Look at what Saddam did to the Kurds.
Posted on 12/04/2001 8:25:34 AM PST by Will_Kansas
A chamber of horrors so close to the 'Garden of Eden'
In Foreign Parts in Basra, Southern Iraq
Andy Kershaw
01 December 2001
I thought I had a strong stomach – toughened by the minefields and foul frontline hospitals of Angola, by the handiwork of the death squads in Haiti and by the wholesale butchery of Rwanda. But I nearly lost my breakfast last week at the Basrah Maternity and Children's Hospital in southern Iraq.
Dr Amer, the hospital's director, had invited me into a room in which were displayed colour photographs of what, in cold medical language, are called "congenital anomalies", but what you and I would better understand as horrific birth deformities. The images of these babies were head-spinningly grotesque – and thank God they didn't bring out the real thing, pickled in formaldehyde. At one point I had to grab hold of the back of a chair to support my legs.
I won't spare you the details. You should know because – according to the Iraqis and in all likelihood the World Health Organisation, which is soon to publish its findings on the spiralling birth defects in southern Iraq – we are responsible for these obscenities.
During the Gulf war, Britain and the United States pounded the city and its surroundings with 96,000 depleted-uranium shells. The wretched creatures in the photographs – for they were scarcely human – are the result, Dr Amer said.
He guided me past pictures of children born without eyes, without brains. Another had arrived in the world with only half a head, nothing above the eyes. Then there was a head with legs, babies without genitalia, a little girl born with her brain outside her skull and the whatever-it-was whose eyes were below the level of its nose.
Then the chair-grabbing moment – a photograph of what I can only describe (inadequately) as a pair of buttocks with a face and two amphibian arms. Mercifully, none of these babies survived for long.
Depleted uranium has an incubation period in humans of five years. In the four years from 1991 (the end of the Gulf war) until 1994, the Basrah Maternity Hospital saw 11 congenital anomalies. Last year there were 221.
Then there is the alarming increase in cases of leukaemia among Basrah babies lucky enough to have been born with the full complement of limbs and features in the right place. The hospital treated 15 children with leukaemia in 1993. In 2000 it was 60. By the end of this year that figure again will be topped. And so it will go on. Forever.
(Depleted uranium has a half-life of 4.1 billion years. Total disintegration occurs after 25 billion years, the age of the earth.)
In any other country, in which the vital drugs are available, 95 per cent of these infant leukaemia cases would be treated successfully. In Basrah, the figure is 20 per cent. Most heartbreakingly, many children on the road to recovery go into relapse part way through treatment when the sporadic and meagre supply of drugs runs out. And then they die.
By the United Nations' own admission 5,000 Iraqi children die every month because of a shortage of medicines created by sanctions imposed by ... the United Nations.
Tony Blair, on numerous occasions, has misled Parliament and the country (perhaps unwittingly) by saying that Saddam Hussein is free to buy all the medicines Iraq needs under the oil-for-food programme. This is not true. Oil for food amounts to just 60 cents (40p) per Iraqi per day and everything – food, education, health care and rebuilding of infrastructure – has to come out of that. There simply is not enough to go around.
And has Mr Blair heard of the UN Security Council 661 Committee? If he has, then he keeps quiet about it. The committee was certainly unknown to me until I toured the shabby hospitals of Basrah.
This committee, which meets in secret in New York and does not publish minutes, supervises sanctions on Iraq. President Saddam is not free to buy Iraq's non-military needs on the world market. The country's requirements have to be submitted to 661 and, often after bureaucratic delay, a judgement is handed down on what Iraq can and cannot buy. I have obtained a copy of recent 661 rulings and some of the decisions seem daft if not peevish. "Dual use" is the most common reason to refuse a purchase, meaning the item requested could be put to military use.
So how does the 661 committee expect Saddam Hussein to wage war with "beef extract powder and broth"? Does 661 expect him to turn on the Kurds again by spraying them with "malt extract"? Or to send his presidential guard back into Kuwait armed to the teeth with "pencils"? Pencils, you see, according to 661, contain graphite and therefore could be put to military use. (Tough on the eager schoolchildren of Basrah who have little with which to write).
Across town at the Basrah Teaching Hospital, the whimsical rulings of 661 are not so comical. Dr Jawad Al-Ali, the director of oncology, trained in the UK and a member of the Royal College of Physicians, talked of an "epidemic" of cancers in southern Iraq. "The number of cancer cases is doubling every year. So is the severity of the cancers, and there has been a big increase in cancer among the young," he said.
