Future Generations Are Counting On Us

KONA, HI ~ To: Our Noble Friends at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Re: DU at Pohakuloa Training Area and Beyond
Date: August 26, 2009

Aloha and Mahalo for coming to hear from concerned citizens.

They say it’s not the snake bite that kills; it’s the venom. The act of dumping radioactive toxins in Hawaii was not malicious; it was an unconscious act, like a snake bite. When the beast strikes out, aware only of its own need, survival in the heat of battle, it may accidentally wound itself, not realizing the poisonous venom could harm the entire species in ways we don’t want to envision.

But today, the venom of weapons of mass destruction has left enough scars, and allowing a nuclear hazard to remain at Pohakuloa Training Area (PTA) in Hawaii, or any further proliferation and pollution of Hawaii, would be an assault on our lives, our liberty, and our freedom to live healthfully and peacefully.

This is a fragile island. Unique life forms found nowhere else in the world abound here. Our island is a natural treasure, and should be protected in the spirit that the U. S. Military says is its mission, to protect the U. S. and its citizens. I would like to direct our attention so we can actually produce our desired results, which are protection of health, peace, and freedom in the world, right? Let’s see if our efforts are realizing their purpose.

are we free to be healthy?

Lethal Depleted Uranium – DU — is a radioactive substance with a half-life of 4.5-billion years. DU has been allegedly lost and found by the Army in at least 4 locations on the Big Island over the last two years, after officials had assured residents otherwise.

The U. S. Army and state health officials stopped looking for more DU then because the Big Island terrain of undulating, ridged, and swirling lava rock laid down by the towering Mauna Kea volcano have made the tiny yellow shards hard to find.

No one knows yet how much more military debris and nuclear toxin may be discovered in Hawaii, or how dangerous it really is, but one look at photos of infants poisoned by the effects of DU weaponry used by the U. S. military in Afghanistan, will wake you up and change your life forever.

I can’t believe any sane person would want their government to use or allow this nightmare toxin anywhere, much less in their own backyard.

If the NRC, the Army, and our state health department really want to protect our health, and the health of our devoted, heroic soldiers in the military, they can begin by responding to legitimate health concerns which the people of Hawaii justly have.

Already, Hawaii County Council requests for gathering accurate statistics and testing people whose ailments look suspiciously like radiation poisoning have been rebuffed. Why, when we are doing what is natural to us, protecting our families and communities, would the the U. S. Military ignore us? Isn’t protection of our people and communities the purpose of the U. S. Military?

Let’s look for a moment at the methods we can use together to accomplish our goals of health, peace, and freedom.

are we free to be peaceful?

In Hawaii, nurses who report one in 17 infants are being born with one or more birth defects, find it hard to be peaceful. They are outraged. We don’t know all the reasons why infants are born armless, footless, fingerless, thumbs growing out the center of their palms, with intestines misplaced and deformed faces, but it happens more frequently where parents of children have been exposed to Radioactive Depleted Uranium.

The health department apparently does not know if the rate of birth defects is going up or going down in Hawaii because the most recent state health surveys I’ve heard about were conducted by people phoning random households and asking, “Is anyone sick?”

Telephone surveys are not hard data. We need to collect accurate statistics from health care providers, hospitals, schools, and clinics, carefully evaluating for radiation markers – cancers, leukemia, and respiratory ailments.

are we free to be free?

Suddenly, late in the day when bombs were dropped on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, and after initial opposition by Governor Joseph B. Poindexter, martial law was declared in Hawaii and the writ of habeas corpus was suspended.

General Walter C. Short issued a proclamation in which he announced that he was taking over the government and assuming the position of military governor of Hawaii. Initially it was assumed that martial law would last only a short time. However, it lasted for almost three years. (check it out at http://gohawaii.about.com/od/hawaiianhistory4/ss/lest_we_forget_5.htm)

At that point, there was a seismic shift in Hawaii’s pristine natural condition. On Oahu, during and after World War II, someone or several in the hierarchy of leadership allowed the U. S. Military to dump 2000 fifty-five gallon drums of radioactive toxins off the coast of Oahu at Pearl Harbor. A mixed crew of Hawaiians – hula dancers as well as housewives, retired Marines as well as nurses — are still thinking about the effects of that war as we assert the right of our people to remain free, free to be healthy.

radioactive uranium, the wages of war.

Take a deep breath. Or wait, maybe better not.

The immediate threat to Hawaii is the U. S. Army, which has stationed 1000 19-ton vehicles and 4,000 soldiers in Hawaii. The Stryker Brigade Combat Team tanks carry Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons, which are radioactive (RU). When these radioactive uranium munitions are fired, they spread aerosols in the tank, onto soldiers who occupy the tanks, and into the nearby atmosphere, surface water, flora, fauna, and the entire food chain.

