by Rachel King, TomPaine.com Exclusive

This ACLU attorney says it's time America caught up with the civilized world and abandoned the juvenile death penalty.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/killing_kids.php

An die
mobilfunkkritischen Initiativen in Bayern

Volksbegehren "Für Gesundheitsvorsorge beim Mobilfunk"

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

viele von Ihnen haben im Mai und Juni dieses Jahres das Volksbegehren "Für Gesundheitsvorsorge beim Mobilfunk" unterschrieben. Mit dieser Rundmail informieren wir Sie über den weiteren Zeitplan für dieses wichtige Projekt. Bitte leiten Sie den folgenden Text an Ihren Verteiler weiter und stellen Sie ihn gegebenenfalls auf Ihre Internetseiten.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Urban Mangold
Organisator des Volksbegehrens


Volksbegehren "Für Gesundheitsvorsorge beim Mobilfunk" geht in die nächste Runde

Landesweites überparteiliches Aktionsbündnis wird gegründet - wir brauchen Ihre Hilfe!

Das 2004 von der bayerischen ödp initiierte Volksbegehren "Für Gesundheitsvorsorge beim Mobilfunk" geht in die nächste Runde und soll jetzt von einem überparteilichen Bündnis getragen werden. Ziel des Projektes ist, dass die Mobilfunkbetreiber ihre Sendemasten nicht mehr hinstellen können wo sie wollen. Die Gemeinden sollen vielmehr festlegen, dass Sendemasten nicht in Wohngebieten, bei Kindergärten und Schulen, sondern an unproblematischeren Standorten aufgestellt werden können. Hierfür sollen per Volksbegehren die Bayerische Bauordnung und das Landesentwicklungsprogramm geändert und eine Genehmigungspflicht eingeführt werden. Weil eine Senkung der Grenzwerte Bundesangelegenheit ist und Volksentscheide auf Bundesebene nicht möglich sind, bleibt als zweitbeste Möglichkeit nur eine Reduzierung der Strahlenbelastung durch die gezielte Auswahl weniger sensibler Standorte.

So geht es jetzt weiter:

Die erste Hürde (25.000 Zulassungsunterschriften) ist übersprungen. Anfang Januar 2005 werden die Unterschriften beim Innenministerium eingereicht. Dann käme voraussichtlich im April 2005 die 14-tägige Eintragungszeit.

Innerhalb dieser vom Innenministerium festgelegten 14 Tage müssen sich 10 % aller bayerischen Wähler bei ihren Gemeinden in dort ausliegende Listen eintragen. Das sind etwa 920.000 Bürger. An dieser hohen Hürde scheitern viele Volksbegehren.

Mit unserem Zeitplan (Einreichung der 25.000 Unterschriften im Januar) erreichen wir, dass unsere Eintragungszeit zeitlich nicht zu nahe an der Eintragungszeit des vom Bund Naturschutz initiierten Volksbegehrens "Aus Liebe zum Wald" (16. bis 29.11.2004) oder mitten im Winter liegt. Eine Zusammenlegung der Eintragungszeiten wäre zwar ideal gewesen, ist aber leider nicht möglich, da das Innenministerium dies nicht zuläßt. Wenn sich 10 % aller Bürger während der 14 Tage eingetragen haben, kommt es an einem ebenfalls vom Innenministerium festgelegten Termin zum eigentlichen Volksentscheid.

Zur Vorbereitung der 14-tägigen Eintragungzeit soll ein überparteilches Bündnis aus Ärzten, mobilfunkkritischen Initiativen, Umweltverbänden und vielen einzelnen Helferinnen und Helfern gebildet werden. Die ödp als Initatorin will den weiteren Verlauf bewußt auf eine überparteiliche Ebene heben.

Die Hürden für Volksentscheide sind sehr hoch! Deshalb brauchen wir Hilfe von so vielen Menschen wie möglich!

Wir bitten Sie, sich schon jetzt als Helfer zu melden, damit das Volksbegehren-Koordinationsbüro – wenn es soweit ist – mit Ihrer Hilfe die bayerischen Bürger überall auf die Eintragungszeit aufmerksam machen kann. Bitte schreiben Sie dem Volksbegehrenbüro mit dem online-Formular unter http://www.gesundheitsvorsorge-mobilfunk.de, ob wir mit Ihrer Hilfe rechnen können (und wenn es auch nur Werbung im Bekanntenkreis ist). Sie erhalten dann Flugblätter und Plakate in der gewünschten Menge.

Mit freundlichem Gruß

Urban Mangold
Organisator des Volksbegehrens
Volksbegehren-Koordinationsbüro
Postfach 2165, 94011 Passau
Tel. 0851/931171 Fax 931192
info@gesundheitsvorsorge-mobilfunk.de
http://www.gesundheitsvorsorge-mobilfunk.de

With our military forces overstretched and recruitment plummeting, many folks, especially students, want to know if the Bush administration is going to restart the draft.

We have a right to know how the Bush administration will handle this security dilemma and how the Iraq war will impact future generations. Please contact President Bush and call on him to give us some straight answers about the draft.
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=3090161&url_num=2&url=http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/2020vision/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=231

Before the election, Bush campaign officials accused activists of igniting public fears and told us that it will never happen. But as long as we stay in Iraq?and President Bush hasn?t indicated that we?ll leave any time soon?the troops will have to come from somewhere.

The truth is that Bush?s go-it-alone, pre-emptive strategies have gotten us stuck in a tight spot. Not only have Bush?s policies alienated us from allies that could have contributed more troops, they?ve also led to a decline in recruitment.

We have reached a fork in the road. If we don?t begin to reign in our troop deployments in places like Iraq, we may be faced with the draft. Americans deserve to know the full consequences of our military engagements abroad. Take Action Today!
http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/track.jsp?key=3090161&url_num=3&url=http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/2020vision/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=231

Best,

Tom and Billie
Your online team at
20/20 Vision

http://www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/2020vision/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=231

http://www.stopfcc.com/


Informant: Terry L Parker

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov2004/Burstyn1116.htm
.........NO!!!!!!...cherokee

Dissident Voice - Santa Rosa,CA,USA

... Applied Digital Solutions, the company making the chips say it will save lives and limit injuries from errors in medical treatment...

See all stories on this topic:
http://news.google.com/news?ie=utf8&oe=utf8&persist=1&num=30&hl=en&client=google&ncl=http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Nov2004/Burstyn1116.htm

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=582743


Informant: ItalysBadBoy

I would like you all to see this picture:
http://www.buergerwelle.de/pdf/mast_read.jpg

I have never felt more inclined to swear and curse than when I recently acquired a com metre from Powerwatch and discovered to my horror that for several years I have been sleeping with 2.5 volts running constantly through my brain, courtesy of MM02, Hutchinson 3g, T-mobile and in the last year, Tetra.

Thanks so much for your concern for my welfare and all those other poor souls who are being equally blasted by the emissions from an industry that puts profit before health and safety.

Don't tell me it's within thermal guidelines, it's the BIOLOGICAL effects that count.

Would any of you like to be the guinea pig instead ?

Our children have to live with this and also my daughter goes to school that has a mast on the roof.

No-one should have this invasion into their home without power to do anything about it.

This should not be allowed until we KNOW what the dangers to health are.

Now I know why in the last few years I have suffered from unexplained severe vertigo for 4 months, constant waking up every night at 4 am. Pains in my feet, sore eyes, degeneration of vision, thirst, (which has prompted the doctor to send me for tests for diabetes 3 times, only to find I haven't got diabetes!)

The readings in my sister's home are worse and she is very poorly. I'm absolutely determined that this injustice should not prevail.

Think about it and be prepared.

This is not a matter of trivia, it will become a severe problem eventually for us all and some sensible solutions to the siting of masts must be sought NOW.

I must stress that the anger expressed in this email is aimed at the mobile phone operators and those who have a part in agreeing to place masts where they can cause harm to people.

It was not aimed at my dear friends who fight along side me in the battle to make health an important consideration in the siting of masts.

Mrs. Bush


From: Mobile Phone Mast Campaigners Networking

Useful TETRA links: Find where masts are
http://www.tetrawatch.net/links/links.php?id=find

DEMOCRATS who donated to "Voter Count Fund" DEMAND A REFUND!!!

Legal minds out there...

HELP US..."THEY" GOT YOUR (AND OUR) MONEY!!!

MAYBE THIS WOULD GET THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY TO GET INTO THE VOTER FRAUD RECOUNT GAME!!!

(see my original post below the one that follows)

Leonwrote:

Ramey, please provide a legal interpretation in regard to this matter.

Citizens who donated this money to the Democrat "Voter Count Fund" should submit a formal "written notice" to demand a refund.

You should receive the service that you originally had paid for.

If they do not voluntary return your money, perhaps you should consider a personal or "class action" lawsuit regarding this established voter fund. This donation fund account was for the benefit of "voters" and not a political party. This money should only be used for its "original intent" purposes only. To use otherwise is also a form of fraud. The Democrat Party should maintain "the trust" of the American consuming public if they expect to receive future contributions.

LEON

Subj: [People-v-Ohio-n-Florida] Green & Libertatians raising $$ for Ohio recount..WHERE IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!!!
Date: 11/16/2004 4:17:05 PM Central Standard Time
From: jacopel
Reply-to: People-v-Ohio-n-Florida@yahoogroups.com
To: affdisclosures
Sent from the Internet (Details)

Green & Libertatians raising $$ for Ohio recount..WHERE IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY!!!

http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=415

What a statement does this make about the power people behind the scenes in the Democratic Party. They have $50,000,00 the party has set aside in case they had to pay for a recount.

WHAT ARE THEY DOING WITH THAT MONEY WHEN IT IS NEEDED THE MOST - IF NOT FOR THIS ELECTION FOR FUTURE ONES.

