No Picture

An Interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore

{mosmedia}  Is it possible to follow your passions, to do what you truly love to do, without compromising you r values? What about meeting basic human needs? Can it be done? Some people struggle most of their lives to obtain this dream. Some eventually submit to a job that goes against their beliefs or end up starving to death in the street. Yet others have proven that it is possible to live a life that is consistent with your values, pursue the things you love, and still afford food and rent. Anne Elizabeth Moore is one of those rare people. read more

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(((RADIO TF)))

Toward Freedom talked with Leslie Cagan (organizer with the anti-war coalition, United For Peace and Justice) and Gordon Clark (Coordinator of Iraq Pledge of Resistance) in front of the White House on September 26, 2005 during the civil disobedience action they helped organize in which nearly 400 people were arrested for protesting without a permit. The protesters were requesting a meeting with the President in order to demand the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.  In this interview Cagan and Clark discuss the meaning behind the civil disobedience, how it was coordinated and where the peace movement might be headed.

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 Michael Klare, author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petrol gave a talk on September 7, 2005 in Burlington, Vermont on "The Implications of Scare Global Water Resources for Security and Conflicts: 

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Listen below to Between the Lines, a weekly radio show produced by Toward Freedom Board Members Scott Harris and Anna Manzo.  Stay tuned for more commercial free coverage of stories usually ignored by mainstream media.  Get RealPlayer here

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Headlines for the week ending 9/30/05: Evasive Responses in Senate Hearing Alarm Opponents of Supreme Court Chief Justice Nominee John Roberts; Global Warming Linked to the Increased Power of Hurricanes Battering the U.S.; Bring Them Now Bus Tour Builds Momentum Toward Sept. 24 Iraq War Protest in Washington, D.C.; Underreported News Summary from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 9/23/05: Crisis of Confidence in Direction of U.S. an Opportunity for Progressive Change; People of New Orleans Fight for Voice in City's Reconstruction; Five Unanswered Questions About 9/11 Critical to Prevent Future Attacks; Underreported News Summary from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 9/16/05:Dismantling of FEMA Partly to Blame for Failed Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina; Class and Race Issues Played Major Role in Who Survived Hurricane; Consumer Group Claims Oil Companies' Disaster Profiteering Necessitates Price Controls; Underreported News Summary from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 9/9/05: Opposition to Proposed Iraq Constitution May Deepen Violence and Instability; Bush Administration Efforts to Oust Venezuelan President Was Context for Pat Robertson's Call to Assassinate Hugo Chavez; United Farmworkers Union Organizes at Guimarra Vineyards After Heatstroke Deaths; Underreported News Summary from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 9/2/05Israeli Withdrawal from Gaza Accompanied by Destabilizing Expansion of Settlements in the West Bank; Documents Reveal Supreme Court Nominee John Roberts Disparaged Anti-Discrimination Efforts; Opponents of Prison Industrial Complex Rally for Policy Change in Nation's Capital; Underreported News Summary from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 8/26/05: Federal Court Overturns "Cuban 5" Espionage Conviction, Calls for New Trial; Christian Right Campaigns for Radical Reform of U.S. Judicial System; Cindy Sheehan's Vigil at President's Texas Ranch Sparks Powerful Antiwar Activism Among Soldiers' Families; Underreported News Summary from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 8/19/05White House is Shaping Public Opinion for a Future Confrontation with Iran; Declassified Documents and Testimony; Implicate High Officials in Torture of U.S.-Held Detainees; Cindy Sheehan, Mother of Slain Soldier Demands Meeting with President Bush on Iraq War; Underreported News Summary from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 8/12/05: Hardball White House Tactics Win Passage of Central America Free Trade Agreement; Congress Approves Energy Bill with Billions of Dollars in Subsidies and Deregulation for Energy Industry; Split in AFL-CIO Could Spur New Organizing But Dissidents Fail to Address Fundamental Flaws; Underreported News Summary from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 8/5/05: Draft of New Iraqi Constitution Would Roll Back Women's Rights; Despite Lack of Long Judicial Record; Supreme Court Nominee John Roberts Has Sided with Executive Branch and Corporate Power; FBI Surveillance of Progressive Activist Groups Will Chill Free Speech, Critics Charge; Underreported News Summary
from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 7/29/05: The Downing Street Memos and Valerie Plame-CIA Scandal Reveal a White House Bent on Misleading Public on Rationale for Iraq War; Rep. Barbara Lee Introduces Bill That Would Prohibit Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq; U.N. Troops Accused of July 6th Massacre in Haiti's Cite Soleil; Underreported News Summary from Around the World

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Headlines for the week ending 7/15/05: Bush Call to 'Stay the Course in Iraq', Echoes Pronouncements Made During Vietnam War; Military Base Closings Force Communities to Plan for Sustainable Economic Development; Civil War Looms in AFL-CIO as Dissidents Demand Reform and Threaten to Break Up Federation; Underreported News Summary from Around the World 

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Headlines for the week ending 7/8/05: Iraqi Union Activists Call for End of U.S. Occupation; Peace Groups Organize Giant September Anti-War Protests in Washington, D.C.; Big Business Will Be Among Few Winners if Congress Ratifies Central America Free Trade Agreement and More 

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No Picture

Global Notebook 6-30-05

NATIONAL 

Guard unit formed to track domestic groups. 

SACRAMENTOCalifornia‘s National Guard has quietly set up a special intelligence unit with “broad authority” to monitor, analyze and distribute information on potential terrorist threats, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Although Guard officials claim the unit won’t focus on U.S. citizens, it already has been involved in tracking at least one recent anti-war rally organized by families of slain soldiers, according to e-mails obtained by the newspaper.  read more

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Uranium Casualties

 

Members of the 42nd Military Police Company of the New York National Guard remember the place in Iraq where they were stationed as a hellhole. “The place was filthy; most of the windows were broken; dirt, grease, and bird droppings were everywhere,” Sergeant Agustin Matos later recalled. “I wouldn’t house a city prisoner in that place.” There were also the frequent sandstorms, blowing dust right into the area where Matos and his fellow company members were based. Sergeant Hector Vega, a retired postal worker from the Bronx who had served in the National Guard for 27 years, said the smoke “was so thick, you could see it.”

Both Matos and Vega survived the war and returned to the US, but all hasn’t been well since then. They and other members of their company now suffer from a variety of maladies: nausea, dizziness, shortness of breath, fatigue, joint pain, and excessive urination, for starters.

The soldiers repeatedly asked to be tested, but the army refused. Eventually, they contacted the New York Daily News with their story. Early this year, the newspaper asked Dr. Asaf Durakovic, a former Army doctor and medical expert, to conduct laboratory tests. His conclusion: four soldiers “almost certainly” inhaled radioactive dust from exploded US shells manufactured with depleted uranium (DU).

The investigation caught the attention of Sen. Hillary Clinton, who chastised the US Defense Department for not screening soldiers returning from duty in Iraq. “We can’t have people coming back with undiagnosed illnesses,” she said. “We have to have before and after testing programs for the soldiers.” Under fire, the Pentagon reversed its decision and began to test some soldiers from the 42nd who had returned home.

However, it’s already a bit late – and not just for the soldiers of the 42nd. Over at least 13 years, and possibly longer, military personnel from the US and other countries have served in wars where DU was used. An extremely dense metal used in armor penetrating shells and to strengthen tank armor, DU is what’s left after enriched uranium is separated from natural uranium so fuel can be produced for nuclear reactors. Military contractors like to use it because it’s cheap; so cheap, in fact, that governments often make it available for free.

Those who defend its use claim that most of the element’s radioactive qualities have been removed before use. However, mounting evidence suggests that DU can pose serious health risks.

The Campaign Against Depleted Uranium (CADU) reports that 15 countries have DU in their military arsenal. In addition to the US, they include the UK, France, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Bahrain, Thailand, Iraq, Pakistan, Taiwan, Kuwait, and Israel. The US has had DU ammunition since the 1950s, but allegedly didn’t use it until the Gulf War. DU has since been used in Bosnia (1995), Yugoslavia (1999), and Iraq.

Ignored Warnings

In July 2004, RAI, Italy’s national television station, reported that 27-year-old Luca Sepe, a veteran of the Yugoslavian conflict, was the “27th Italian victim” of the DU bombings there. It is estimated that another 267 Balkan veterans from Italy have cancer. At this point, there is no solid proof that Italian soldiers died from exposure to DU. One reason is that, as in the US and other countries using DU, the Italian government has blocked investigation of those illnesses and deaths.

In a report about what it labels “Balkan Syndrome,” the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) has noted that the “Italian Minister of Defense refuses to give compensation to [the Italian soldiers’] families, let alone to admit that depleted uranium has played a role in these cases. Hardly any information is given to soldiers currently on missions abroad about the risks they are facing, and whoever complains is treated as a traitor and marginalized.”

In the 1991 Gulf War, DU was mainly used against Iraqi forces in the desert. In the recent Iraq War, the Pentagon used its radioactive arsenal in suburban areas. According to Pentagon and UN statistics, the US used between 1100 and 2200 tons of shells containing DU during March and April 2003.

Parts of spent DU shells and DU-contaminated debris can be found today strewn on the streets of Iraq’s urban areas. Contaminated sites have been identified, but many of them have yet to be cleaned up. This has created a potential health hazard for many Iraqis. The ICBUW reports that “to minimize the risk of exposure, foreign troops have been instructed to stay away from potentially contaminated areas as much as possible, or, at least, to wear respiratory protection and gloves when it is necessary to enter such sites.”

In May 2003, Scott Peterson, an Iraq-based staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, took Geiger counter readings at several sites in Baghdad. His readings in some places registered more than 1000 times the normal radiation levels. Three months later, the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper reported elevated radiation levels at six sites located between Basra and Baghdad.

Soon after the war, the expert analysis of the World Health Organization and other leading scientific organizations led to warnings that children who come into contact with DU-contaminated shells faced health risks. Even earlier than that, in February 2003, the scholarly, peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Radioactivity reported, “Children playing with soil may be identified as the critical population group, with inhalation and/or ingestion of contaminated soil as the critical pathway.”

Studies Disputed & Delayed

For more than a decade, the US military has denied that DU poses any health risks and has even tried to suppress the growing evidence that it’s a toxic killer that should be banned. As Ed Ericson wrote in the May-June 2003 issue of E: The Environmental Magazine, the Pentagon “has cashiered or attempted to discredit its own experts, ignored their advice, impeached scientific research into DU’s health effects and assembled a disinformation campaign to confuse the issue.”

The stonewalling began in 1991, after US and British military forces fired about 350 tons of DU at Iraqi tanks and other targets. After the war, Iraqi doctors began reporting increases in cancer and birth defects rates in southern Iraq. As suspicions deepened that DU may have caused the problems, the Pentagon called the charge unsubstantiated. While Saddam Hussein was still in power, Iraqi medical researchers sought to present their findings at international conferences. They were prevented by the economic embargo.

The US military insists that studies from the Gulf War reveal no long-term problems from DU. Only soldiers who had shrapnel wounds from DU or who were inside tanks shot by DU shells and accidentally breathed radioactive dust were at risk, it claims. This would exclude any of the soldiers from the 42nd who became sick since their Iraq tours. Yet, independent organizations say other studies contradict these assertions. In April 2003, for example, the Royal Society, Britain’s leading scientific organization, said that some soldiers could suffer from “kidney damage and an increased risk of lung cancer,” depending on their level of DU exposure.

The problem is that no thorough studies of DU’s long-term effects have been done. In effect, scientists have just begun to measure how much uranium is actually released when uranium-tipped ammunition hits its targets. Without these studies, the amount of uranium dust to which soldiers are exposed can’t be determined.

In the absence of studies and definitive findings, the US and Britain have avoided the issue, resisting pressure to decontaminate DU affected areas in Iraq and implement a moratorium on its military use. In one of the few modest steps in the right direction, Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott introduced the Depleted Uranium Munitions Study Act of 2003. The bill calls for studies of DU’s health effects, requires the Environmental Protection Agency to identify US sites where DU munitions have been used in test firing, and recommends study of the water, vegetation, and soil at these locations for possible contamination. The bill also requires the cleanup of contaminated areas.

This May, the Depleted Uranium Screening and Testing Act of 2004 was introduced in the House. It would require the Pentagon to identify and test those members of the US armed forces who were exposed to DU during military service. Meanwhile, the US General Accounting Office has undertaken a study of the health of veterans exposed to DU in the 1991 Gulf War, as well as the policies of the Department of Defense and the Department of Veteran Affairs in identifying and treating exposed vets.

Germany, one of the strongest critics of the Iraq War, is sending in a team of environmental experts under the auspices of the UN. The group will evaluate the policies of Saddam Hussein, the UN embargo, and the impact of the two invasions on Iraq’s natural resources. The US and British governments have given their blessing. “That is significant because they will also face some critical questions, such as the impact of using depleted uranium munitions,” Germany’s Environmental Minister Juergen Trittin told the press.

Such initiatives, however, fall short of what is needed. A good start would be to acknowledge that the illnesses and deaths of soldiers and civilians from radioactive poison may fit the definition of a war crime. 

Ron Chepesiuk, a Rock Hill, SC-based journalist is the author of The Bullet or the Bribe: Taking Down Colombia’s Cali Drug Cartel.

LINKS:

Nukewatch, the Wisconsin-based environmental and peace action group, provides a comprehensive section on DU, with overview and links to resources and recent articles, at http://www.nukewatch.com. The Low Level Radiation Campaign, at www.llrc.org, features a search engine accessing articles on radiation in Iraq. Important recent writing includes “Radiation in Iraq Equals 250,000 Nagasaki Bombs,” by Bob Nichols, at www.dissidentvoice.org; “Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War,” by Leuren Moret, at http://globalresearch.ca; and Tareq Delwani on Jordan’s potential ban of Iraqi scrap metal due to uranium contamination, at http://www.islamonline.net.

No Picture

A Letter from TF’s Publisher and Editor

Hello -- again. Toward Freedom is back! Not with our magazine, but with a new and expanded Website that will continue the incisive international reporting that TF began 53 years ago. After several months of in depth discussion, the TF board of directors has begun to develop some new approaches, including a decision to strengthen our link to writers, readers, and activists who are working to create a just society.

As a first step, we have engaged journalist Ben Dangl, who has traveled extensively and written about progressive movements in Latin America. He has already revamped our Website and now becomes its editor. Please check it out at www.TowardFreedom.com and send in your stories and ideas. In the months ahead, we think you will find articles that surprise and intrigue you - continuing our tradition of bringing voices unheard into the mainstream. Other new initiatives will be announced in the future. 

Looking forward to networking with you in cyberspace,

Robin Lloyd

TF Board co-chair

A note from the new editor:

The launch of our new website takes place at a time of extreme global crisis.The War in Iraq; the creation of a possible free trade block in South America; the centralization of corporate media in the US - the list could go on and on. Yet flashes of hope have sprung up in the midst of these challenges. Labor unions are organizing in Iraq; Bolivians rejected a plan to exploit the country's gas reserves and alternative media in the US is on the rise. Toward Freedom is a part of this progressive movement and we hope you'll join us as we work for a better world. 

Starting with our July 4th inaugural issue, www.TowardFreedom.com will be publishing articles on a weekly basis on topics ranging from human rights and the environment to youth issues and activism.Our new multimedia site also includes an online bookstore, a blog, radio/audio streaming, a RSS feed, a searchable database and newly organized archives. Video streaming will soon be up and running as well.

I am excited about editing TF's new website and look forward to being a part of this community of readers, writers and activists. We'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions as we move ahead. If you have any questions or comments, or would like to write for Toward Freedom, please email me: [email protected]

To sign up for our weekly email newsletter, go here

Thanks for reading and stay tuned,

Ben Dangl

TF Editor

No Picture

Television’s Reality Gap

Not content with controlling wartime news, the US turns propaganda into entertainment

In drafting the US Constitution, one of the central goals was to insure a separation of powers. The basic idea was that each branch would be checked and balanced: executive power overseen by the legislature, legislative power evaluated by the judicial branch, a judiciary appointed by the executive but confirmed by the legislature, and so on. The approach was meant to maximize democratic rule by and for the people. read more