Two to five years after exposure, local animals and humans often develop nerve disorders, bleeding, cancers, and tumors. Nobody wants to think about the deadly invisible uranium particles which are spreading death and mutilation in places like Afghanistan, Hawaii, and other areas around the world.

We want to be happy! We want others to be happy. We want to live in Aloha in Hawaii and spread the sense of Aloha to others. But remaining happy in this time and place includes sharing happiness in the decision to dampen, derail, and stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, which DU clearly is.

When celebrated Longevity Specialist Dr. Gabriel Cousins says Not-So-Depleted Uranium “threatens to kill and destroy a whole world,” he is not exaggerating.

close to home

The U. S. Army has admitted to using not-so-depleted-uranium in Hawaii and contaminating Schofield Barracks on Oahu in 45 separate locations. On our delicate tropical islands, almost 1000 different Superfund and toxic debris spills have been identified over the last half a century. Hawaiians want the U. S. Army to clean up its lethal pollution and stop using illegal weapons of mass destruction here and elsewhere.

Current medical problems found in places where the U. S. is using weapons of mass destruction— Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia — are now showing up in Hawaii. Neurological disorders in the children, cancers, birth defects, tumors, and bleeding gums. On the islands of Oahu and the Big Island, known worldwide as the ‘Healing Island,’ hunters have found bizarre animal tumors, people undergo nerve spasms, and diabetes, asthma, and other markers for radiation poisoning continue to alarm residents.

We have no polluting industry in Hawaii to account for this, except the Pohakuloa Training Area.

You may say, well, what about the vog? Yes, the volcanic ash swirling in a fog cloud of crystals makes it harder to breath on some days for some people. But the days or weeks of sulfuric acid in the air may irritate lungs and sting the eyes, but it does not produce birth defects in future generations like DU does.

hawaiians are known by travelers worldwide as the keepers of Aloha

Tourists flock to the island for its beauty, majesty, and sense of Aloha. Once in paradise, many are shocked to learn that Kona Hospital nurses have seen an alarming increase in cancers, thyroid problems, and diabetes downwind of Pohakuloa, the U. S. Army Training Area where the Pentagon recently overrode a majority of the citizenry and stationed the Stryker Brigade Combat Team.

The Strykers are massive military tanks that carry the huge 105 mm cannon and multiple 25 mm Bushmaster machine guns, both of which shoot DU ammunition. When fired, they discharge radioactive aerosols that affect local populations, like the Iraqi and Bosnian children whose leukemia rates soared 400% above normal following those wars.

not-so-depleted uranium exposure ~ not a pretty picture

When inhaled, DU particles lodge in the lungs and bathe the surrounding tissue with radioactive alpha radiation. Whether uranium weapons are fired in Iraq, Palestine, or Hawaii, aerosolized uranium particles rise in the atmosphere and ride on high-altitude currents to endanger the respiratory system of every living thing, no matter where we live.

Once DU exposure has occurred, genetic misinformation enters and burns the sperm, can be passed to one’s mate during intercourse, and causes birth defects in children. It makes no difference if you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a Jew or Hawaiian, Liberian or a libertarian, DU particles follow their radioactive destiny, which lasts an astounding 4.5 billion years before uranium deteriorates to lead.

Hermann Joseph Mueller, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1946 for his discovery of mutations resulting from X-ray irradiation, tracked genetic mutations for 40,000 generations. With no known way for the human body to rid itself of these radioactive particles, the health damage is essentially permanent.

You cannot protect yourself from this hazard, as it penetrates protective gear, clothing, and gas masks.

Breathing radioactive particulate matter has long been known to cause lung cancer. Miners working in uranium and other types of mines where radioactivity is an occupational hazard have a higher incidence of lung cancer. This danger from airborne uranium is much greater than that found from cigarette smoking, and uranium has more far-reaching implications in future generations.

In Bosnia, where DU weapons were used, multiple malignancies are cropping up. Physicians report seeing patients with three simultaneous malignancies, something never previously reported in medicine, and there is no known therapy for them. Dr. James Howenstine, a Board-certified specialist in internal medicine, says, “Children in Iraq are dying in epidemic numbers from malignancies.”

Death may seem like a blessing when compared to the newborn babies with genetic damage in the face, limbs and atrophied organs. In Bastra, Iraq, after Gulf War I, there was maybe one baby a week born with birth defects,” says Dr. Cousins. “Now it is 10-12 a day. “

What’s happening in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan as a result of the United States using DU weapons of mass destruction is a preview of coming attractions in Hawaii, and eventually all over the world, if we don’t act now to stop it.