As importantly, disclosures of improprieties and, perhaps straight out cheating during the elections could go a long way to setting up the publics consciousness for the next election

Now more than ever, efforts such as the one I'm starting to point to in my Blog
http://effectnetwork.blogspot.com/ must become a reality


Informant: Jack Topel

Progressives: Get Ready to Fight
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111704F.shtml

Top scientist asks: is life all just a dream?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1358588,00.html

Kissinger's Population Control Agenda in Action
http://tinyurl.com/5eqaf


From: cheesemind

"A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal." -- Ted Turner - CNN founder and UN supporter

"Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government."
Henry Kissinger, Speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992. Bilderberg meeting.


Kissinger, Eugenics And Depopulation

By Leuren Moret
11-20-4

Dr. Henry Kissinger, who wrote: "Depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World."
Research on population control, preventing future births, is now being carried out secretly by biotech companies. Dr. Ignacio Chapela, a University of California microbiologist, discovered that wild corn in remote parts of Mexico is contaminated with lab altered DNA. That discovery made him a threat to the biotech industry.

Chapela was denied tenure at UC Berkeley when he reported this to the scientific community, despite the embarrassing discovery that UC Chancellor Berdahl, who was denying him tenure, was getting large cash payments - $40,000 per year - from the LAM Research Corp. in Plano, Texas.

Berdahl served as president of Texas A&M University before coming to Berkeley. During a presentation about his case, Chapela revealed that a spermicidal corn developed by a U.S. company is now being tested in Mexico. Males who unknowingly eat the corn produce non-viable sperm and are unable to reproduce.

Depopulation, also known as eugenics, is quite another thing and was proposed under the Nazis during World War II. It is the deliberate killing off of large segments of living populations and was proposed for Third World countries under President Carter's administration by the National Security Council's Ad Hoc Group on Population Policy.

National Security Memo 200, dated April 24, 1974, and titled "Implications of world wide population growth for U.S. security & overseas interests," says:

"Dr. Henry Kissinger proposed in his memorandum to the NSC that "depopulation should be the highest priority of U.S. foreign policy towards the Third World." He quoted reasons of national security, and because `(t)he U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries ... Wherever a lessening of population can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resources, supplies and to the economic interests of U.S.

Depopulation policy became the top priority under the NSC agenda, Club of Rome and U.S. policymakers like Gen. Alexander Haig, Cyrus Vance, Ed Muskie and Kissinger. According to an NSC spokesman at the time, the United States shared the view of former World Bank President Robert McNamara that the "population crisis" is a greater threat to U.S. national security interests than nuclear annihilation.In 1975, Henry Kissinger established a policy-planning group in the U.S. State Department's Office of Population Affairs. The depopulation "GLOBAL 2000" document for President Jimmy Carter was prepared.

It is no surprise that this policy was established under President Carter with help from Kissinger and Brzezinski - all with ties to David Rockefeller. The Bush family, the Harriman family - the Wall Street business partners of Bush in financing Hitler - and the Rockefeller family are the elite of the American eugenics movement. Even Prince Philip of Britain, a member of the Bilderberg Group, is in favor of depopulation:

"If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels" (Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, leader of the World Wildlife Fund, quoted in "Are You Ready for Our New Age Future?" Insiders Report, American Policy Center, December 1995).

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been proposing, funding and building Bio-Weapons Level 3 and Level 4 labs at many places around the U.S. even on university campuses and in densely populated urban locations. In a Bio-Weapons Level 4 facility, a single bacteria or virus is lethal. Bio-Weapons Level 4 is the highest level legally allowed in the continental U.S.

For what purpose are these labs being developed, and who will make the decisions on where bio-weapons created in these facilities will be used and on whom? More than 20 world-class microbiologists have been murdered since 2002, mostly in the U.S. and the UK. Nearly all were working on development of ethnic-specific bio-weapons (see Smart Dust, Roboflies &).

Citizens around the U.S. are frantically filing lawsuits to stop these labs on campuses and in communities where they live. Despite the opposition of residents living near UC Davis, where a Bio-Weapons Level 4 lab was planned, it had the support of the towns mayor.

She suddenly reversed her position after a monkey escaped from a high security primate facility on the campus where the bio-weapons lab was proposed. Residents claimed that if UC Davis could not keep monkeys from escaping from their cages, they certainly could not guarantee that a single virus or bacteria would not escape from a test tube. The AWOL monkey killed the project (see Smart Dust, Roboflies&).

Population is a political problem. The extreme secrecy surrounding the takeover of nuclear weapons, NASA and the space program and the development of numerous bio-weapons labs is a threat to civil society, especially in the hands of the military and corporations.

The fascist application of all three of these programs can be used to achieve established U.S. government depopulation policy goals, which may eliminate 2 billion of the worlds existing population through war, famine, disease and any other methods necessary.

Two excellent examples of existing U.S. depopulation policy are, first, the long-term impact on the civilian population from Agent Orange in Vietnam, where the Rockefellers built oil refineries and aluminum plants during the Vietnam War. The second is the permanent contamination of the Middle East and Central Asia with depleted uranium, which, unfortunately, will destroy the genetic future of the populations living in those regions and will also have a global effect already reflected in increases in infant mortality reported in the U.S., Europe, and the UK.

References

Birth defects: The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm, Life photo-essay(1995), http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf01.html.

Statement by Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh,
http://homepage.mac.com/kaaawa/iblog/C337802379/E1557478132/.

Smart dust, roboflies, microbugs: UC is spying on youby Leuren Moret, San Francisco Bay View, Feb. 26, 2003,
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2003/Berkeley-Library-Classified22feb03.htm.

San Francisco Bay View
National Black Newspaper
4917 Third Street
San Francisco California 94124
Phone: (415) 671-0789
Fax: (415) 671-0316
editor@sfbayview.co

http://www.sfbayview.com/110304/ucregents110304.shtml

In Oregon, the Sustainability level in the volumes of "rules" of the Salmon Environmental Act legislation (which no legislator has read and that was admitted to us by a Senator) .... is said to be 800,000 people... right now we have 3+ million.... Oregon and Congressmen Wyden and Smith are salivating over the bio weapon/science industry. Governor Kulongoski said "Oregons Future is in Nanotechnology". He said he is creating "shovel ready soil" in the corporate interest, we are sold out completely. These "representatives" are placing us at extreme risk. Other states are fighting the building of these laboratories they are so dangerous. Here they are funding the futures of our children with the profit from exploiting corporate schemes and violating the public trust. It is a global agenda, a federal agenda, and compelled contracts are used at state and country level to manipulate the scheme in to place.

Usually the corporate interest railroad ahead no matter who tries to stop them, by prevailing in court no matter what claims are brought, no one prosecutes them. The corrupted courts protect each other and they just do what they intend to do. Call it something that is deceiving and the people buy it as "treatments" and "science" and "security", etc. POISION and EXPLOITATION, they call us "commodity" in their "funding streams". As in the case with the Salmon "environmental endangered species protection program" here in Oregon, they will kill everything living in the stream for their profit. Instead of law and justice and the strong flow of due process, a stinking heap of dead shredded bodies being sold for cat food (soilent green is here) behind the facade.

They are doing all this now. 2,300 US American children are dissappearing every DAY according to the latest Justice Dept. figures ... Who is monitoring anything? ALL levels of authority and offices of trust are WORKING FOR THIS SUSTAINABLE AGENDA, THE OFFICE OF PEACE, THE PATRIOT ACT, JUSTICE 2020 COURTS OF ARBITRATION AND MEDIATION ARE HERE, THE OATH IS THE TALMUD THAT CONGRESSMAN WYDEN TOOK, AS WELL AS FORMER GOVERNORS KITZHABER AND GOLDSCHIMIDT BEFORE HIM.

They have taken over Oregon in every way, A "thousand new laws" passed every session to criminalize the people and destroy their lives, their families. The legislature, courts and agencies in concert are by bar design strangling the people with outlaw statutes, agressively. And when the people attempt to defend themselves in the court they are shredded, and find out the court is not about their rights, or the law, or the facts, just an outrageous and huge liquidating system for their rendering.... you lose everything.... children, houses going fast now, that is going to accelerate fast now ...

The people have to stop it. Where is the OUTRAGE ???? The DANGER IS HERE. The kind of pollution they are creating is irreversable - radioactive half lifes of thousands of years, mutating the DNA and molecular structures of living things, completely without accountability or conscience, no truth at all in what they KNOW they are doing.... Unleashing with nanotech poisions and creations at a subersive level to our whole life structure. Ever since the 40's when science learned to CREATE NEW THINGS WITH MOLECULES, the destruction has been extreme. And now they are doing this at nanotech, atomic level, a zillion times "smaller", penetrating all molecules which are whole cities compared to the atomic level.... .they "rearrange" things (we have a better design than God) and start selling it right away.... they are taking blood and putrid "natural proteins" for example and at molecule level you dont know it, so then they add "artificial and natural flavoring and color" and now it looks like food or "medicine". It is beyond demonic what they are doing, bottom line is selling the chemicals they make and the toxic waste of those chemical manufacturing processes, much of it waste from bomb making and other toxic elements for war purposes.... Bottom line with this whole thing is they are constantly looking for ways to profit from their creations and toxic waste BECAUSE IT WOULD COST THEM FORTUNES TO DISPOSE OF IT SAFELY AND THEY DONT TELL ANYONE IT IS POISION, ALSO THEY USE INT INTENTIONALLY, NOW EVEN PUTTING UD IN CEMENT IN THE US .... THEY CONCEAL THE EVIDENCE IN ANY COURT WITH SETTLEMENTS AND DEALS, NO ONE PROSECUTED, NO RECORD MADE, NO ONE SEES WHO THE MURDERERS ARE. A HUGE DECEPTION THEY HAVE GOING .....

This is not being paranoid, this is seeing how it works clearly in the courtroom and how completely lawless the courts are acting now on all of us. This agenda is well underway already, STOP IT NOW everywhere you stand against it ... it is protected and enforced in courtrooms on judicial orders - take back our lawful process and prosecute ALL who are furthering this sustainabile scheme - it is the corporate interest they are "sustaining" ... it is a huge rendering machine in the corporate interest

WE STOP IT IN THE COURTROOM WHERE THEY ENFORCE IT. WE BRING THEM IN INSTEAD AND TURN THEIR AGRESSIONS BACK ON THEM BY MAKING THE RECORD OF IT ... ONLY IN THE COURTROOM CAN YOU DO THIS... WE HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO STOP IT NOW ...

pamela gaston
http://www.avoiceforchildren.com

--------

"Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves... So there are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations..."

