dubs aff juniors ndi 2010 8 12 jarassick

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 1Juniors DUBs Aff

DUBsDUBs........................................................................................................................................................................................................1

top line - 1ac1ac – Genocide..........................................................................................................................................................................................31ac – Genocide..........................................................................................................................................................................................41ac – Genocide..........................................................................................................................................................................................51ac – Genocide..........................................................................................................................................................................................61ac – Genocide..........................................................................................................................................................................................71ac – Genocide..........................................................................................................................................................................................81ac – Genocide..........................................................................................................................................................................................91ac – Genocide........................................................................................................................................................................................101ac – Genocide........................................................................................................................................................................................111ac – Genocide........................................................................................................................................................................................121ac – Genocide........................................................................................................................................................................................131ac – Genocide........................................................................................................................................................................................141ac – Genocide........................................................................................................................................................................................15

topicalityTopicality – “Presence” Includes Equipment/Weapons..........................................................................................................................16Topicality – “Presence” Includes Environmental Damages...................................................................................................................17Topicality – “Presence” is Influence.......................................................................................................................................................18Topicality – “Presence” Can be Invisible...............................................................................................................................................19Topicality – “Presence” Includes DUBs.................................................................................................................................................20

frameworkFramework – Media/Body Counts Bad..................................................................................................................................................21Framework – Future Deaths...................................................................................................................................................................22

healthHealth Effects – Cancer..........................................................................................................................................................................23Health Effects – Cancer Deaths..............................................................................................................................................................24Health Effects – Birth Defects................................................................................................................................................................25Health Effects – Other Diseases.............................................................................................................................................................26Health Effects – A2: No Gulf War Syndrome.........................................................................................................................................27Health Effects – A2: No Gulf War Syndrome.........................................................................................................................................28Health Effects – A2: No Gulf War Syndrome – Methodology Indict.....................................................................................................29Health Effects – A2: Body Filters Uranium............................................................................................................................................30Health Effects – A2: Low DU Levels in Patients...................................................................................................................................31Health Effects – Impact Calculus – Precautionary Principle..................................................................................................................32

int'l lawInternational Law – Gas Weapons..........................................................................................................................................................33International Law – Gas Weapons – A2: U.S. Not Signed On...............................................................................................................34International Law – Laundry List...........................................................................................................................................................35International Law – Four Tests...............................................................................................................................................................36International Law – Cruelty/Unconfirmed Effects.................................................................................................................................37International Law – Indiscriminate Harm...............................................................................................................................................38International Law – Noncombatants.......................................................................................................................................................39International Law – Neutral States.........................................................................................................................................................40

envEnvironment – Nondisclosure................................................................................................................................................................41Environment – Radioactivity..................................................................................................................................................................42Environment – Dispersal/Widespread Effects........................................................................................................................................43Environment – DU Permeates to Humans..............................................................................................................................................44Environment – Water/Soil.......................................................................................................................................................................45

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 2Juniors DUBs AffEnvironment – Contamination................................................................................................................................................................46Environment – Danger Lasts Many Years..............................................................................................................................................47

leftist impactsK Impacts – Right to Existence..............................................................................................................................................................48K Impacts – Genocide.............................................................................................................................................................................49K Impacts – Equivalent to a Huge Nuclear War.....................................................................................................................................50K Impacts – Systemic Impact.................................................................................................................................................................51K Impacts – Nuclearised Planet..............................................................................................................................................................52K Impacts – A2: Unintentional...............................................................................................................................................................53

levinas workLevinas – Obligation to the Suffering.....................................................................................................................................................54Levinas – Precedes Calculations.............................................................................................................................................................55Levinas – Logic of Genocide..................................................................................................................................................................56Levinas – Ethical Responsibility............................................................................................................................................................57Levinas – Sanctity of Life.......................................................................................................................................................................58

add-onsImperialism K Add-On...........................................................................................................................................................................59Proliferation K Add-On..........................................................................................................................................................................60

u.s. keyU.S. Key – Systemic Death....................................................................................................................................................................61U.S. Key – Moral Imperative*................................................................................................................................................................62U.S. Key – Ethical Obligation................................................................................................................................................................63U.S. Key – Locations..............................................................................................................................................................................64U.S. Key – DUB Unacceptability...........................................................................................................................................................65U.S. Key – Responsibility.......................................................................................................................................................................66U.S. Key – 1AC......................................................................................................................................................................................67

solvency mechsSolvency – Microbial Cleanup...............................................................................................................................................................70Solvency – Microbes Ext: Stops Animal/Plant Uptake..........................................................................................................................71Solvency – Microbes Ext: Microbes Perfectly Suited............................................................................................................................72Solvency – Microbes – A2: Tests Inconclusive/Abiotic Factors............................................................................................................73Solvency – Microbes – A2: Still Radioactive.........................................................................................................................................74Solvency – Microbes List.......................................................................................................................................................................75Solvency – Plant Cleanup.......................................................................................................................................................................76

politicsPlan Popular – Activist Groups...............................................................................................................................................................77Plan Popular – GOP................................................................................................................................................................................78Plan Unpopular – GOP...........................................................................................................................................................................79


