Doctors are calling for an investigation into an unprecedented number of birth defects in Fallujah, Iraq.
The war-ravaged population center has seen an increase of up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants since pre-war levels, according to a report by the UK’s Guardian. Documented statistics for birth defects in Fallujah have only emerged in recent months, but the rate of abormalities, including early-life cancers, is high enough to cause alarm at Fallujah’s General Hospital.
“We are seeing a very significant increase in central nervous system anomalies,” the hospital’s director, Dr Ayman Qais, told the Guardian. “Before 2003 I was seeing sporadic numbers of deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities has increased dramatically.”
“Most are in the head and spinal cord, but there are also many deficiencies in lower limbs,” he said. “There is also a very marked increase in the number of cases of less than two years with brain tumors. This is now a focus area of multiple tumors.”
Here’s a video. Warning, its graphic and may not be suitable for younger children:
The Raw Story reporter mentions white phosphorus bombs as a possibility also, but my money is on depleted uranium, or maybe the combination of both. But who really knows? I have my doubts that any thorough investigation will ever be carried out, and certainly not by the US government. Just as for years our government denied the effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and has stalled investigations into the causes of Gulf War Syndrome, the effects of toxic chemicals and compounds employed in today’s military arsenal will also likely be swept under the rug.
This is one more reason war must be a last option, and not a first one. The events of 9/11 did not require a war against Iraq. Now the innocent people of that country anf our service men and women will suffer from the “collateral damage” of that war of aggression for decades to come. And people wonder why we want Bush and Cheney tried as war criminals? As the International Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials stated after the end of of the War in Europe which Nazi Germany stated:
“[T]o initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and a whole host of lesser lights in the Bush administration are war criminals. They will never be tried for their crimes in America, but they should carry that taint with them for the rest of their lives.