February 28, 2006 7:35 PM

HAVE DU WILL TRAVEL

Leuren Moret, of Berkeley, Calif., is an independent scientist who works on radiation and public health issues with communities around the world. She earned her B.S. in Geology at U.C. Davis in 1968, and her M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from U.C. Berkeley in 1978. Moret is a geoscientist who became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after witnessing fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. She now dedicates her life to revealing and understanding the actual health effects of radiation exposure. She has worked extensively on the impact of radiation on public health from nuclear power plants and atmospheric testing and how radiation moves through the environment. Moret works with the Radiation and Public Health Project, a group of independent scientists and has written a scientific report on depleted uranium for the United Nations subcommission investigating the illegality of depleted uranium munitions. She has been trained on radiation issues by a former Manhattan Project Scientist and retired insider at the Livermore Lab who is an expert on radioactive fallout and rainout. Together with Dr. Hari Sharma, they have studied high levels of depleted uranium measured in the tissue samples of 70 residents of Basra, Iraq, who died after the Gulf War from internal exposure to depleted uranium. She wrote the forword to Akira Tashiro’s award-winning “Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Depleted Uranium,” and appears in the recently released DVD “Beyond Treason” that was produced by Power Hour Productions <http://www.beyondtreason.com/>, an 89-minute film that presents comprehensive documentation from United States Government archives of a massive cover-up, including military and civilian experimentation, dating back over 60 years.

‘Depleted uranium is the trojan horse of nuclear war.’

Iconoclast Interview With Leuren Moret

ICONOCLAST: What do you think of the Busby report? Do you think it’s pretty accurate?

MORET: Oh, I think it’s totally accurate. Those numbers are from the British government. There is absolutely no doubt at all that those numbers are completely accurate. That facility has been there for years. It was established out of concern for the public to monitor the nuclear powerplant emissions and the nuclear weapons facility emissions in Britain. They have the best equipment. They have the best technicians. They have the best scientists doing all of that monitoring, whose numbers have to be completely correct. If anything, they would be lower than the actual amounts that they were measuring. They would never make them higher.

ICONOCLAST: How would you describe what happened?

MORET: What happened is Dr. Busby is on a British government committee and he is an official scientific advisor on low level radiation to the British government. He also works with the European Parliament and they asked him to produce an independent report on low level radiation for the European Parliament. He produced something with 45 other scientists called the ECRR Report. It came out in January of 2003. I took it all over the Eastern U.S. and was introducing it and talking to it before they even had a press conference and released it in Britain. He went to Bosnia and Kosovo and collected depleted uranium samples and we’ve all been very concerned about the transport of these tiny particles all over the world. I am really the one who brought this issue out into the open. It was perfectly reasonable and justified for him to ask the Aldermaston facility for those numbers.

They’d always given them to him before, but when he asked them two years ago, out of concern about the transport of these materials, they refused to give them to him. I asked him why and he said that. Three years ago, Halliburton took over that facility. I asked, did Halliburton take over a British government air monitoring facility and he said yes. That’s very interesting and they’re the ones who wouldn’t give you the numbers and he said yes. Last Jan.1, in 2005, the Freedom of Information Act went into law and was effective on that day and that’s the day he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the numbers. They still refused to give them to him and so there was a long delay. Finally, Halliburton gave him the numbers, but they wouldn’t give him any of the 2003 numbers for the Iraq war. When I saw how high that number was, 1,700, I understood exactly why they had taken the facility over three years before. It was too high.

ICONOCLAST: What should the numbers be?

MORET: Less than 30. We should only be measuring natural uranium in the air that is coming out of mineral sources and natural sources. There already is contanimation from nuclear weapons testing and even lower orbital space is contaminated with uranium and uranium decay products. I discovered a paper on it in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity, which was written in 2002. That is a very, very small amount. What they’re measuring now are these horrendous peaks that exactly correlate with the battlefield events in Iraq and Kosovo and Bosnia and Afganastan. And there is even a piece during a Chechnya conflict in ‘98 and ‘99, which indicates the Russians are using it, too, in Chechnya.

ICONOCLAST: If you have shock and awe going on in Iraq and the readings are being monitored in the UK, is it like a sweep of these going through there and then you have your spikes and then it goes back down, is that in the air?

MORET: Yes. This is just pollution to have a point source, a battlefield or whatever that is releasing this into the air. On those filters in Britain, there were also sand and dust particles that were 1 to 5 microns that also came from the Middle East. These are well known all over Europe because sand and dust storms that originate in the Middle East and Central Asia and especially North Africa have been identified for centuries in Europe.