1ac – GenocideContention One is the Status Quo –

First, U.S. military presence in Iraq has created significant DU exposure

Al-Azzawi 06 (Dr. Souad N. Al-Azzawi Assoc. Prof. / Mamoun Univ. for Science & Technology, August 21 2006 [last modified], “Depleted Uranium Radioactive Contamination In Iraq:An Overview,” online: http://www.brusselstribunal.org/pdf/DU-Azzawi.pdf #!tylerd)

Depleted Uranium (DU) weaponry has been used against Iraq for the first time in the history of recent wars. The magnitude of the complications and damage related to the use of such radioactive and toxic weapons on the environment and the human population mostly results from the intended concealment, denial and misleading information released by the Pentagon about the quantities, characteristics and the area’s in Iraq, in which these weapons have been used. Revelation of information regarding what is called the Gulf War Syndrome among exposed American veterans helped Iraqi researchers and Medical Doctors to understand the nature of the effect of these weapons, and the means required to investigate further into this issue. The synergetic impact on health due to the post Gulf War I economical sanctions and DU related radioactive contamination raised the number of casualties in contaminated areas as in southern Iraq. Continual usage of DU after Gulf War I on other Iraqi territories through the illegal No-Fly Zones and the major DU loaded Cruise Missiles attack of year 1998, all contributed in making the problem increasingly complex. During 2003, military operations conducted in Iraq by the invading forces used additional rounds of DU in heavily populated areas such as Baghdad, Samawa and other provinces . It is only fair to conclude that the environment in Iraq and its population have been exposed continuously to DU weaponry or its contaminating remains , since 1991. Accordingly millions of Iraqi’s have received higher doses of radioactivity than ordinary background levels. As a result a multi-fold increase of low level radiation exposure related diseases have been registered since 1995. An increase of children’s leukemia, congenital malformations, breast cancer etc…

The US refuses to acknowledge or clean up the DU in Iraq

Fahey 03 (Dan Fahey has a masters in IR from Tufts University, June 24 2003, “The Use of Depleted Uranium in the 2003 Iraq War,” online: http://www.wise-uranium.org/pdf/duiq03.pdf #!tylerd)

There does not yet appear to be any coherent US policy on environmental assessment or remediation of DU contamination in Iraq. An April story on BBC News Online quoted a Pentagon spokesman as stating “I don’t believe we have any plans for a DU clean-up in Iraq.”74 To date, the US government has also refused to release information about the quantities and locations of DU expenditure in Iraq, or allow UNEP’s Post Conflict Assessment Unit into Iraq to study DU. This is a shortsighted approach that has ill served US policy in the past. Indeed, the US government’s reluctance to provide information about DU in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan

has helped fuel speculation about widespread and severe health effects caused by DU in those places, which have further been cited by

political groups to support opposition to the United States. The timely release information about DU and prompt environmental assessments could have resolved many of the uncertainties that persist about the effects of the use of DU munitions in other conflicts ; the Department of Defense should learn from its past mistakes to proactively take steps to enable UN experts to assess and address DU contamination in Iraq.


1ac – GenocideContention Two is the Ongoing Iraqi Genocide –

Four internal links –

First, the use of DU munitions constitutes a genocide of the Iraqi people

Douglas 7 (Ian, visiting professor in politics at An-Najah National University, “US Genocide in Iraq,” http://www.brusselstribunal.org/pdf/NotesOnGenocideInIraq.pdf) Showers

Looking closer, we find that the word genocide has two lives: its common meaning and its legal substance. Commonly, genocide is taken to mean the total annihilation of a people. Nothing less counts, hence scepticism in using the word. On rapid reading, UN General Assembly Resolution 96 of 1946 authorising the drafting of a genocide convention suggests the same understanding: “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”1 But this definition bears reading again, for it is not the fact of annihilation that constitutes the crime of genocide, but rather denial of the right of existence of an entire given group. This nuance is important.Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention —now the legal standard2 — makes this point clear by focusing on the concept of intent, supplementing this with the important phrase, “in whole or in part”, thus grounding genocide not in numbers annihilated, but in the iniquity of a rationality that intends massively destructive consequences. This qualification is what ensures that the Genocide Convention is a preventative mechanism and not simply a reactive instrument. It also means that guilt is a moral determination. Indeed, in origin the term itself — coined in the inter-war period by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish legal scholar — emerged from the effort to make “barbarity” and “vandalism” crimes under international law. It is intent to destroy that is the basis of the crime of genocide , illustrated in definable acts that constitute — or would — genocide.


