Speeches

TROOPS IN IRAQ WILL ONCE AGAIN BE EXPOSED TO DEADLY CHEMICALS
House of Representatives - March 05, 2003

Mr. Speaker, I am here to talk on behalf of three doctors and myself. I was a physician during the Vietnam War. I was in Long Beach. I saw the troops coming back from the Vietnam War, and I saw what the war did to them. I also have been in government since then and have seen how our government for many years denied that Agent Orange had any effect whatsoever on the troops.

In 1984 we settled a claim for all of the problems created by Agent Orange, which we finally admitted. Now we have a case before the Supreme Court at this very time where they are trying to reopen that claim on behalf of people who are suffering even 40 years after the war.

It is for that reason that I raise the issue today of depleted uranium in Iraq. I was there. I was in Iraq in 1991, and I was there again this year; and the evidence is overwhelming of the impact of what Iraq has suffered from depleted uranium and what we, the United States, are about to suffer.

Dr. Al-Ali said that before the Gulf War they had only three or four deaths a month from cancer. Now it is 30 to 35 patients dying every month, and that is just in his department. That is a 12-fold increase, 1,200 percent increase in cancer mortality. Studies indicate that 40 to 48 percent of the population in that area will get cancer in 5 years. That is almost half the population.

A woman doctor, Dr. Ginan Hassen, said, ``I studied what happened in Hiroshima. It is almost exactly the same here. We have an increased percentage of congenital malformaties, an increase of malignancy, leukemia, brain tumors, and the rest.'' Under the economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council, now in its 14th year, Iraq is denied the equipment and expertise to decontaminate its battlefields from the 1991 Gulf War.

These are two Iraqi doctors talking. Let me quote an American doctor, Dr. Doug Rokke, who was appointed by Norman Schwarzkopf to go in as a part of the decontamination team and clean up what we did. We dumped 300 tons of munitions with depleted uranium in this area that he was sent in to clean up. He says: ``I have 5,000 times the recommended level of radiation in my body. Most of my team are now dead.'' Eighteen out of 24 people, American soldiers sent in to clean that up, are now dead.

Dr. Rokke says, ``We face an issue to be confronted by the people in the West, those with a sense of right and wrong.'' First, a decision by the United States and Britain to use weapons of mass destruction, depleted uranium. When a tank fired a shell, each round contains 4,500 grams of solid uranium. What happened to the Gulf was a form of nuclear war. That was 1991. We are about to do it again. People are talking about 3,000 missiles into Baghdad in the first day and 3,000 on the second day, all with depleted uranium on the point. Why is that used? Because it is so penetrating, when it explodes, it creates a white dust, uranium oxide, and people walk around, it gets in their lungs and reproductive organs. Children died. That is where those figures come from for the children. That is why we have so many malformations at birth among Iraqi women. It is to the point today where Iraqi women say, Is my child normal?

Mr. Speaker, we did that once to them, and we are about to do it again. We are about to do it again, and we are about to do to our own troops, hundreds of thousands of them, what we did to Doug Rokke. Dr. Rokke marched in there and did his duty. I am here talking for the veterans of our country and for the women and men who are on the line for us out there. I do not want them sent into that.

We are going to march troops right through the very place where this happened to the Iraqi people. Will our government admit what they are doing? No. They will not talk about what is going on with depleted uranium.

Here is the issue. The Secretary of VA, Mr. Principi, remember the Bush administration, writes a letter to the Department of Defense and says please do preservice evaluations on all of the men and women so we can look at, when it is over, what the difference is.

How can we send 300,000 American people into war that kills Iraqis left, right and center with impugnity? This is an unjust war. There are many reasons to be against this war; but this reason, the soldiers and Marines and sailors of the United States are the major reason we should not be doing it. We are exposing our own people to something that we will not admit we are doing.