Saturday, March 11, 2006

Halliburton's Depleted Uranium Cover Up

File this story under the headline;

The Joys Of Privatization

Tony Blair is really Maggie Thatcher in drag, doing that Victor Victoria thing. As this story about the contracting out of a major British military establishment to Halliburton shows.

And meanwhile back in the USSA folks are all verklempt that a private British Company, good old P&O , currently contracted to run American ports is being sold to the UAE.

My guess is they would be happier if it was sold to Halliburton. I know Dick Cheney would be. And then Halliburtons cover ups of dangers to humanity could be excused as National Security.

Privatizing State functions means the state is no longer answerable to the public, to its citizens. The Privatized State is responsible to its stakeholders, that is the companies it contracts out to and their shareholders. This reveals the real meaning of 'stakeholder democracy' that Tony Blair and George Bush talk about.

Depleted uranium measured in British atmosphere from battlefields in the Middle East

by Leuren Moret

"Did the use of uranium weapons in Gulf War II result in contamination of Europe? Evidence from the measurements of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, Aldermaston, Berkshire, U.K.," shows such contamination, reported the Sunday Times Online, in a shocking scientific study authored by British scientists Dr. Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan.

The highest levels of depleted uranium ever measured in the atmosphere in Britain were transported on air currents from the Middle East and Central Asia. Of special significance were those from the Tora Bora bombing in Afghanistan in 2001 and the "shock and awe" bombing during Gulf War II in Iraq in 2003.

Out of concern for the public, the official British government air monitoring facility, known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment, at Aldermaston, was established years ago to measure radioactive emissions from British nuclear power plants and atomic weapons facilities.

The British government facility was taken over three years ago by Halliburton, which refused at first to release air monitoring data to Dr. Busby, as required by law.

The fact that the air monitoring data was circulated by Halliburton AWE to the Defense Procurement Agency implies that it was considered to be relevant and that Dr. Busby was stonewalled because Halliburton AWE clearly recognized that it was a serious enough matter to justify a government interpretation of the results and official decisions had to be made about what the data would show and its political implications for the military.

In a similar circumstance, in 1992, Major Doug Rokke, the director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Cleanup Project after Gulf War I, was ordered by a U.S. Army general officer to write a no-bid contract, "Depleted Uranium, Contaminated Equipment and Facilities Recovery Plan Outline," describing the procedures for cleaning up Kuwait, including depleted uranium, for Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton.




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