1ac – GenocideSecond, the use of DU irradiates the Iraqi population – and America is the only responsible actor that can stop the atrocity

Peterson, ‘3 – writer for CSM and DU activist [Scott, “Remains of toxic bullets litter Iraq”, 5/15, http://www.csMonitor.com/2003/0515/p01s02-woiq.html //adi]

BAGHDAD (15 May 2003) -- At a roadside produce stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, business is brisk for Latifa Khalaf Hamid. Iraqi drivers pull up and snap up fresh bunches of parsley, mint leaves, dill, and onion stalks. But Ms. Hamid's stand is just four paces away from a burnt-out Iraqi tank, destroyed by -- and contaminated with -- controversial American depleted-uranium (DU) bullets. Local children play "throughout the day" on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road. No one has warned the vendor in the faded, threadbare black gown to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven't been told not to play with the radioactive debris. They gather around as a Geiger counter carried by a visiting reporter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout. The Monitor visited four sites in the city -- including two randomly chosen destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles, a clutch of burned American ammunition trucks, and the downtown planning ministry -- and found significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad. In the first partial Pentagon disclosure of the amount of DU used in Iraq, a US Central Command spokesman told the Monitor that A-10 Warthog aircraft -- the same planes that shot at the Iraqi planning ministry -- fired 300,000 bullets. The normal combat mix for these 30-mm rounds is five DU bullets to 1 -- a mix that would have left about 75 tons of DU in Iraq. The Monitor saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away. There, a 3-foot-long DU dart from a 120 mm tank shell, was found producing radiation at more than 1,300 times background levels. It made the instrument's staccato bursts turn into a steady whine. "If you have pieces or even whole [DU] penetrators around, this is not an acute health hazard, but it is for sure above radiation protection dose levels," says Werner Burkart, the German deputy director general for Nuclear Sciences and Applications at the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. "The important thing in any battlefield -- especially in populated urban areas -- is somebody has to clean up these sites ." Minimizing the risk Fresh-from-the-factory DU tank shells are normally handled with gloves, to minimize the health risk, and shielded with a thin coating. The alpha particle radiation emitted by DU travels less than an inch and can be stopped by cloth or even tissue paper. But when the DU material burns (usually on impact; or as a dust, it can spontaneously ignite) protective shields disappear, and dangerous radioactive oxides are created that can be inhaled or ingested. "[The risk] depends so very much on how you handle it," says Jan Olof Snihs, of Sweden's Radiation Protection Authority in Stockholm. In most cases dangers are low, he says, unless children eat toxic and radioactive soil, or get DU oxides on their hands. Radioactive particles are a "special risk associated with a war," Mr. Snihs says. "The authorities should be aware of this, and try to decontaminate places like this, just to avoid unnecessary risk." Pentagon officials say that DU is relatively harmless and a necessary part of modern warfare. They say that pre-Gulf War studies that indicated a risk of cancer and of causing harm to local populations through permanent contamination have been superseded by newer reports. "There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq," said Lt. Col. Michael Sigmon, deputy surgeon for the US Army's V Corps, told journalists in Baghdad last week. He asserted that children playing with expended tank shells would have to eat and then practically suffocate on DU residue to cause harm. But there is a growing chorus of concern among United Nations and relief officials, along with some Western scientific experts, who are calling for sites contaminated with DU be marked off and made safe. "The soil around the impact sites of [DU] penetrators may be heavily contaminated, and could be harmful if swallowed by children," says Brian Spratt, chair of the working group on DU at The Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific institution. Heavy metal toys? Fragments and penetrators should be removed, since "children find them fascinating objects, and can pocket them," says Professor Spratt. "The science says there is some danger -- not perhaps a huge danger -- of these objects. ... We certainly do not say that these things are safe; we say that cleanup is important." The British Ministry of Defense says it will offer screening to soldiers suspected of DU exposure, and will publish details about locations and quantities of DU that British troops used in Iraq -- a tiny fraction of that fired by US forces. The Pentagon has traditionally been tight-lipped about DU: Official figures on the amount used were not released for years after the 1991 Gulf War and Bosnia conflicts, and nearly a year after the 1999 Kosovo campaign. No US official contacted could provide DU use estimates from the latest war in Iraq. " The first thing we should ask [the US military] is to remove that immediately," says Carel de Rooy, head of the UN Children's Fund in Baghdad, adding that senior UN officials need urgent advice on avoiding exposure. The UN Environment Program last month called for field tests. DU "is still an issue of great concern for the general public," said UNEP chief Klaus Töpfer. "An early study in Iraq could either lay these fears to rest or confirm that there are indeed potential risks." US troops avoid wreckage During the latest Iraq conflict Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and A-10 Warthog aircraft, among other military platforms, all fired the DU bullets from desert war zones to the heart of Baghdad. No other armor-piercing round is as effective against enemy tanks. While the Pentagon says there's no risk to Baghdad residents, US soldiers are taking their own precautions in Iraq, and in some cases have handed out warning leaflets and put up signs. "After we shoot something with DU, we're not supposed to go around it, due to the fact that it could cause cancer," says

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 6Juniors DUBs Affa sergeant in Baghdad from New York, assigned to a Bradley, who asked not to be further identified. "We don't know the effects of what it could do," says the sergeant. "If one of our vehicles burnt with a DU round inside,

