For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is anti-war radio Right y'all welcome to show appreciate you tuning in it's anti-war radio here every Friday on KPFK from 630 to 7 o'clock, of course, we're on 98.7 FM in Santa Barbara 93.7 FM in San Diego and 99.5 in Ridgecrest China Lake as well as streaming live around the world at KPFK org Okay, so now to Kelly B. Vallejos She writes for anti-war comm as a regular columnist and also for the American conservative magazine She also does freelance reporting for numerous publications in Washington DC And as I said, she's the author of the cover story of the April issue of the American conservative magazine Poison generation for Iraq's children.
The war is not over.
Welcome to the show Kelly.
How are you doing?
Great Thanks for having me Scott Well, I'm very happy to have you here and this is a very hard-hitting piece there in the American conservative magazine which is the flagship magazine of the anti-war right in this country and Oftentimes it's worth reading in depth, but this article was really great and especially timely since it's now the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq and Primarily this article is concerned with the pollution of various kinds and The disastrous effects that this pollution has had for the people of Iraq So that I think as you even say in the piece Even though the American people would prefer to just pretend the Iraq war is ancient history or something It's still going on for the people there Can you tell us a little bit about the consequences and and maybe some of the likely causes that we're talking about here?
Sure I mean, I I basically would call this if you're going to look at you know Something in it crystallized the impact of the u.s.
Invasion of Iraq.
I would say this is the greatest you know singular example of the tragedy of our Invasion of Iraq if not the 30 relates 30-year relationship.
We've had the u.s.
Has had with Iraq I This was a very difficult piece to write but just to drill down a bit Basically it talks about the impact that like you said the pollution the impact of 30 years really of Of war in Iraq beginning with the Iran and Iraq war in which we supplied Monetarily and with weapons Saddam Hussein and the Iraq war against Iran in which thousands and thousands of pounds of munitions were dropped tanks It's not in chemical weapons Then you fast forward to the Persian Gulf War another anniversary that was reached this week the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and which again we use heavy artillery and tanks Notably with depleted uranium That still sits out in the deserts Of Iraq and then the more recent u.s.
Invasion of Iraq in the last eight years so the impact of that on the landscape of Iraq of Iraq has been devastating and the the greatest example we have right now is The increase of birth defects in places like Fallujah for example and Basra which were very very heavily hit both in and this war Specifically Fallujah and in the Persian Gulf War in Basra and what they're finding in a recent Study that I that I mentioned in the piece and Fallujah the scientists have determined a 15% in incident rate of birth defects among babies born in their general hospital in 2010 and to sort of Bring this into perspective, you know an estimated 3% of every live birth in the u.s.
Is affected has affected by birth defects and 6% worldwide.
So we're talking a huge auspicious number here We're talking birth defects.
Well, hold on second Kelly.
I was going to say if If people have you know young kids riding along in the back of the minivan right now You might want to turn it to music before Kelly starts describing some of the birth defects We're talking about being found at the Fallujah General Hospital.
Oh, yeah.
I mean as a mother This is particularly a very difficult story for me to do because every time that you know, I went to do research You know googling birth defects Fallujah.
I would Indiscriminately get photographs of these babies that are born and we're talking everything from congenital heart defects to what you would call skeletal Malformations which could be pieces of the skull missing missing eyes missing limbs Additional limbs where there shouldn't be limbs babies who are just Lying there lifeless and limp because their heads are three four times the size They should be things that you don't even want to see or ever hope to see that will give you nightmares at night And there are pictures and pictures and examples upon examples on the internet That you know, I think most of us would probably not ignore but never see unless we were Investigating it ourselves and and this is sad because the evidence is there and we have have had basically Like you said earlier have decided that the war is over but this is occurring and they're looking for help and Their own government isn't giving them help And we certainly aren't doing it.
Now.
What are what what are the causes?
This is this is this is the big The big investigation that's going on.
