UN RESOLUTION ON LEBANON:
BLUEPRINT FOR INTENSIFIED WAR
AND COLONIAL OCCUPATION

The US-French resolution that is to be voted on by the United Nations Security Council early this week represents an imperialist diktat to the people of Lebanon and an attempt by Washington to legitimize and consummate the geo-strategic goals pursued in the month-long US-Israeli war of aggression.

It is deliberately written in such a provocative manner as to ensure its rejection not only by Hezbollah, but by the Lebanese government itself. Not a single Lebanese grievance is addressed. What it demands, essentially, is that Hezbollah enter a suicide pact with its enemies and that Lebanon accept its transformation into a semi-colony.

The aim is to provide prior justification for the continued massacre of the Lebanese people. The inevitable mantra that will be played out by government officials and the mass media in the days and weeks ahead will be that bleeding Lebanon has only itself to blame for its suffering because it would not accept “peace.”

National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley spelled this out, declaring at a press conference Sunday that a rejection of the resolution “will tell you something about who wants peace and who does not, and that will be a clarifying moment.”

Both US and Israeli officials have made it clear that this resolution signals not an end to the carnage and destruction in Lebanon, but rather their brutal escalation.

Speaking Sunday at President Bush’s ranch in Crawford Texas, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stressed that fighting would likely continue for “some time to come.” She said that while she hoped to see “an end to large-scale violence” in the short run, “these things take a while to wind down.”

During the last month of slaughter, Rice has engaged in a ghoulish version of “shuttle diplomacy” aimed not at halting the bloodshed, but at staving off calls for a cease-fire and allowing the Israeli military to continue its work of demolishing Lebanon’s infrastructure and using mass terror to drive the impoverished Shiite population out of south Lebanon.

It is clear that the US-French resolution is aimed at achieving essentially the same objectives. At Washington’s insistence, it calls not for an immediate cease-fire, but only for a “cessation of hostilities” within an unspecified time frame.

While demanding an end to all military activity by Hezbollah, the document calls upon Israel merely to halt “all offensive military operations,” a vague formulation that would essentially allow the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to continue their scorched-earth campaign in Lebanon under the pretext of “self-defense.”

It makes no demand for the immediate withdrawal of the more than 10,000 Israeli troops that have invaded Lebanese territory, nor does it propose any timetable for their leaving the country.

This one-sided document demands the “unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers,” while only “encouraging the efforts aimed at settling the issue of the Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel.”

The resolution essentially imposes the stated US-Israeli war aims, demanding the “establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani river... an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Lebanese armed and security forces and of UN mandated international forces” as well as the “disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon deployed in this area.” It provides no prescription, however, for ending Israeli occupation of either the Lebanese Shebaa farms region or the Syrian Golan Heights.

One section of the document provides for “reopening airports and harbors [now closed as a result of Israeli bombardment and an air and naval blockade] for verifiably and purely civilian purposes.” What is the meaning of such verification? By whom? Essentially, the UN resolution is aimed at robbing Lebanon of any semblance of sovereignty and reducing it to a semi-colonial protectorate dominated by Washington and Israel.

Once the Security Council passes this measure, a second resolution is to be prepared spelling out the composition and rules of engagement of a UN “peace-keeping” force. This force is expected to consist of at least 15,000 combat troops—up to a third of them French—backed by armor, which will be authorized to utilize massive and deadly force to disarm and expel the Hezbollah resistance fighters from the proposed buffer zone south of the Litani River.

According to published reports, agreement on this second resolution could take another two weeks of talks, during which Israel will continue its war of annihilation against Lebanon. Washington has engineered the diplomatic process at the UN precisely in such a way as to provide Israel with the opportunity to continue its assault. Asked on Sunday whether President Bush believed there was still a long way to go before the fighting ended, White House spokesman Tony Snow answered, “I don’t think he has any delusions about what lies ahead.”

