear whether the refugees were trying to escape NATO attacks or the actions of Serb troops and police who were reported to have forcibly evicted hundreds of ethnic Albanians from their homes in the area in recent days.

NATO said it was checking the report, which follows a string of mistakes and accidents in its 52-day-old bombing campaign aimed at halting Serb repression in Kosovo.

Previous blunders include attacks on residential areas, a passenger train, a bus and a refugee convoy, and the accidental bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade.

Yugoslavia says more than 1,200 civilians have been killed and 5,000 injured since NATO's bombing began.

While expressing regret, NATO has always insisted that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic started the conflict in Kosovo, a majority ethnic Albanian province in southern Serbia.

Britain's deputy defense minister, John Spellar, declined comment on the Korisa incident but said Milosevic's forces in Kosovo were making ethnic Albanians stand under bridges during NATO bombing raids so as to claim them as civilian casualties.

NATO said the overnight raids targeted tanks, military vehicles, artillery and troops on the ground in Kosovo. Power was knocked out in Serbia's three biggest cities.

In Albania, U.S. artillery units which support Apache attack helicopters exercised with live fire Friday in a sign that their aircraft were close to going into action in Kosovo.

The Apache is a fast, low-flying helicopter for fighting ground troops and tanks.

NATO hopes its deployment will mark a breakthrough in the campaign. It says bombing raids to date have already taken a heavy toll, but Yugoslavia's defense minister insisted they had failed to destroy his military.

``After 51 days of war, we have not had serious losses in any Yugoslav unit,'' Pavle Bulatovic told a Greek newspaper.

Yugoslavia has said it is withdrawing troops from Kosovo, but Belgrade's ambassador to Greece, Dragomir Vucicevic, said Friday it would not pull back any more until NATO stopped its bombing campaign and removed forces from neighboring countries.

Russia's Itar-Tass news agency said Moscow's Balkan envoy would visit Belgrade again next week to try to end the conflict.

Tass said Viktor Chernomyrdin would be accompanied by Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, who is emerging as a spearhead of Western diplomacy in the crisis.

But a senior European diplomat said Ahtisaari would only go to meet Milosevic in Belgrade if Washington and Moscow bridged their differences on the makeup of a future Kosovo peace force.

News of Chernomyrdin's latest planned trip emerged after two warnings in as many days from President Boris Yeltsin that Moscow was ready to abandon its diplomacy unless the West took its proposals more seriously.

Russia has traditional ties with Serbia -- both are Slav, Orthodox Christian nations -- and is widely seen as the best hope of bringing diplomatic influence to bear on Belgrade.

China, a key player by virtue of its veto right on the U.N. Security Council, sent a signal that its fury may be abating after NATO's bombing of its Belgrade embassy last Friday, in which three people were killed.

Chinese ambassador Li Zhaoxing told President Clinton that President Jiang Zemin was prepared to speak to him by telephone, after refusing to take a call over the weekend.

In Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was sending its first officials and supplies to Kosovo since pulling expatriate staff out of the war zone on March 29.

An ICRC spokesman said a two-truck convoy carrying emergency supplies left Belgrade Friday morning and would deliver them in Kosovo's capital Pristina later in the day.

    THE MISSILE THAT DROPPED IN BULGARIA YESTERDAY WAS AN AIR-TO-GROUND - Macedonian Press Agency Sofia, 03/06/1999 (MPA)

The missile that dropped on Bulgarian territory yesterday was possibly an air-to-ground type. The missile dropped 10 kilometers from the Yugoslav borders and 75 kilometers from the Kozlodui nuclear plant.

The above were stated by Bulgarian minister of defense Georgi Ananiev, who referred to yesterday's crash of a military training MiG-21 aircraft that resulted to the deaths of its pilot and trainer and ruled out the likelihood for the plane to have been harassed or hit by a foreign war plane.

    Hungarian farmers find two missiles "lost" by NATO planes.Tass News Agency Online

BUDAPEST, May 31 (Itar-Tass) - Two Hungarian farmers in the settlement of Beremend and Zalauilak have been startled on Monday morning when they discovered two missiles in their orchards presumably "lost" by NATO fighter bombers returning after another air raid on cities of neighboring Yugoslavia.

One of the hazardous charges was found in a vegetable garden and the other one went through a roof of a pig shed, leaving an enormous hole in the roof, and scared to death both the inhabitants of the shed and their owners.