Defense Secretary William Cohen, 1997

--------

WORLD DEPOPULATION PLAN?
http://tinyurl.com/rwf6d
Please see: http://www.greatdreams.com/population.htm

POPULATION EXPLOSION - A PROBLEM TO SURVIVAL OF HUMAN EXISTENCE


Informant: Di

--------

Kissinger Out Of The Closet
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/512628/

POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE TO CURRENT EUGENICS PLANNED
http://tinyurl.com/4vko7

THE DEPOPULATION AGENDA
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/493257/

--------

The Haig-Kissinger depopulation policy
http://educate-yourself.org/nwo/nwopopcnsaglobal2000report10mar81.shtml

Kissinger's 1974 Plan for Food Control Genocide
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2249_kissinger_food.html
Top Scientist Advocates Mass Culling 90% Of Human Population
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2006/030406massculling.htm

Depleted Uranium a tool to depopulate the world
http://www.infowars.com/articles/life/depleted_uranium_a_tool_depopulate_world.htm


Informant: Karana777

--------

WORLD DEPOPULATION IS TOP NSA AGENDA
http://home.iae.nl/users/lightnet/world/depopulation.htm

DEPOPULATION & LOST CONTROL OF THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM
http://tinyurl.com/gkwrj

National Security Study Memorandum 200
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/502685/

Eugenics
http://tinyurl.com/6a9qr

All about Chemtrails and why they are being made
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/573478/

Tesla and the Asian Tsunami
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/453716/

http://www.theonion.com/election2004/news_4045.php

http://www.theonion.com/election2004/


Informant: Shanti Renfrew

http://tinyurl.com/3jcx4
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111704V.shtml

http://tinyurl.com/57kbr

Heroic soldiers returning from Iraq seem to be prey to the same debilitating, potentially fatal illnesses that first became known as Gulf War syndrome and then afflicted veterans of Bosnia and Kosovo. Critics point to the U.S.’s own ammunition made of toxic, radioactive depleted uranium—an explanation the Pentagon is resisting

By David Rose

When he started to get sick, Staff Sergeant Raymond Ramos’s first instinct was to fight. “I had joint pains, muscle aches, chronic fatigue, but I tried to exercise it out,” he says. “I was going for runs, working out. But I never got any better. The headaches were getting more frequent and sometimes lasted all day. I was losing a lot of weight. My overall physical demeanor was bad.”

A 20-year veteran of the New York National Guard, Ramos had been mobilized for active duty in Iraq in the spring of 2003. His unit, the 442nd Military Police company, arrived there on Easter, 10 days before President Bush’s MISSION ACCOMPLISHED appearance on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. A tall, soft-spoken 40-year-old with four children, the youngest still an infant, Ramos was proud of his physique. In civilian life, he was a New York City cop. “I worked on a street narcotics team. It was very busy, with lots of overtime—very demanding.” Now, rising unsteadily from his armchair in his thickly carpeted living room in Queens, New York, Ramos grimaces. “The shape I came back in, I cannot perform at that level. I’ve lost 40 pounds. I’m frail.”

At first, as his unit patrolled the cities of Najaf and al-Diwaniyya, Ramos stayed healthy. But in June 2003, as temperatures climbed above 110 degrees, his unit was moved to a makeshift base in an abandoned railroad depot in Samawah, where some fierce tank baffles had taken place. “When we first got there, I was a heat casualty, feeling very weak,” Ramos says. He expected to recover quickly. Instead, he went rapidly downhill.

By the middle of August, when the 442nd was transferred to Babylon, Ramos says, the right side of his face and both of his hands were numb, and he had lost most of the strength in his grip. His fatigue was worse and his headaches had become migraines, frequently so severe “that I just couldn’t function.” His urine often contained blood, and even when it didn’t he would feel a painful burning sensation, which “wouldn’t subside when I finished.” His upper body was covered by a rash that would open and weep when he scratched it. As he tells me this, he lifts his shirt to reveal a mass of pale, circular scars. He was also having respiratory difficulties. Later, he would develop sleep apnea, a dangerous condition in which he would stop breathing during sleep.

Eventually, Ramos was medevaced to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Doctors there were baffled and sent him on to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. There, Ramos says, one neurologist suggested that his condition could have been caused by some long-forgotten head injury or might just be “signs of aging.” At the end of September 2003, the staff at Walter Reed ordered him to report to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where, he says, a captain went through his record and told him “I was clear to go back to Iraq. I got the impression they thought I was faking it.” He was ordered to participate in a long-distance run. Halfway thruugh, he collapsed. Finally, on July 31, 2004, after months of further examinations, Ramos was discharged with a medical disability and sent home.

Symptoms such as Ramos’s had been seen before. In veterans of Operation Desert Storm, they came to be called Gulf War syndrome; among those posted to Bosnia and Kosovo in the l990s, Bal kans syndrome.

“I WORKED ON A STREET NARCOTICS TEAM,” SAYS RAMOS. “THE SHAPE I CAME BACK IN, I CANNOT PERFORM AT THAT LEVEL. I’M FRAIL. “

He was not the only member of the 442nd to suffer them. Others had similar urinary problems, joint pains, fatigue, head-aches, rashes, and sleep apnea. Today, some scientists believe that all these problems, together with others found in war-zone civilians, can be traced to the wide-spread use of a uniquely deadly form of ammunition.

In the ongoing Iraq conflict, just as in the Gulf War of 1991 and in the Balkans, American and British forces have fired tens of thousands of shells and cannon rounds made of a toxic and radioactive material called depleted uranium, or D.U. Because D.U. is dense - approximately 1.7 times as dense as lead—and ignites upon impact, at a temperature of about 5,400 degrees. it can penetrate armor more effectively than any other material.

It’s also remarkably cheap. The arms industry gets its D.U for free from nuclear-fuel processors, which generate -large quantities of it as a by-product of enriching uranium for reactor fuel. Such processors would otherwise have to dispose of it in protected, regulated sites. D.U. is “depleted” only in the -. sense that most of its fissile U-235 isotope has been removed. What’s left— mainly U-2 38—is still radioactive.

Three of the main weapons systems _ still being used in Iraq—the M-l Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the A-10 Warthog attack jet—use D.U. ammunition. A 120-mm. tank round contains about nine pounds of solid D.U. When a D.U. “penetrator” strikes its target, up to 70 percent of the shell’s mass is flung into the air in a shower of uranium-oxide fragments and dust, some in the form of aerosolized particl es less than a millionth of a meter in
diameter. When inhaled, such particles lodge in the lungs and bathe the -surrounding tissue with alpha radiation, known to be highly dangerous internally, and smaller amounts of beta and gamma radiation.

Even before Desert Storm, the Pentagon knew that D.U. was potentially hazardous. Before last year’s Iraq invasion, it issued strict regulations designed to protect civilians, troops, and the environment after the use of D.U. But the Pentagon insists that there is little chance that these veterans’ illnesses are caused by D.U.

The U.S. suffered only 167 fatal combat casualties in the first Gulf War. Since then, veterans have claimed pensions and health-care benefits at a re.ord rate The Veterans Administration reported this year that it was paying service- related disability pensions to 181,996 Gulf War veterans—almost a third of the total still living. Of these, 3,248 were being compensated for “undiagnosed illnesses.” The Pentagon’s spokesman, Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of its Deployment Health section, says that Gulf War veterans are no less healthy than soldiers who were stationed elsewhere.

Those returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom are also beginning to report illnesses in significant numbers. In July2004, the VA disclosed that 27,571 of them—16.4 percent of the total—had sought health care. Of that group, 8,134 suffered muscular and skeletal ailments; 3,505 had respiratory problems; and 5,674 had “symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions.” An additional 153 had developed cancers. The VA. claims that such figures are “typica1 of young, active, healthcare-seeking populations,” but does not offer figures for comparison.

There is also evidence of a large rise in birth defects and unprecedented cancer rates among civilians following the first Gulf War in the Basra region of southern Iraq, where the heaviest fighting took place. Dr. Kilpatnck says, “I think it’s very important to try to understand what are the causes of that high rate of cancer and birth defects. There has to be a good look at that, but if you go to the M. D. Anderson hospital, in Houston, Texas, you’re going to find a very high rate of cancer. That’s because people from all over the country with cancer go there, because it’s one of the premier care centers. Basra was the only major hospital in southern Iraq. Are the people there with these different problems people who lived their entire lives in Basra, or are they people who’ve come to Basra for care?” It is possible, he says, that some other environmental factor is responsible for the illnesses, such as Saddam’s chemical weapons or poor nutrition “I don’t think anything should be taken off the table.”

In October 2004, an early draft of a study by the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ illnesses, a scientific panel run by the V.A., was leaked to The New York Times. According to the Times, the panel had concluded that there was a “probable link” between veterans illnesses and exposure to neurotoxins, including a drug given to troops in 1991 to protect them from nerve gas, and nerve gas itself which was released when U.S.-led forces destroyed an Iraqi arms depot. Asked why there was no mention of D.U. in the report, Dr. Lea Steele, the panel’s scientific director, says that her group plans to address it in a later report “We’ve only just begun work on this topic. We are certainly not ruling it out”

D.U.’s critics, meanwhile, say it’s entirely possible that both neurotoxins and D.U. are responsible for the widespread sickness among veterans.

Members of the 442nd have vivid memories of being exposed to D.U. Sergeant Hector Vega, a youthful-looking 48-year-old who in civilian life works in a building opposite Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum, says he now struggles with chest pains, heart palpitations, headaches, urinary problems, body tremors, and breathlessness—none of which he’d ever experienced before going to Iraq. He recalls the unit’s base there: “There were burnt-out Iraqi tanks on flatbed trucks 100 yards from where we slept. It looked like our barracks had also been lit, with black soot on the walls.

