[Peace-discuss] Wesley & Me' by Norman Solomon

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

This is very good!  I also suggest that you read Norm Solomon's and Reese 
Erlich's book "TARGET IRAQ"  if you have not read it already.   Clark wanted to 
start WW3 by attacking the Russians. He also authorized use of-as Norm 
writes-uranium munitions, ensured the cover up, and then refused to clean it and 
provide medical care inspite of existing directives, UN requests, and common sense. 
  

doug 


Wesley & Me': A Real-Life Docudrama
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/solomon1.html
by Norman Solomon
September 26, 2003

Here's the real-life plot: A famous documentary filmmaker puts out a letter
to a retired four-star general urging him to run for president. The essay
quickly zooms through cyberspace and causes a big stir.

For Michael Moore, the reaction is gratifying. Three days later, he thanks
readers "for the astounding response to the Wesley Clark letter" and "for
your kind comments to me." But some of the reactions are more apoplectic
than kind.

Quite a few progressive activists are stunned, even infuriated, perhaps most
of all by four words in Moore's open letter to Gen. Clark: "And you oppose
war."

The next sentence tries to back up the assertion: "You have said that war
should always be the 'last resort' and that it is military men such as
yourself who are the most for peace because it is YOU and your soldiers who
have to do the dying."

But for some people who've greatly appreciated the insightful director of
"Bowling for Columbine," the claim is a real jaw-dropper. It could easily be
refuted by mentioning a long list of names such as Colin Powell, Alexander
Haig and William Westmoreland; we might also think of John McCain and other
militarists who won high elective office after ballyhooed service in the
armed forces.

Other flashbacks make Moore's statement seem not only simplistic but also
gullible: After all, many presidents have touted war as a "last resort" –
even while the Pentagon killed people in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Panama,
Afghanistan, Iraq ... and, oh yes, Yugoslavia.

Moore's Sept. 12 open letter doesn't mention the 1999 war on Yugoslavia –
which included more than two months of relentless bombing under the
supervision of Wesley Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe at the
time.

A second letter, dated Sept. 23, does refer to that bloodshed. Moore recalls
his own opposition to the war while summarizing news reports that Clark
wanted to utilize ground troops, a move that might have reduced the number
of civilian deaths. But the followup letter doesn't mention the huge
quantities of depleted uranium used in Yugoslavia under Clark's authority.
Or the large number of cluster bombs that were dropped under his command.

When each 1,000-pound "combined effects munition" exploded, a couple of
hundred "bomblets" shot out in all directions. Little parachutes aided in
dispersal of the bomblets to hit what the manufacturer called "soft
targets." Beforehand, though, each bomblet broke into about 300 pieces of
jagged steel shrapnel.

Midway through the war, five springs ago, BBC correspondent John Simpson
reported from Belgrade in the Sunday Telegraph: "In Novi Sad and Nis, and
several other places across Serbia and Kosovo where there are no foreign
journalists, heavier bombing has brought more accidents." He noted that
cluster bombs "explode in the air and hurl shards of shrapnel over a wide
radius." And he added: "Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of
the most savage weapons of modern warfare."

I agree with much of what Moore wrote in his Sept. 23 essay. Certainly, "we
need to unite with each other to keep our eyes on the prize: Bush Removal in
'04." But with our eyes on the prize, we should not stumble into the classic
trap of candidate flackery while applying political cosmetics.

Clark has yet to repudiate his own actions in 1999. And this year, his
espoused positions about the war on Iraq have blended criticism with
ambivalence, equivocation and even triumphalism.

Many news outlets don't seem very interested in contradictory details. So,
the Sept. 29 edition of Time magazine says in big type: "Wes Clark has
launched a presidential bid that has a four-star luster. But is the antiwar
general prepared for this kind of battle?"

But if Wesley Clark is "antiwar," then antiwar is a pliable term that
doesn't mean much as it morphs into a codeword for tactical objections
rather than principled opposition.

"Nothing is more American, nothing is more patriotic than speaking out,
questioning authority and holding your leaders accountable," Gen. Clark said
in a Sept. 24 speech. That's a key point – and it must always apply to how
we deal with all politicians, including Wesley Clark. Overall, a strong case
can be made that Clark would amount to a major improvement over the current
president. But those who recognize the importance of ousting the Bush team
from the White House should resist the temptation to pretty up any
Democratic challenger.

**

Source:
http://www.thenation.com
=========================================================
The Balkans DU Cover-Up

by ROBERT JAMES PARSONS
 
Last November, when stories first appeared in the European press of deaths 
from leukemia among Italian soldiers who had served in the Balkans, alarm 
bells started ringing across the Continent. The leukemia was--and still 
is--believed by many independent experts to be caused by radiation from 
depleted uranium (DU) arms used in the Balkans during the war. Since most 
European countries are members of NATO, most of them have troops stationed in 
or near areas believed to be contaminated. 
 
