100 Attend Annual Hiroshima Day March and Vigil
Speaker Accuses U.S. of Deliberately Depopulating Earth
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Before a crowd of 100 people outside the U.S.S. Midway museum on the Embarcadero downtown, Berkeley-based anti-nuclear scientist and activist Leuren Moret accused the U.S. government and the “vested interests” who control it of deliberately using nuclear weapons, including depleted uranium, to cut the world’s total population in half. Moret, an environmental commissioner in the Berkeley city government, president of Scientists for Indigenous People and host of a public-access cable TV show on nuclear issues, said the U.S. government “wants to eliminate two to three billion people” and cited a 30-year-old document as her source.
“This is not a conspiracy theory; this is U.S. national policy,” Moret said. “It’s called Global 2000 and it was written by Henry Kissinger, General Alexander Haig and [former Democratic senator and vice-presidential candidate] Ed Muskie for President Carter. We are in Global 2000 now, and I am convinced that the amount of carpet bombing and grid bombing that started under Clinton in the 1990’s is what Global 2000 is, because certainly the health statistics I have from India, Japan, Britain and the United States support that.”
Moret said that only a deliberate policy of extermination could possibly explain the U.S. military’s insistence on using so-called “depleted uranium” — ammunition made from leftover “spent fuel” from nuclear power plants — in all its wars at least since the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. “You and me and our children, and our future children, are living in the Auschwitz radioactive poison gas chamber today,” she said. “The whole global atmosphere is polluted now, and the half-life of depleted uranium is 4 1/2 billion years.”
According to Moret, the increased amount of radioactivity in the atmosphere is both a short-term and long-term health hazard, increasing not only the incidence of diseases long associated with radioactive exposure, like cancer, but other health hazards most people don’t think of as having a nuclear risk factor. “One radioactive atom is 10 to 100 million times more toxic to developing organisms than the most harmful chemicals, such as thalidomide,” she said. “Most of atmospheric testing pollution is actually depleted uranium, and it damages the pancreas and the ability of insulin to get into the cells and perform its proper function. So now you know … that our global diabetes epidemic is due to depleted uranium.”
Moret cited a new documentary film detailing what she called “the history of treason that our government has committed against our own soldiers,” including the atomic tests of the 1950’s in which army companies were marched through ground zero right after the bombs went off, the MK Ultra mind-control experiments, Agent Orange in Viet Nam, the anthrax vaccines largely believed to be the cause of “Gulf War syndrome” and Western sales of biological weapons and their precursors to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. “The bunkers [where these were stored] were blown up [in the 2003 attack] so that the public would not know that the ammunition and illegal biological weapons and other weapons were stamped, ‘Made in Russia,’ ‘Made in Germany,’ ‘Made in Jordan,’ ‘Made in Britain,’ ‘Made in the U.S.A.’,” Moret said. According to Moret, the U.S. government’s motive for all this is “GOD” — “God, Oil and Drugs.”
San Diego Mesa College political science professor George Callas, who’s involved with an organization called Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII), followed Moret with a discussion that touched briefly on the U.S. program for regime change throughout the Middle East. “History clearly shows that, since prior to 9/11 and as far back as early 1991, this administration has been planning for invading both Iraq and Iran,” Callas said. But most of his presentation focused on the determination of the Bush administration to loosen the controls on U.S. use of nuclear weapons to allow field commanders, with presidential approval, to launch nuclear attacks on states that don’t have nuclear weapons themselves.
“Since Bush first came into office, he has aggressively sought to create and promote the use of U.S. nuclear weapons of mass destruction against non-nuclear states,” Callas explained. “According to reports in the San José Mercury-News of March 15, 200 and Agence France Presse of February 2, 2005, Bush’s first-strike nuclear policy was originally traced to vice-president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. They initiated the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which states that the U.S. military, including nuclear forces, will now be used to dissuade adversaries from undertaking military programs or operations that could threaten U.S. interests or those of its allies and friends during conventional war.”
Callas quoted a Bush administration nuclear security official as having told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2004 that Bush’s strategy “represents a radical departure from the past and the most fundamental rethinking of the roles and purposes of nuclear weapons in almost a quarter-century. Instead of treating nuclear weapons in isolation, it considered them an integrated component of American military power.” According to Callas, this policy will not only make the U.S. a nuclear aggressor for the first time since 1945, it will sabotage the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, encourage states and terrorist organizations that don’t now have nuclear weapons to get them, and create the threat that “any regional conflict could explode into an all-out nuclear war.”
Jewish poet Steve Kowit commented on Israel’s invasion of Lebanon — “the latest episode in Homo satanicus’s destruction of the planet,” he called it — and read a poem called Intifada, which paralleled Israel’s occupation and treatment of the Palestinians to the 1,600 years of oppression against the Jews, mostly by Christian Europeans. Kowit stressed that, despite the mainstream media’s portrayal of an Israeli population solidly behind prime minister Ehud Olmert’s military policy, “there are peace demonstrations, anti-invasion demonstrations, going on almost every day in Israel by extraordinarily courageous peace groups there: Rabbis for Human Rights, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, Ta’iush, Gush shalom, Bat Shalom and Women in Black, which is now international but began as an Israeli peace group.”
Following Kowit’s moving reading, Gary Stewart of the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice came up and promoted the Declaration of Peace campaign, aimed at pressuring Congress to set a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. “It demands that Congress adopt and activate a plan to get us out of Iraq and to commit to bringing the troops home by March 19 of next year, return the oil to the Iraqi people, close all the military bases [the U.S. is building in Iraq, and] have a peace divident that addresses the vital social needs of this country, and no preventive war in Iraq or anywhere else.” The Declaration of Peace group has set a deadline of September 21, 2006 for Congress to act; it it doesn’t, the group states on its Web site (www.declarationofpeace.org), “Declaration signers across the U.S. will engage in nonviolent action in Washington, D.C. and in communities throughout the nation.”
The rally outside the U.S.S. Midway also featured Sara Haldeman-Starr, pastor of the First Church of the Brethren where the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice meets, and folksinger Michael Officer, who sang three songs without explicit political content. Following the speechmaking, attendees walked on the traditional silent vigil down the Embarcadero and back to the Midway site.
