Tedd Weyman: The effects of Uranium weapons contamination of civilians the environment in Iraq and Afghanistan
My presentation is a combination of many things – some are very technical, some are more emotional. I will try to keep the technical side to a minimum and focus more on public health facts and the things that I have observed and that we have recorded in both Afghanistan and in Iraq.
I think this is a very emotional subject and just the introduction alone starts to make this a difficult topic for me. When I arrived in Basra about four months after the end of the bombing campaign “Shock and Awe” I and other team members from the UMRC visited several cities in Iraq and drove across the country and we arrived in a residential area on the south side of Basra, called Abu Kasib, which means “the Father of Fertility”. Abu Kasib is probably the largest and most important date growing region in the world. It has several millions beautiful big date palms. In the middle of this wonderfully rich and fertile area along what they call the Shat al Arabi where the Eufrate River and the Tigris River come together there is a large delta, which supports this very rich farming area. Abu Kasib sits there and there was a large battlefield where the largest battle was fought by the British contingent under the title of Operation James. When we drove to that area there was a man about my age, late-forties or early fifties, and he was climbing in and around some tanks – there may be around seventy-five to a hundred tanks in this area among the date palms and along the roads. They had been sitting there for five months after the battle and this man had his young son with him. He made his living by salvaging the metal parts out of the tanks and selling those for re-cycling. Of course the tank engines are very valuable and whether they are diesel or gasoline engines they are very powerful so if they can be taken out and salvaged they could make quite a bit of money.
Now if you know anything about depleted uranium ammunition you know what they are famous for is leaving a residue called an oxide which is a black powder. When the munition strikes the tank it aerosolizes that material into the air and also produces a powder through erosion and through pulverization and leaves that powder on top of the tanks and on the ground around the tanks. And these oxides and the metal particles that are in these weapons are what we are here to talk about today. From the tips of his fingers to about halfway up the upper part of his arm this man’s skin was completely black. That black was a combination of the grease and dirt from the tank engines and a paste of uranium oxides that stuck to his arm. So this was a very dramatic representation of a very immediate risk because those oxides are toxic and radioactive and they have many medical effects.
It is an emotional experience when you go I don’t want to talk about my own contamination because I don’t think it’s about me. People say “Why didn’t you wear a mask, why didn’t you cover up more carefully and so on. But it is very difficult to go into Afghanistan or Iraq and have a face mask on and go around interviewing people who have been exposed, who don’t have fresh water, who are suffering from malnutrition, who have diseases – many of the are endemic to the country but many are a result of their immune system deficiencies caused by the effects of the war. To go there with a mask and interview them seems so inappropriate; it’s very hard to cover up. When the British radiation team arrived they came into Basra with white hard-shell suits and positive pressure masks and gloves and radiation detection equipment of course. They looked like something out of a futuristic movie. To walk around the fields and underneath the date trees and test for radiation and uranium activity... the Iraqis got a great kick out of this as you can well imagine.
I will briefly give you an overview of our findings in Iraq and in Afghanistan
A little background on UMRC: The Uranium Medical Research Centre was started by doctor Asaf Durakovic- he was the chief of radiation medicine for the Veterans’ Administration in the US for several years. He was the first physician to identify depleted uranium contamination in the US troops coming back from the Gulf War 1. And he was the first physician to be fired; summarily dismissed by the American Army and the Veterans’ Affairs for bringing this information to light. The files were stolen in transport and the information was hushed and after about four or five years of court cases and battles he was fired from the US government for revealing this contamination in the Gulf War 1 veterans. He started the UMRC under a different name: Uranium Medical Project in the mid-90’s and since then UMRC has been doing studies of civilians and also, where we can, of troops who served in the first Gulf War. We haven’t done any studies of troops or civilians from the Balkans but we have done Afghanistan and also Gulf War II. We are an independent organisation and do not take funds from any government agency. All our trips and all our research and laboratory costs are paid for by donations. We don’t want any ties to any government because we want to remain independent.
There are four ways in which uranium used in weapons can be made available to people to be potentially harmful to them. The first is when the anti-tank penetrators hits their target. They pulverize because of the high impact – a portion of them turns into a powder and they are pyroforic, that is, they burn. This is a famous feature of uranium – in fact there are very few metals that have this characteristic. So this goes into the air like a very fine dust. The second is that these things are deposited as oxides. From the high heat of the impact they oxidise and they can be carried on clothing and on other materials – a truck or a vehicle driving through a battlefield will pick the stuff up and transport it to other parts of the country. And, then if there is any bombing that occurs later in that location the uranium dust will be whipped back into the air and be pushed around by the wind and by the weather. And, then finally, there is the resuspension and transport of this dust through weather patterns and other mechanical disturbances. It can stay in the air for a very long time – for days or weeks in a form that’s called the colloid: very tiny particles that can go to very high altitudes and travel several thousand kilometres. Of course it disperses and thins out at those distances.
