Thursday, September 01, 2005
Identifying MisInformation: State's Blogger Backlash :: PEJ News :: Peace, Earth & Justice News
Identifying MisInformation: State's Blogger Backlash :: PEJ News :: Stories, Features, Opinion and Analysis :: Peace, Earth & Justice News: "The State Department's absurd claim about DU is particularly pernicious. 'In southern Iraq, scientists are reporting five times higher levels of gamma radiation in the air, which increases the radioactive body burden daily of inhabitants,' writes Leuren Moret, an international radiation specialist. 'In fact, Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan are uninhabitable.... Cancer starts with one alpha particle under the right conditions. One gram of DU is the size of a period in this sentence and releases 12,000 alpha particles per second.'
But according to the miscreants at the State Department, we don't have to worry about DU because 'weapons-grade uranium or fuel-grade uranium' is more dangerous, sort of like it is more dangerous to drink a few ounces of wood stripper than a fifth of bourbon. 'Depleted uranium is what is left over when natural uranium is enriched to make weapons-grade or fuel-grade uranium. In the process, the uranium loses, or is depleted, of almost half its radioactivity, which is how depleted uranium gets its name. But facts like this are less important in peoples' minds than the deeply ingrained associations they have with the world 'uranium.' For this reason, most people believe that depleted uranium is much more dangerous than it actually is.' Note the words 'natural' and 'depleted' here, leading us to believe the stuff is more or less harmless, an assertion that is criminal and malicious, to say the least."
But according to the miscreants at the State Department, we don't have to worry about DU because 'weapons-grade uranium or fuel-grade uranium' is more dangerous, sort of like it is more dangerous to drink a few ounces of wood stripper than a fifth of bourbon. 'Depleted uranium is what is left over when natural uranium is enriched to make weapons-grade or fuel-grade uranium. In the process, the uranium loses, or is depleted, of almost half its radioactivity, which is how depleted uranium gets its name. But facts like this are less important in peoples' minds than the deeply ingrained associations they have with the world 'uranium.' For this reason, most people believe that depleted uranium is much more dangerous than it actually is.' Note the words 'natural' and 'depleted' here, leading us to believe the stuff is more or less harmless, an assertion that is criminal and malicious, to say the least."