Last week he was struggling to treat 20 cancer patients with "a huge shortage of chemotherapy drugs" and just two days supply of morphine. "We are crippled," he said, "by Committee 661." The doctor applied for, but was denied, life-saving machinery – deep X-ray equipment, blood component separators, even needles for biopsies. All, said 661, could have military use.
Tell that to Mofidah Sabah, the mother of four-year-old Yahia. The little boy has both leukaemia in relapse and neuroblastoma, a cancer behind the eye that has bulged and twisted his left eyeball in its socket. Ms Sabah travels miles every day to sit and cuddle her son on his grubby bed. If Yahia lived in Birmingham, his chances of survival would not be in much doubt. But not in Basrah. "I'm afraid he will not live very long," Dr Amer whispered.
Ms Sabah said: "I will leave everything to God, but I want God to revenge those who attacked us." Yahia's illness is not her first brush with tragedy. She lost 12 members of her family during an Allied bombing in 1991. Her husband, a soldier, fought in the Gulf war. He is still in the Iraqi army and has just been reposted, to Qurna, 50 miles north of Basra and among the contaminated former battlefields. Qurna, according to legend, was the site of the Garden of Eden.
Look at what Saddam did to the Kurds.
Well, there's a lot of kids missing arms and legs born to veterans. You can ignore that if you want to, but it's pretty clear that something is happening.
Yes!
Sure, as soon as they live up to their end of the bargain, which they had agreed upon.
Oh gosh. It's incubating. And what will we see when it's finished incubating?
without brains
Ah. The answer. Little Saddams.
Seriously, though - it seems more likely that a large number of these kinds of birth defects is the result of something like Saddam's rampant chemical weapons research, in all its sloppiness.
Really? Then, how do you explain Gulf War Syndrome?"
It's fairly well established that a number of soldiers were in fact exposed to a cocktail of chemicals in Iraq. Again, cauterize the place - it's past time.
It is still radioactive, but to a greatly lesser extent than fuel grade. The half-lives listed are silly, and I am not aware of anyone even speculating that the earth is anywhere near 25 billion years old. Most don't even believe the Universe to be that old. In any event, generally the longer the half-life, the lower the intensity of radiation (after all, it's spread out over more time).
Most of this article displays profound ignorance of the science it professes to be relating.
Exactly what I wanted to post. Saddam used nerve gas on his own people. I remember seeing the pictures of Kurds he was trying to eliminate.
My work experience includes chemical plants before my career as a software developer and I'll bet the Iraqi's don't use the environmental controls and safety measures we use in our plants. They are making some nasty stuff in their factories and you can bet their people are not protected. Consequently you will have more birth defects.
Our organophosphate pesticides are similar to the organophosphate nerve agents.
Most anything written in "The Independent" radiates ignorance at approximately two billion terracurie per second. That's why its readers tend to become instantly stupid as rocks.
The article is bogus. Propaganda. Besides which the 'Garden of Eden' was in present day Afghanistan.
Facts? Documentation?
What would be truly amazing here would be if so many of such would be able to go to term. A great many mutants and abbherations come to be under normal circumstance, but only rarely do they make it to birth with severe deformations, and rarer still to a year old. Iraqi pre-natal medical science is amazing.
Indeed. But we have seen that Saddam isn't exactly focussing on his people's welfare, much of the time. I'd expect the medical all-round coverage in Iraq to be, at least, slightly below par. Is it possible that all this is in fact deliberately manufactured, or results of deliberate experiments in the Iraqi chemical wepons program?
Mass hysteria.
How do you explain that all the malingerers and crappy soldiers in the units I was in 'suddenly' came down with GWS so they could get out of formations and stay on sick-call and get special treatment?
How do you explain that this mysterious illness appears more often in support troops than in combat troops who actually could have been exposed to 'something'?
Based on what I saw in the Army it was a nice way to be a sick-call commando and sham out of your job.
Sorry...look inward first.
So on point.
I have seen some of these photos with my own eyes in foreign news service providers online. Easier for the overly credulous to simply discount them as bu!!$hit than to go look for oneself, I guess.
Overthrowing/killing Saddam was never what the gulf war, the inspections or the sanctions were all about anyway. There are a million children dead/dying in Iraq (regardless of who's responsible) and Saddam is still quite alive.
'anything we do is always right, and anything they do is always wrong.'
exactly.
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