It was open to the elements, and dust was coming in all the time. When the wind blew, we were eating it, breathing it. It was everywhere.” (The Department of Defense, or D.O.D., says that a team of specialists is conducting an occupational and environmental health survey in the area.)

Dr. AsafDurakovic, 64, is a retired U.S. Army colonel and the former head of nuclear medicine at a veterans’ hospital in Wilmington, Delaware. Dr. Durakovic reports finding D.U. in the urine of 18 out of 30 Desert Storm veterans, sometimes up to a decade after they were exposed, and in his view D.U. fragments are both a significant cause of Gulf War syndrome aind a hazard to civilians for an indefinite period of time. He says that when he began to voice these fears inside the military he was first warned, then fired: he now operates from Toronto, Canada, at the independent Uranium Medical Research Centre.

In December 2003, Dr. Durakovic analyzed the urine of nine members of the 442nd With funds supplied by the New York Dailv News, which first published the results, Durakovic sent the samples to a laboratory in Germany that has some of the world’s most advanced mass-spectrometry equipment He concluded that Ramos, Vega, Sergeant Agustin Matos, and Corporal Anthony Yonnone were “internally contaminated by depleted uranium (D.U.) as a result of exposure through (the] respiratoty pathway.”

The Pentagon contests these findings. Dr. Kilpatrick says that, when the D.O.D. conducted its own tests, “our results [didl not mirror die results of Dr. Durakovic.” “Background” sources, such as water, soil, and therefore food, frequently contain some uranium. The Pentagon insists that the 442nd soldiers’ urinary uranium is “within normal dietary ranges,” and that “it was not possible to distinguish D.U. from the background levels of natural uranium.” The Pentagon says it has tested about 1,000 vets from the current conflict and found D.U. contamination in only five. Its critics insist this is because its equipment is too insensitive and its testing methods are hopelessly flawed

At a briefing before the Iraq invasion in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrick tried to reassure reporters about D.U. by citing the cases of about 20 Desert Storm vets who had D.U. shrapnel in their bodies. “We have not seen any untoward medical consequences in these individuals,” he said. “There has been no cancer of bone or lungs, where you would expect them.” It appears that he misspoke on that occasion: one of these veterans had already had an arm amputated for an osteosarcoma, or bone tumor, at the site where the shrapnel entered. Dr. Kilpatrick confirms that the veteran was treated by the V.A. in Baltimore, but says his condition may not have been linked with the shrapnel: “Osteosarcomas are fairly common.” Studies have shown that D.U. can begin to move through the body and concentrate in the lymph nodes, and another of the vets with shrapnel has a form of lymphatic cancer. But this, Dr. Kilpatrick says, has “no known cause.” He concedes that research has not proved the negative, that D.U. doesn’t cause cancer. But, he says, “science doesn’t in 2004 show that D.U. causes any cancer.”

It does, however, show that it may. Pentagon-sponsored studies at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, have found that, when D.U. was embedded in animals, several genes associated with human tumors underwent “aberrant activation,” and oncoproteins of the type found in cancer patients turned up in their blood. The animals’ urine was “mutagenic,” meaning that it could cause cells to mutate. Another institute project found that D.U. could damage the immune system by hastening the death of white blood cells and impairing their ability to attack bacteria.

In June 2004 the U.S. General Accounting Office (G.A.O.) issued a report to Congress that was highly critical of government research into Gulf War syndrome and veterans’ cancer rates. The report said that the studies on which federal agencies ware basing their claim that Gulf War veterans were no sicker than the veterans of other wars “may not be reliable” and had “inherent limitations,” with big data gaps and methodological flaws. Because cancers can take years to develop, the G.A.O. stated, “it may be too early” to draw any conclusions. Dr. Kilpatrick dismisses this report, saying it was “just the opinion of a group of individuals.”

Yet another Pentagon-funded study suggested that D.U. might have effects on unborn children After finding that pregnant rats transmitted D.U. to their offspring through the placenta, the study concluded:

“Fetal exposure to uranium during critical prenatal development may adversely impact the future behavioral and neurological development of offspring.” In September 2004, the New York Daily News reported that Gerard Darren Matthew, who had served in Iraq with the 719th Transportation Company, which is based in Harlem, had tested positive for D.U. after suffering migraines, fatigue, and a burning sensation when urinating. Following his return, his wife became pregnant, and their daughter, Victoria Claudette, was born missing three fingers.

Ultimately, critics say, the Pentagon underestimates the dangers of D.U.because it measures them in the wrong way: by calculating the average amount of D.U. radiation produced throughout the body. When we meet, Dr. Kilpatrick gives me a report the Department of Defense issued in 2000. It concludes that even vets with the highest exposures from embedded shrapnel could expect over 50 years to receive a dose of just five rem, “which is the annual limit for [nuclear industry] workers.” The dose for those who inhaled dust from burned-out tanks would be “far below the annual guideline (0.1 rem) for members of the public.”

But to measure the effect of D.U. as a whole-body radiation dose is meaningless, Asaf Durukovic says, because the dose from D.U. is intensely concentrated in the cells around a mote of dust The alpha particles D.U. emits—high-energy clumps of protons and neutrons—are harmless outside the body, because they cannot pass through skin. Inside tissue, however, they wreak a havoc analogous to that of a penetrating shell against an enemy tank~ bombarding cell nuclei, breaking chains of DNA, damaging fragile genes. Marcelo Valdes, a physicist and computer scientist who is president of Dr. Durakovic’s research institute, says the cells around a

“DUST WAS COMING IN ALL THE TIME,” SAYS SERGEANT VEGA. “WE WERE EATING IT, BREATHING IT. IT WAS EVERYWHERE.”

D.U. particle 2.5 microns in diameter will receive a maximum annual radiation dose of 16 rads. If every pocket of tissue in the body were to absorb that amount of radiation, the total level would reach 7 trillion rads—millions of times the lethal dosage.

In the potentially thousands of hot spots inside the lungs of a person exposed to D.U.dust; the same cells will be irradiated again and again, until their ability to repair themselves is lost. In 1991, Durakovic found D.U. in the urine of 14 veterans who had returned from the Gulf with headaches, muscle and skeletal pain, fatigue, trembling, and kidney problems. “Immediately I understood from their symptoms and their histories that they could have been exposed to radiation,” he says. Within three years, two were dead from lung cancer: “One was 33, the other 42. Both were nonsmokers, in previously excellent health.”

D.U. he says, steadily migrates to the bones. There it irradiates the marrow where stem cells, the progenitors of all the other cells the body manufactures in order to renew itself, are produced. “Stem cells am very vulnerable,” Durakovic says.

“Bombarded with alpha particles, their DNA will fall apart, potentially affecting every organ. If malfunctioning stem cells become new liver cells, then the liver will malfunction. If stem cells are damaged, they may form defective tissue.

If D.U. is as dangerous as its critics allege, it can kill even without causing cancer. At her home in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Susan Riordon recalls the return of her husband, Terry, from the Gulf in 1991. Terry, a security captain, served in intelligence during the war: his service record refers to his setting up a “safe haven” in the Iraqi “theatre.” Possibly, Susan speculates, this led him behind enemy lines and exposed him to D.U. during the long aerial bombing campaign that preceded the 1991 invasion. In any event, “when he came home, he didn’t really come home,” she says.

At first, Terry merely had the usual headaches, body pain, oozing rash, and other symptoms. But later be began to suffer from another symptom which afflicts some of those exposed to D.U.: burning semen. “If he leaked a little lubrication from his penis, it would feel like sunburn on your skin. If you got to the point where you did have intercourse, you were up and out of that bed so fast-it actually causes vaginal blisters that burst and bleed.” Terry’s medical records support her description. In England, Malcolm Hooper, professor emeritus of medicinal chemistry at the University of Sunderland, is aware of 4,000 such cases. He hypothesizes that the presence of D.U. may be associated with the transformation of semen into a caustic alkali.

“It hurt [Terry] too. He said it was like forcing it through barbed wire,” Riordon says. “It seemed to burn through condoms; if he got any on his thighs or his testicles, he was in hell.” In a last, desperate attempt to save their sex life, says Riordon, “I used to fill condoms with frozen peas and insert them [after sex] with a lubricant” That, she says, made her pain just about bearable. Perhaps inevitably, he became impotent “And that was like our last little intimacy gone.”

By late 1995, Terry was seriously deteriorating. Susan shows me her journal—she titled it “The Twilight Zane”—and his medical record. It makes harrowing reading. He lost his fine motor control to the point where he could not button his shirt or zip his fly. While walking, he would fall without warning. At night, he shook so violently that the bed would move across the floor. He became unpredictably violent: one terrible day in 1997 he attacked their 16-year-old son and stated choking him. By the time armed police arrived to pull him off, the boy’s bottom lip had turned blue. After such rages, he would fall into a deep sleep for as long as 24 hours, and awake with no memory of what had happened. That year, Terry and Susan stopped sleeping in the same bedroom. Then “he began to barricade himself in his room for days, surviving on granola bars and cartons of juice.”

As he went downhill, Terry was assessed as completely disabled, but there was no diagnosis as to why. His records contain references to “somatization disorder,” post-traumatic stress, and depression. In 1995 the army doctors even suggested that he had become ill only after reading of Gulf War syndrome. Through 1998 and 1999, he began to lose all cognitive functions and was sometimes lucid for just a few hours each week.

Even after he died, on April 29,1999, Terry’s Canadian doctors remained unable to explain his illness. “This patient has a history (of] ‘Gulf War Syndrome’ with multiple motor- sensory and emotional problems” the autopsy report by pathologist Dr. B. Jollymore, of Yarmouth, begins. “During extensive investigation, no definitive diagnosis has been determined.... Essentially it appears that this gentleman remains an enigma in death as lie was in life.”

