U.N.: HIZ B'ALLAH v ISRAEL 'WAR' A TESTING GROUND FOR NEW WEAPONS, ACCORDING TO CONSPIRACY THEORISTS

UN unable to confirm radiation spike after Lebanon war
(AFP)
28 October 2006

BEIRUT - The UN, which has been studying the ecological damage in Lebanon caused by the war between Israel and Hezbollah, said Saturday it would soon be able to say whether uranium-based munitions were used, as claimed by a British newspaper.

“If there is uranium we will find it,” said Boutros Al Harb, director ofthe United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for Asia and the Middle East, based in Bahrain.

The Independent newspaper said scientists studying samples of soil after Israeli bombing in Lebanon have shown high radiation levels, suggesting that uranium-based munitions were used.

It said samples taken from two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri have been sent for further analysis to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire, southern England, for mass spectrometry.

The samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed ”elevated radiation signatures”, Chris Busby, the British scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, was quoted as saying.

Britain’s Ministry of Defence has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples, the report added.

An Israeli army spokesman denied Saturday the use of illegal munitions.

“All the arms and ammunition that we use are legal and conform to international laws,” he told AFP.

UNEP director Harb said he could not immediately confirm the claims of high radiation levels.

“The analysis of samples taken by our munitions experts is being done in a laboratory at Spitz in Switzerland. I am not able today to confirm nor rule out the presence of uranium,” Harb told AFP by telephone from Bahrain.

“The results should be sent to us by mid-November.”

Around 20 UNEP experts spent two weeks, with Lebanese environmentalists, from the beginning of October evaluating the impact on the environment of the July 12 to August 14 war between Israel and Shiite militia Hezbollah, Harb said.

They tested air, water and soil samples at some 75 heavily bombarded sites in southern Lebanon and the mainly Shiite suburbs of south Beirut, he added.

Their report will be made public mid-December in Beirut.

and

Was Lebanon a Weapon-Testing Ground for US, Iran?
Robert Fisk,
The Independent

Did Israel use a secret new uranium-based weapon in southern Lebanon this summer in the 34-day assault that cost more than 1,300 Lebanese lives, most of them civilians? We know that the Israelis used American ‘bunker-buster’ bombs on Hezbollah’s Beirut headquarters. We know that they drenched southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war, leaving tens of thousands of bomblets which are still killing Lebanese civilians every week. And we now know — after it first categorically denied using such munitions — that the Israeli Army also used phosphorous bombs, weapons which are supposed to be restricted under the Third Protocol of the Geneva Convention which neither Israel nor the United States have signed.

But scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions may now also be included in Israel’s weapons inventory — and were used against targets in Lebanon. According to Dr. Chris Busby, the British scientific secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed “elevated radiation signatures.” Both have been forwarded for further examination to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire for mass spectrometry — used by the Ministry of Defense — which has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples.

Busby’s initial report states that there are two possible reasons for the contamination. “The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission devise or other experimental weapon (e.g. thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash.... The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium.” A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.

Enriched uranium is produced from natural uranium ore and is used as fuel for nuclear reactors. A waste product of the enrichment process is depleted uranium, an extremely hard metal used in anti-tank missiles for penetrating armor. Depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium, which is less radioactive than enriched uranium.

Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas — until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air. I myself saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into flames.

Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon last summer — except for “marking” targets — even after civilians were photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with phosphorous munitions. Then last Sunday, Israel suddenly admitted that it had not been telling the truth. The Israeli minister in charge of government-Parliament relations, Jacob Edery, confirmed that phosphorous shells were used in direct attacks against the Hezbollah, adding that “according to international law, the use of phosphorous munitions is authorized and the (Israeli) Army keeps to the rules of international norms.”

Asked by the Independent if the Israeli Army had been using uranium-based munitions in Lebanon this summer, Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that “Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorized by international law or international conventions.” This, however, begs more questions than it answers. Much international law does not cover modern uranium weapons because they were not invented when humanitarian rules like the Geneva Conventions were drawn up and because Western governments still refuse to believe that their use can cause long-term damage to the health of thousands of civilians living in the area of the explosions.

American and British forces used hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) shells in Iraq in 1991 — their hardened penetrator warheads manufactured from the waste products of the nuclear industry — and five years later, a plague of cancers emerged across the south of Iraq. Initial US military assessments warned of grave consequences for public health if such weapons were used against armored vehicles. But the US administration and the British government later went out of their way to belittle these claims. Yet the cancers continued to spread amid reports that civilians in Bosnia — where DU was also used by NATO aircraft — were suffering new forms of cancer. DU shells were again used in the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq but it is too early to register any health effects.

“When a uranium penetrator hits a hard target, the particles of the explosion are very long-lived in the environment,” Busby said yesterday. “They spread over long distances. They can be inhaled into the lungs. The military really seem to believe that this stuff is not as dangerous as it is.”

Yet why would Israel use such a weapon when its targets — in the case of Khiam, for example — were only two miles from the Israeli border? The dust ignited by DU munitions can be blown across international borders, just as the chlorine gas used in attacks by both sides in World War I often blew back on its perpetrators.

Chris Bellamy, professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University, who has reviewed the Busby report said: “At worst it’s some sort of experimental weapon with an enriched uranium component the purpose of which we don’t yet know. At best — if you can say that — it shows a remarkably cavalier attitude to the use of nuclear waste products.” The soil sample from Khiam — site of a notorious torture prison when Israel occupied southern Lebanon between 1978 and 2000, and a front-line Hezbollah stronghold in last summer’s war — was a piece of impacted red earth from an explosion; the isotope ratio was 108, indicative of the presence of enriched uranium.

“The health effects on local civilian populations following the use of large uranium penetrators and the large amounts of respirable uranium oxide particles in the atmosphere,” the Busby report says, “are likely to be significant.... We recommend that the area is examined for further traces of these weapons with a view to clean up.”

This summer’s Lebanon war began after Hezbollah guerrillas crossed the Lebanese frontier into Israel, captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three others, prompting Israel to unleash a massive bombardment of Lebanon’s villages, cities, bridges and civilian infrastructure. Human rights groups have said that Israel committed war crimes when it attacked civilians, but that the Hezbollah were also guilty of such crimes because they fired missiles into Israel which were also filled with ball-bearings, turning their rockets into primitive one-time-only cluster bombs.

Many Lebanese, however, long ago concluded that the latest Lebanon war was a weapons testing ground for the Americans and Iranians. Just as Israel used hitherto unproven US missiles in its attacks, so the Iranians were able to test-fire a rocket which hit an Israeli corvette off the Lebanese coast, killing four Israeli sailors and almost sinking the vessel after it suffered a 15-hour on-board fire. What the weapons manufacturers make of the latest scientific findings of potential uranium weapons use in southern Lebanon is not yet known. Nor is their effect on civilians.

Pertinent Links:

1) UN unable to confirm radiation spike after Lebanon war

2) Was Lebanon a Weapon-Testing Ground for US, Iran?