1ac – Genocideor an ammo truck, we wouldn't go near it, even if it had important documents inside. We play it safe. " Six American vehicles struck with DU "friendly fire" in 1991 were deemed to be too contaminated to take home, and were buried in Saudi Arabia. Of 16 more brought back to a purpose-built facility in South Carolina, six had to be buried in a low-level radioactive waste dump. Television footage of the war last month showed Iraqi armored vehicles burning as US columns drove by, a common sign of a strike by DU, which burns through armor on impact, and often ignites the ammunition carried by the targeted vehicle. "We were buttoned up when we drove by that -- all our hatches were closed," the US sergeant says. "If we saw anything on fire, we wouldn't stop anywhere near it. We would just keep on driving." That's an option that produce seller Hamid doesn't have. She says the US broke its promise not to bomb civilians. She has found US cluster bomblets in her garden; the DU is just another dangerous burden, in a war about which she remains skeptical. "We were told it was going to be paradise [when Saddam Hussein was toppled], and now they are killing our children," she says voicing a common Iraqi perception about the risk of DU. "The Americans did not bother to warn us that this is a contaminated area." There is a warning now at the Doura intersection on the southern outskirts of Baghdad. In the days before the capital fell, four US supply trucks clustered near an array of highway off-ramps caught fire, cooking off a number of DU tank rounds. American troops wearing facemasks for protection arrived a few days later and bulldozed the topsoil around the site to limit the contamination. The troops taped handwritten warning signs in Arabic to the burned vehicles, which read: "Danger -- Get away from this area." These were the only warnings seen by this reporter among dozens of destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles littering the city. "All of them were wearing masks," says Abbas Mohsin, a teenage cousin of a drink seller 50 yards away, said referring to the US military cleanup crew. "They told the people there were toxic materials ... and advised my cousin not to sell Pepsi and soft drinks in this area. They said they were concerned for our safety." Despite the troops' bulldozing of contaminated earth away from the burnt vehicles, black piles of pure DU ash and particles are still present at the site. The toxic residue, if inhaled or ingested, is considered by scientists to be the most dangerous form of DU. One pile of jet-black dust yielded a digital readout of 9,839 radioactive emissions in one minute, more than 300 times average background levels registered by the Geiger counter. Another pile of dust reached 11,585 emissions in a minute. Western journalists who spent a night nearby on April 10, the day after Baghdad fell, were warned by US soldiers not to cross the road to this site, because bodies and unexploded ordnance remained, along with DU contamination. It was here that the Monitor found the "hot" DU tank round. This burned dart pushed the radiation meter to the far edge of the "red zone" limit. A similar DU tank round recovered in Saudi Arabia in 1991, that was found by a US Army radiological team to be emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. Their safety memo noted that the "current [US Nuclear Regulatory Commission] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year." The normal public dose limit in the US, and recognized around much of the world, is 100 millirems per year. Nuclear workers have guidelines 20 to 30 times as high as that. The depleted-uranium bullets are made of low-level radioactive nuclear-waste material, left over from the making of nuclear fuel and weapons. It is 1.7 times as dense as lead, and burns its way easily through armor. But it is controversial because it leaves a trail of contamination that has half-life of 4.5 billion years -- the age of our solar system. Less DU in this war? In the first Gulf War, US forces used 320 tons of DU, 80 per cent of it fired by A-10 aircraft. Some estimates suggest 1,000 tons or more of DU was used in the current war. But the Pentagon disclosure Wednesday that about 75 tons of A-10 DU bullets were used points to a smaller overall DU tonnage in Iraq this time. US military guidelines developed after the first Gulf War -- which have since been considerably eased -- required any soldier coming within 50 yards of a tank struck with DU to wear a gas mask and full protective suit. Today, soldiers say they have been told to steer clear of any DU. "If a [tank] was taken out by depleted uranium, there may be oxide that you don't want to inhale. We want to minimize any exposure, at least to the lowest level possible," Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official told journalists on March 14, just days before the war began. "If somebody needs to go into a tank that's been hit with depleted uranium, a dust mask, a handkerchief is adequate to protect them -- washing their hands afterwards." Not everyone on the battlefield may be as well versed in handling DU, Dr. Kilpatrick said, noting that his greater concern is DU's chemical toxicity, not its radioactivity: " What we worry about like lead in paint in housing areas -- children picking it up and eating it or licking it -- getting it on their hands and ingesting it." In the US, stringent NRC rules govern any handling of DU, which can legally only be disposed of in low-level radioactive waste dumps. The US military holds more than a dozen NRC licenses to work with it. In Iraq, DU was not just fired at armored targets. Video footage from the last days of the war shows an A-10 aircraft -- a plane purpose-built around a 30-mm Gatling gun -- strafing the Iraqi Ministry of Planning in downtown Baghdad. A visit to site yields dozens of spent radioactive DU rounds , and distinctive aluminum casings with two white bands, that drilled into the tile and concrete rear of the building. DU residue at impact clicked on the Geiger counter at a relatively low level, just 12 times background radiation levels. Hot bullets But the finger-sized bullets themselves -- littering the ground where looters and former staff are often walking -- were the "hottest" items the Monitor measured in Iraq, at nearly 1,900 times background levels. The site is just 300 yards from where American troops guard the main entrance of the Republican Palace, home to the US and British officials tasked with rebuilding Iraq. "Radioactive? Oh, really?" asks a former director general of the ministry, when he returned in a jacket and tie for a visit last week, and heard the contamination levels register in bursts on the Geiger counter. "Yesterday more than 1,000 employees came here, and they didn't know anything about it," the former official says. "We have started to not believe what the American government says. What I know is that the occupiers should clean up and take care of the country they invaded." US military officials often say that most people are exposed to natural or