Not long before Terry’s death, Susan Riordan had learned of Asaf Durakovic, and of the possibility that her husband absorbed D.U. His urine-test results—showing a high D.U. concentration eight years after he was presumably exposed— came through on Monday, April 26: “Tuesday be was reasonably cognitive, and was able to tell me that he wanted his body and organs to go to Dr, Durakovic,” she remembers. “He knew it was too late to help him, but he made me promise that his body could help the international community. On the Wednesday, I completed the purchase of this house. On Thursday, he was dead.

“It was a very strange death. He was very peaceful. I’ve always felt that Asaf allowed Terry to go: knowing he was positive meant he wasn’t crazy anymore. Those last days he was calm. He wasn’t putting the phone in the microwave; he had no more mood swings.”

After Riordon’s death, Dr. Durakovic and his colleagues found accumulations of D.U. in his bones and lungs. Dr. Dumkovic suspects the military of minimizing the health and environmental consequences of D.U. weapons, and suggests two reasons it may have for doing so: “to keep them off the list of war criminals, and to avoid paying compensation which could run into billions of-dollars.” To this might be added a third: depleted uranium, because of its unique armor-penetrating capabilities, has become a defining feature of American warfare, one whose loss would be intolerable to military planners.

In 1991, the U.S. used D.U. weapons to kill thousands of Iraqis in tanks and armored vehicles on the ‘highway of death” from Kuwait to Basra. The one-sided victory ushered in a new era of “lethality overmatch”—the ability to strike an enemy with virtual impunity. A Pentagon pamphlet from 2003 states that a central objective of the American military is to “generate dominant lethality - overmatch across the full spectrum of operations,” and no weapon is better suited to achieving that goal than D.U.

The value of depleted uranium was spelled out more simply in a Pentagon briefing by Colonel James Naughton of the army’s Materiel Command in March 2003, just before the Iraq invasion: “What we want to be able to do is strike the target from farther away than we can be hit back.... We don’t want to fight even. Nobody goes into a war and wants to be even with the enemy. We want to be ahead, and D.U. gives us that advantage.”

If the Pentagon is right about the risks of D.U., such statements should not be controversial. If it is wrong, says retired army colonel Dr. Andras Korenyi-Both, who headed one of the main field hospitals during Desert Storm and later conducted some of the first research into Gulf War syndrome, the position is less clear-cut. “You’d have to deal with the question of whether it’s better not to use D.U. and have more of your soldiers die in battle or to use D.U. and lose very few in the field—but have them get sick and die when they get home.”

One desert morning in the early spring.— of 1991, while sitting in his office at the Eskan Village military compound near Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Lieutenant Doug Rokke was shown a memorandum. Rokke, a health physicist and training specialist; was a reservist and had recently been ordered to join the Third U.S. Army’s depleted-uranium-assessment team, assigned to clean up and move American vehicles hit by friendly fire during Operation Desert Storm. The memo, dated March 1, came from a senior military officer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico.

During the Gulf War, it said, “D.U. penetrators were very effective against Iraqi armor.” However, “there has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of D.U. on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of D.U. on the battlefield, D.U. rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal.... I believe we should keep this sensitive issue at mind when after action reports are written.” Rokke says: “I interpreted the memo to mean: we want this stuff—don’t write any thing that might make it difficult for us to use it again”

Rokke’s assignment was dangerous and unpleasant. The vehicles ware coated with uranium-oxide soot, and dust lay in the sand outside. He wore a mask, but it didn’t help. “We could taste it and smell it,” he says of the D.U. “It tasted very strong and unmistakable.” Years later, he says he was found to be excreting uranium at 5,000 times the normal level. Now 55 he pants during ordinary conversation and says he still gets a rash like the one Raymond Ramos of the 442nd suffers from. In addition, Rokke has joint pains, muscle aches, and cataracts.

In 1994, Rokke became director of a Pentagon project designed to learn more about D.U. contamination and to develop training that would immunize its risks. “I’m a warrior, and warriors want to fulfill their mission,” Rokke says. “I went into this wanting to make it work, to work out how to use D.U. safely, and to show other soldiers how to do so and how to clean it up. This was not science out of a book but science done by blowing the shit out of tanks and seeing what happens And as we did this work, slowly it dawned on me that we were screwed. You can’t do this safely in combat conditions. You can’t decontaminate the environment or your own troops.”

Rokke and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments at the US Department of Energy’s Nevada nuclear test site. They set fire to a Bradley loaded with D. U. rounds and fired D.U. shells at old Soviet tanks. At his remote, ramshackle farmhouse amid the rural flatlands of central Illinois, Rokke shows me videos of his tests. Most spectacular are those shot at night, which depict the fiery streak of the D.U. round, already burning before impact, followed by the red cascade of the debris cloud. “Everything we hit we destroyed,” he says. “I tell you, these things are just…fantastic.”

The papers Rokke wrote describing his findings are more sobering. He recorded levels of contamination that were 15 times the army s permissible levels in tanks hit by D.U., and up to 4.5 times such levels in clothing exposed to D.U.

The good news was that it was possible, using a special Department of Energy vacuum cleaner designed for sucking up radioactive waste, to reduce contamination from vehicles and equipment to near official limits, and to “mask” the intense radiation around holes left by D.U. projectiles by sealing them with layers of foam caulking, paint, or cardboard. (Such work, Rokke wrote, would naturally have to be carried out by teams in full radiological-protection suits and respirators.) When it came to clothes, however,

“IT WAS A VERY STRANGE DEATH. HE WAS VERY PEACEFUL… KNOWING HE WAS D.U. POSITIVE MEANT THAT HE WASN’T CRAZY ANYMORE.”

D.U. particles “became imbedded in the clothing and could not be removed with brushing or other abrasive methods.” Rokke found that even after he tried to decontaminate them the clothes were still registering between two and three times the limit “This may pose a significant logistics impact,” Rode wrote, with some understatement.

The elaborate procedures required to decontaminate equipment, meanwhile, would be almost impossible to implement a in combat. “On a real battlefield, it’s not like there’s any control,” Rokke says. “It’s chaos. Maybe its night. Who’s going to come along and isolate contaminated enemy tanks? You’ve got a pile of rubble and mess and you’re still coming under fire. The idea that you’re going to come out in radiological suits and vacuum up at a building or a smashed T-72 [tank]—it’s ridiculous.”

Large amounts of black D.U.-oxide dust were readily visible within 50 meters of a tank hit by penetrators and within 100 meters of the D.U.-packed Bradley that was set on fire. But less obvious amounts were easily detected at much greater distances. Worse, such dust could be “resuspended” in the atmosphere “upon contact, if wind blew, or during movement.” For American troops, that meant that “respiratory and skin protection is warranted during all phases of recovery.” For civilians, even ones at considerable distances, it meant they might be exposed to windblown D.U. far into the future.

After Rokke completed the project, be was appointed head of the lab at Fort McClellan where it had been based. He resigned the staff physicist post he’d held for 19 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and moved south with his family. Early in 1996, after he began to voice the conclusions he was drawing about the future viability of D.U.weapons, he was fired. ‘Then I remembered the Los Alamos memo,” he says. “They’d wanted ‘proponency’ for D.U. weapons, and I was giving them the opposite”.

I ask Dr. Kilpatrick, the D.O.D. spokesman on D.U., about Rokke’s test firings. His reply: “One, he never did that. He was in Nevada as an observer. He was not part of that
at all. At that time he was working in education at an army school, and his assignment was to develop educational materials for troops.” Rokke, he says, may have spent a few days observing the tests but he did not organize them.

Documents from Rokke’s service record tell a different story. His appraisal from December 1, 1995, written by Dr.Ed Battle, then chief of the radiation laboratories at Fort McClellan, describes Rokke’s mission as follows: to “plan, coordinate, supervise and implement the U.S. Army… depleted uranium trraining development project.” He continued: Captain Rokke has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to function well above his current rank and is as effective as any I have known.” He had directly participated in “extremely crucial tests at n-the Nevada Atomic Test Site” and his achievements had been “absolutely phenomenal.”

Rokke was awarded two medals for his works The citation for one commended him for “meritorious service while assigned as the depleted uranium project leader. Your outstanding achievements have prepared our soldiers for hazards and will have a vast payoff in the health, safety, and protection of all soldiers.”

Rokke’s work in Nevada helped persuade the military that D.U. weapons had to be dealt with carefully. On September 16,2002, General Eric Shinseki, the U.S. Army chief of staff, signed Army Regulation 700-48, which sets forth strict rules for handling items, including destroyed or disabled enemy targets, that have been hit and contaminated by D.U. “During peacetime or as soon as operational risk permits,” it states, local commanders must “identify, segregate, isolate, secure, and label all RCE [radiologically contaminated equipmentj. Procedures to minimize the spread of radioactivity will be implemented as soon as possible.” Under pre-existing regulations, damaged vehicles should be moved to a collection point or maintenance facility, and covered and wrapped with canvas or plastic tarp to prevent spread of contaminants with loose items placed in double plastic bags. Soldiers who carry out such tasks should wear protective equipment.

The burned-out tanks behind the 442nd s barracks in Samawah may not have been the only D.U.contaminated pieces of equipment to be left where they lay. In the fall of 2003, Tedd Weyman, a colleague of Dr. Durakovic’s, spent 16 days in Iraq, taking samples and observing the response of coalition forces to General Shinseki’s directive. “When tanks shot up by D.U. munitions were removed, I saw no precautions being taken at all,” he says. “Ordinary soldiers with no protection just came along and used chains to load them onto flatbeds, towing them away just as they might your car if it broke down on the highway. They took them to bases with British and American troops and left them in the open” Time after time, Weyman recorded high levels of contamination—-so high that on his return to Canada he was found to have 4.5 times the normal level of uranium in his own urine.

A Pentagon memo, signed on May 30,2003, by Dr. William Winkenwerder, an assistant defense secretary, says that any American personnel “who were in,on, or near combat vehicles at the time they were struck by rounds,” or who entered such vehicles or fought fires involving D.U. munitions, should be assissed for possible exposure and receive appropriate health care.This category could be said to include any soldier who fought in, or cleaned up after, battles with Iraqi armor.