In France, the February 2000 broadcast of a documentary about DU triggered a 
steadily increasing demand for more and better information. At the same time, 
reports were surfacing in Belgium of illness among that country's troops 
stationed in the Balkans. Early this year, Spain and Greece announced they 
will screen their soldiers for contamination, and Portugal has decided to 
remove its troops entirely from Kosovo. 
 
Country after country summoned US ambassadors or dispatched delegations to 
NATO headquarters in Brussels in search of more information about DU. But 
NATO--which in effect means the United States--has stuck to the Pentagon's 
oft-repeated refrain: If there is a problem, soldiers' health should 
certainly be studied, but it is impossible that DU is involved because its 
radiation is so low as to be utterly harmless. 
 
A major reason for Pentagon evasiveness is the almost 200,000 Gulf War vets 
apparently suffering from the variety of illnesses lumped together as Gulf 
War Syndrome who have filed claims against the VA for service-related 
illnesses. Three-quarters of that group are now classified by the VA as 
disabled, and almost 7,000 of the original total have died. 
 
In the case of contamination by Agent Orange in Vietnam, the Pentagon ended 
up admitting claims from anybody who had served in the theater after use of 
the defoliant had begun. If this were repeated in the case of Gulf War 
Syndrome, most of the almost 700,000 vets who served on the ground in the 
Persian Gulf would be eligible to press claims. 
 
Further, in addition to helping solve the serious problem of what to do with 
nuclear waste, DU weapons play a key role in the US military's concept of a 
"no loss" war. If such arms performed brilliantly against tanks in the Iraq 
war, they performed equally brilliantly against the Serbian regime's huge 
underground installations ("hardened targets" in military jargon) in Kosovo, 
where NATO has admitted to using some nine and a half tons of DU. Hence, far 
from planning to remove DU from its arsenal anytime soon, the Pentagon wants 
to increase its use. 
 
Thus, duly attentive to its own interests, the US government has consistently 
pressured its NATO allies and the UN--which has assumed responsibility for 
Kosovo--to keep the lid on DU contamination investigations (to the extent 
that such inquiries cannot be thwarted outright). Such pressure, however, has 
not stopped information from slowly leaking out, as evidenced by the French 
documentary and the reports from Belgium. But until the Italian government 
decided in December to launch an official inquiry into DU use in Kosovo, 
there was no general awareness of the danger among the European public. 
Significantly, Britain, whose government has long been at odds with its own 
veterans over Gulf War Syndrome and is the only country other than the United 
States to admit to using DU, has been a low-key but insistent supporter of 
the Pentagon line. 
 
Much, in fact, is already known about DU. Contrary to what the Pentagon keeps 
insisting, the "depleted" in the name depleted uranium does not indicate 
uranium bereft of all but weak, hence harmless, radiation. Rather, it is 
depleted of its contents of the uranium isotope U-235, which, because it is 
fissionable, is used for bombs and for fuel in nuclear reactors. What's left, 
U-238, is 40 percent less radioactive but still extremely dangerous. Anybody 
handling DU metal must wear clothing resistant to high-level radiation, 
hermetically sealed and equipped with a respirator. 
 
The Pentagon itself knows the dangers. On July 22, 1990, the US Army made 
public an exhaustive study of armor-piercing DU munitions (quoted in the 
Military Toxics Project's 2000 report "Don't Look, Don't Find"), which warned 
of respirable DU oxides, created during combat, that could cause cancer and 
kidney problems. It further warned that "following combat, the condition of 
the battlefield and the long-term health risks to natives and combat veterans 
may become issues in the acceptability of the continued use of DU kinetic 
energy penetrators for military applications." Nevertheless, since the Gulf 
War, the Pentagon has spent millions to convince the public--and especially 
Gulf War veterans--that radiation from DU is essentially harmless. 
 
In May 1999, during the Kosovo war, the UN arranged for representatives of 
all humanitarian aid agencies involved in the conflict to make an initial 
assessment of the overall situation in the field. However, the UN Environment 
Program's report, sounding the alarm on DU contamination, was not made public 
until it was leaked to this journalist by people within the organization who 
described themselves as exasperated with UNEP director Klaus Töpfer's 
willingness, as they saw it, to defer to US foreign policy. According to the 
sources, the pressure had come directly from Washington, presumably from the 
Pentagon, through UN headquarters in New York. The leaked report appeared on 
June 18, 1999, in two Swiss French-language dailies, Le Courrier and La 
Liberté. Later, at a UN press conference in Geneva, Töpfer denied suppressing 
the report. Reminded that it had been written up in the press, he said that 
was proof that it was public information. 
 
Another report, funded by the European Commission and published shortly after 
the war, made virtually no mention of depleted uranium. However, without 
identifying them, the report incorporated, verbatim, several paragraphs of 
the suppressed UNEP report. 
 
Under pressure to do something after the end of the war, UNEP set up a 
working party, the Balkans Task Force, to make a full report. Töpfer 
appointed Finland's former Environment Minister Pekka Haavisto to lead it. 
Haavisto was adamant that depleted uranium was part of the overall pollution 
picture and could not be left out of the inquiry. When the resulting report 
was released in October 1999, it was shorn of all but two of its seventy-two 
pages on DU. 
 