There's been there's many theories one being that depleted uranium that I had mentioned earlier Our Depleted uranium basically is used is a dense heavy metal that is used both in an armor plating on our tanks As well as in our munitions now the extent of how much we've used in this war It's pretty much a secret because the the military knows it's controversial it's been controversial since the Persian Gulf War when it was used and Our own soldiers were being exposed to it and friendly firefights with the tank battles and they came home and complained of all sorts of Illnesses, but also birth defects in the babies that their wives were having There had been many studies and many surveys done But the Department of Defense surprise surprise has denied that the depleted uranium has anything to do with Incidences increased instances of cancer birth defects among our soldiers So you can imagine that they don't have anything to do with anything that's happening among Iraqis But anyway, so the use of depleted uranium and uranium is controversial but they're still using it the Air Force uses it the Army the Marines and in places like Fallujah, which had been unbelievably Hounded by US air power during 2004 and 2005 if you can remember this was a big hotbed of Sunni Resistance, they were the ones that that hung the Blackwater Contractors off the bridge the Sunnis in Fallujah.
And so the Marines went in there and basically tried to to basically Restore order there to take it out of control of the insurance surgeons hands They managed to do that.
They put they put the security in the hands of local Fallujans and left and then they had to come back after George Bush the minute George Bush was reelected in 2004 He he started another air campaign.
So we're basically talking about large areas of the city just leveled we're talking about GPS Guided bombs just like plucking buildings out plucking insurgents out, you know strafing going on I mean, you just just you you can imagine Looking at pictures of Fallujah today.
It's a wasteland But they managed to quote-unquote pacify them in the end But anyway, so what's left there and and and we can only imagine so the babies that are being born today are Like I said 15% of them in 2010 were being born with these birth defects Is it the depleted rhenium?
Are they is it the fact that there's no sewage or clean water in Fallujah?all sorts of I mean that the The the burning of the the trash on the on the forward operating braces I talked about a little bit about that in the article.
So we basically destroyed the ecology of Iraq But we need to find out exactly what's causing the birth defects and also the high levels of cancer Among Fallujah as well as the people in Basra, which I explained I mentioned earlier was also heavily hit, too The studies are there But they need the help to bring it not only to bring it to light and to do something about it We are So far ignoring the plight of these people for all obvious reasons.
It is an embarrassment and humiliation and it is Anathema to everything that we were told we went into Iraq to save and liberate these people Well, and you know now that it's the eighth anniversary of the invasion the seventh anniversary of the first major assault on Fallujah I thought it would be useful perhaps to contrast this quote Which comes from a piece by Tom Englehardt at Tom dispatch calm but originally it comes from General Sanchez's book and It's a description.
It's a apparently a direct quote Sanchez I guess kept the record of George Bush on the eve of that attack and I wanted to compare and contrast You know this tough talk a little bit with the reality that you're describing from General Sanchez's book kick-ass Bush said Echoing Colin Powell's tough talk if somebody tries to stop the march to democracy We will seek them out and kill them.
We must be tougher than hell this Vietnam stuff This is not even close.
It is a mindset.
We can't send that message.
It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal There is a series of moments and this is one of them our will is being tested But we are resolute we have a better way Stay strong stay the course kill them be confident prevail We are going to wipe them out.
We are not blinking That was the pep talk that George W Bush gave the Marine Corps generals on the eve of that first assault on Fallujah Fallujah in 2004 in the spring of 2004 According to General Sanchez they all were just beside themselves like this isn't a Yale football game And they are not you know junior officers either These are the head Marines in the entire Corps, and they were just standing there dumbfounded and as George Bush is leading this chair He's creating a situation with these orders this amounts to orders Kelly which as you describe in your article again it's poison generation at The American conservative magazine, it's online at their website as well Women are being warned To not even have babies at all right in Fallujah They are being told look as a preventative measure just do not have a family Right that's the reality of Bush's little pep talk to the Marine Corps generals where the rubber meets the road Yeah, and as I mentioned in the story, I mean they they've done I mean there was a survey of I think it's like 40 sites in the country that are Contaminated with high levels of radiation Dioxin and 20 and Fallujah and Basra accounted for 25 percent of these contaminated sites now I mean with the depleted uranium it could I mean it could be anything from the from the dust the heavy metal and the dust To what's sitting over still sitting around there.
I mean there's tanks.
There's equipment.
There's there's Unexploded shells, I mean there's exploded shells.
I mean there's there the place is is the dumpster right now and There was radioactive Material everywhere that hasn't been cleaned you have kids playing in old tanks And you know you don't know what's in the water supply And when you have a government like Maliki's government that could care less whether his own people have Clean water much less the Sunnis and Fallujah.