Still, the Pentagon insists that the risks remain acceptably small. “There isn’t any recognized disease from exposure to natural or depleted uranium,” Dr. Kilpatrick says. He tells me that America will mount a thorough cleanup in Iraq, disposing of any D.U. fragments and burying damaged vehicles in unpopulated locations, but that, for the time being, such an operation—is impossible. “We really can’t begin any enviromnental assessment or cleanup

“WE DON’T WANT TO FIGHT EVEN, SAID COLONEL JAMES NAUGHTON. “WE WANT TO BE AHEAD, AND D.U. GIVES US THAT ADVANTAGE”

while there’s ongoing combat.” Nevertheless, he says, there’s no cause for concern.“I think we can be very confident that what is in the environment does not create a hazard for those living in the environment and working in it.”

As this article was going to press, the Pentagon published the findings of a new study that, according to Dr. Kilpatrick, shows D.U. to be a “lethal but safe weapons system.”

In his Pentagon briefing in March 2003, Dr. Kilpatrrck said that even if D.U. weapons did generate toxic dust, it would not spread. “It falls to the ground very quickly—usually within about a 50-meter range,” he said. “It’s heavy. It’s 1.7 times as heavy as lead. So even if it’s a small dust particle it stays on the ground.” Evidence that this is not the case comes; from somewhere much closer than Iraq—; an abandoned D.U.-weapons factory in. Colonie, New York, a few miles from Albany, the state capital.

`In 1958, a corporation called National Lead began making depleted-uranium products at a plant on Central Avenue, surrounded by houses and an Amtrak line. In 1979, just as the plant was increasing its production of D.U. ammunition to, meet a new Pentagon contract, a whistleblower from inside the plant told the county health department that N.L. was releasing large amounts of D.U. oxide into the environment.

Over the next two years, he and other workers testified before both the New York State Assembly and a local residents’ campaign group. They painted a picture of reckless neglect D.U. chips and shavings were simply incinerated, and the resulting oxide dust passed into the atmosphere through the chimneys. “I used to do a lot of burning,” William Luther told the governor’s task force in 1982. “They told me to do it at night so the black smoke wouldn’t be seen.” Later, many of the workers were found to have inhaled huge doses into their lungs, and some developed cancers and other illnesses at relatively young ages.

In January 1980 the state forced N.L. to agree to limit its radioactive emissions to 500 microcuries per year. The following month, the state shut the plant down. In January alone, the D.U.-chip burner had released 2,000 microcunes. An official environmental survey produced horrifying results. Soil in the gardens of homes near the plant was emitting radiation at up to 300 times the normal background level for upstate New York. Inside the 11-acre factory site, readings were up to five times higher.

The federal government has been spending tax dollars to clean up the Colonie site for the past 19 years, under a program called FUSRAI’—the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Today’ all that is left of the Colonie plant are enormous piles of earth, constantly moistened with hoses and secured by giant tarpaulins to prevent dispersal, and a few deep pits. In its autumn 2004 bulletin to residents, the FUSRAP team disclosed that it had so far removed 125,242 tons of contaminated soil from the area, all of which have been buried at radioactive-waste sites in Utah and Idaho. In some places, the excavations are more than 10 feet deep. FUSRAP had also discovered contamination in the neighboring Patroon Creek, where children used to play, and in the reservoir it feeds, and had treated 23.5 million gallons of contaminated water. The cost so far has been about $155 million, and the earliest forecast for the work’s completion is 2008.

Years before FUSRAP began to dig, there were data to suggest that D.U. particles— and those emitted at Colonie are approximately the same size as those produced by weapons—can travel much farther than 50 meters. In 1979, nuclear physicist Len Dietz was working at a lab operated by General Electric in Schenectady, 10 miles west of Colonie. “We had air filters all around our perimeter fence,” he recalls. “One day our radiological manager told me we had a problem: one of the filters was showing abnormally high alpha radiation. Much to our surprise, we found D.U. in it. There could only be one source: the N.L. plant” Dietz had other filters checked both in Schenectady and at other G.E. sites. The three that were farthest away were in West Milton, 26 miles northwest, and upwind, of Colonie. All the filters contained pure Colonie D.U. “Effectively,” says Dietz, “the particles’ range is unlimited.”

In August 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry published a short report on Colonie. On the one hand, it declared that the pollution produced when the plant was operating could have increased the risks of kidney disease and lung cancer. Because the source of the danger had shut down, however, there was now “no apparent public health hazard.” Thus there was no need to conduct a full epidemiological study of those who had lived near and worked at the factory—the one way to produce hard scientific data on what the health consequences of measurable D.U. contamination actually are.

The people of Colonie have been trying to collect health data of their own. Sharon Herr, 45, lived near the plant for nine years. She used to work 60 hours a week at two jobs—as a clerk in the state government and as a real-estate agent. Now she too is sick, and suffers symptoms which sound like a textbook case of Gulf War syndrome: “Fourteen years ago,I lost my grip to the point where I can’t turn keys. I’m stiff, with bad joint and muscle pain, which has got progressively worse. I can’t go upstairs without getting out of breath. I get fatigue so intense there are days I just can’t do much. And I fall down—I’ll be out walking and suddenly I fall.” Together with her friend Anne Rabe, 49, a campaigner against N.L. since the 1980s, she has sent questionnaires to as many of the people who lived on the streets close to the plant as possible. So far, they have almost 400 replies.

Among those who responded were people with rare cancers or cancers that appeared

TANKS SHOT UP BY D.U. MUNITIONS WERE REMOVED,” WEYMAN SAYS, “I SAW NO PRECAUTIONS BEING TAKEN AT ALL."

At an unusually young age, and families whose children had birth defects. There were 17 cases of kidney problems, 15 of lung cancer, and 11 of leukemia There were also five thyroid cancers and 16 examples of other thyroid problems - all conditions associated with radiation. Other people described symptoms similar to Herr’s. Altogether, 174 of those in the sample had been diagnosed with one kind of cancer or another. American women have about a 33 percent chance of getting cancer in their lifetimes, mostly after the age of 60. (For men, it’s nearly 50 percent.) Some of the Colonie cancer victims are two decades younger. “We have what look like possible suspicious clusters,” says Rabe. ‘~A health study here is a perfect opportunity to see how harmful this stuff really is.”


On June 14,2004, the army’s Physical Evaluation Board, the body that decides whether a soldier should get sickness pay, convened to evaluate the case of Raymond Ramos of the 442nd Military Police company. It followed the Pentagon’s approach, not Dr. Durakovic’s. The board examined his Walter Reed medical-file summary, which describes his symptoms in detail, suggests that they may have been caused by serving in Iraq, and accepts that “achieving a cure is not a realistic treatment objective.” But the summary mentions no physical reason for them at all, let alone depleted uranium.

Like many veterans of the first Gulf War, Ramos was told by the board that his disability had been caused primarily by post-traumatic stress. It did not derive “from injury or disease received in the line of duty as a direct result of armed conflict.” Instead, his record says, he got “scared in the midst of a riot” and was “emotionally upset by reports of battle casualties.” Although he was too sick to go back to work as a narcotics cop, he would get a disability benefit fixed at $1,197 a month, just 30 percent of his basic military pay.

On the day we meet, in September 2004, his symptoms are hardly alleviated. “I’m in lots of pain in my joints. I’m constantly fatigued— I can fall asleep at the drop of a dime. My wife tells me things and I just forget. It’s not fair to my family.”

For the time being, the case against D.U. appears to remain unproved. But if Asaf Durakovic, Doug Rokke, and their many allies around the world are right, and the Pentagon wrong, the costs—human, legal, and financial—will be incalculable. They may also be widespread. In October, the regional health authority of Sardinia, Italy, began hearings to investigate illnesses suffered by people who live near a U.S. firing range there that tests D.U. weapons.

In 2002 the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights declared that depleted uranium was a weapon of mass destruction, and its use a breach of international law. But the difference between D.U. and the W.M.D. that formed the rationale for the Iraqi invasion is that depleted uranium may have a boomerang effect, afflicting the soldiers of the army that fires it as well as the enemy victims of “lethality overmatch.”

The four members of the 442nd who tested positive all say they have met soldiers from other units during their medical treatment who complain of similar ailments, and fear that they too may have been exposed. “It’s bad enough being sent out there knowing you could be killed in combat,” Raymond Ramos says. “But people are at risk of bringing something back that might kill them slowly. That’s not right.”

Umweltorganisationen protestieren gegen Weltbank-Pläne

In der Demokratischen Republik Congo nimmt der Druck auf die Regenwälder dramatisch zu. Mit Unterstützung der Weltbank sollen neue Konzessionen an Holzkonzerne vergeben werden. Bedroht sind bis zu 60 Millionen Hektar Regenwald - eine Fläche so groß wie Frankreich.

Mitte November 2004 haben internationale Umweltorganisationen ein sofortiges Moratorium für den kongolesischen Holzsektor gefordert.

Über unsere Homepage
http://www.regenwald.org

können Sie mit einer Protestmail an den Weltbank-Präsidenten die Forderung nach einem Moratorium unterstützen.

Bitte leiten Sie diese Nachricht an möglichst viele Freunde und Bekannte weiter!

Vielen Dank für Ihre Hilfe.

Reinhard Behrend
Rettet den Regenwald e. V.
http://www.regenwald.org

As many of you likely know, yesterday, NJ Courts cleared the way to the 2nd NJ Bear Hunt. Please take a minute to vote on this newspaper on-line poll, to ask the new NJ Gov. to stop the bear hunt:

http://www.dailyrecord.com/

If you would like to learn more about the court decision and the battle to stop the hunt take a look at:

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-7/110067449369690.xml

WAR will be issuing a press release and a recruiting call for Bear Defenders within the next 24 hours. If you want to help please stay tuned and watch for our e-mail: "Operation: Take Back The Woods"

Or you can contact WAR at: centcom@war-online.org or visit the Win Animal Rights website: http://war-online.org (Take Back the Woods information will be posted to website by Nov. 18th)

For any of you that still believe you can make a difference using the political system below is information being distributed by NJARA:

As many of you likely know, yesterday, NJ Courts cleared the way to the 2nd NJ Bear Hunt. Please take a minute to vote on this newspaper on-line poll, to ask the new NJ Gov. to stop the bear hunt:

http://www.dailyrecord.com/

If you would like to learn more about the court decision and the battle to stop the hunt take a look at:

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-7/110067449369690.xml

WAR will be issuing a press release and a recruiting call for Bear Defenders within the next 24 hours. If you want to help please stay tuned and watch for our e-mail: "Operation: Take Back The Woods"

Reprinted below is the text from an action alert forward from NJARA and SaveNJBears. For those of you that still believe in the political process, consider writing, calling and faxing the addresses listed
below.