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 7Juniors DUBs Aff"background" radiation n daily life. For example, a round-trip flight across the US can yield a 5 millirem dose from increased cosmic radiation; a chest X-ray can yield a 10 millirem dose in a few seconds. The Pentagon says that, since DU is

1ac – Genocide"depleted" and 40 per cent less radioactive than normal uranium, it presents even less of a hazard. But DU experts say they are most concerned at how DU is transformed on the battlefield, after burning, into a toxic oxide dust that emits alpha particles. While those can be easily stopped by the skin, once inside the body, studies have shown that they can destroy cells in soft tissue . While one study on rats linked DU fragments in muscle tissue to increased cancer risk, health effects on humans remain inconclusive. As late as five days before the Iraq war began, Pentagon officials said that 90 of those troops most heavily exposed to DU during the 1991 Gulf War have shown no health problems whatsoever, and remain under close medical scrutiny. Released documents and past admissions from military officials, however, estimate that around 900 Americans were exposed to DU. Only a fraction have been watched, and among those has been one diagnosed case of lymphatic cancer, and one arm tumor. As reported in previous articles, the Monitor has spoken to American veterans who blame their DU exposure for serious health problems. The politics of DU But DU health concerns are very often wrapped up in politics. Saddam Hussein's regime blamed DU used in 1991 for causing a spike in the cancer rate and birth defects in southern Iraq. And the Pentagon often overstates its case -- in terms of DU effectiveness on the battlefield, or declaring the absence of health problems, according to Dan Fahey, an American veterans advocate who has Monitored the shrill arguments from both sides since the mid-1990s. "DU munitions are neither the benign wonder weapons promoted by Pentagon propagandists nor the instruments of genocide decried by hyperbolic anti-DU activists," Mr. Fahey writes in a March report, called "Science or Science Fiction: Facts, Myth and Propaganda in the Debate Over DU Weapons." Nonetheless, Rep. Jim McDermott (D) of Washington, a doctor who visited Baghdad before the war, introduced legislation in Congress last month requiring studies on health and environment studies, and clean up of DU contamination in the US. He says DU may well be associated with increased birth defects. "While the political effects of using DU munitions are perhaps more apparent than their health and environmental effects," Fahey writes, "science and common sense dictate it is unwise to use a weapon that distributes large quantities of a toxic waste in areas where people live, work, grow food, or draw water." Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the issue, Iraqis worry about DU. "It is an important concern.... We know nothing about it. How can I protect my family?" asks Faiz Askar, an Iraqi doctor. "We say the war is finished, but what will the future bring?"


1ac – GenocideThird – DU exposure massively increases the risk of birth defects

Bertell, ‘6 – Rosalie Bertell, Grey Nun of the Sacred Heart, received her Ph. D. degree in Biometrics with minors in Biology and Biochemistry from the Catholic University of America, in 1966. Since that time she has worked as a biometrician and environmental epidemiologist. By choice, Dr. Bertell works for the victims or potential victims of industrial, technological and military pollution with a particular emphasis on assisting the struggles of third world and indigenous people to preserve their Human Right to life and health [Rosalie, “DEPLETED URANIUM: ALL THE QUESTIONS ABOUT DU AND GULF WAR SYNDROME ARE NOT YET ANSWERED”, International Journal of Health Services, Volume 36, Number 3/2006 //adi]

Soluble uranium oxide and all nanoparticles can cross the placenta, and these are particularly toxic to the rapidly developing embryo or fetus. At low doses, they damage the fetal brain, causing behavioral problems, such as aggressiveness and hyperactivity, and mental retardation. Other teratogenic effects are congenital malformations and diseases. The underdeveloped immune and hormonal systems of the fetus are more easily compromised than in a fully mature adult. One official epidemiological study did look at the health of the offspring of Gulf War veterans. This was a study of veterans in general and was not limited to those either with GWS or with known exposure to DU. This study of birth defects in the children of veterans in the United States, undertaken by Han Kang of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (36), focused on the first pregnancy after returning home from the Gulf War. Slightly less than 21,000 veterans, from all four branches, active and retired, were included in the study (about 70% of those to whom questionnaires were sent). Male Gulf War veterans were twice as likely, and female veterans almost three times as likely, to report children with birth defects than their counterparts who did not serve in the first Gulf War. Birth defects included webbed fingers and toes, heart murmurs, chromosomal abnormalities, and brain tumors. The researchers excluded developmental disorders, perinatal complications, and pediatric disorders from the study. Male veterans reported miscarriages more often, and the increase, 1.62 times, was statistically significant. Female veterans also reported more miscarriages, but the sample size of female veterans was too small to reach statistical significance. No attempt was made to relate these findings to DU or any other Gulf War exposure (36).