Nothing less than the genetic future of humanity is at risk. While the heat of war may make us believe we ought to take extraordinary and risky measures to protect our citizens, I daresay uranium poisoning has murdered thousands of times more people than those who were lost in the World Trade Towers. This is not to belittle their deaths or the real concerns about terrorism, but rather to elicit responses and call people to action towards fulfilling our true goals: health, peace, and freedom. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

THE ONLY WAY TO STOP NOT-SO-DEPLETED URANIUM POISONING IS TO CLEAN UP THE MESS AND STOP USING IT!

oh no! not the animals too?

Here in Hawaii, hunters report finding dead birds and animals with strange tumors around the Army’s Pohakuloa Training Area on the great mountain, Mauna Kea. Neurological disorders, rashes, asthma, and other radiation-related diseases are appearing in an area where there’s no polluting industry and an ecology representing thousands of years of healthy balance.

DU laying fallow on the ground may not cause problems, but if it is hit, heated, or ignited, it can aerosolize, enter the troposphere, and continue to ravage populations all around the world.

In Hawaii, we need to establish health baselines, track the changes, and do research using scientific methods. Until then, no one can say how large the impact has been, but we know this: health professionals on the Big Island are seeing alarming rises in cancer, leukemia, and asthma, all diseases identified by Dr. Sister Rosalie Bertell, a Ph. D. nun specializing in radiation disease, as radiation poisoning markers.

(Visit http://www.ratical.org/radiation/NRBE/NRadBioEffects.html for more detail)

as goes Hawaii and Afghanistan, so goes the troposphere.

Anywhere on the planet where a modern army chooses to practice for war or wage real war using Depleted Uranium, they release not-so-depleted radioactive particles.

Not-so-depleted uranium knows no national or continental boundary. You can’t fence it or contain it.

Radioactive Uranium aerosols suspended in the air ANYWHERE in the world is another coffin nail in the genetic suicide we could be igniting in the species if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission allows it in Hawaii and elsewhere.

Radiation readings spiked dangerously high thousands of miles away in London nine days after the U. S. invasion of Iraq during the Shock-and-Awe phase of that war. The global scale of troposheric radiation is immense. The worldwide obesity problem that’s stumped everyone from Oprah to Dr. Gupta might even be caused by radiation poisoning, according to Dr. Bertell.

But the darkest effects occur in war zones themselves. A Canadian research group found very high levels of uranium in Afghans during tests just after the invasion. On April 30, 2008, Dawood Azami of the BBC World Service reported that rates of health problems affecting Afghan children doubled in the last two years. Some scientists say the rise is linked to the use of weapons containing depleted uranium (DU) by the US-led coalition that invaded the country in 2001.

Dr. Mohammed Daud Miraki wrote a book called Afghanistan After Democracy about his experience of watching the genocide of children and neighbors. He included photos of infants born with birth defects in Afghanistan during the Gulf War. (Visit www.afghanistanafterdemocracy.org to see the photos)

Dangerous radiation exposures have abused not only our enemies, but also our friendly neighbors like the Bikini Islanders, who in the 1950s were exposed to radioactive fallout in nuclear tests conducted by the U.S. government so scientists could study the long-term effects of radiation.

How many more deaths from radiation poisoning must we see before we take this deadly threat to the future of humanity seriously?

In Afghanistan, Dr. Miraki gave up on raising money for hospitals and research on children’s birth defects, cancers, and radiation poisoning and started raising money for orphanages. He saw there was no way to save so many who suffered from the Radioactive Depleted Uranium tragedy in his home country – increased birth defects, leukemia, and small cancers circulating in the body.

For myself, I believe in the power of the mind to change the effects of toxins like Depleted Uranium. But I worry about the infants, the people who don’t know yet how to use their reason and their skills to produce desired results in body, mind, work, civic duty and community spirit. Even a very mindful body, besieged by toxins, may not be able to keep the promise of health made in the mind.

Now, horrible as it is. It’s all workable.

the nun who would save our soldiers and children

The first book on radiation-related cancer was published in 1912, almost 90 years ago. In 1966, Dr. Rosalie Bertell earned a Doctorate in Biometry at the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC. She has been working in environmental epidemiology ever since, collaborating in analyses undertaken in the US, Canada, Japan, the Marshall Islands, Malaysia, India, Germany, Ukraine and other countries.