A group of Hungarian sappers has been sent to the area of emergency to defuse the charges. The farmers' houses have been cordoned off by the police and personnel of Civil Defence Services. Experts from the Hungarian Air Force base in Tasara where US "peace-keepers" are stationed now have gone to the area where the charges were found to establish the cause of the loss of the missiles. The local authorities say that it is not immediately clear yet whether the missiles were dropped by NATO planes, but they failed to explain how the charges which might go off at any moment happened to arrive on the territory of Hunagarian farms. Meanwhile, Tamas Zuhman, deputy of the Hungarian parliament who had visited the "site" in Zalauilak, told journalists that US Air Force designation marks were clearly seen on the sides of the missile.

The Hungarian population has been increasingly concerned over accidental technical malfunctioning demonstrated by NATO aviation. This is not the first time when missiles dropped from NATO planes were found. Last week, a pilot of a US refueling plane having spotted fire on board discharged around 50,000 liters of fuel from the altitude of 3,500 meters over the territory of a Hungarian national forest reserve when the pilot prepared for an emergency landing.

ere/gor 18:17, 31 may 1999

    Message From A Cluster Bomb by Norman Solomon

Hi! My name's CBU-87/B, but my friends call me Cluster Bomb. And I do appreciate the tender treatment I'm receiving from the news media, as I slice up civilians in Yugoslavia.

MY PALS AT THE PENTAGON put me in the category of a “Combined Effects Munition.” My maker describes me as an “all-purpose, air-delivered cluster weapons system.” Not to brag or anything, but such labels don’t do me justice. When I explode, the results can really be awesome.

I’ve gotten to do my stuff in Yugoslavia this month. One of my memorable performances came at around noon on a Friday. Some people in the city of Nis were shopping at a vegetable market when — boom! — I arrived. It was dramatic as hell.

LOW MEDIA PROFILE A news article that I found in the May 8 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “the bombs struck next to the hospital complex and near the market, bringing death and destruction, peppering the streets of Serbia’s third-largest city with shrapnel and littering the courtyards with yellow bomb casings.”

This was one of my few moments in the U.S. media limelight, so forgive me while I quote some more: “In a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood. A dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots.”

I know, it’s immodest to flaunt my press notices. But people don’t get to see those sorts of news accounts very much in America! If the stories are reported at all, they’re usually buried (ha ha) on back pages of newspapers and rarely even mentioned on the networks.

UNPLEASANT MORALIZING

Once in a while, some Western journalist decides to put me down. The moralizing can be unpleasant. For instance, BBC correspondent John Simpson has been reporting from Belgrade, and he did a rather brusque commentary that the Sunday Telegraph in London published a few days ago.

“In Novi Sad and Nis, and several other places across Serbia and Kosovo where there are no foreign journalists, heavier bombing has brought more accidents,” Simpson carped. He complained that cluster bombs “explode in the air and hurl shards of shrapnel over a wide radius.” And he went on to say: “Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare.”

Cluster bombs like me could do without the overheated pejoratives, thank you. Fortunately, we hardly ever have to endure such indignities in the American press.

But please don’t forget the very real accomplishments that I can partially claim as my own. The next time you see a headline or hear a newscaster referring to the “air campaign,” remember that my achievements are outrageously understated by such jargon.

IN SEARCH OF SOFT TARGETS

You see, I’m a 1,000-pound marvel, a cluster bomb with an ingenious design. When I go off, a couple of hundred “bomblets” shoot out in all directions, aided by little parachutes that look like inverted umbrellas. Those ‘chutes slow down the descent of the bomblets and disperse them so they’ll hit plenty of what my maker calls “soft targets.” Before that happens, though, each bomblet breaks into about 300 pieces of jagged steel shrapnel.

Sometimes, as a cluster bomb, I get a little jealous of the exaggerated notoriety that the news media confer on outfits like the National Rifle Association. They get credited with the proliferation of murder and mayhem.

Well, they’re rank amateurs! Piddling sidearms pushers! Compared to me, they’re small-time retailers. I’m into wholesale. They don’t know how to preserve, protect and defend the Grim Reaper as I do.

SELECTIVE FOCUS

I just laugh when I read the nasty things that so many editorial writers and pundits have been writing about the NRA. While they rant and rail against assault rifles that take a few lives now and again in the United States, I’ve been busy slicing up tender human bodies in Yugoslavia.

When those high school students died in Colorado, the news media kept saying what a horrendous tragedy it was. But what about the work I’ve done on kids and grownups in Yugoslavia? Journalists merely echo the statements coming out of the White House, mumbling that it’s regrettable and can’t be helped.

The pundits keep talking about gun control. Meanwhile, big bombs like me are increasingly out of control as we roam the skies above Yugoslavia.