Senior Israeli officials reacted to the draft resolution with either indifference or vows to intensify the war against Lebanon. Tourism Minister Isaac Herzog, a member of the security cabinet, indicated that the proposed UN measure would prompt an immediate acceleration of Israeli attacks. “Until the resolution enters into force, the army will continue to act,” he said in an Israeli television interview. “We have the coming days for lots of military moves. But we have to realize the timetable is getting shorter. It is a fact that we have to accept and act in accordance with.”

Justice Minister Haim Ramon, speaking on army radio, dismissed the significance of the resolution. “This is just a draft,” he said. “So we must continue fighting ... We still have goals to achieve militarily.” He added that Israel would continue its military operations in south Lebanon until the UN security force was deployed in the area.

There is every indication that Israel has already begun this escalation. Over the weekend it carried out a massive bombardment of at least 15 villages in an area along the border, leveling most of them. One village, Aitaroun, was pounded by a barrage of over 2,000 shells. Israel’s immediate aim is to carve out a four-mile-deep “security zone” along its border by driving out all its inhabitants.

While the UN resolution calls for “facilitating the safe return of displaced persons,” the Israeli Defense Forces are already creating facts on the ground by turning much of south Lebanon into uninhabitable rubble. Israel is conducting a massive operation in ethnic cleansing, turning the estimated one million Lebanese driven from their homes into permanent refugees and forcibly removing the impoverished Shiite population from their land.

In its latest warning of mass slaughter the Israeli military dropped leaflets threatening to carry out a bombardment of the port of Sidon, a city with a pre-war population of 100,000, which has been swelled substantially by refugees pouring in from other parts of the devastated south. Many had seen it as a safe haven because it is predominantly Sunni.

The Lebanese government rejected the US-French resolution, calling for its amendment to include the demand for the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from southern Lebanon.

A government source told Agence France-Presse that the resolution as it currently stands “will not resolve the crisis either for the good of Lebanon or for Israel. Israel will not have a guarantee of secure frontiers and Lebanon will not recover all its occupied territory.” The official added that the Lebanese government could not demand that Hezbollah lay down its arms as long as its territory remained under Israeli occupation.

Lebanon’s energy minister, Mohammed Fneish, a member of Hezbollah made the same point. “We are in a defense situation,” he said. “When the Israeli aggression ceases, very simply, we will stop (fighting) on condition that no Israeli soldier remains inside Lebanese land.”

By the count of the government in Beirut, over 1,000 Lebanese civilians have been killed, while many hundreds more are believed buried beneath the rubble of homes and apartment buildings demolished by Israeli air strikes and bombardments. The ratio of Lebanese to Israeli civilian casualties stands at 30 to 1, yet the UN resolution treats Hezbollah as the principal source of aggression.

Meanwhile, Israeli officials speak openly of assassinating Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a war aim.

The criminality and cynicism of Washington’s diplomacy found clearest expression in Secretary of State Rice’s explanation of why the war against Lebanon can be expected to go on for weeks more, with Washington’s approval. “We’re trying to deal with a problem that has been festering and brewing in Lebanon now for years and years and years, and so it’s not going to be solved by one resolution in the Security Council,” she declared.

This “festering” problem is not, in the eyes of Washington, the continuous Israeli seizure of land and use of military force against neighboring Arab countries, the plight of the Palestinians expelled from their homeland and subjected to decades of occupation, or Israel’s constant flouting of international law and United Nations resolutions. On the contrary, the problem is the failure of Israel’s 18-year occupation to defeat the Lebanese masses and the emergence of a powerful resistance movement. This is what Washington now proposes to crush by military force as part of its drive to assert US hegemony over the entire Middle East.

There is a strong element of desperation behind this strategy. US imperialism confronts deepening debacles in both Iraq and Afghanistan. There is as well growing concern within both US and Israeli ruling circles that the current intervention in Lebanon is confronting far greater resistance than had ever been anticipated, and that support within the Israeli population itself for the war is waning. In this sense, the UN resolution represents something of an insurance policy, proposing the formation of a “multinational force” that can be sent in to realize US-Israeli aims if the IDF proves inadequate for the task.

The collaboration of France in this enterprise has an unmistakable significance. Paris has reportedly offered to provide thousands of its own troops for this effort. The government of Jacques Chirac dropped its initial demand for a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire and has now accommodated itself to the US-Israeli strategy of continuing the slaughter in Lebanon under the cover of the UN “peace effort.”

The French government has developed a working relationship with Washington over the course of the last few years in relation to Lebanon, co-authoring the 2004 UN resolution demanding the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country and co-sponsoring with the Bush administration the so-called “Cedar Revolution” that followed the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, with the aim of installing a pro-Western government.

As the former colonial power in Lebanon, France has no principled disagreements with the American Middle East strategy. It is merely asserting its own interests there and throughout the region. No doubt, it also hopes through its involvement to stave off a broader US “preemptive war” against Iran, where European capital has significant interests and which provides a substantial share of Europe’s energy supplies.

This policy of appeasement of US militarism will do nothing to deter Washington from widening its interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan into a broader regional war that threatens to engulf the entire planet. US imperialism is determined to established its unfettered control over the world’s energy resources—including those of Iran, which possesses the second largest supplies of oil and gas, and from which American corporations have been excluded by Washington’s embargo of more than quarter-century against the country.

The US-French resolution on Lebanon has exposed, yet again, the United Nations as a pliant tool of US and world imperialism. Its inability to halt the carnage in Lebanon, followed by its blatant complicity in its continuation and escalation, recalls nothing so much as the League of Nations standing aside as fascist Italy conquered Ethiopia and imperial Japan ravaged China in the 1930s.

The struggle against the criminal aggression being waged against the peoples of Lebanon and Iraq and the fight against the growing danger of a far wider conflagration in the Middle East and internationally can be waged only on the basis of the independent mobilization of working people internationally on the basis of a common program directed against the economic and social system that produces war - capitalism. - By Bill Van Auken 7 August 2006
http://wsws.org/articles/2006/aug2006/leba-a07.shtml

US-ISRAELI WAR AIM
IS TO ANNIHILATE LEBANON


The sharp escalation of the attacks against Lebanon Friday have made it abundantly clear that the objective of this US-Israeli war of aggression is to demolish Lebanon as an independent and sovereign country.

The war is aimed at transforming the country into an occupied territory controlled by the US and Israel, perhaps through the medium of a NATO “peacekeeping” force. The destruction of Lebanon is being carried out quite deliberately, and with very definite designs. For Israel, it is yet again a matter of annexation of more territory. And for Washington, it is the preparation of new and even bloodier wars, directed in the first instance against Syria and Iran.

The pretense that this war is being waged to defend Israel from terrorism or even to destroy the Shiite Hezbollah movement is belied by the Israeli bombing campaign that is now striking targets and claiming victims far from the Shiite centers of south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut.

In one of the worst atrocities since the war began, an Israeli air strike claimed the lives of over 33 farm workers, blown to pieces as they loaded plums and peaches onto trucks at a farm warehouse in the far north of the Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian border. At least another 20 people were wounded in the attack. Most of the victims were Syrian Kurds. They were taken across the border to Syrian hospitals, because previous bombing raids had demolished roads leading to hospitals in Lebanon itself.

This massacre of farm workers followed airstrikes that systematically demolished bridges on the main coastal highway linking Beirut and the Lebanese south to the northern half of the country. Marking the first major attacks on the predominantly Christian North, these attacks served to cut the country in two and to cut off the sole remaining lifeline for relief supplies from abroad. At least five people were killed in these bombings, which were conducted during the morning rush hour, including motorists who were crushed to death as the bridges were bombed from beneath them.

In the south of Lebanon, near the Israeli border, yet another horror was reported Friday, after Israeli airstrikes demolished two homes where civilians were apparently seeking refuge from the military offensive. According to Lebanese officials some 57 people were trapped beneath the rubble of the buildings, and it was unknown how many were dead and if there were survivors.

Meanwhile, Israeli warplanes have resumed their bombings of the urban Shiite neighborhoods of southern Beirut, demolishing apartment buildings, roadways and other structures. Planes have dropped leaflets demanding that all residents of the crowded urban districts flee for their lives.

After nearly four weeks of Israeli attacks, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora declared in a speech broadcast to an emergency session of the Organization of the Islamic Conference convened in Malaysia, that 900 civilians have been killed in Lebanon, 3,000 wounded, and more than one million, a quarter of the Lebanese population, have been turned into internal refugees. A third of the dead, he said, were children under the age of 12.

The Israeli campaign to cut Lebanon off from the outside world while severing one part of the country from another is threatening to create a humanitarian catastrophe that could cause even more deaths than the bombs and shells being dropped on the country’s civilian population.

Israel has been enforcing a total air and sea blockade of Lebanon since mid-July. As a result, fuel supplies are running critically low, threatening to plunge the country into darkness. Fuel tankers have been turned away by Israeli warships. The most immediate catastrophic impact is that major hospitals, including ones that remained open during the civil war of the 1970s, are being forced to close because of lack of fuel and medicine, as well as the inability of staff to get to work. Medical personnel have warned that critical patients will likely die as a result of the blockade.

Throughout Beirut and the rest of the country, power outages are becoming commonplace, with some areas getting only two hours of electricity a day. Meanwhile, stores are running out of essential foodstuffs.

Lebanon’s President Emile Lahoud issued a statement accusing Israel of waging a “war of starvation” against the Lebanese people. “It is an aggression that has exceeded Israel’s declared objectives. Israel has now decided to destroy Lebanon,” he said.

The effect of Friday’s bombing of the key bridges linking the north and south of the country is to accelerate this destruction by cutting off the last route for aid entering the country.

The deliberate sabotaging of any attempts at relieving the suffering of the Lebanese people threatens to have catastrophic consequences. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned that the contamination of drinking water due to the destruction of infrastructure and the cutoff of fuel supplies threatened south Lebanon and its displaced population in particular with the outbreak of deadly epidemics.

Lahoud’s statement is not merely an emotional denunciation of the savage Israeli attack on Lebanon, but rather an accurate appraisal of the real objectives of this war.

The Bush administration in Washington and the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Israel, have launched a war whose aim it is to smash Lebanon as a country, using mass terror to expel entire populations and to reduce the nation as a whole to the status of a semi-colonial protectorate, wholly subordinated to the interests of Washington and the Zionist regime.

The war aims are emerging out of the barbaric methods that are being employed against the people of Lebanon. For Israel, it appears increasingly likely that the objective is the annexation of a significant portion of Lebanese territory, after it has been emptied of its civilian population through the means of massacres and terror. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz has ordered the military to prepare to drive all the way to the Litani River, 15 miles north of the border. The control of this river has been a strategic objective of the Zionists since before the founding of the Israeli state.

The experience of the last 40 years have demonstrated that Israel is a state without fixed borders. The momentum of each new war expands its control over new territory to meet its supposed security needs. In Lebanon, the Israeli state is pursuing the equivalent of what was referred to under Hitler’s Third Reich as lebensraum—the killing or expulsion of populations viewed as inferior in order to repopulate their land.

For Washington, the Israeli offensive has a far broader significance. The destruction of Lebanon is seen as a stepping stone to the launching of new aggressive wars aimed at achieving “regime change” in Syria and Iran. The unconditional US support for Israel’s criminal war against the Lebanese people is driven most fundamentally by US imperialism’s strategic goal of establishing its undisputed domination of the Middle East and its oil wealth.

This was undoubtedly the same goal that motivated US support for last year’s so-called “Cedar Revolution.” That this event and the elections that followed only served to strengthen Hezbollah’s political influence was seen by Washington as an intolerable impediment to its aims, best remedied through the use of murderous military force.

The naked aims of US imperialism found expression in a column published Friday by Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, one of the most consistent proponents of the Bush administration’s policy of militarism in the Middle East. “America’s green light for Israel to defend itself is seen as a favor to Israel,” he wrote. “But that is a tendentious, misleadingly partial analysis. The green light—indeed, the encouragement—is also an act of clear self-interest. America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat.”

Krauthammer criticized Israel not for the murderous character of its war against the Lebanese people, but rather for failing to utilize even greater force. Washington, he wrote, had “counted on Israel’s ability to do the job. It has been disappointed. Prime Minister Olmert has provided unsteady and uncertain leadership. Foolishly relying on air power alone, he denied his generals the ground offensive they wanted, only to reverse himself later.”

These are the real sentiments within the Bush administration. It wants Israel to get on with the business of mass killing in Lebanon, bringing the casualties into the tens if not hundreds of thousands to achieve US objectives.

That the brutality of this strategy is provoking massive upheavals throughout the Middle East is beyond dispute. Much of it is directed against the abject hypocrisy and criminality of the American role in planning and supporting this bloody enterprise. It should be recalled that not too many years ago official Washington and the American mass media was waging a massive campaign invoking “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo as a pretext for war in the Balkans. Now it is rushing bombs and missiles to Israel in order to facilitate the rapid cleansing of south Lebanon of its entire Shiite population through the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.

Over 100,000 marched in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City in Baghdad on Friday denouncing Israel and the US for the war in Lebanon and vowing to fight the US occupation. Right-wing Arab regimes such as in Jordan and Egypt have been forced to distance themselves from Washington.

And the Beirut newspaper Daily Star warned in an editorial on Friday that the war is exacerbating “the conspicuous disenchantment of large segments—perhaps majorities—of Arab public opinion with their own government policies.” It added, “The consequences are ominous in a region with so much of the world’s energy reserves, and so many governments and ordinary citizens willing to use the most awful kind of violence to achieve their goals. The signs of radicalization that continue to manifest themselves in various Arab countries, as a consequence of the war between Lebanon and Israel, must not be ignored.”

The Bush administration seems oblivious to this apparently sound advice. Having led the country into the disastrous quagmire of Iraq, it is welcoming the possibility of new wars and new terrorist attacks as a means of reinvigorating its flagging “global war on terrorism.”

The growth of mass opposition to the policies of Israel and Washington will be attributed to “terrorism,” and the pretexts will be found for new and even more terrible wars.
The ostensible opposition party in Washington, meanwhile, is vying with the administration over which of them is the most enthusiastic supporter of the Israeli war on Lebanon.

Representative of this party is Hillary Clinton, the Democratic senator from New York and leading candidate for the party’s presidential nomination in 2008.

Speaking in Buffalo, New York on Tuesday, just days after scores of people, the majority of them children, were massacred in the village of Qana, Clinton reiterated her unconditional backing for the Israeli state. The US, she said, “needs to take the lead in protecting Israel. It has to guarantee Israel’s security...whether that means putting troops in or not, I don’t know.”

Not a word of sympathy or concern for the bleeding Lebanese population passed Clinton’s lips. This attitude is not the exception, but the rule, for the entire American political establishment as well as the mass media. Atrocities that recall nothing so much as the crimes of German and Italian fascism in the 1930s—Ethiopia, Guernica, the Blitzkrieg against Poland—are treated as perfectly acceptable and understandable acts of Israeli “self-defense.”

Underlying this utter lack of morality lie the class interests of America’s ruling oligarchy, which has determined that its global interests can best be furthered through the utilization of unrestrained militarism.

In the end, American working people will be forced to pay the price for this seemingly insane policy. The costs of US militarism will be increasingly felt in the destruction of living standards and what little remains of social services for working people at home.

Moreover, the ever-widening war in the Middle East cannot be sustained much longer without the imposition of the military draft. It is highly probable that once the 2006 midterm elections are over, a bipartisan effort will be mounted—no doubt spearheaded by the Democrats—to resurrect the dragooning of American youth into the expeditionary forces that are being prepared to wage the so-called “long war” for US imperialist hegemony.

The struggle against war can be advanced only through the independent political mobilization of working people based upon a socialist program that seeks the international unification of workers in every country in a common struggle against the global financial and corporate interests that dominate the planet. The Socialist Equality Party is intervening in the 2006 elections in order to advance such an alternative. http://wsws.org/articles/2006/aug2006/leba-a05.shtml


ISRAEL AND US
PLANNED LEBANON
INVASION IN JUNE

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was planned between top Israeli officials and members of the Bush administration. On June 17 and 18, former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud Knesset member Natan Sharansky met with Vice President Dick Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute conference in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

There, the impending Israeli invasions of both Gaza and Lebanon were discussed. After receiving Cheney's full backing for the invasion of Gaza and Lebanon, Netanyahu flew back to Israel and participated in a special "Ex-Prime Ministers" meeting, in which he conveyed the Bush administration's support for the carrying out of the "Clean Break" policy -- the trashing of all past Middle East peace accords, including Oslo.

Present at the meeting, in addition to Netanyahu, were current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir is very old and suffers from dementia and Ariel Sharon remains in a coma after a series of strokes.

After the AEI meeting, Sharansky, who has the ear of Bush, met with the Heritage Foundation in Washington and then attended a June 29 seminar at Philadelphia's Main Line Haverford School sponsored by the Middle East Forum led by Daniel Pipes. Sharansky appeared with Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum who this past Thursday was beating the war drums against Syria, Iran, and "Islamo-fascism" in a fiery speech at the National Press Club attended by a cheering section composed of members of the neocon Israel Project, on whose board Santorum serves along with Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss and Virginia GOP Rep. Tom Davis.

Our Washington sources claim that the U.S.-supported invasions of Gaza and Lebanon and the impending attacks on Syria and Iran represent the suspected "event" predicted to take place prior to the November election in the United States and is an attempt to rally the American public around the Bush-Cheney regime during a time of wider war.

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=4877


ATTACK ON LEBANON
A JOINT ISRAELI-U.S.
MILITARY OPERATION

July 26, 2006: Our intelligence sources report that the Israeli Defense Force attack on Lebanon is being carried out as a joint Israeli-U.S. military operation. Moreover, there are joint Israeli and U.S. war rooms coordinating the U.S-supported Israeli attacks on Lebanon.

The ultimate aim of Washington and Jerusalem is not only to eliminate Hezbollah as a political force in Lebanon but also to remake Lebanon as an American and Israeli client state. Israeli forces are pounding parts of Lebanon, especially in the north, where there are no Hezbollah units and primarily Christian populations.

In addition, Israeli forces are being aided by the Bush administration with high-resolution overhead imagery from U.S. spy satellites and signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts from National Security Agency assets, including SIGINT satellites.

Bush administration assisting Israeli Defense Force attack on Lebanon with overhead imagery and signals intelligence intercepts.

The result of U.S. intelligence support for Israel is directly linked to the targeting of particular locations, including the Israeli launch of 24 high-explosive missiles on a block of ten buildings in south Beirut.

The entire block was levelled in the attack. The deliberate Israeli attack on a United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) outpost in southern Lebanon was the result of that post gaining information of Israeli atrocities committed against the civilian Lebanese population.

The Israeli attack, called deliberate by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, killed blue helmet peacekeepers from China, Finland, Canada, and Austria. Israeli continued to attack the UN post even as rescuers attempted to locate survivors in the rubble of the building.

The deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, an NSA spy ship monitoring communications during the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, was the result of the Liberty intercepting Israeli communications on the massacre by Israeli forces of surrendering Egyptian prisoners of war in Sinai. Israeli planes continued to attack the ship, even after it raised a large American flag. U.S. Navy and NSA survivors in the water were also strafed by Israeli aircraft.

www.waynemadsenreport.com/
Wayne Madsen – Wayne Madsen Report July 22/23-26, 2006
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=4877


ISRAELIS RAIN DOWN
DEADLY DU
ON LEBANESE CIVILIANS

Esteemed depleted uranium expert Dr. Doug Rokke is pointing the finger at Israel for using deadly and illegal depleted uranium munitions against the Lebanese people which were sold to them by the U.S. government - and calls for an immediate halt to the practice.

Dr. Doug Rokke's military career spanned four decades before he was appointed as the head of the US Army's investigative team into the assessment and teaching of the dangers of depleted uranium.