They were called blood rains because in the hot desert conditions, iron oxide coats the grains of sand and dust and when they’re transported North over Europe and they’re rained out, those iron oxides stain the rain kind of the color of a weak wine and they were a bad omen. Boy, they sure are a bad omen now, because they’re also transporting radioactive isotopes. Now, that sand and dust, we already know where that’s coming from, were on the filters with the much smaller particles of depleted uranium, which the average particle size for atmospheric test is a tenth of a micron. These DU particles form at really high temperatures under battlefield conditions and they’re very tiny. They’re called nanoparticles.

ICONOCLAST: Do they land on the ground?

MORET: No. These are so small that the movement in the air currents and the big convection cells which are weather fronts and stuff, keep them suspended. They don’t settle out. They have to be rained out or snowed out or permanently suspended.

ICONOCLAST: If this is in the air in the UK and it rains, do they become part of the soil?

MORET: Yes. They rain on buildings and rooftops and on trees and leaves and on people. Because they’re wet, they stick to whatever they land on and it is almost impossible to remove it.

ICONOCLAST: They radiate when they’re there?

MORET: Yes. So, it’s causing an epidemic of melanoma, globally. That means skin cancer, especially in children. There are increases in infant mortality now being reported in the New York Times a couple of years ago. I saw an article in January of 2003, Mysterious Increases in Infant Mortality in 20 Regions of Europe. It’s a global disaster. There’s a frog die-off going on. Frogs are dying off all over the world. The worst thing is the global increases in diabetes. Diabetes is an immediate response just within months to these depleted uranium battles. We can see especially huge increases in the Gulf states which are Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and then on up the east coast.

ICONOCLAST: How do you know they’re attributed to DU?

MORET: Because the increases correlate each year with the battles. When there aren’t battles or that stuff isn’t transported sufficiently across the Atlantic, then there is not much of an increase. It drops off or stabilizes.

ICONOCLAST: The reason the Gulf states are affected more is because of the Trade Winds?

MORET: Yes. These are not hurricanes. These are huge sand and dust storms that are a million square miles in size.

ICONOCLAST: Are the affects permanent or if they quit using this type of ammunition, would it reverse.

MORET: Well, it’s like atmospheric testing contamination of radioactive pollution of the atmosphere. As it’s rained out and snowed out, it’s deposited in the environment and it sticks to any surface where it lands. It’s removed from the atmosphere. The most harmful pathway of exposure is inhalation. If it is sticking to things, at least it’s not in the air and eventually it’s going to end up in the ocean. But that will be a long, long time.

ICONOCLAST: One thing that the Times article suggested was that radiation experts also said that other environmental sources were more likely to blame. What would they be referring to?

MORET: This is typical spin. They’ve been saying this for years and they say, well, it’s in your backyard. It’s in the soil. That’s true, but the concentration of uranium that occurs throughout the earth is like one part per two and a half million. So, it’s a very low concentration and a lot of it is in the ocean. It’s not getting these huge concentrations in Britain on air filters at atomic monitoring facilities because it’s from a natural source. This is airborne. The air monitoring station isn’t just measuring at one site. They had over five sites where they were measuring these numbers and they were actually higher away from the actual facility where the emissions are coming out. If it was from that facility, the numbers would have been the highest at the facility because it would have been the point source. The fact that you’re finding Middle Eastern dust and sand on the filters with the DU indicates that it is coming from the Middle East.

ICONOCLAST: You can tell what kind of sand it is by some kind of test?

MORET: Oh sure. All the nuclear facilities in every country in Europe — Greece and Romania and Italy — they monitor every single day, those sand and dust storms from whatever is coming from whatever direction. They’ve always done that. During the battle of Kosovo and Bosnia, the European Parliament requested that all those countries do air monitoring of radioactive pollution and of chemical pollution coming from the NATO invasion of Yugoslavia. These were very extensive reports and are available from the EU. I don’t think there is any place it’s more monitored than Europe because they just have the infrastructure and the facilities and they know everything.

ICONOCLAST: The spikes that occurred, when they occurred, were an oddity? You wouldn’t have spikes normally.

MORET: There has to be a point first, to have such high levels. The highs and lows from the weather conditions and the direction of the wind currents is consistent with these high levels in Britain.

ICONOCLAST: It says in this article that on two occasions, levels exceeded this ratio in which the Environmental Agency must be informed so within safety limits.

