The U.S. & U.K. Occupation Forces have been heavily engaged in the past months, since the end of their assault against the Iraqi people, in widespread search campaigns for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) they themselves gave their ally dictator to use against his Kurdish population and Iranian neighbors. We saw the satellite pictures presented by Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council of alleged "mobile labs", then we saw him again with a vile of Anthrax, but if the world topped for a minute and asked Iraqi children, the answer to the mystery of who was using WMDs in Iraq would have been a lot easier to find.

Children in Basra and other southern cities have been observed by UN officials playing with destroyed tanks and empty ammunition shells that were fired during the two wars launched by the Bush family. Incidentally, cancer rates among Iraqi children have increased 60 percent after the end of the first Gulf War. "It is well known that an orthopedic surgeon in England will see one case of bone tumor every three years" says Dr. Thamer Hamdan, an American- and Scottish- trained surgeon in Basra "here, I see one every two weeks".

Diagnosis: Depleted Uranium (DU) dumped in Iraq by U.S.-U.K. war machines. It is estimated that 320 tons were fired during round one of the Middle East imperialist project in '91 and 1000-2000 tons in round two; similarly against Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

Depleted Uranium, a.k.a- "Silver Bullet", "Nuclear Bullet", "Tank Killer", "DU Penetrators" is a by-product of the process used to enrich natural uranium for use in nuclear reactors and weapons. It has the ability to "self-sharpen" upon impact and instead of flattening out it burns off as it pierces through its targets. "DU gave us a huge advantage over their tanks" said war Colonel James Naughton at a March 2003 Pentagon press briefing. "Apparently over their children too" someone should have replied. When explodes, DU creates a cloud of particles that contaminates the area of impact and eventually ends up in the water and food chain.

DU is both radioactive and "genotoxic": it chemically alters the DNA switching on genes that would otherwise be expressed. Most common signs of being exposed to it are: leukemia, birth defects, and malfunction of body organs. However, with a half life of 4.5 billion years and a clean up cost of roughly $30 billion per amount unleashed in round one alone, Iraqi mothers can count on mourning a lot longer than they have expected since losing over 500,000 of their children to the UN-backed sanctions. But if you think Iraqi children are the only victims of the Bushes WMD, think again.

Returning home from their "mission accomplished" U.S.-U.K. soldiers soon realized that their mission has just begun. 200,000 U.S. and hundreds of U.K. troops who were exposed to DU were showing symptoms of what later became known as "Gulf-War syndrome". The Pentagon refused to take responsibility and dismissed all claims as unfounded and stress related. Similarly, European troops serving in the Balkans developed "Balkans-Syndrome".

On Jan 17, 2001 the European Parliament voted 394/60 in favor of banning DU. Research found British soldiers who served in Iraq suffered ten times more genetic damage than the general population. "This level of genetic damage does not occur naturally" states Professor Albrecht Schott, head of the research team. In the U.S, an environmental pediatrician discovered a 30 percent rate of abnormalities among children of Gulf War veterans. "The use of DU is a war crime" says Dr. Doug Rokke, Jacksonville State University health physicist who was part of the Army team sent in 1991 to investigate "Gulf-War syndrome", "we must do what is right for the citizens of the world - ban DU". Similarly, Iraqi veterans have a 60 percent greater chance of getting cancer than other citizens. Is this a new phenomenon? You bet it's not.

During the American assault against Vietnam from 1962-1971, the U.S. "freedom fighters" sprayed 19 million gallons of herbicides, a.k.a.- "Agent Orange" over 5 million acres of indigenous South Vietnamese land. This caused a grave humanitarian and environmental disaster. What was the U.S. war strategists' logic? "Stripping the countryside bare and destroying the jungle foliage that helped conceal the enemy would save American lives". Save American lives?

300,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people were exposed to "Agent Orange" causing them: cancer, malfunction of body organs, and premature death to name the least. Sounds familiar? What was the Pentagon's response? Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Corporations that were taken to court by the infected veterans ended up settling for an amount that left each veteran with a little over six thousand bucks, and the controversy was swept under the carpet without further questions.

In the U.S., land of the free or free market, the corporation has emerged to be the single most powerful institution. Fifty out of the world's top hundred economies are corporations, many of which are based in the U.S., manufacturing DU or better named WMD. "Got Milk?"- Iraqi children don't. Such names as Alliant Techsystems, a subsidiary of Honeywell Systems, and Primex Technologies, a subsidiary of General Dynamics. How about this Dynamic: the Bush family is infected with "War-Crime Syndrome". One British corporation alone has been reported to have 20,000 tons of DU ready to be recycled, hint hint, why don't we dump it somewhere in the "Orient".

According to the UN sub-commission's report in 2002, international laws breached by the use of DU are: Universal Declaration for Human Rights, the Charter of the UN, the Genocide Convention, the Convention Against Torture, the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. In 1996, the UN sub-commission on Human Rights classified DU ammunition as 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'.

The 1976 U.S. Air Force's Manual, "International Law: The Conduct of Armed Conflict and Air Operations", clearly emphasizes adherence to International Law and states "that treaties, having the force of law equal to laws enacted by the Congress on the United States, be scrupulously adhered to by the United States Armed Forces". It goes on to name all the treaties that the US has proudly violated. Under the Hague Conventions of 1907 for example the treaty strictly outlaws the use of poison "It is especially forbidden: To employ poison or poisoned weapons". Poison was then interpreted by the USAF as "biological or chemical substances causing death or disability with permanent effects when, they are ingested, enter the lungs or blood stream or touch the skin". Did somebody say war crimes? Remember that none of the U.S. elites can ever be tried for war crimes since the U.S. has not recognized the International Criminal Court.

Translation: unless the Iraqi people come up with approximately 75 billion dollars to clean the mess left by Big-Bush and Little-Bush, for the next 4.5 Billion years, Iraqi children will suffer an increasing rate of cancer and birth defects because they happen to lie within the geographic boundaries of the U.S. Empire's aspirations. The Empire will continue to use WMD and has by now armed 18 of its allies with it, but no one will attempt to challenge it because the Empire above the law. In the meantime, we live in a world where the U.S. Empire remains in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today".