Dr. Rokke has been called upon as an advisor for the Centers of Disease Control, Department of Defense, National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, U.S Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Department of Transportation, FAA, U.S. Department of Defense. U.S. General Accounting Office, Department of Veterans Affairs, British Royal Society, British House of Lords and House of Commons, United Nations, and Presidential Special Oversight Board.

Depleted uranium is a radioactive toxic poison - according to Wikipedia, "Depleted uranium is a byproduct of the enriching of natural uranium for use in nuclear reactors. When most of the fissile radioactive isotopes of uranium are removed from natural uranium, the residue is called depleted uranium."

Depleted uranium is indiscriminate in who it targets. During an appearance on the Alex Jones Show, Dr. Rokke described some of the effects of depleted uranium - a battlefield weapon that once used can never be cleaned up and remains in the atmosphere for eternity.

"What we know from first hand experience and what happened to those of us in Gulf War I and when we did our research for the US Army - the first thing that hits you is respiratory problems, then you have the rashes, then you start having permanent lung damage within a few months because of radiation and chemical toxicity, then you have neurological problems, then you have gastrointestinal problems."

"You have decalcification of the bones and the teeth - then you have all the eye problems due to the alpha and beta damage to the eyes - and then the cancers, the leukemia and everything else," said Rokke.
"It's catastrophic, the US Army briefing the Pentagon leaders prior to Gulf War II in 2002 flat out acknowledged all of the problems yet they disregard them and say that they don't exist in public."

Following the bombing of Afghanistan a scientific study by British scientists Dr. Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan concluded that high levels of depleted uranium had contaminated Europe, having drifted on air currents from the Middle East and Central Asia.

Rokke said the Israelis first used depleted uranium munitions against the Egyptians during the Arab-Israeli war in 1973-74.

He outlined the path to the Israeli use of depleted uranium munitions, the 'civilized world's' dirty bombs, in Lebanon over the last two weeks.

Extreme birth deformities across Iraq and the Balkans are attributed to indiscriminate use of depleted uranium.

"The US Army confirmed they had used over 500 tons of uranium munitions just in the first two months in Iraq - that's the shock and awe - the US Army thoroughly confirmed in that the GBU 28 - which is a precision guided bomb if you will - 5,000 pounds of explosives contains a uranium warhead - again these are the bunker busters," said Rokke.

"Well low and behold last week guess what the United States delivered to Israel - over 100 GBU 28's to use against targets in Lebanon."

"The Army thoroughly confirmed that its a radioactive bomb and the shrapnel is there after its use and it's a problem and everything else so it's all there."

"So now we have photographic confirmation - and I want to repeat - photographic confirmation of Israeli tankers loading uranium rounds into Israeli tanks and using them in Lebanon," Rokke told Jones.

"What we have now is deliberate use of radioactive munitions, depleted uranium munitions, which are illegal according to the United Nations."

"We've got all the Lebanese being effected, all the women and children being affected, all the Israelis being effected, and the areas over there are so small you're going to have the whole region effected and contaminated."

"We knew about the GBU 28 delivery, we knew that was a given thing - now we were looking at the damage that's being done to Lebanon and all the damage indicates DU but until we actually got the full photograph of the DU round being loaded by an Israeli tank gunner we didn't have that and that came in yesterday," said Rokke.

Rokke expands on Israeli use of depleted uranium mission in an article in which he states that, "the use of uranium weapons is absolutely unacceptable, and a crime against humanity. Consequently the citizens of the world and all governments must force cessation of uranium weapons use. I must demand that Israel now provide medical care to all DU casualties in Lebanon and clean up all DU contamination."

On Tuesday we carried a video of Lebanese doctors describing injuries to children as showing all the hallmarks of phosphorous - a chemical weapon also highly contentious in battlefield use.

In a related development, former NSA official Wayne Madsen was told by his sources that the Israelis deliberately targeted and killed four UN observers because they had obtained knowledge of Israeli atrocities being perpetrated against the Lebanese population. - Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com July 28 2006