Fourth – Depleted Uranium has the potential to turn Iraq into a wasteland – already cancer rates are skyrocketing

Etchison, ‘7 – PhD [Craig, Truthout, “Depleted Uranium: Pernicious Killer Keeps on Killing”, 2/19, http://www.cleaniraq.org/pages/e_Pernicious_Killer.htm //adi]

We must also consider the real possibility of Iraq as an uninhabitable wasteland, with the residue of the DU aerosol blowing in the wind and flowing in the waters to adjacent lands, a residue with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Is this outlook too bleak? Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, director of the Oncology Center at the largest hospital in Basra said the following in 2003. "Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient.... We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer.... My wife has nine members of her family with cancer. " He went on to point out that these were families with no history of cancer. After Gulf War I, the United Kingdom's Atomic Energy Authority estimated that DU contamination could kill half a million Iraqis.


1ac – GenocideAnd, evaluate our impacts first – five reasons

First, Failure to take a stand against depleted uranium threatens the survival of the planet by allowing ever increasingly poisonous weapons to be deployed routinely

Nixon 05 (Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at Universite of Wisconsin: Madison, February 18 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 51, Issue 24, pB7-B10, EBSCOhost, online: http://irgg.research.yale.edu/documents/ToolsofWar.pdf #!tylerd)

Perhaps the greatest challenge we now face is to reinstate a more expansive vision of what it means to be secure. What span of time will we allow to define our national security and our security as a species? At home and across the planet, in wartime and in peace, environmental safeguards must be reasserted, safeguards on which our health, freedoms, and international standing depend. The current fixation on meeting terror with high-tech military terror has shrunk our vision of what constitutes sustainable security. If we improved the fuel efficiency of America's cars and light trucks by a mere 2.7 miles per gallon, we would be liberated from the need to import any oil from Saudi Arabia. Such a bold but feasible move to conserve energy would also help reintegrate a viable environment into our vision of how to protect America in the long term. We cannot afford to shrink the threats to our future to the real but reductive threat of terrorism. If we continue to glorify poisonous weapons of fake precision, belated war deaths will become increasingly widespread, as will the political consequences of the accompanying blow-back rage. We will face an unbounded war, as the planet itself metastasizes into a combatant: the ultimate, toxic hyperpower, a force of random, abiding retribution

And, This devastation will continue for generations as depleted uranium spreads throughout the Iraqi environment

MTP 03 (KAHAE Military Toxics Project, June 2003, “"Depleted" Uranium Munitions:Nuclear Waste as a Weapon,” online: http://www.kahea.org/lcr/pdf/Depleted_Uranium_Fact_Sheet.pdf #!tylerd)

Immediate battlefield exposures of combat and cleanup personnel to "depleted" uranium are only the tip of the toxic and radioactive iceberg. Continuing environmental exposures present a much longer-term danger to civilians in post-conflict areas. The Royal Society (the British national academy of sciences) recently concluded that because DU may move into the environment – especially water sources – over many decades , "contaminated land might be a concern for hundreds of years" and "contamination of water supplies or other sensitive components of the environment…might only become apparent after a number of years or more likely decades." Environmental

contamination at production and testing sites is addressed above; here we review conflict and post-conflict exposures . Firing of DU munitions can immediately contaminate air, soil, and water with ingestible particles of toxic and radioactive "depleted" uranium. Unless shells and fragments are removed from areas of use, they will continue to release DU into the environment for years or decades. Corrosion of spent shells adds to amounts of mobile DU dust in environment. If not cleaned up, it may contaminate food or water supplies, or be resuspended into the air and carried by wind. Activities such as construction or plowing may be hazardous to people in the area. Children living in affected areas are particularly at risk of playing in DU contaminated areas, and ingesting contaminated soil.


1ac – GenocideSecond, weigh genocide first – util is bankrupt and normalizes genocide

Destexhe 95 (Alain Destexhe is fmr secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, fmr president of the Int’l Crisis Group and secretary of the Belgian Senate Special Committee of Inquiry into the Genocide in Rwanda, “Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century,” pp. 9-11, NYU Press, google books, #!tylerd)

Another reason why it is of fundamental importance to make distinctions between different kinds of catastrophes is that they are then revealed to vary greatly both in nature and in degree. However, the increasing amount of exaggerated news coverage given to any disaster, natural or manmade, nearly