STOP THE 2004 BEAR HUNT

Please contact the following Senators and ask them to stop the 2004 bear hunt, and request that they ask Governor Codey to do the same.

In a court decision issued today, Commissioner Campbell has been told by the court that he must start issuing bear permits. This means we have a mere two and a half weeks before the bear hunt begins. We must move quickly and with all the strength we have if we are to stop another brutal and vile bear slaughter.

Over the course of this week, you will receive three alerts asking you to contact key legislators who can act to stop the hunt. Starting Wednesday, contact the following Senators and ask them to please stop the bear hunt for this year. Please use ALL THREE forms of communication: phone, fax, and email.

There are only 5 legislative sessions left before the hunt begins. ACT NOW!!

Senator Bernard F. Kenny Jr.
235 Hudson Street, Suite 1
Hoboken, NJ 07030
Phone (201) 653-1466
Fax (201) 714-9825
Email: senkenny@njleg.org

Senator Shirley K. Turner
1440 Pennington Rd.
Ewing, NJ 08618
Phone (609) 530-3277
Fax (609) 530-3292
Email: senturner@njleg.org

Senator Byron M. Baer
125 State St.
Hackensack, NJ 07601
Phone (201) 343-3333
Fax (201) 343-1594
Email: senbaer@njleg.org

Senator Joseph F. Vitale
87 Main Street
Woodbridge, NJ 07095
Phone (732) 855-7441
Fax (732) 855-7558
Email: senbaer@njleg.org

Please also contact our NJ Federal Senators -

U.S. Senator Jon S. Corzine
Phone (202) 224-4744
FAX: (202) 228-2197
Website: http://corzine.senate.gov/contact.cfm
Use website for email

U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg
Phone: (202) 224-3224
Fax: (202) 228-4054
Website: http://lautenberg.senate.gov/webform.html
Use website for email


Informant: Ima Vegan

As many of you may know, one of our last great wild places, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is under a fresh attack from the oil industry and their allies in Congress and the Administration. This looming threat is more serious, and more dangerous, than ever before. That's why The Wilderness Society has launched an all-out campaign to protect the Arctic wilderness. We are encouraging everyone to take action now at: http://www.wilderness.org/arctic

Anti-wilderness forces in Congress hope to use a backdoor budget process to sneak this giveaway onto the same federal budget the government needs to function. They know that they don't have the votes necessary to enact this ill-conceived plan through the normal legislative process that requires 60 votes to pass such highly controversial measures in the U.S. Senate. The decision to circumvent the normal rules is being made NOW.

Just last week, Rep. Richard Pombo (R-California), a vocal drilling advocate and chairman of the House Resources Committee, claimed that now is "The best chance we've had" to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. (CNN.com, 11/10/2004)

We need to send Congress and the Administration a strong early message that we're NOT going to stand by and watch as America's wild places are sold off to the highest bidder. Send a letter to your U.S. Senator at http://www.wilderness.org/arctic today!

Thanks for your help,

Cory Davies


Informant: ItalysBadBoy

http://deoxy.org/wc/wc-index.htm


Informant: ICIS-Institute for Cooperation in Space

Genetically modified madness

Forum: GM trees
http://elonmerkki.net/dyn/forum/thread/?id=286

Informant: Harlan Girard


GE Trees in Christian Science Monitor
http://tinyurl.com/5ndzr

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3339650


Informant: keyhles

http://rense.com/general59/wake.htm


Informant: Shanti Renfrew

Seen this one?

Eve


PLEASE TAKE ACTION, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE. PLEASE FORWARD TO EVERYONE.

Smoking Gun

You may have seen the associated press story about the precinct in Cuyahoga county that had less than 1,000 voters, and gave Bush almost 4,000 extra votes.

But that turns out to be only the tip of a very ugly iceberg. The evidence discovered by some remarkably careful sleuthing would convince any reasonable court to invalidate the entire Ohio election.

In last Tuesday's election, 29 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, reported votes cast IN EXCESS of the number of registered voters - at least 93,136 extra votes total. And the numbers are right there on the official Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website:

Bay Village - 13,710 registered voters / 18,663 ballots cast Beachwood - 9,943 registered voters / 13,939 ballots cast
Bedford - 9,942 registered voters / 14,465 ballots cast
Bedford Heights - 8,142 registered voters / 13,512 ballots cast
Brooklyn - 8,016 registered voters / 12,303 ballots cast
Brooklyn Heights - 1,144 registered voters / 1,869 ballots cast
Chagrin Falls Village - 3,557 registered voters / 4,860 ballots cast
Cuyahoga Heights - 570 registered voters / 1,382 ballots cast
Fairview Park - 13,342 registered voters / 18,472 ballots cast
Highland Hills Village - 760 registered voters / 8,822 ballots cast
Independence - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Mayfield Village - 2,764 registered voters / 3,145 ballots cast
Middleburg Heights - 12,173 registered voters / 14,854 ballots cast
Moreland Hills Village - 2,990 registered voters / 4,616 ballots cast
North Olmstead - 25,794 registered voters / 25,887 ballots cast
Olmstead Falls - 6,538 registered voters / 7,328 ballots cast
Pepper Pike - 5,131 registered voters / 6,479 ballots cast
Rocky River - 16,600 registered voters / 20,070 ballots cast
Solon (WD6) - 2,292 registered voters / 4,300 ballots cast
South Euclid - 16,902 registered voters / 16,917 ballots cast
Strongsville (WD3) - 7,806 registered voters / 12,108 ballots cast
University Heights - 10,072 registered voters / 11,982 ballots cast
Valley View Village - 1,787 registered voters / 3,409 ballots cast
Warrensville Heights - 10,562 registered voters / 15,039 ballots cast
Woodmere Village - 558 registered voters / 8,854 ballots cast
Bedford (CSD) - 22,777 registered voters / 27,856 ballots cast
Independence (LSD) - 5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Orange (CSD) - 11,640 registered voters / 22,931 ballots cast
Warrensville (CSD) - 12,218 registered voters / 15,822 ballots cast

The Republicans are so BUSTED.

http://boe.cuyahogacounty.us/BOE/results/currentresults1.htm#top
is the official website of the Cuyahoga county election board, providing irrefutable evidence that the vote was off by at least 93,000.

Kerry lost Ohio by approximately 130,000, so this is not an insignificant figure that can be ignored, particularly when there are numerous other indications of voter fraud in Ohio and elsewhere. I think the only possible alternative is to invalidate the entire Ohio election, if not the entire national election.

I'd say the game's up. America, it looks pretty much like you've been had.

Sincerely,
Teed Rockwell
Philosophy Dept.
Sonoma State University
up!

BUSH HAS NOT YET BEEN CHOSEN BY THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE. THE ELECTORS MEET AND VOTE ON DEC. 13. QUESTIONS NEED TO BE RAISED ABOUT THE RESULTS - AND RAISED LOUDLY - TO GET AN INVESTIGATION LAUNCHED BEFORE THAT DATE. SO FAR, THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IN NOT PICKING UP THE STORY. THEY MOVED VERY SLOWLY AFTER THE 2000 ELECTION. OVER TO YOU.

November 17, 2004

In recent days, we've been heartened and buoyed by the activist community's resilience and determination for a just count of every vote. But this is not about Bush and Kerry; it's about saving our democracy and ensuring free and fair elections in the future.

With that in mind, we've written a Voter Bill of Rights, a list of 10 essential steps for improving our electoral system (please see below).

We know so many of you have been eager to turn your concerns into action. Here are three concrete steps you can take in the next week to move this electoral reform agenda forward:

1) SIGN and CIRCULATE the new Voter Bill of Rights. Our goal is to get 25,000 people to sign the Voter Bill of Rights by November 30, and then send the bill to all members of congress. For that, WE NEED YOUR HELP.

To sign, visit:
http://www.codepinkalert.org/National_Actions_Voter_Bill_of_Rights.shtml

2) HOST OR ATTEND a house party this Sunday, November 21, along with MoveOn PAC, to discuss where we go from here. Download the Voter Bill of Rights to help facilitate the conversation and encourage local actions to address some of the flaws in our current system. For more details and to sign up to host a party go to: http://action.moveonpac.org/future/

Give us your feedback! CODEPINK wants to hear from you. Please fill out a brief questionnaire to help CODEPINK formulate a clear campaign for peace and social justice in the coming year.
http://www.codepinkalert.org/National_Actions_Questionnaire.shtml

3 ) CALL the Congressional Switchboard toll-free at 1.800.839.5276 and urge your Congressional representatives to sign on to Rep. John Conyers' letter and request to the General Accountability Office to undertake a full investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration. In addition, email and fax the Voter Bill of Rights to your representatives and ask them how they're working to ensure a more just and secure electoral system. Email it to everyone you know who want to make our electoral process fair and truly democratic.

Here's a link to the letter (pdf):
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/gaoinvestvote2004ltr11804.pdf

Thank you all for your determination in the wake of this disastrous election to set things right in the future!

With appreciation,
Andrea, Carol, Chris, Claire, Dana, Gael, Jodie, Medea, Nancy, Sue, Tiffany

http://www.codepinkalert.org


Informant: Martin Greenhut

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0307/S00065.htm


Informant: Ben Hijink

http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/11/1705813.php
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/1706319.php


Informant: Scott Munson

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm


Informant: protectyourvote

http://www.zeit.de/2004/48/Gl_8asern_neu


Nachricht von der BI Bad Dürkheim

[Von ftd.de, 14:14, 17.11.04]

Die Rückversicherungsbranche sucht nach der Berechenbarkeit so genannter Emerging Risks. Elektromagnetische Felder, Nano- und Gentechnik sind als Risiken besonders unbeliebt.