I have some slides here that show this:
1) This is a picture of what is called Baghdad Gate, the south entrance into the city where a battle was fought. Iraqi tanks were attacked mostly by Apache helicopters. They were rocketed as well as fired upon by a 30-mm cannon. And you see beside this tree that it is all black and the tank has been removed but the hole you see behind the tree you can see that it is black on the ground and black up the tree. That black is not from burning, it is not like wood burning [i.e. carbon deposits]. Those are uranium oxides. Behind me was an Iraqi family who were driving from Basra to Baghdad and they stopped to have a picnic – they were having their lunch right there. But the ground here is completely contaminated.
2) This is a Geiger counter. On the right is an Iraqi tank crew member’s vest and we found it lying on the ground; it had been discarded after the battle and we were quite surprised to see how radioactive it was. It was saturated with particles of uranium. Now, what’s interesting is that there is no discoloration in this vest – it is green. There is no black like the tree or the ground that I showed you. And this was a very interesting finding because these particles of contamination are not black oxides. It is a metallic dust that does not show any black discoloration. The clothes can pick up this [dust]. If you are in the battle you take the clothes home and we have many anecdotal cases of families and particularly wives being contaminated when Gulf War veterans returned home with their clothing that was never washed in the battle field in Iraq and their wives emptied out their kits, dusted out their clothing and cleaned their shoes and this dust, which is not visible, filled the air and the wives became contaminated too in their own homes, back in America.
3) This is a famous picture that has been in many international magazines. It is the Afghan photo of the friendly fire accident when American troops were almost killed in Mazar Sharif when the prison was bombed at the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom in Northern Afghanistan. This dust plume is from one bomb – you see the size of that plume. There were actually many people killed in this area when they blew up the prison. I want you to get the idea of the sheer size and density of dust plumes. If there is any uranium in the bomb or on the ground on the battlefield that bomb is going to launch a significant amount of materials into the air.
4) These are also famous photos - this is of course Baghdad. If you have been reading about uranium weapons you will have read Dai Williams’ work out of London. He has used these photos and he says they are bunkers busters that are uranium tipped. We have taken samples from some of these bomb sites – I’ll come back to that in a minute.
5) And this is also a famous photograph. About ten days into Operation Iraqi Freedom there was what they call a Sharki wind storm. That is when a dense delta clay dust is blown up across the desert in Iraq and across the whole Arabian desert. That [dust storm] stopped the operation for about three days.
In countries like Afghanistan and Iraq where you have a lot of windstorms, if uranium has been used in the battle field where these troops are, it easily becomes available to humans.
6) Just to give you an idea of what UMRC has been doing : we have made four trips into Afghanistan and collected samples, mostly in the Jalalabad and Kabul areas and we have done one recent trip into Iraq and there we collected about a hundred samples. We collect mostly urine samples but also samples of soil and water. Urine is where uranium is excreted from the body and most easily measured so this is what we focus on: collecting human urine and having it analyzed.
7) This is the nose of an Iraqi tank – the metal is about four inches thick and that is my pen which is a similar pen size as this. It is actually quite a big round [hole] and you can see it [DU round] has penetrated right through. Every one of these tanks or any personnel carriers or buildings that are hit by these weapons the rounds go in and they go out the other side and they keep going and they will go through a couple of tanks and a couple of buildings if they are in the way. The ground is quite heavily littered. The Toxic Remnants of War Organisation which has been lobbying the UN to require countries to clean up afterwards says there is one million tons of spent and unspent toxic military equipment lying in Iraq right now.
8) This is a suburb outside Kabul. It’s a typical scene in Afghanistan where a bunker buster was used – you can’t see the crater here but the crater is about thirty feet deep. These bombs are designed to travel through buildings and then blow up underneath them so they are actually set to blow up at a certain altitude which is below ground level. In the case of most buildings we saw in Iraq and in Afghanistan that were hit by larger bombs the bombs went through several floors, they penetrated several stories of heavily reinforced concrete down several floors, punching through each one [and exploded] underneath the building. In these countries very few buildings have basements – they are built on concrete slabs. The bombs go underneath the slabs and blow up the building that way. You see this quite commonly.
The way that we find uranium contamination or not is looking for where the bombing occurred or where battle fields were and we take radiation detection equipment and we see if we can find radioactive materials there. And, we interview people for their health condition. In Afghanistan we interviewed several communities where there was bombing in eastern Afghanistan and the Jalalabad area and these [the list on the slide] were the classic symptoms that we found. There is a small community called Lalma outside Jalalabad. They witnessed the bombing of an area called Farm Arda and the large plume of smoke came across the fields and onto this little village. And these people inhaled it – within minutes to hours everyone who was outdoors and inhaled the dust started to have burning sensations in their nose. Some of them actually started to bleed immediately. Most had nasal discharge. They developed a burning down through their throat and in their upper chest and then within twenty-four hours most people were having blood discharge from their sinuses and from their throat and their mouth and within a few days they were having coughs, some dry coughing, some wet coughing. Many had eye irritation, numbness around the lips and so on and some developed diarrhea within a day or so, gastric problems, [and] non-specific flu-like symptoms. We looked at people with these kinds of conditions and took their urine and we’d take it to the laboratory and examined it to see what’s in the urine. In the urine uranium can be released – everybody has a little bit. We look for specific characteristics, and what’s called “the signature” in the urine [to determine] the type of uranium. And that’s done in the laboratory.