always infers that these events have one common denominator: they are seen as the product of fate and misfortune rather than the deliberate policy of any one individual or group. This results from the inability of the general public to make clear distinctions (value judgements) between a genocide and a civil war, a mugging and a road accident, famine, cholera epidemics and natural disasters. Massacres and killings are put down to barbarism, age-old hatreds, ancient fears and tribal wars: ambiguous terms rooted in the racial thinking of the nineteenth century which often sowed the seeds of much later hostility . For example, die first real signs of antagonism between the Serbs and Croats only surfaced at the beginning of the twentieth century; and it was after 1960, in the countrysides of Burundi and Rwanda, where the populations mainly lived, thai the social differences between Hutu and Tutsi ceased to be seen as such and became an ethnic divide. This simplification of issues can be seen everywhere, not only within the media but also in supposedly learned works on the subject, such as a recent collection with the already ambiguous tide L 'histoire inhumane: massacres et genocides des origines d nos jours. From the first page onwards, we are told that at the root of all massacres 'there is always fear, from whence comes haired', and the author concludes: The world seemed to have known the heights of horror with Nazism, the extermination camps and the holocaust of the Jews (the Shoah), but on 6 August 1945, the United States, the world's leading democratic country... dropped the first atomic bomb in history on Hiroshima.... Thus did terror make its entry into history on a global scale.11 The author, Guy Richard, not only trivialises the genocide committed by the Nazis, but, no doubt involuntarily, he implies that the two atrocities can be measured within the same set of values, oblivious to the totally different motivations that lay behind each of them. By giving equal significance to both events he even infers that the United States could be held responsible (guilty perhaps?) for a new and worse form of barbarism. In the face of this slanted argument, one almost hesitates to point out that it was Japan and Germany that declared war on the rest of the world and not the other way around, and that the aims of the Nazis and their system of values were far from the same as those of the Allies. The destruction of Dresden,

unnecessary and criminal as it was, must also be understood as the response - albeit exaggerated, horrendous and futile - to Coventry, Rotterdam and Warsaw. But the bombs that fell on Dresden and the shells fired by both sides in the First World War (and if any war can be termed

a butchery it is this) did not pre-select a race or a people as their victims, The pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was involved in fighting a war, not trying to exterminate die Japanese and deny their right to live as any other people. Although the government was prepared to commit a crime in order to hasten the end of the war, it did not do so by selecting the Japanese or the Germans as enemies and categorising them as a sub-human species. It should be clear that fear was not the source of the Second World War but rather, as with all widespread massacres, the source lay in individuals and their ideologies. It cannot be denied, therefore, that ultimately it must always be possible to pinpoint certain individuals responsible for carrying the guilt of their actions and making them face the consequences. It is totally unacceptable and even dangerous to group together all those who die in tragic circumstances, regardless of the way in which they die. It should be obvious that it is not at all the same thing to die from cholera in a refugee camp or as the targetted victim of ethnic cleansing in one's own home. If it were all one and the same, then there would be no more at stake than the right of all victims to our compassion. Crime and guilt then cease to be significant and the particularly horrible murder of one individual would be measured with the same stick as a mass killing.


1ac – GenocideThird, we must satisfy our infinite obligation to the Other – we universalize this ethic.

Simmons 99 (William Paul Simmons is a professor in the Dept. of History and PoliSci at Bethany College, Philosophy and Social Criticism. Vol. 25 no. 6. p. 85-86. “The Third: Levinas' Theoretical Move From An-archical Ethics to the Realm of Justice and Politics.” #!tylerd)

How is it possible to break the stranglehold of ontology? How can transcendence be rediscovered in the Western tradition? How can Levinas claim that ethics and not ontology deserves to be labeled ‘first philosophy’? According to Levinas, the face-to-face relationship with the other person, the Other, is beyond the grasp of ontology. The face cannot be totalized because it expresses infinitude. In other words, the ego can never totally know the Other. In fact, the Other exists prior to the subject and ontology: the Other comes from the immemorial past. How can Levinas reject the Cartesian hypothesis and claim that the relationship with the Other is primary? How can the relationship with the Other precede my being? How can the Other be an-archical? In Totality and Infinity, Levinas develops his an-archical ethics by reviving the Platonic distinction between need and eros or desire.6 A need is a privation which can be sated, but a desire cannot be satisfied. The ego satisfies its needs, and remains within itself, by appropriating the world. ‘Need opens upon a world that is for-me; it returns to the self. . . . It is an assimilation of the world in view of coincidence with oneself, or happiness.’ 7 As the desired is approached, on the other hand, the hunger increases. It pulls the ego away from its self-sufficiency. Thus, needs belong to the realm of the Same, while desires pull the ego away from the Same and toward the beyond. Nonetheless, desires also originate in an ego who longs for the unattainable. Therefore, desire has a dual structure of transcendence and interiority. This dual structure includes an absolutely Other, the desired, which cannot be consumed and an ego who is preserved in this relationship with the transcendent. Thus, there is both a relationship and a separation. According to Levinas, this structure of desire is triggered by the approach of the Other. The ego strives to com-prehend, literally, to grasp the Other, but is unable. The Other expresses an infinitude which cannot be reduced to ontological categories. The ego is pulled out of itself toward the transcendent. This inability to com-prehend the Other calls the ego and its self-sufficiency into question. Have I, merely by existing, already usurped the place of another? Am I somehow responsible for the death of the Other? The face calls the ego to respond before any unique knowledge about the Other. The approach of the human Other breaks the ego away from a concern for its own existence; with the appearance of the Other, Dasein is no longer a creature concerned with its own being. What I want to emphasize is that the human breaks with pure being, which is always a persistence in being. This is my principal thesis. . . . The being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might. Heidegger says at the beginning of Being and Time that Dasein is a being who in his being is concerned for this being itself. That’s Darwin’s idea: the living being struggles for life. The aim of being is being itself. However, with the appearance of the human – and this is my entire philosophy – there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other.8 The face as pure expression calls the ego to respond, to do something to justify its existence. However, Levinas’ theory of responsibility does not call for the annihilation of the ego. Levinasian responsibility maintains the dual structure of desire; that is, it questions the privileged place of the Same, but it keeps the ego intact, albeit in a subordinate position. Without a responsible self, responsibility would lose its meaning. Levinas furnishes a new way to think about responsibility: the ego does not choose to answer the Other’s demand; to be human, it must respond to the Other. Responsibility is so extreme that it is the very definition of subjectivity, the ego is subject to the Other. ‘The I is not simply conscious of this necessity to respond . . . rather the I is, by its very position, responsibility through and through.’9 This primordial, an-archical responsibility is concrete, infinite, and asymmetrical. A relationship with the infinite cannot be used as an excuse not to care about the world. My responsibility for the Other must be expressed in a concrete way, with ‘full hands’ . Levinas often cites a Jewish proverb: ‘The

