U.S. forces deployed more than 1,000 tons [of depleted uranium] during the 2003 invasion: "soon be seeing the second wave of cancer and birth defects"

Sound off: Where the views and opinions of our staff and others are expressed on various topics that relate to Bush: "An Arab-American Priest, Depleted Uranium, and Iraq | by Robert Hirschfield | Washington Report on Middle East Affairs | November 2005

TRAVELING around southern Iraq in the late 1990s to investigate the effects of U.N. economic sanctions on ordinary Iraqis, Jesuit Father Simon Harak stopped at a hospital in Basra. Meeting with him and his colleagues from the anti-sanction group Voices in the Wilderness, Dr. Jenan Hassan briefed them about the medical horrors she and other doctors were confronting as a result of the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons by the U.S. Army in southern Iraq during the 1991 Gulf war. There was a fivefold increase in cancer, especially leukemia, she said, and a five- to eightfold increase in children born with genetic defects.

Dr. Hassan showed the Voices group some of the newborns.

"We saw a baby with a head growing out of his head," recalled Harak. "We saw babies with intestines growing outside their bodies."

Sitting in his spartan cubicle in Lower Manhattan, where he works as the anti-militarism coordinator for the War Resisters League, Harak, a 57-year-old Arab-American whose parents are from Lebanon, emphasized that, in comparison to the 300 tons of DU weaponry used against Iraq in the first Gulf war, U.S. forces deployed more than 1,000 tons during the 2003 invasion.

"Given the fact that there is an incubation period involved here," he pointed out, "we shall soon be seeing the second wave of cancer and birth defects as a result of that war." ...