Oh, I mean they I mean they are being punished They were punished back in 2004 and they're being punished now So who knows what they're drinking what they're eating what they're touching you know it we're talking Women children people who had nothing to do with the resistance there And like you they're they're still being punished and like you said with George Bush and his big pep talk You know the Marines went in there to punish Fallujah for what they did to those contractors to pacify them Why should they care what's happening to them now?
There is a series of moments, and this is one of them.
Yeah And that's our legacy Yeah, he's deformed babies Well and I defy anybody to go online and start looking this up and not be rocked to the core With what they see if not you're just not human well and the thing is there's no electromagnet that can scoop all this stuff up the the Usefulness of a depleted uranium round is that it's self-sharpening instead of going dull on impact it actually the Lattice work of the molecules actually makes it a self-sharpening round what that means is You know minuscule or microscopic pieces of little depleted uranium 238 dust Floating around in a country.
That's a desert I mean this is never going to go away for the rest of the history of mankind this place is going to be polluted with This uranium right and it's half-life is for the rest of humanity Right I I talked to one you know a Navy a Navy doctor who's been studying the dust in In the desert and his theory and this has nothing really to do with a depleted radium He is more concerned at the fact that when you're pummeling the earth Over the over the course of 30 years now you're pummeling the desert You're real.
You know you're rupturing the earth things are coming out in that dust that should not be naturally occurring heavy metals All right, you know so you you add that to the the burning trash pits that are all over Iraq I mean, and we're not talking little trash fires.
We're talking huge Pits that are burning all sorts of toxins in the air Then you add that to the depleted radium Then you add that to the open sewage that Maliki is allowing and you just got you got one big hellhole over there that We all it all comes back to us All comes back to us.
Well.
You know you mentioned in your article again It's a Kelly B. Vallejo's here on anti-war radio with us the article is in the American conservative magazine It's online at amcon mag.com It's the cover story for the April issue poison generation for Iraq's children the war is not over and You mentioned this article from last July published last July in the International Journal of Public Health about birth defects and Sex ratio among children being born in Fallujah, and I actually interviewed on on the other radio show One of the authors of that study Dr. Christopher Busby, and he explained because I asked him the mystery of well You know depleted uranium isn't it is depleted.
It's 238 not 235 that you make nuclear weapons out of it's What's left over after you enrich to 235 basically right?
So it's not that Radioactive and but then again it is a heavy metal so maybe it's heavy metal poisoning more than Radioactive poisoning something like that and what he told me Kelly was that what he?
Believes, and I don't know if he actually had this completely nailed down yet But the information that he has is that the actual little particles of depleted uranium dust that lodged Themselves in the cells themselves become little antenna for natural occurring radiation in the environment and basically Amplified that leading to all these cancers and leukemias and birth defects and and destroyed chromosomes Yeah, it's a it's a mix of all of those things really it's the the radiation that comes with it, but plus it becomes And the heavy metal poisoning plus it's an antenna for even more radiation Yeah, and when our own military is warning its soldiers to stay away from the tanks You know to stay away from the the the you the unexpected munitions You know they're admitting that this is that this is this this radiation is harmful So they're admitting to their own soda soldiers that this this is harmful But then they turn around and say oh, no this depleted uranium Can't be the cause of these high levels of cancer among veterans and among these Iraqis You know it's this Pentagon shuffle that we see all the time with you know you know the Gulf War syndrome You know or agent orange in Vietnam The you know the the soldiers that are getting sick from the the burn pits you know that I just mentioned you know they do this all the time and So I mean it's not surprising that they're ignoring with what's happened in Fallujah But it's just it's just a tragedy Well, you know the war party says that they love the troops so much that you can't criticize the war party for coming up with The policies that the troops are made to implement and yet, then they just throw them away like garbage I know that you've written in the American conservative before about the burn pits especially in Pallad and Some of the cancers coming from that and you know there's just no question about it Everybody knows that the US government particularly the military are the biggest polluters on the planet And it looks like we're talking about the very worst kind of pollution imaginable I mean imagine seriously in your town Especially for the ladies out there in your town the local hospital says look just don't get pregnant Because chances are your kid You know could be born with two heads or one arm or one eye in the center of his forehead as you write in this article at the American conservative magazine Yeah, exactly and these doctors were saying that they were seeing about two two incidents a day of defects as opposed to a few Every two weeks you know it gotten that bad.
