Last week Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown instructed the people of Britain of their ‘patriotic duty’ to support the troops. The Manchester based Iraq Solidarity Campaign had just launched an initiative with Combat Stress, to raise funds and awareness for: ‘..everyone who has been affected by the consequences of the Iraq invasion’, troops and Iraqis alike.
Combat Stress, which this year celebrates its 90th anniversary of dealing with traumatised troops, from shell shock in the first World War to the more recently diagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, currently cares for 4,000 service personnel, which, they state, is the tip of the iceberg.
Having launched with a successful information and fund raising event, central Manchester’s busy Stretford Mall shopping centre agreed to allow a stall for the initiative. However, it transpires that they must have public liability insurance, at a cost of approximately £400. As the average donation is about £1, the first £400+ would go, not to the traumatised, but to support this ludicrous New Labour piece of red tape.
It is hard to understand what damage to the public could be inflicted by a small tressle table, a collection tin and a quantity of A5 leaflets.
Meanwhile, it further transpires that the Ministry of Defence has been using ‘covert surveillance’ techniques on soldiers returning from combat, who claim disability compensation. This is just the latest shoddy attempt to evade supporting financially those mentally and physically injured in the armed forces returning from Britain’s questionable, illegal and currently unwinnable marauding in far away lands in which they have no business, or in preparation for the onslaught.
Those who were used as guinea pigs in Britain’s nuclear tests in the Pacific in the 1950’s, given no protection and instructed to attend the detonations, but cover their eyes with their hands, suffered possibly the most massive X-ray known to mankind, as they saw the bones in their hands, exactly as that on the medical plate version. Predictably they suffered life threatening and life terminating conditions. Many have died and those ill and suffering ever since, still fight on for compensation in their ailing twilight years. A recent High Court ruling, finally awarded the compensation they sought, but the legal wrangling continues.
After the 1991 forty two day blitzkrieg on Iraq, what came to be known as Gulf War Syndrome hit those who had been involved in numerous of the coalition personnel. British troops, so ‘valued’ by Mr Brown, had, it transpired, been given multiple vaccinations, some untested. Guinea pigs again. Countless medical records including the inoculations given and subsequent symptoms, personal medical records vital for future treatment and assessment, simply went missing – for ever. There was also definitely something in the air too. Australians on a war ship well off the coast of southern Iraq also became ill.
That something, as became known about a year later, was chemically toxic and radioactive DU (depleted uranium) used in US and British missiles and bullets. It is, of course, neither depleted nor alone uranium (which remains to poison the earth and the gene pool for four and a half billion years.) The forces, the Iraqi population and the earth was subject to another lethal experiment, which even outdid the unspeakable evil of the Pacific testing, since these weapons are created from the nuclear waste from the nuclear fuel cycle and contain the whole lethal cocktail. ‘Nuclear waste with fins on’, as one expert described this unprecedented assault on the planet and humanity.
When British veterans Ray Bristow and Colin Purcell-Lee, both medics in the 1991 assault, blocked at every turn by the Ministry of Defence from finding out what was causing their life threatening symptoms, undertook the exhausting overland journey from Jordan to Baghdad, to attend an international Conference on the toxic threats the bombardment had caused, where some world foremost experts were to speak, they returned to a shock.
They had been collecting urine specimens from sick Gulf veterans and sending them to two specialists, one in Canada and another in Bremen, Germany, for analysis, and meticulously documenting the results. Those results included the fact that almost all of the sickest veterans had over one hundred times the ‘safe’ level of uranium in their bodies.
The police had raided Bristow’s home and removed all the painstakingly gathered data and test results. Four eminent specialists involved in trying to unravel the troops’ problems, two in Canada and two in the United States received threats on their lives, one was forced to flee across the States from his Professorship in a southern university, the other Professor fled the country. When the tests, which had come back with such chilling reading from two different academic institutions in two different countries, were re-run by the Ministry of Defence’s medical unit formed to ‘assist’ the 1991 Gulf war veterans, they came back negative. No surprise there then.
In December 2003, ten months after the invasion of Iraq, the Defence Correspondent of the (London) Daily Telegraph, Michael Smith, alleged that the Ministry of Defence was ‘forcing out sick Gulf war veterans’, using ‘manning contol system to avoid paying soldiers medical pensions. Neuro-toxin damage has been recorded in personnel who have served in Iraq has shown to have led to brain damage, arthritus and chronic fatigue – and frontal-lobe damage. And the Ministry sleights of hand continue still.
A ‘patriotic duty’ to support them eh? No, clobbered by succesive government’s and for eleven years, New Labour’s penny pinching, duplicity, demented by-laws and paranoia at every turn. And Gordon Brown’s hypocrosy is without bounds.
The final irony worth mentioning is that Combat Stress is supported by the Ministry of Defence.