So we carried suitcases, which were very heavy, of urine back across the borders and tried to explain to the authorities why I was carrying bottles of urine. In most [eastern] countries they don’t want anything to do with it [the urine] but in western countries they are very curious about it.
The symptoms progress to fatigue, fever and nocturnal perspiration – these are symptoms I know well myself: headaches, very very bad headaches that don’t come on in any predictable way but usually at night when you are asleep and recurring continuous pain in the joints and muscles, short term sporadic memory loss, often confusion and disorientation which can be a real problem if you are trying to give presentations.... Depression can go along with this, particularly in Afghanistan where people have become debilitated. In Iraq there are men who were exposed in or around the battlefields and they are not able to work any more and become very depressed because they don’t know what’s wrong with them, they have no energy. So we do surveys of public health and interviews to identify what symptoms people have and their history of exposure. If they have a history or symptoms that are resembling exposure to the uranium we collect the urine and bring it back to the laboratory and it’s tested there.
9) These are some of the results from our first trip to Afghanistan from that village I was telling you about. The average person has around five or six – eight, nine nanograms of uranium excreted for every litre of urine. These vary according to conditions – there is more or less uranium in different environments. The American standard is 8 nanograms of uranium for every litre of urine. This is a tiny amount picked up from the natural environment, including water. The Afghan uranium levels [shown in this slide] are 281, 247, 453 nanograms per litre with an average of 275 nanograms of uranium in each litre of urine versus the American average of 8.
10) There are different attempts to explain this. I am on record as explaining this as a source from the weapons because we found an interesting signature of uranium in Afghanistan – it wasn’t depleted uranium but is similar to natural uranium. There are some contents of some reactor products in this, some spent fuel products that are in very small quantities that lead one to believe that the source of the contamination is man-made or artificial and not natural. The bomb sites themselves are particularly high in uranium and so are the water courses immediately surrounding the bomb sites. The rice fields around Jalalabad where that bombing occurred that I explained before have very high levels of uranium, much higher than areas distant from where the bombing. So, putting these things together, I have come to the conclusion that this is from the weapons. These are very high levels however you explain them and need to be further investigated. We are a voluntary organisation – nobody has pursued this - not the World Health Organisation, the United Nations - no one follows this up.
Really what is important is the averages at the bottom: 275 nanograms per litre of urine. The bottom 11.88 was the internal control – I think it was done by Randy’s {Randy Parrish, NERC] lab. So a control was taken in England of 11 nanograms [per litre] – that was used as a control standard in the lab [the Afghan results] are quite significantly elevated levels.
11) This is the bunker buster crater associated with the bombing where very high levels [of uranium] were found.
12) These are children in Kabul who are collecting water for us to bring back to the lab to be tested.
13) And now we go on to Iraq. Nobody knows why this was bombed; this is the farmer market in the central market place in downtown Baghdad. It was completely flattened by huge bunker busters. The whole area is contaminated. The radiation levels are anywhere from two to five times normal in this area. We took samples in Baghdad – you can see here the central market, at the airport, at the telephone exchange communications tower that everybody has seen on TV, Baath Party Head Quarters and so on. So we took quite a few samples from the Baghdad area as well as from many town and cities south of Baghdad.
14) This is the telephone exchange. The bunker busters that hit this building went through eight or nine stories before they exploded.
15) This is in As Suweirah, south of Baghdad – it is a tank that was hit by and A-1- [Thunderbolt] ‘tank buster’. These are craters in the road. You see here the marks in the road and indentations from the 30-mm rounds that hit this tank and then as the jet went by it sent them into the ground.
Summing up:
Recently released in papers in New York City about a week ago was the results of the most recent studies that we did where we collected urine from some US troops that were stationed in As Samawah. You are probably familiar with As Samawah because that’s the community where the Dutch have quite a controversial political issue. The Dutch troops refuse to stay there. Japan is having a significant political debate because now they are stationed there. Here [in this slid] we have [the uranium findings] in the US troops who have come back from As Samawah.
We found through the laboratory analyses that out of the nine troops that we examined four of them had depleted uranium in their urine. This is the first finding of depleted uranium of any non-Iraqi [from this recent conflict]. We have findings of many Iraqis with depleted uranium but that means nothing to the American and British governments. They don’t care how many Iraqis or Afghans are contaminated by depleted uranium but if you show them one American or British soldier with depleted uranium contamination it becomes a crisis. So this has become a political crisis in the US and it’s about to take off and as a result of this becoming public a week and a half ago we are starting to get endless calls from troops who have returned saying “I’d like to get tested as well”. I wish that the results in Afghans and Iraqi civilians would draw as much attention in western countries as the results from the troops. But they don’t. Except for people like yourselves who have a conscience and a conscientiousness we find that governments have no interest at all in the civilians. But they are very concerned with their troops. So we have now have positive proof through the research that there is contamination in Gulf War II troops just like there was in Gulf War I. So there will be a whole new round of political issues raised world wide on these [result] with the Coalition and you’ll be seeing a lot more about it in the upcoming news.