MORET: They say that, but none of it is safe. A report issued by the National Academy of Sciences came out in July. It’s the seventh report over the last 30 or 40 years, which is an official scientific academy report in the United States and it stated very clearly there is no safe level of radiation exposure.

ICONOCLAST: They also say in this article that other experts says local environmental sources, such as a power station, were more likely at fault. What would a power station be?

MORET: A nuclear power plant.

ICONOCLAST: Wouldn’t they have had some kind of major. . .

MORET: It would have had to be a Chernobyl event in Britain, which they couldn’t hide because of their country’s, you know, I told you they are all monitoring, they would have been alarmed. It would have had to been a huge accident.

ICONOCLAST: So, that doesn’t hold any water.

MORET: No. By the way, the abundance of uranium in the earth’s crust is 2.4 parts per million. Sea water is actually smaller. It has a very low concentration. What they always say is that it’s in the soil all over your yard and you can dig around and its there. Or, it’s coming from another source. It’s coming from a nuclear power plant nearby. It just can’t be true because the air currents were coming directly from the Middle East and they weren’t being transported from other power plants or sources in Britain.

Dr. Busby, because he’s an expert on radiation and this kind of stuff, because of how I told you this is transported all over the world, it’s completely mixed in the global atmosphere in one year, no matter where they used it. It’s just mixed that quickly. It’s amazing. In the report that was produced after the first Gulf War, it was from all the oil well fires and all the munitions and all the battlefields. That was a thick, black cloud that covered the area for a whole year after Gulf War I. That city had material that was deposited globally in the ice record in tropical glaciers, on the Antarctic Ice Sheet, in Hawaii, in the Himalayas, in the Alps, and a year later, it was deposited in the ice record all over the world. What happens is that the equator is very warm and the poles are very cold and this temperature gradient caused a mixing in the atmosphere of hot and cold air. They need to all be the same temperature. That causes of this violent mixing and the new particles are part of all of that. They are just globally mixed in one year.

ICONOCLAST: What happens if the levels get real high in the waters and fish end up with . . .

MORET: They don’t need to be high. Low level radiation is devestating. It’s a thousand times more harmful, according to Busby’s European Committee on radiation risk report.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki studies only considered cancer and birth defects as legitimate diseases caused by radiation exposure. They only considered the exposure of the victims to neutrons and gamma rays, which were external. They said there was no internal contamination. We know that that’s not true. Everybody in Japan was contaminated by the bombs. It wasn’t until Cherynobyl when they could actually measure the radiation and fields and dose. Then they looked at each chromosome and determined that the gamuts were 1,000 times higher than what that ICRP model would have predicted. Then they also counted the genetic mutation in wheat and in mice. They knew what the exact dose was and they saturated from the ICRP model how many defects there should be in the DNA and they counted a dozen times higher or a dozen times more than had been predicted.

We know the ICRP model is faulty. It can’t be used at all for internal exposure. It wasn’t done correctly, anyway. It was perfectly reasonable and legitimate for Dr. Busby to request those air monitoring numbers from Aldermaston, because we know that that’s the dust from the Middle East. We know it ends up in Europe and Britain. I’ve been to England in the morning and in the evening. I went out in the street, and there was this red sand all over cars and all over windshields and in the streets. That was from North Africa.

ICONOCLAST: Should the people in Britain be alarmed?

MORET: Yes! But there is nothing they can do. We have to stop these weapons. They’re altering atmospheric testing. The equilavent of 40 thousand Hiroshima bombs have been released into the atmosphere. The amount of radiation included with the emissions from the nuclear power plants have created, according to Dr. Roseleaf herself, the death and mutilation and diseases in 1.3 billion people. It’s had a global effect. What they’ve released since 1991 is the equalivent of at least 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. That’s 10 times more than during atmospheric testing. We are having a very serious public health threat globally. You can see it in the infant mortality increases. They started down as soon as they stopped testing in 1963. They kept going down until these darn unanium wars started in 1991. We’re having a global frog die-out. They’re living in the fresh water, rain waters that is washing out. We’re having a decline in fisheries globally. We’re just stripping this beautiful planet of all these diverse forms of life.

ICONOCLAST: This absorption into the atmosphere globally, there is no safe place?

MORET: There is no safe place. There is no possible way to escape from it.

ICONOCLAST: Are there uranium detectors that people can buy?