Throughout this period a procession of officials conspicuously uncritical of 
the US position on DU came to Geneva. These included Dennis McNamara, the UN 
High Commissioner for Refugees' special envoy to the Balkans, who stressed at 
a press conference on July 12, 1999, NATO's assurances that depleted uranium 
posed no problems. Dr. Keith Baverstock of the World Health Organization's 
regional office for Europe also insisted that there was absolutely no danger, 
though he added that depleted uranium could cause problems in a battle 
situation. And former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, now the UN Secretary 
General's special envoy to the Balkans, curtly stated that depleted uranium 
was a "nonissue." 
 
After news leaked that the Balkans Task Force had received a targets map from 
NATO, Töpfer called a meeting in Geneva on March 20, 2000, to consider how to 
deal with the leak, but on the same day, Le Courrier published the map. The 
next day Haavisto was allowed to present it to the Geneva media. Töpfer 
received a second, much more detailed, targets map in early July. Haavisto is 
said to have become aware of it only in September, at which time he pressed 
to send a mission as soon as possible into the field to investigate at least 
some of the target spots before winter set in. Töpfer's response was to 
postpone any mission until after the October 24 municipal elections in 
Kosovo, allegedly out of fear that if disquieting information got out it 
might trigger mass exoduses such as had occurred during the war, thus marring 
the "democratic" system the "humanitarian war" had created. The mission 
finally began its investigation in November. 
 
UNEP was far from alone in its timidity. As the world's highest instance of 
policy-setting in the area of public health and as a member of the UN system, 
the World Health Organization should have taken the lead in investigating DU. 
But the WHO is bound by an agreement with the International Atomic Energy 
Agency (IAEA)--whose mandate boils down to promoting nuclear power--to obtain 
the agency's consent whenever it proposes to undertake anything pertaining to 
radiation and public health. (When questioned by telephone, David Kyd, 
spokesman for the IAEA, claimed that his agency's mandate did not allow it to 
investigate DU, adding that DU was, in any case, perfectly harmless.) 
 
Thus it is no surprise that the fact sheet on DU that the WHO announced as 
being in the works right after the end of the war was quietly canceled. A 
subsequent general study of DU due out in December 1999 has still not 
materialized, and a fact sheet hurriedly brought out this past January in 
response to the European public's outcry is vague, contradictory and at odds 
with current scientific knowledge about radiation and its effect on humans. 
When the Balkans Task Force undertook its initial 1999 Kosovo study, the IAEA 
did the measuring, and no radiation worthy of notice was found. 
 
The November 2000 field assessment mission by the Balkans Task Force, which 
has just reported its findings, further perpetuates the cover-up. Using WHO 
radiation safety standards designed for measuring a brief "one event" source 
of radiation conceived of as hitting the whole body, it concludes that there 
is no real problem. However, the greatest danger from DU comes from the 
uranium oxide dust created when the metal hits its target and can then be 
inhaled. The Swiss government, whose military now cooperates with NATO, paid 
for the project, and people from a lab run by the Swiss military were part of 
the team, significant because the lab has echoed the Pentagon in declaring 
that the whole DU issue is not worthy of discussion. (Switzerland, with a 
huge Kosovar population that acted like a magnet for refugees during the war, 
has its own reasons for downplaying the danger.) 
 
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the chief coordinator of 
humanitarian relief during and immediately after the war, took the 
contamination threat seriously enough to launch its own inquiries and to 
issue a directive made available to Le Courrier in early 2000 by Deputy High 
Commissioner Frederick Barton. Among other things, it lays down rules for 
personnel in the field: No pregnant women are to be sent to Kosovo, those 
assigned there must be given the option of another post elsewhere and those 
ultimately sent must have a note in their file to facilitate any later 
compensation claims. Barton also made clear on several occasions that efforts 
had been made to warn the refugees as they were returning to Kosovo--efforts 
that he said had later been thwarted by the UN administration, by NATO and by 
the local Albanian political leaders. 
 
Others share this skepticism. Dr. Chris Busby, a low-radiation specialist, 
recently conducted his own field assessment, whose results were presented to 
Britain's Royal Society. In addition to finding radiation more than a hundred 
times higher than natural background levels near target sites, he has 
concluded that most of the uranium oxide particles are constantly being 
resuspended in the air, allowing them to be blown by the wind throughout the 
country and easily inhaled. 
 
For those long critical of US influence in European affairs, whether they are 
concerned with the Continent's military structure or simply a European 
identity with reduced US influence, the DU dispute is heaven-sent. The latest 
UN report, as well as a whitewash from the European Commission a week 
earlier, far from calming the storm, seem to have intensified mistrust. The 
extent to which such feelings affect EU public policy will depend on how long 
the European public keeps up its demand for a reliable explanation of what is 
behind the "nonissue" now known as Balka