Wednesday 14th of October 2026
Home » Blogs » John Richardson's blog

the cost of privilege ....

the cost of privilege ....

The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, "the seeds of our death". An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr Teaching Hospital in Basra, Dr. Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. "Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long after.

That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can't be eaten."

Along the corridor, Dr. Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was trying to save. Many had neuroplastoma. "Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years," she said. "Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima.

The sudden increase of such congenital malformations is the same.

Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf War battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, "Each round fired by an A-10 Warhog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare.

Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that "the epidemic speaks for itself". The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the cancer programme of the World Health organisation (WHO) in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq Sanctions Committee]." He told me, "We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics."

Recently, Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: "The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers."

Today, a WHO report, the result on a landmark study conducted jointly with the Iraqi Ministry of Health has been "delayed". Covering 10,800 households, it contains "damning evidence", says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains "top secret". The report says that birth defects have risen to a "crisis" right across Iraqi society where DU and other toxic heavy metals were by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr. Jawad Al-Ali reports "phenomenal" multiple cancers in entire families.

Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, "smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness... and let other people clean up the mess".

The "mess" left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse "presidential library and museum" and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.

Their "mess" is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi Ministry of Social Affairs' estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost both parents. "This means a horrific 14 per cent of Iraq's population are orphans," he wrote. "An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows". Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.

In her book 'Dispatches from the Dark Side', Gareth Peirce, Britain's greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, "human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently... in Blair's language a 'virus' to be 'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.'" The very concept of war was mutated to "our values versus theirs". And yet, says Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiques reveal no dissent".

For Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to Guantanamo was "the best way to meet our counter terrorism objective". These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of "our values" is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?

John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US. Follow John Pilger on twitter @pilgerwebsite - johnpilger.com

From Iraq. A Tragic Reminder To Prosecute The War Criminals

 

depleted.....

 

Do we need new legislation on war and the post-war period?

by Angelo Fiore Tartaglia*

 

My legal battle on behalf of Italian servicemen who developed a wide variety of cancers upon their return from international peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and subsequently in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon stems precisely from the need to restore dignity to these sick individuals, who were systematically dismissed from the Italian Armed Forces on account of their illnesses. In essence, these people were stripped of their dignity as soldiers, being treated almost as waste to be disposed of or as individuals seeking to exploit their illness to make financial claims against the State.
    Twenty-six years ago, the causes of the cancers were unknown; military personnel were not regarded as workers and were therefore not afforded the protections and rights to which workers are entitled; they constituted a special category, almost an isolated entity for whom it was extremely difficult to ensure even the most basic form of protection. The Italian State and the international community categorically denied that the depleted uranium used by NATO forces in the aforementioned wars could cause diseases in humans. It was believed at the time that decisions regarding how to deploy military personnel on international missions, what equipment to provide them with and what protective measures to offer them were political decisions that no judge could question. Furthermore, there were no court rulings linking cancers to specific risk factors; even less so was there any evidence that depleted uranium left unused in projectiles could irreversibly pollute the environment and cause cancer in humans.
    Recognising the dignity stripped away by war and by the belligerent states from the soldiers who had served and were serving in those environments was therefore an almost impossible goal to achieve, as the obstacles to overcome were too numerous and too great. Yet, at the same time, for me – a young man passionate about the law – it represented a battle for truth and justice.
    Servicemen were afraid to report their illnesses for fear of losing their jobs. It was therefore difficult to address this issue, which in the meantime had become a genuine social problem due to the huge number of servicemen who fell ill upon returning from these missions, leaving their families and children to fend for themselves because of their extremely serious illnesses. It was also difficult to speak to the media because almost no one believed the problem was real, and in any case, everyone was afraid of speaking out against the State and NATO.
    With a great deal of patience and determination, I somehow managed, through independent journalists, to bring the issue to the attention of the public. In Italy, following these press reports and the first legal cases I had begun to bring, a parliamentary committee of inquiry was set up specifically to investigate the cases of these cancerous conditions affecting a very large number of military personnel and to determine whether there was a causal link between depleted uranium and these cancers.
    The first parliamentary committee came to no conclusion.
    The issue was thus swept out of the public eye because neither the parliamentary committee of inquiry nor the expert committees commissioned by the state had identified the cause of these cancers. Some had even claimed, on the basis of data later found to be false, that more soldiers who had remained in Italy fell ill than those who had been deployed to the Balkans.
    The second parliamentary committee reached the same conclusion, as did the third.
    In the meantime, I had brought the legal cases which ultimately proved me right; I had managed to dismantle and overcome all the objections and obstacles. My argument and the evidence I had gathered withstood scrutiny at all subsequent levels of the courts and across the various jurisdictions to which I had appealed. The obstacles were enormous, but incredibly, I – who firmly believed in justice and in the need to restore my clients’ lost dignity – was succeeding in my endeavour.
    There were so many favourable judgements that the fourth parliamentary committee of inquiry mentioned in its final report that the numerous judicial rulings had by then established the existence of a causal link (that is, the cause-and-effect relationship) between cancerous conditions and depleted uranium.
    I was contacted by my Serbian colleague Srđjan Aleksić, who had read about my judgements on the internet. He told me that in Serbia the problem of depleted uranium had become a massive scourge amongst both military veterans and civilians. I decided to begin working with him because the issue of the deprivation of human dignity had resurfaced with even greater force in my eyes.
    We worked day and night on behalf of the most vulnerable – people who had developed as many as five or six different types of cancer and could not even afford treatment. Illness and cold indifference leave human beings to fend for themselves. We fought, researched and worked even during the Covid pandemic, meeting in Serbia to restore dignity to these people. We have won the first three cases in Serbia. In Italy, I have secured nearly 600 favourable judgements.
    We are now set to launch a case against NATO in Serbia. This is our battle for dignity, and in this battle, we must build a team, uniting with all those who oppose oppression and injustice, and who believe the right to life and the right to a healthy environment are sacred values, and that trampled dignity must be restored to those who have lost it.
    To date, there is no genuine law governing wartime and post-war situations. War does not only cause damage during armed conflicts; because of these depleted uranium weapons, it creates a veritable environmental disaster that has endless repercussions for human beings and future generations.
    The issue of human dignity has become a fundamental and universally widespread problem. International relations are based on agreements lacking any real sanctions, and the law of the strongest prevails; the right to the tyranny of the strongest reigns supreme.
    It is now more necessary than ever to take legal protection a step further, to create a system of sanctions based on the judicial condemnation of such conduct against humanity. Together, we can win. On my own, I have won 600 times; together, we can restore dignity to all those from whom it has been taken away. It takes time, dedication and passion. We are ready and we will press ahead; anyone who wishes to support us is most welcome. •

 

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2026/no-20/21-6-october-2026/do-we-need-new-legislation-on-war-and-the-post-war-period

 

 

READ FROM TOP.

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….