Overall, this has been a great spring for me. And from the standpoint of public relations, I’m doing fine. Back in the offices of top Washington officials, and in the upper echelons of American news media, I’ve got lots of friends in very high places. They may pretend not to know me, but we understand each other very well.

Norman Solomon is a media critic based in San Francisco and author of books, including “Habits of Highly Deceptive Media.” Normon writes a syndicated weekly article for FAIR titled, Media Beat.

    Acts of murder: Up to 38 aircraft have been shot down or crashed. This is suppressed, of course By John Pilger Tuesday, May 18, 1999, Copyright (c) 1999 The Guardian; Source: World Reporter (tm)

THE room is filled with the bodies of children killed by Nato in Surdulica in Serbia. Several are recognisable only by their sneakers. A dead infant is cradled in the arms of his father. These pictures and many others have not been shown in Britain; it will be said they are too horrific. But minimising the culpability of the British state when it is engaged in criminal action is normal; censorship is by omission and misuse of language. The media impression of a series of Nato 'blunders' is false. Anyone scrutinising the unpublished list of targets hit by Nato is left in little doubt that a deliberate terror campaign is being waged against the civilian population of Yugoslavia.

Photos of a bombed hospital in Serbia

Eighteen hospitals and clinics and at least 200 nurseries, schools, colleges and students' dormitories have been destroyed or damaged, together with housing estates, hotels, libraries, youth centres, theatres, museums, churches and 14th-century monasteries on the World Heritage list. Farms have been bombed, their crops set on fire. As Friday's bombing of the Kosovo town of Korisa shows, there is no discrimination between Serbs and those being 'saved'. Every day, three times more civilians are killed by Nato than the daily estimate of deaths of Kosovans in the months prior to the bombing.

The British people are not being told about a policy designed largely by their government to cause such criminal carnage. The dissembling of politicians and the lies of 'spokesmen' set much of the news agenda. There is no sense of the revulsion felt throughout most of the world for this wholly illegal action, for the punishment of Milosevic's crime with a greater crime and for the bellicose antics of Blair, Cook and Robertson, who have made themselves into international caricatures.

'There was no need of censorship of our dispatches. We were our own censors,' wrote Philip Gibbs, the Times correspondent in 1914-18. The silence is different now; there is the illusion of saturation coverage, but the reality is a sameness and repetition and, above all, political safety for the perpetrators.

A few days before the killing of make-up ladies and camera operators in the Yugoslav television building, Jamie Shea, Nato's man, wrote to the International Federation of Journalists: 'There is no policy to attack television and radio transmitters.' Where were the cries of disgust from among the famous names at the BBC, John Simpson apart? Who interrupted the mutual back-slapping at last week's Royal Television Society awards? Silence. The news from Shepherd's Bush is that BBC presenters are to wear pinks, lavender and blues which 'will allow us to be a bit more conversational in the way we discuss stories'.

Here is some of the news they leave out. The appendix pages of the Rambouillet 'accords', which have not been published in Britain, show Nato's agenda was to occupy not just Kosovo, but all of Yugoslavia. This was rejected, not just by Milosevic, but by the elected Yugoslav parliament, which proposed a UN force to monitor a peace settlement: a genuine alternative to bombing. Clinton and Blair ignored it.

Britain is attacking simultaneously two countries which offer no threat. Every day Iraq is bombed and almost none of it is news. Last week, 20 civilians were killed in Mosul, and a shepherd and his family were bombed. The sheep were bombed. In the last 18 months, the Blair government has dropped more bombs than the Tories dropped in 18 years.

Nato is suffering significant losses. Reliable alternative sources in Washington have counted up to 38 aircraft crashed or shot down, and an undisclosed number of American and British special forces killed. This is suppressed, of course.

Anti-bombing protests reverberate around the world: 100,000 people in the streets of Rome (including 182 members of the Italian parliament), thousands in Greece and Germany, protests taking place every night in colleges and town halls across Britain. Almost none of it is reported. Is it not extraordinary that no national opinion poll on the war has been published since April 30?

'Normalisation,' wrote the American essayist Edward Herman, depends on 'a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improved technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm). It is the function of experts and the mainstream media to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.'

This week, the unthinkable will again be normalised when Nato triples the bombing raids to 700 a day. This includes blanket bombing by B-52s. Blair and Clinton and the opaque-eyed General Clark, apologist for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, are killing and maiming hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people in the Balkans. No contortion of intellect and morality, nor silence, will diminish the truth that these are acts of murder. And until there is a revolt by journalists and broadcasters, they will continue to get away with it. That is the news.

Find background to the war on the Guardian network at www.newsunlimited.co.uk