MORET: Yes. You’re going to have much higher readings along the Gulf Coast region, right where you are. I looked at the diabetes rates in those states and Texas really got slammed. It goes up the East Coast. All of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. are on the East Coast. People are being exposed to various products from the nuclear power plants emission, but they’re getting exposed to DU, too, the decay products. What is the most harmful effect from both exposures, surprisingly enough, is particulate from the nanoparticle. That is a nonspecific catalyst. Each one of them has an enzyme effect. Catalytic or enzyme poisons are biologically the most damaging of all. That’s why the soldiers and people who were exposed are sick within 24 to 48 hours. It’s that catalytical effect.

ICONOCLAST: If you live close to a power plant there’s a chance . . .

MORET: You’re absolutely being internally exposed 24 hours a day. Every breath that you take. A 100 mile radius is where you get the highest exposure. We collected chicken eggshells and baby teeth from people living around the Indian Point Reactor and the levels in the chicken eggshells was the same as in the baby teeth. It’s just completely poisioning the air, the soil, the food, the water, and blood. These tiny particles go right through your skin. They go through everything and a really good example of the horrible effect is the World Trade Center disaster. All of the huge numbers of metal and tiny particles, the highest ever measured in the United States, in fact, I think around the world, were measured in the month after the Trade Center disaster.

ICONOCLAST: Is that because of fires or explosions.

MORET: The fire. That building came down and all this kinetic energy, you know all the energy that it takes to build a building and carry all those materials up, when that building collapses, that is kinetic energy which is released and it created a very hot pile which continued to burn for months.

ICONOCLAST: Did the EPA take action?

MORET: Well, the EPA scientists were very alarmed about it and about the nanoparticle pollution in the air, but they weren’t allowed to say anything, because of the administrator who was a coverup artist. She and her husband had very strong ties, including personal investments in companies that were related to the insurance companies in the World Trade Center. The EPA scientists were not allowed to say anything.

ICONOCLAST: So people breathed all these particulates.

MORET: Yes.

ICONOCLAST: What do you think is the significance of Busby’s report, overall.

MORET: It concerns everything that I’ve been saying for five years. That this pollution of depleted uranium particles are traveling. They’re being carried on air currents and they’re being transported all over the world.

ICONOCLAST: The reports by the military and the U.S. and Britain are wrong?

MORET: Well, the military job is to kill people and to destroy things. Depleted uranium is a very effective weapon. They are not responsible for anything that happens after that point. So they’re going to cover it up so that they can continue to use weapons that kill lots of people and destroy things. The U.S. government, the British government, the Australian government and countries that have used DU are violating international treaties. They are violating the Geneva and the Hague conventions. They’re violating the Geneva 1925 gas protocal that prohibits gas weapons that kill indiscriminately. We are violating our own federal laws. It meets the definition under U.S. federal code in two of three categories. It’s a weapon of mass destruction under our own federal law. It violates U.S. military law. What they’re really worried about is that they would be financially responsible for these terrible weapons and it would totally bankrupt any country. We can never clean up the Middle East or Central Asia. We can’t clean up the atmosphere. They poisioned our world.

ICONOCLAST: What is the long-term prognosis for Iraq?

MORET: Oh, Iraq, the former Yugoslovia, and Afghanastan are completely uninhabitable now. No one should be living there.

ICONOCLAST: Where do these people go?

MORET: Well, they’re just going to slowly die. Their DNA is already destroyed.

ICONOCLAST: How long does a soldier have to be in Iraq before he has health problems.

MORET: What Major Doug Rokke told me, he was in charge of the depleated uranium cleanup team in Iraq, he said we were sick within 24 to 48 hours. Many soldiers have described that . . .

ICONOCLAST: What kind of sickness is it? What are the symptoms?

MORET: The symptoms are all of a sudden they started feeling sick and muscle and joint pain and rashes. Just a general malaise and losing control of their body functions. Some of them came back in adult diapers after Gulf War I. The men have burning semen and they internally contaminate their wives. Vanity Fair magazine’s David Rose did a wonderful article. A very indepth, very hard-hitting article, in the December 2004 issue. I’ve been to panels. Some of them are so sick that their heads are down on their arms all of the time except when they are talking. They have chronic fatigue. Any surgery or wounds that they have will not heal because their immune system is completely damaged by the DU particles. One breath of air can give you a fatal dose.

ICONOCLAST: If this is happening through the Trade Winds coming up along the Texas coast, how would people tell if they’ve had exposure?

MORET: They can’t tell. Suddenly, people are getting diabetes. Infant mortality is increasing. These are ways that they can tell or they can notice, for instance, the frog die-off in the environment. These are environmental indicators. There is no way to clean it up and there is no way to avoid exposure.