Die Mobilfunkantenne auf dem Dach, winzigste Nanopartikel in der Sonnencreme, die genmanipulierte Tomate auf dem Frühstücksbrötchen - überall lauern unerforschte Gefahren. Im Versicherungsdeutsch heißen sie "Emerging Risks" und gelten als heikle Fälle. "Die Versicherbarkeit von Emerging Risks muss dem strikten Grundsatz nach vielfach verneint werden", heißt es in einer Analyse der Swiss Re. Dennoch müsse man das Damoklesschwert der neuen Risiken "bestmöglich versicherbar machen".

Gerade für die Rückversicherer sind Emerging Risks eine enorme Herausforderung: Da ein Schadensfall in der Vergangenheit noch nicht eingetreten ist, gestaltet sich die Berechenbarkeit des Risikos und damit der nötigen Prämien als äußerst schwierig. Tritt der Schadensfall ein, passiert das häufig graduell und mit großen Zeitabständen. Oft herrscht sogar Unsicherheit darüber, ob überhaupt ein Risiko besteht.

Ausschlussklauseln geplant

Elektromagnetische Felder (EMF) sind so ein umstrittenes Problem: Sie werden durch Mobilfunkantennen, Handys oder Starkstromleitungen erzeugt. Bei vielen Menschen herrscht Angst vor Krankheiten oder anderen Schädigungen, die solche Felder auslösen könnten. "Die Risikoperzeption ist hoch", nennt das Marcel Bürge, Leiter des Bereichs Risk Engineering bei der Swiss Re. "Ein Ursache-Wirkungs-Zusammenhang zwischen elektromagnetischer Strahlung und Erkrankungen ist wissenschaftlich aber nicht nachgewiesen." Trotzdem hat es bereits Klagen gegen Mobilfunkbetreiber gegeben. Bis der Gegenbeweis erbracht ist, bleibt das EMF-Risiko für die Rückversicherer weitgehend unkalkulierbar.

Omega: es stimmt nicht, dass ein Ursache-Wirkungs-Zusammenhang zwischen elektromagnetischer Strahlung und Erkrankungen nicht wissenschaftlich nachgewiesen ist. Siehe unter:

Die Naila-Mobilfunkstudie
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/283426/

Wissenschaft und Mobilfunk
http://omega.twoday.net/stories/293807/

Mit einem solchen Risiko will die Branche so wenig wie möglich zu tun haben. In einem Ranking der Swiss Re taucht EMF als das schwierigste unter den Emerging Risks auf - noch vor Genfood und Rinderwahn. "Wenn wir alleine darüber entscheiden könnten, würden wir EMF am liebsten zumindest aus proportionalen Industrie-Versicherungsverträgen ausschließen", sagte Swiss-Re Manager Bürge. Je nach Kunde gebe es bereits Ausschlussklauseln in diesem Bereich: "Ein Mobilfunkantennen-Besitzer wird es schwer haben, von uns eine uneingeschränkte Deckung zu bekommen, die EMF einschließt."

Unbekannte Auswirkungen

Dass die Rückversicherer Angst vor dem Versichern bekommen, ist vor allem bei solchen Risiken der Fall, die sie selbst durch komplizierte mathematische Modelle in ihrer Höhe nicht abschätzen können. "Solange wir die Risiken anhand von Szenarien einigermaßen berechnen können, sind sie versicherbar", so Bürge. In die Kategorie versicherbar fallen die Risiken der Nanotechnologie. Diese relativ neue Technik nutzt winzigste industriell gefertigte Partikel, um beispielsweise schnellere Computerchips herzustellen, effizientere Batterien oder feuchtigkeitsspendende Sonnencremes. Ungeklärt ist bisher aber, was Nanopartikel anrichten können, wenn sie in den menschlichen Körper gelangen. "Tierversuche haben teilweise Ergebnisse gezeigt, die uns an Asbest erinnern", gibt Bürge zu. Deshalb seien die Rückversicherer sehr bestrebt, wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse über die Nanotechnologie zu sammeln.

Bevölkerung fürchtet Gen-Produkte

Die Möglichkeit zu Tierversuchen macht die Risiken wenigstens in Ansätzen berechenbarer. Aber das ist offenbar nicht der einzige Grund dafür, dass in diesem Bereich Ausschlüsse seitens der Rückversicherer eher unüblich sind. "Nanotechnologie wird sich zu einem Riesengeschäft entwickeln, auch für die Versicherer", prognostizierte Bürge. "Wir versuchen mit Hilfe von Wissenschaftlern sicherzustellen, dass jeder, der Nanopartikel in die Welt setzt, zuvor die Folgen testen muss." Generell gilt für Emerging Risks: Je besser sie zu berechnen sind, desto besser sind sie zu versichern. Große Schwierigkeiten sieht Bürge derzeit im Bereich der Identifikations-Mikrochips sowie in einem möglichen Szenario von Antibiotikaresistenz bei Patienten. Solche Fälle seien für die Rückversicherer wegen möglicher Klagen von Betroffenen überhaupt nicht abschätzbar, sagt Bürge. Genmanipulierte Tomaten oder Sojabohnen hält der Experte persönlich für eher unschädlich. Dennoch verhalte es sich damit ähnlich wie mit EMF: Die psychologische Risikoperzeption in der Bevölkerung sei sehr hoch. Das kann über kurz oder lang auch zu vielen Klagen und möglicherweise Urteilen gegen die Hersteller genmanipulierter Produkte führen, ganz unabhängig vom naturwissenschaftlichen Nachweis einer Schädlichkeit. Dazu kommt, dass gentechnisch veränderte Pflanzen kaum sauber getrennt von anderen Agrarprodukten angebaut werden können. Das kann zu einer Haftung der Gen-Bauern führen - wie sie im deutschen Gesetz auch ausdrücklich vorgesehen ist. In der Liste der problematischen Emerging Risks der Swiss Re schaffen es Nahrungs- und Genussmittel aus gentechnisch veränderten Pflanzen daher auch auf Platz zwei.

http://www.boerse-online.de/ftd/artikel.html?artikel_id=655815


Nachricht von der BI Bad Dürkheim

by Nebojsa Malic

AntiWar.Com

11/18/04

It is not uncommon for countries that have been infected by democracy to fall prey to a malaise in which every sphere of life becomes political, i.e., falls under the control or influence of the state. The amount of power this gives the state becomes so strong a lure that it attracts the very worst of characters, and tempts even the best who somehow manage to stumble into governance. Power struggles at the top result in widespread destruction of society, or even the country itself. One very clear example of this is Serbia today -- but if one looks hard enough, it can be seen everywhere. Only the extent varies...

http://antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=4002


The battle of the century

by Jim Peron

Institute for Liberal Values

11/18/04

Capitalism is inherently anti-fundamentalistic. The fundamentalist puts a restricted, stilted version of their religion at the centre of everything. They take the culture bound words of some ancient mystical writing and attempt to apply it to a modern age. There is a conflict inherent in this. But for the fundamentalist the ancient word supersedes that of anything since then. So instead of looking for truths that apply to the modern world they attempt to restrict and confine the modern world so it will fit the ancient text. But capitalism undermines this...

http://makeashorterlink.com/?L27C12FC9


The "Armageddon" Nation?

by Dorothy Anne Seese

Ether Zone

11/18/04

The dispensationalists in the 'Christian right' are sitting around waiting for some fuzzy rapture and the hypocrites who disregard all Ten Commandments while claiming to be Christians are leading them into the grand delusion. And the world into a fake Armageddon. It's doubtful few have even done enough research to know what 'Armageddon' (the Bible one) is, they take Hollywood's version. And they're going to make it real at the expense of American blood, foreign blood, and the destruction of anything in the way of American hegemony. So they think...

http://www.etherzone.com/2004/sees111804.shtml


It has happened here

by Pierre Tristam

CounterPunch

11/17/04

Requisite recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance at public functions, singing 'God Bless America' at sports events, fawning over the military in bumper stickers, in business-seminar speeches, in the public ceremonies of virtually every national holiday, in the $16-million exhibit at the Smithsonian of American wars dubbed 'The Price of Freedom,' in the president's silly and improper salutes every time he encounters a uniform -- these are the signs of a society growing not only less secure with its civilian identity, but also more martial, more authoritarian, more uniformly submissive, less tolerant, much less democratic...

http://www.counterpunch.org/tristam11172004.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

by James Ridgeway

Village Voice

11/16/04

The expected appointment of Condi Rice this afternoon as secretary of state signals the rise of another patsy to be window dressing for the president's foreign policy. That policy, as everyone by now knows, is mostly made by the neo-cons in the Pentagon, not in the State Department. American foreign policy today has little to do with diplomacy, but rather is based on unilateral doctrine of telling the offending nation what we want it to do, and then if it balks, sending in gun boats to enforce our rule...

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0446/mondo6.php


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

by Jessi Winchester

Liberty For All

11/18/04

Americans have been bombarded with constant prophecies of impending gloom and doom from government sources on nearly a daily basis since 9-11. The word 'terrorism' has been used so often it has lost its impact and we are desensitized to it. We've repeatedly been reminded to be 'vigilant' to the point we simply ignore the warning color code. But worst of all is the ill-named Patriot Act. This Orwellian legislation has virtually stripped Americans of their individual liberties and turned the nation into a police state...

http://www.libertyforall.net/2004/nov14/Curtailing.html


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp

Houston Chronicle

11/17/04

The Sierra Club alleged in a lawsuit today that the Bush administration quietly changed a rule so oil and gas producers could more easily drill under national parks from outside their boundaries. The environmental group filed the suit in D.C. District Court asking for an immediate injunction to reverse the alleged rule change, which it said was done without public input. It also asks that the drilling be stopped."

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/2906382


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp