The United Nations First Committee has voted, by an overwhelming margin, for state users of depleted uranium weapons to release data on where the weapons have been used to governments of states affected by their use.

136 states last night voted in favor of a resolution calling on state users of depleted uranium weapons to release quantitative and geographical data to the governments of affected states. The resolution will now go forward to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) for a second vote at the end of November.

Although UNGA resolutions are non-binding, they are a useful means of focusing attention on key issues. In this case the ongoing failure of the US to release data on its use of depleted uranium in Iraq and concerns over the use of the weapons in other conflicts, such as the interventions in Somalia in the mid-1990s. The resolution was submitted by Indonesia on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The resolution was opposed by only four states – the US, UK, France and Israel. These four also voted against previous resolutions accepting that DU has the potential to damage human health (2007) and calling for more research in affected states (2008).

For a full rundown of the results visit: http://www.bandepleteduranium.org/en/a/348.html

Here is a link to a recent study of cancer and birth defects in iraq:

http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/7/2828/pdf, and a wiki page on the likely cause: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium.

And here are links to stories I’ve published about depleted uranium:

http://www.seattlepi.com/national/95178_du12.shtml

http://www.seattlepi.com/national/133581_du04.html

Dear Mr. Blair,

You do not know me. Why should you? Or maybe you should have known me and the many other UN officials who struggled in Iraq when you prepared your Iraq policy. Reading the Iraq details of your “journey”, as told in your memoir, has confirmed my fears. You tell a story of a leader, but not of a statesman. You could have, at least belatedly, set the record straight. Instead you repeat all the arguments we have heard before, such as why sanctions had to be the way they were; why the fear of Saddam Hussein outweighed the fear of crossing the line between concern for people and power politics; why Iraq ended up as a human garbage can. You preferred to latch on to Bill Clinton’s 1998 Iraq Liberation Act and George W Bush’s determination to implement it.

You present yourself as the man who tried to use the UN road. I am not sure. Is it really wrong to say that, if you had this intention, it was for purely tactical reasons and not because you wanted to protect the role of the UN to decide when military action was justified? The list of those who disagreed with you and your government’s handling of 13 years of sanctions and the invasion and occupation of Iraq is long, very long. It includes Unicef and other UN agencies, Care, Caritas, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the then UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and Nelson Mandela. Do not forget, either, the hundreds of thousands of people who marched in protest in Britain and across the world. Are we all naive, delusional victims of a dictator’s propaganda?

You suggest that you and your supporters – the “people of good will”, as you call them – are the owners of the facts. Your disparaging observations about Clare Short, a woman with courage who resigned as international development secretary in 2003, make it clear you have her on a different list. You appeal to those who do not agree to pause and reflect. I ask you to do the same. Those of us who lived in Iraq experienced the grief and misery that your policies caused. UN officials on the ground were not “taken in” by a dictator’s regime. We were “taken in” by the challenge to tackle human suffering created by the gravely faulty policies of two governments – yours and that of the United States – and by the gutlessness of those in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere who could have made a difference but chose otherwise. The facts are on our side, not on yours.

Here are some of those facts. Had Hans Blix, the then UN chief weapons inspector, been given the additional three months he requested, your plans could have been thwarted. You and George W Bush feared this. If you had respected international law, you would not, following Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, have allowed your forces to launch attacks from two no-fly zones. Allegedly carried out to protect Iraqi Kurds in the north and Iraqi Shias in the south, these air strikes killed civilians and destroyed non-military installations.

I know that the reports we prepared in Baghdad to show the damage wreaked by these air strikes caused much anger in Whitehall. A conversation I had on the sidelines of the Labour party conference in 2004 with your former foreign secretary Robin Cook confirmed that, even in your cabinet, there had been grave doubts about your approach. UN Resolution 688 was passed in 1991 to authorise the UN secretary general – no one else – to safeguard the rights of people and to help in meeting their humanitarian needs. It did not authorise the no-fly zones. In fact, the British government, in voting for Resolution 688, accepted the obligation to respect Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

I was a daily witness to what you and two US administrations had concocted for Iraq: a harsh and uncompromising sanctions regime punishing the wrong people. Your officials must have told you that your policies translated into a meagre 51 US cents to finance a person’s daily existence in Iraq. You acknowledge that 60 per cent of Iraqis were totally dependent on the goods that were allowed into their country under sanctions, but you make no reference in your book to how the UK and US governments blocked and delayed huge amounts of supplies that were needed for survival.

In mid-2002, more than $5bn worth of supplies was blocked from entering the country. No other country on the Iraq sanctions committee of the UN Security Council supported you in this. The UN files are full of such evidence. I saw the education system, once a pride of Iraq, totally collapse. And conditions in the health sector were equally desperate. In 1999, the entire country had only one fully functioning X-ray machine. Diseases that had been all but forgotten in the country re-emerged.

You refuse to acknowledge that you and your policies had anything to do with this humanitarian crisis. You even argue that the death rate of children under five in Iraq, then among the highest in the world, was entirely due to the Iraqi government. I beg you to read Unicef’s reports on this subject and what Carol Bellamy, Unicef’s American executive director at the time, had to say to the Security Council. None of the UN officials involved in dealing with the crisis will subscribe to your view that Iraq “was free to buy as much food and medicines” as the government would allow. I wish that had been the case. During the Chilcot inquiry in July this year, a respected diplomat who represented the UK on the Security Council sanctions committee while I was in Baghdad observed: “UK officials and ministers were well aware of the negative effects of sanctions, but preferred to blame them on the Saddam regime’s failure to implement the oil-for-food programme.”

No one in his right mind would defend the human rights record of Saddam Hussein. Your critical words in this respect are justified. But you offer only that part of this gruesome story. You quote damning statements about Saddam Hussein made by Max van der Stoel, the former Dutch foreign minister who was UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iraq during the time I served in Baghdad. You conveniently omitted three pertinent facts: van der Stoel had not been in Iraq since 1991 and had to rely on second-hand information; his UN mandate was limited to assessing the human rights record of the Iraqi government and therefore excluded violations due to other reasons such as economic sanctions; and his successor, Andreas Mavrommatis, formerly foreign secretary in Cyprus, quickly recognised the biased UN mandate and broadened the scope of his review to include sanctions as a major human rights issue. This was a very important correction.

Brazil’s foreign minister, Celso Amorim, who in the years of sanctions on Iraq was his country’s permanent representative to the UN, is not mentioned in your book. Is that because he was one of the diplomats who climbed over the wall of disinformation and sought the truth about the deplorable human conditions in Iraq in the late 1990s? Amorim used the opportunity of his presidency of the UN Security Council to call for a review of the humanitarian situation. His conclusion was unambiguous. “Even if not all the suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war.”

Malaysia’s ambassador to the UN, Hasmy Agam, starkly remarked: “How ironic it is that the same policy that is supposed to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction has itself become a weapon of mass destruction.” The secretary general, too, made very critical observations on the humanitarian situation in Iraq. When I raised my own concerns in a newspaper article, your minister Peter Hain repeated what the world had become accustomed to hearing from London and Washington: it is all of Saddam’s making. Hain was a loyal ally of yours. He and others in your administration wrote me off as subjective, straying off my mandate, not up to the task, or, in the words of the US state department’s spokesman at the time, James Rubin: “This man in Baghdad is paid to work, not to speak!”

My predecessor in Baghdad, Denis Halliday, and I were repeatedly barred from testifying to the Security Council. On one occasion, the US and UK governments, in a joint letter to the secretary general, insisted that we did not have enough experience with sanctions and therefore could not contribute much to the debate. You were scared of the facts.

We live in serious times, which you helped bring about. The international security architecture is severely weakened, the UN Security Council fails to solve crises peacefully, and there are immense double standards in the debate on the direction our world is travelling in. A former British prime minister – “a big player, a world leader and not just a national leader”, as you describe yourself in your book – should find little time to promote his “journey” on a US talk show. You decided differently. I watched this show, and a show it was. You clearly felt uncomfortable. Everything you and your brother-in-arms, Bush, had planned for Iraq has fallen apart, the sole exception being the removal of Saddam Hussein. You chose to point to Iran as the new danger.

Whether you like it or not, the legacy of your Iraq journey, made with your self-made GPS, includes your sacrifice of the UN and negotiations on the altar of a self-serving alliance with the Bush administration. You admit in your book that “a few mistakes were made here and there”. One line reads: “The intelligence was wrong and we should have, and I have, apologised for it.” A major pillar of your case for invading Iraq is treated almost like a footnote. Your refusal to face the facts fully is the reason why “people of good will” remain so distressed and continue to demand accountability.

To read more about life in Iraq under the sanctions, click here.

A depleted uranium bullet (photo from Wikipedia)

(The embedding link has been disabled. When you click to start the video, you will get a message suggesting you watch it on YouTube. Please do. The video is long, but it is definitely worth watching.)

Here is a link to the study mentioned at the end of the video report:
http://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/7/7/2828/pdf, and a wiki page on the suspected cause: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium.

And here are links to stories I’ve published about depleted uranium:

http://www.seattlepi.com/national/95178_du12.shtml

http://www.seattlepi.com/national/133581_du04.html

Dateline is a multi-award winning international current affairs program with a brief to provide stories for Australians about life beyond Australia’s shores. The program is presented by George Negus, one of Australia’s most respected journalists, and is made up of a team of acclaimed producers and video journalists. Commissioned in 1984, it is Australia’s longest-running international current affairs program.

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), according to an Australian government website, “is the voice and vision of multicultural Australia.” The principal function of SBS, is to provide multilingual and multicultural radio and television services that “inform, educate and entertain all Australians, and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society.”

Iraq has between 25 and 50 percent unemployment, a dysfunctional parliament, rampant disease, an epidemic of mental illness, and sprawling slums. The killing of innocent people has become part of daily life. What a havoc the United States has wreaked in Iraq.

UN-HABITAT, an agency of the United Nations, recently published a 218-page report entitled State of the World’s Cities, 2010-2011. The report is full of statistics on the status of cities around the world and their demographics. It defines slum dwellers as those living in urban centers without one of the following: durable structures to protect them from climate, sufficient living area, sufficient access to water, access to sanitation facilities, and freedom from eviction.

Almost intentionally hidden in these statistics is one shocking fact about urban Iraqi populations. For the past few decades, prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the percentage of the urban population living in slums in Iraq hovered just below 20 percent. Today, that percentage has risen to 53 percent: 11 million of the 19 million total urban dwellers. In the past decade, most countries have made progress toward reducing slum dwellers. But Iraq has gone rapidly and dangerously in the opposite direction.

According to the U.S. Census of 2000, 80 percent of the 285 million people living in the United States are urban dwellers. Those living in slums are well below 5 percent. If we translate the Iraqi statistic into the U.S. context, 121 million people in the United States would be living in slums.

If the United States had an unemployment rate of 25-50 percent and 121 million people living in slums, riots would ensue, the military would take over, and democracy would evaporate. So why are people in the United States not concerned and saddened by the conditions in Iraq? Because most people in the United States do not know what happened in Iraq and what is happening there now. Our government, including the current administration, looks the other way and perpetuates the myth that life has improved in post-invasion Iraq. Our major news media reinforces this message.

I had high hopes that the new administration would tell the truth to its citizens about why we invaded Iraq and what we are doing currently in the country. President Obama promised to move forward and not look to the past. However problematic this refusal to examine on the past — particularly for historians — the president should at least inform the U.S. public of the current conditions in Iraq. How else can we expect our government to formulate appropriate policy?

More extensive congressional hearings on Iraq might have allowed us to learn about the myths propagated about Iraq prior to the invasion and the extent of the damage and destruction our invasion brought on Iraq. We would have learned about the tremendous increase in urban poverty and the expansion of city slums. Such facts about the current conditions of Iraq would help U.S. citizens to better understand the impact of the quick U.S. withdraw and what are our moral responsibilities in Iraq should be.

Adil E. Shamoo is a senior analyst at Foreign Policy In Focus, and a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He writes on ethics and public policy. He can be reached at: ashamoo@umaryland.edu

“The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.”

The Guardian reported today that, “The footage of the July 2007 attack was made public in a move that will further anger the Pentagon, which has drawn up a report identifying the whistleblower website (Wikileaks) as a threat to national security. The US defence department was embarrassed when that confidential report appeared on the Wikileaks site last month alongside a slew of military documents.

“The release of the video from Baghdad also comes shortly after the US military admitted that its special forces attempted to cover up the killings of three Afghan women in a raid in February by digging the bullets out of their bodies.”

WARNING: This video shows graphic violence.

According to the Institute for Public Accuracy, Beau Grosscup, the author of the book “Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment” and a professor of international relations at California State University in Chico, said today: “The video demonstrates that, with helicopter gunships flying overhead, the people below (allegedly armed fighters) show no fear nor any attempt to run or hide. This should be strong evidence that they were engaged in normal peaceful activities yet the gunners choose to assume otherwise. If the rules of engagement allow the shooting of wounded recovery efforts as clearly demonstrated here, then those rules need changing. There was a clear intent to attack – ‘engage’ – the recovery vehicle and personnel. The chatter of U.S. military demonstrates … excessive attitude of lethal intent; anxiousness to shoot while being under no threat whatsoever; blaming Iraqis for wounded children …”

The email included a post from another blogger, Layla Anwar.

“Following my previous post here (on the tribunal site), I just received fresh information regarding Hiba Al-Shamaree, the fellow Iraqi woman writer/blogger who has been kidnapped/arrested by the Iraqi forces on the 20th of January 2010 in the Sayyediya neighborhood in Baghdad.

“Her sister has just updated her blog with the following.”

“Hiba Al-Shamaree is arrested and detained by Baghdad’s security forces on the charges of supporting the Iraqi Resistance (through her writings), she will be presented to the Criminal/Penal Court…

“I am now authorized by Hiba to reveal her true identity to you.

“Her name : Hanan Ali Ahmad Al Mashadani
Age : 33 years old
Profession: Doctor in Ophthalmology

“The charges pressed against her : Inciting to violence and supporting the Resistance and according to informed sources this is a charge that falls under the clause of Terrorism as per the Iraqi law.

“Hiba lived in Amman with us, but she insisted on going to Baghdad on a humanitarian mission/assignment, for a project financed by an Indian NGO called HMOK and which dealt with deaf and mute Iraqi children. Hiba was working as a consultant for this Indian NGO.

“They discovered her pen name Hiba Al Shamaree because when they arrested her she had her laptop with her which they confiscated and they saw the articles she has been posting on her blog.”

The tribunal ended their email with this plea:
PLEASE, THIS IS AN URGENT PLEA –THEY WILL DESTROY HER. THEY WILL PUT HER THROUGH THE MOST HORRENDOUS OF TORTURES, including RAPE. I KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. I KNOW.

The BRussells Tribunal is a group of “intellectuals, artists and activists who denounce the logic of permanent war promoted by the American government and its allies, affecting for the time being particularly one region in the world: the Middle East. It started with a people’s court against the PNAC (the right-wing Project for a New American Century) and its role in the illegal invasion of Iraq, but continued ever since. It tries to be a bridge between the intellectual resistance in the Arab World and the Western peace movements.”

On Tuesday, a string of bombings killed nine people in two of Iraq’s largest cities, Baghdad and Mosul.

Examiner.com posted a slide show from these attacks here.

Last week, suicide bombings in Baghdad killed 127 people and wounded more than 500. Bombings in August and October, also in Baghdad, killed another 250 people.

According to The Associated Press, in Baghdad on Tuesday, “Three parked cars packed with mines and other bombs exploded within minutes of each other around 7:30 a.m. just outside different entrances to the Green Zone, just as Iraqis were coming to the area for work.”

The blasts killed five people and wounded at least 16.

The AP report said, “Four hours later and 225 miles away, in the northwestern Iraqi city of Mosul, two more car bombs and a roadside mine killed four people. The attacks appeared to target a busy neighborhood and a church, wounding up to 40 people.”

Of course, U.S. officials are quick to point out that violence, nationwide, is at its lowest level since 2003, a statistic that Iraqis may not find very comforting. It’s probably hard for many everyday Iraqis to see how the surge has changed their lives, with at least 386 people killed in bombings since August, let alone, the countless people killed in day-to-day violence.

The good news, for the United States, I suppose, is that Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, doesn’t see the bombings and other daily violence preventing the exit of U.S. troops, who are scheduled to leave by the end of 2011. Of course, that’s good news, too, for most Iraqis.

Amnesty reports that at least 1,000 men and women are now on death row in Iraq, a country that has one of the highest rates of execution in the world. Amnesty released the following appeal in late August:

“At least nine women under sentence of death in Iraq are now in imminent danger of execution, as Iraq’s Presidential Council has ratified their death sentences. Three other women have been executed since early June.

The authorities have transferred a number of women to the 5th section of Baghdad’s al-Kadhimiya Prison, which is where condemned prisoners are held immediately before they are executed…

One of the women now in imminent danger, Samar Saed Abdullah, was sentenced to death in August 2005 for the murder of her uncle, his wife

Photo of Samar Saed Abdullah provided to CNN by her family

In an article written in September by CNN.com’s Arwa Damon, Samar Saed Abdullah describes her confession:

“They kept beating me, and they told me, ‘Say whatever we want you to say, and do not say anything else, and say yes, I was an accomplice to this crime.’ Although I had nothing to do with it. Finally, they made me sign a blank piece of paper, and they filled it out afterwards.”

An Iraqi organization, the Women’s Will Association, is trying to build an international coalition to put pressure on the Iraqi government to stop the executions immediately. This group and others suggest sending appeals immediately to representatives in Congress and to people and organizations like these:

Thomas Hammarberg, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights,
commissioner@coe.int

(United Nations) Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,
civilsocietyunit@ohchr.org

Amnesty has suggested that urgent appeals be sent via the Iraqi embassy or diplomatic representative in your country, asking them to forward your appeals to Iraqi President Jalal Talabai.

Also, it can’t hurt to let the White House know what you think:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

It’s sad to say that the death of 21 people is not too bad, but this is a country that, since the U.S. invasion, often saw a daily civilian death toll topping 100.

But there is another, more insidious violence that is on the rise and will likely continue to rise for generations to come.

The Guardian.co.uk reports that doctors in Fallujah are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The report said, “Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems – are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.”

Actually, this rise in birth defects has been reported on – by, at least a handful of journalists – for years. Iraqi researchers and doctors – for years – have documented the rise of birth defects and cancer primarily in southern Iraq where most of the fighting took place in the first Gulf War. With the second war in Iraq, it seems obvious that the problem is spreading. Depleted uranium has been singled out as the most likely cause.

Depleted uranium, which is used for armor-piercing shells of various sizes, is a highly dense metal that is the byproduct of the process during which fissionable uranium used to manufacture nuclear bombs and reactor fuel is separated from natural uranium. DU remains radioactive for about 4.5 billion years. Many governments have outlawed the use of DU as weapons. The United States has not.

In 2002 and 2003, I researched the effects of depleted uranium in Iraq for stories in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper.

In the 2002 story:

“Although the Pentagon has sent mixed signals about the effects of depleted uranium, Iraqi doctors believe that it is responsible for a significant increase in cancer and birth defects in the region. Many researchers outside Iraq, and several U.S. veterans organizations, agree; they also suspect depleted uranium of playing a role in Gulf War Syndrome, the still-unexplained malady that has plagued hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans…”

At the Saddam Teaching Hospital in Basra, Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, a British-trained oncologist, showed me photo albums he kept of dead and deformed infants that he believed were linked to DU. There were photos of infants born without brains, with their internal organs outside their bodies, without sexual organs, without spines, and the list of deformities went on and on.

In the 2003 story:

“Doctors in Iraq say the number of cancers and birth defects may be devastating.

“‘This is the right time for active support to help prevent the catastrophic effects of the bombing,’ said Dr. Alim Yacoub, dean of the Al Mustansiriya Medical School in Baghdad.

‘“If there isn’t a centralized health plan soon, the consequences could be devastating,’ said Yacoub, the foremost Iraqi authority on the effects of DU. Yacoub has tracked the rise of cancer in Iraq for years, and places the blame squarely on DU.”

An Iraqi scientist, Souad N. Al-Azzawi documented the entire history of DU in Iraq and its devastating effects on the people there, in a presentation to the Kuala Lumpur International Conference to Criminalise War in October. Al-Azzawi, who was forced into exile from Iraq, has devoted many years to her work, at considerable personal risk.

So, the problem isn’t that the rise in cancer and birth defects in Iraq is “unprecedented” or “unexplainable.” The problem is the United States government, and other governments, won’t do anything about it.