ICONOCLAST: There is no test you can do?

MORET: Yes. You can get a urine test, but you should have a geology lab measure the uranium in the urine and then look at the isotopic ratio to see if it has the signature of depleted uranium. It won’t be the same as on natural uranium. I don’t know of any uranium mines in Texas. It wouldn’t be coming from the environment.

ICONOCLAST: Is there anything else you want to add?

MORET: We’ve got over 12 or 14 depleted uranium bills in the state legislatures and we did that because we couldn’t get anywhere with the Federal government. It’s been a presidential coverup under President George Herbert Walker Bush, under Clinton who used it in Yugoslovia. It was under George Herbert Walker Bush when it was used for the first time on the battle field by the U.S. government in 1991 in the Iraq war. George W. Bush is responsible for using it in Afghanastan and Iraq. These three presidents are the three biggest war criminals in the history of the entire world. They’ve gotten away with it because they’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the coverup. As long as they can keep people studying it and there is no definitive proof and stuff like that, statements like that are coming out from established scientists in the Pentagon, then the big lie continues. We know by this horrific information published by Dr. Busby that, indeed, this is an environmental issue. It is a global issue and its all being transported all over the world. The Aldermasten Report is the most important one that has come out so far.

ICONOCLAST: What are the hopes of the bills before the Legislature.

MORET: What I did was take the Connecticut bill that got bogged down in the Conneticut Legislature, requiring mandatory testing by the state of returning soldiers who want it, to Louisiana in April of 2005. They had voted unanimously in the House and in their Assembly and the governor signed it into law within eight weeks of me giving it to them on April 19. That was just astounding. I was really shocked. A week later, it was attached to Congressman McDermott’s depleted uranium bill before Congress and, in fact, it was your interview with Doug and me and Melissa Sterry in that whole issue of the paper. I mean you’re President Bush’s hometown newspaper in Crawford, and your paper was attached as a supporting document to that bill. So everybody in the Pentagon and in Congress read that, not to mention the VA and probably the state department. Your paper went all over the government. That’s very important.

ICONOCLAST: But there are other states that are following suit?

MORET: Yes. And now we have, actually, the states have legal jurisdiction over the National Guard so they’re able to pass laws like specifically covering the National Guard. They can’t do it for the regular soldiers, they don’t have legal jurisdiction. What we’re doing is forcing the Pentagon and the Federal Government to follow their own laws and directives and orders to test soldiers; to train them before they’re sent over there, soldiers who’ll be handling it, and then to give them medical treatment when they come back and they’re sick. We’re forcing them to do that for National Guard and then the states are making the government pay for it, the federal government, because they’re violating their own laws and mandates. It’s getting a lot of local media attention. It’s getting activsts and citizens all riled up about this issue and then it’s making the other soldiers and veterans who are not getting this treatment angry because they’re entitled to it too. So we’re pushing states against Federal law.

ICONOCLAST: So about a third of the states have moved forward on this.

MORET: We have it in the New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Legislature. It’s going into California and Oregon. It’s in Washington, Hawaii and I think Michigan or Minnesota. Louisiana has already passed it. Connecticut has passed it into law. We’re really started a snowball thing.

ICONOCLAST: Where do you start the ball rolling. Does someone contact the governor?

MORET: I think the most effective thing is to find two Vietnam veterans. They’ve already been through the Agent Orange poision and all the lies of the government. They’ve all been thrown in the trash can and filed lawsuits that were dismissed. The Vietnam veterans are really the most dangerous group to the federal government. They’ve been the most effective. I gave it to two veterans in Louisiana and they went into the Legislature and looked them in the eye and said now, you’re not going to turn down two Vietnam veterans. It’s impossible to do that. What happened just last week in the Hawaii legislature is that Rep. Ito, who was the chair of the Veterans Committee, refused to introduce the depleted uranium bill into the Legislature so Doug and I and other experts started writing to the Legislaters and encouraging the citizens to put more pressure on Ito. A veteran wrote a letter to Ito that said we’re a group of 3,500 veterans that have agreed to vote as a block and if you don’t put that into the Legislature, we’re going to vote you out. That’s effective. You have to do something and you feel better already. The hardest thing is to take that first step and to do an action.

We need to remind people what Ghandi said . . . “Even a small lamp dispells the darkness.”

Depleted uranium is the trojan horse of nuclear war. It keeps killing and there is no way to turn it off and there is no way to clean it up. After we’re all dead and wipe out our own species, the earth will heal itself.