By Chris Floyd on 9/7/2005, 9:49am PT  

Guest blogged by Chris Floyd

{Introduction by Winter Patriot: Chris Floyd joins us again for another guest spot, this time with news about Weapons Of Mass Destruction. Please note that Chris has a new website, Chris-Floyd.com. I suggest you modify your bookmarks accordingly. And without further ado... here's Chris:}

"Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, "This land is condemned,
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem."
--- Dylan, "Blind Willie McTell"

From the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf, Bush is busy earning his new title: Master of Disaster. Here we catch up with one of his most sordid --- and unsung --- war crimes: using radioactive "dirty bombs" and chemical weapons in Iraq. The item below was published in the Sept. 2 edition of The Moscow Times.

It was the one great fear that trumped all the others, the nightmare scenario that overrode reason, skepticism, and all political debate, stampeding the nation into war: the thought of terrorists wielding weapons of mass destruction --- "dirty bombs" packed with cancerous nukestuff and gene-warping chemical poisons that would kill, maim and deform the innocent.

This was the horror that George W. Bush and his supporters held up --- and still hold up --- before the American people as the moral imperative behind his invasion of Iraq, and the justification for any so-called "abuses" that might be committed in his desperate, noble, no-holds-barred defense of the realm against this ungodly terror.

And despite all the critics and nay-sayers, the president has indeed proven to be a prophet: the nightmare has come true. There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq --- dirty bombs and poison shells --- and they are being used by terrorist leaders to kill and maim Americans, including newborn children. But the "liberal media" are completely burying the story, in a shameless act of treasonous complicity with these enemies of civilization.

In fact, the American media elite spent last weekend fawning on the radical extremist who unleashed these deadly weapons, gathering for an "intimate dinner" at his secluded desert redoubt, the Washington Post reports. While they noshed and joshed with the man of blood, his poisons were deforming the babies of American soldiers, irradiating the bones and organs of thousands of innocent civilians, and bonding chemical toxins to the very DNA of his victims, laying the foundation for generations of anguish and early death, as In These Times reports.

This WMD attack was no piecemeal effort cobbled together by an isolated band of cranks, but a sustained, relentless onslaught delivered by a highly sophisticated military machine: more than six million pounds of radioactive weaponry exploding in every part of the country, its deadly residue raining on plowed fields and playgrounds, swirling in the dust of close-packed cities, winging through vast rural expanses, settling in lungs, coursing through veins, biting into the ground, floating on the water.

The country, of course, is Iraq, where the radical extremist George W. Bush has used more than 3,000 tons of depleted uranium --- the radioactive residue of atomic weapons production and nuclear plants --- in everything from missiles and bombs to rifle and pistol shells. As ITT notes, each DU explosion releases clouds of poison particles that disperse over a wide area and stay radioactive for billions of years. This dispersal pattern means that the American soldiers handling and firing DU ammo --- or just walking through areas blasted by the shells --- get just as poisoned as the thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians stricken by Bush's WMD.

Yes, Bush is now committing the same war crime which he himself cites as the prime example of Saddam Hussein's bottomless evil: using chemical weapons against his own people.

And make no mistake: DU ammo is a chemical weapon of fearsome properties. After Daddy Bush dumped 300 tons of DU on Iraq in the first Gulf War, the Pentagon's own studies showed it to be an uncontrollable hazard, an indiscriminate tormenter of civilians and combatants alike. But the military brass love those malignancy-spawning munitions, which can cut through stone and steel like paper. So they ignored the studies, denounced their own experts --- and expanded the DU arsenal instead.

While insisting --- without any field tests --- that DU radiation is as safe as mother's milk (assuming Mother hasn't been irradiated, of course), the Pentagon conveniently ignores the indisputable chemical toxicity of the highly poisonous heavy metal. Medical scientists say that uranium has "an affinity for bonding with DNA, where even trace amounts can cause cancers and fetal abnormalities," ITT reports. Doctors conducting in-depth tests on National Guard troops now stumbling home from Little Bush's botch-up in Babylon are finding widespread symptoms of uranium poisoning, along with radiation-related deformities in the soldiers' children. Meanwhile, the ghastly effect that DU is having on civilians in Iraq --- where treatment is non-existent in the ruins of the health-care system that Bush's war has destroyed --- can scarcely be imagined.

But apart from a few honorable exceptions --- such as the "downmarket" New York Daily News, which has provided medical help for the poisoned Guard troops shunted aside by the Pentagon --- the major American media have maintained a craven silence about this ongoing atrocity. Certainly no one brought it up last weekend when the White House press corps was invited to Bush's fake ranch for free chow and a personal chin-wag with ole DU Dubya himself --- off the record, of course. It wouldn't do for the American people to know what their betters talk about when they take their ease at poolside amongst the courtiers. The Post reports that the fierce watchdogs of the Fourth Estate were "following [Bush] around in packs every time he moved." But what else could they do? You can't lick somebody's boots unless you get in really close.

And so the dirty bombs will keep falling --- weapons of terror, the stuff of nightmares, a war crime whose virulent harvest will be reaped in the pain of children yet unborn. While Bush partied with the press, while he pranced around before hand-picked crowds of mindless adorers at cheerleading rallies, a harsh chemical death was slowly eating its way into the flesh of the citizen-soldiers and innocent Iraqis he has sacrificed in his vainglorious crusade for profit and power. His ostensible enemies in the "war on terror" can only dream of inflicting such wanton destruction; they will never match the ghoulish reality of the master.

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