In 1998, Dr. Sister Bertell gave testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. She pointed out that victims of nuclear radiation are often our own U. S. soldiers, the ones on the front lines who use the DU weapons, as well as the intended enemy. “Since many of the veterans exposed to nuclear fallout are now dead, it’s been hard to gather together a force (strong enough) to stop the U. S. from using these Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

One survivor is onetime U. S. Colonel Doug Rokke, Ph. D. in Health Physics, the specialist assigned to prepare soldiers to respond to nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare in the Gulf Wars. Dr. Rokke, the U. S. government’s own DU expert, like Madame Curie before him, became poisoned by his contact with uranium dust.

“We recommended care for anybody downwind of uranium dust,” says Dr. Rokke. “Anybody working in and around uranium contamination, and anyone within a vehicle, structure, or building that’s struck with uranium munitions. That’s thousands upon thousands of US troops.”

Thousands of women and children have also been contaminated in Afghanistan and Iraq. “And it’s not just children in Iraq,” Dr. Rokke asserts. “It’s children born to soldiers after they came back home. The military admitted that they were finding uranium excreted in the semen of the soldiers. (So) the genetics are messed up. . . Studies have found that male soldiers who served in the Gulf War were almost twice as likely to have a child with a birth defect, and female soldiers almost three times as likely.”

This is not a problem we can simply sweep under the rug. Many of us, residents of Hawaii and peaceful people around the world, feel you must act to remove the deadly DU from Hawaii and demand an end to the U. S. Military’s use of weapons of mass destruction.

checklist for the NRC from a concerned hawaiian wahini — “woman”

1). In the Hawaiian language, there is another word, Ho’oponopono. It’s to “make things right” among your family, the community, and in the world. When someone has lied, as the Army has lied to Hawaiians and others about Depleted Uranium, trust is damaged. Perhaps they inherited the original mistakes, the lies, the cover-up, but now is the time to tell the truth.

To make things right, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Army, the Department of Health, and our Governor are going to have to admit that Depleted Uranium is not depleted – it’s deadly. Their previous commanders may have betrayed health and environmental laws, but you need not.

2). Here in Hawaii, we need the Army to follow its own U.S. Army Regulation 700-48 to clean up dispersed radioactive contamination and seal off forever areas where disturbance of fragments or unexploded ordnance would generate a hazard.

3). We would like for Dr. Lorrin Pang to have full access to the scoping and characterization teams as they continue to monitor and evaluate the radiation data on the Big Island. We want Dr. Pang to supervise the health assessment so the public will trust it. Otherwise, all your efforts will look to us like a sham, an exercise in self-appeasement, which we’ve heard before.

4). Here’s the key thing: Once the fine particles of Radioactive Uranium are ignited by anything like one of the eight wheels of a Stryker tire or a fire, or during one of the Army’s controlled burns, they dissolve into a fine powder of isotopes, tiny tiny nanoslivers of glass – pure slippery radioactivity that spreads out into the surrounding room, city, state, and up into the sky where it circulates around the entire world.

More worldwide distribution of DU would be a big mistake. We cannot escape it. We must stop using Weapons of Mass Destruction that contain DU. The effects of Radioactive Depleted Uranium munitions, which the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have used or are using in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Puerto Rico, Lebanon, and all over the world, are too devastating to fathom and too brutally fatal to allow.

We must either remove or seal off the contaminated sites. Make them into Nuclear Shrines, built to last the 4.5-billion-year half life it will take to dissipate the radiation. Make the sealed structures into temples, unforgettable reminders to future generations of the sanity of their ancestors, the ones who stopped using nuclear weapons and the deadly wages of war. Make it happen before it is too late.

5). Besides cleaning up and sealing off the DU shards, we insist the U. S. Army give radiation tests to citizens, workers, children, and anyone who may be suffering from medical disorders because of the reckless radioactive contamination of our land, sea, and air.

On the Big Island alone in the last several years, a woman’s sister in Waikaloa developed leukemia after five years in a house they discovered later was near a World War II practice target.

Unexploded ordnance was found in a backyard in Waimea by children playing on a Sunday afternoon.

Twenty-two people in one area of North Kona report having Trigeminal Neuralgia, a rare disorder that could well be associated with radiation poisoning.

And the Army and Department of Health won’t test these ailing people for radiation? Why not? What are they afraid of? We want to know if there is a link and then we will have solid ground to find solutions.

6). We expect the Army to monitor for radiation in the air, soil, tree bark, and animal droppings around the training ranges. We expect them to test local citizens for radiation if they request it, and if there is evidence of poisoning, to pay for medical treatment of children, elders, and adults whose lives have been tragically altered by the U. S. Military’s illegal use of Radioactive Depleted Uranium against U. S. citizens.

Hawaiian citizens want the Army to stop its Build-Up and begin the Clean-Up. That’s how the honorable members of the NRC, our U. S. Military, and the leadership present here today can protect our world and our families.