Can you imagine?
You know being in that hospital, or you know much less I mean being a mother, but I mean being a doctor or nurse in these hospital and going what what is going on here?
They're just overwhelmed with these cases and these people are so dirt poor How are they even how can they even take care of these children effectively they can't and there's a whole you know thing about the culture over there in terms of the shame that families feel when they have a Handicapped child much less a child that is so severely deformed They just hide them away It's just the saddest thing you've ever read about Scott.
I just it just it just breaks my heart It should break everybody's heart Well, and that really is the point right is each of these kids.
That's born with an extra arm something like that That's an individual human being and you know as they say in the cliche joking around.
That's gotta hurt Really bad.
That's a lot of pain if you could quantify it It might be a gigantic pile of pain and grief left behind by this poison Yeah, it's just and and I think that's why the the mainstream media has Decided it's not going to cover this story because you google this up, and you you might get a few References to it, but on the most part.
This is not a story That is it has gone viral so to speak in the United States and that solution study came out a few months ago It you barely heard a whiff of it here in the United States.
It was all over the international press of course But it's just it's just Disgusting the way that we're just ignoring we we our media tends to ignore things that are better that are just so hard to look at or to think about I mean, it's just it's it's Yeah, and so they just ignore it This is just too.
This is too hard to comprehend that we would be responsible for this, so let's just not write about it Well just as we're counting down the minutes to the end of this show.
We're counting down the minutes toward the unleashing of Uncounted certainly thousands maybe tens of thousands Maybe millions of depleted uranium rounds on the people of Libya in Order to save them from their dictator that America stopped backing three and a half weeks ago Right and you won't know about it because he won't tell you they won't tell you how much That's something that you're gonna have to you try to find out for yourself piece it together after the after the fact Right well, and you know that's the funny thing is people look back on the Iraq war now They say it wasn't worth it a two-thirds of the American people now look back on the Afghanistan war that is still being fought with a 100,000 troops over there they say turns out this war in Afghanistan Wasn't even worth it either and yet here we go marching on in to Libya at least from the air to start But of course once they've determined that Qaddafi cannot be allowed to win Then they must make sure he loses and and on down we go and invading another Sunni Arab country perhaps this time wrapped in a baby blue flag, but otherwise no different than under George W Bush and And the lessons of those last two wars that we all now somehow agree We regret are still lost and here we go again depleted uranium rounds and all yeah Because it's not doing their job We're trying you know some of us are trying But the mainstream media not doing their job they never do and this is what happens when I have a theory to about why the Obama administration is trying to do this to is Just because for the spin for the PR because otherwise the narrative is too obvious that these are all revolutions against American back dictators and yet if they can make Libya the most important battle of all of them and put America on the side of the people Against the dictator on that one they can confuse the whole issue for the American people about who's revolting and who they're revolting against And yet here they could get us into this major thing at least from my point of view is simply for a wag the Dog-type we prefer the news says this than that this week sort of scenario.
You know right of ation Yeah, and you never in you know you don't want to discount.
You know Obama's fidelity to his own legacy Which I think often takes Priority over everything else, and I think he he strikes me as a person who is afraid that if he doesn't pull this That he doesn't he doesn't go in with guns blazing that somehow this will be brought back upon him in the upcoming Presidential election in which he will be called weak.
I'm here.
You know weak on our enemies Which he probably would but he doesn't have the guts to stand up to that kind of argument right well And he'll be called all those things just as he is now anyway.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We have to leave it there Kelly I know that you got to go to And thank you I really want to get this this story out there And I think the more people that know about it and read about it and see it Will be as enraged as I and you are absolutely thank you very much again for your time everybody.
That's Kelly B Valle host she's a freelance reporter and also writes for anti-war calm and the American conservative magazine the article Which is at the website and con mag calm it's the cover story of next month's issue Poison generation for Iraq's children the war is not over and that has been anti-war radio for this week I'm sorry We couldn't get a hold of Josh Rogan, but I urge you to check out his blog at the cable it's called the cable at foreign policy calm and He has all the information about the plan of attack and the Obama administration's Consultation with about a dozen congressmen before he goes marching your son on in there So check that out all the rest of bad news at anti-war calm radio archives at antiwar.com/radio.
Thanks You