other’s material needs are my spiritual needs.’10 Thus, Levinas’ ethics demand concrete hospitality for the Other , be it the stranger, the widow, or

the orphan. What are the limits of this responsibility? According to Levinas, the face of the Other calls the ego to respond infinitely. The ego cannot comfortably rest from this responsibility. ‘At no time can one say: I have done all my duty . Except the hypocrite.’11 Just like desire, the more I respond to the Other, the more I am responsible. Responsibility is so extreme that the ego is responsible for the Other’s responsibility. Levinas often cites Alyosha Karamazov as an example of this infinite responsibility. Alyosha boldly claims that ‘each of us is guilty before everyone, for everyone and for each one, and I more than others.’12


1ac – GenocideFourth, Genocide destroys culture – life and death are rendered meaningless.

Card 03 (Claudia Card is professor of philosophy at University of Wisconsin, Winter 2003, Hypatia, vol. 18 issue 1, JSTOR #!tylerd)

Specific to genocide is the harm inflicted on its victims' social vitality. It is not just that one's group membership is the occasion for harms that are

definable independently of one's identity as a member of the group. When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose their cultural heritage and may even lose their intergenerational connections . To use Orlando Patterson's terminology, in that event, they may become "socially dead" and their descendants "natally alienated," no longer able to pass along and build upon the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and projects of earlier generations (1982, 5-9). The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than that of physical death. Social death can even aggravate physical death by making it indecent, removing all respectful and caring ritual,

social connections, and social contexts that are capable of making dying bearable and even of making one's death meaningful . In my view,

the special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death (when it does that) but social death, producing a consequent meaninglessness of one's life and even of its termination.

Fifth, Their disads are subsumed by our infinite responsibility to the Other—objectifying the other leads to dehumanization

Jordaan 6 (Eduard, Researcher in the Department of Political Science at the University of Stellenbosch, “Affinities of Socio-political Thought of Rorty and Levinas,” http://psc.sagepub.com/content/32/2/193.full.pdf)

In both Rorty and Levinas there is a connection between an increased concern for the other and the other’s approaching us outside of the more typical categories in which it is usually presented. The static objectification of the other in a concept hides his or her humanity, pre-empting our recognition of him or her as unique. It is the uniqueness of the other, what overflows categories of knowledge, that is ethical, that constitutes what Levinas terms the ‘face’ of the other and is what reminds us of the humanity of and our responsibility to this unique being. One area where Rorty and Levinas differ is in focus and it is as such that we can see their work as complementary in explaining the ethical approach of the other. Levinas is more useful in suggesting why we do not recognize our duties to the other when she or he is objectified, whereas Rorty is more helpful in suggesting practical ways in which the other can confront the subject as face (sentimental education). According to Levinas, traditional philosophy and progressive politics have tended to look for what is common among people and to emphasize their similarity. While this is entirely understandable and commendable given a world history of oppression, inequality, hatred and racism, such an emphasis on human commonality has had the effect of suppressing what is unique, what is other. While the Enlightenment emphasis on the equality of persons has inspired great moral progress, therein lies also a dark side, a side that glosses over the human in people, that is, over their uniqueness. The aspiration towards a political society in which citizens are equal constitutes a striving towards a social arrangement in which persons become interchangeable units in a system and life occurs indifferently alongside one another. Such equality masks the ethical accusation of the subject in which she or he is responsible for the other to the individuating point of substitution. However, in this section our concern lies with the alterity of the other, not the election of the responsible subject. The political order in which each subject has his or her freedom similarly and rationally preserved is an impersonal order that ‘consists in negating or in absorbing the other, so as to encounter nothing’. To be approached by the other as face is to be struck by a human being who ultimately cannot be reduced to a theme, who is resistant to totalization and who cannot be contained in a system. I am awakened to the other ‘precisely when the other has nothing in common with me, when the other is wholly other, that is to say, a human other’. The other is ‘at once what disturbs order and this disturbance itself’. The persistent resistance by the other to objectification and thematization awakens the subject to its prior domination of the other and muddles the subject’s clear conscience . ‘The event of putting into question is the shame of the I for its naïve spontaneity, for its sovereign coincidence with itself in the identification of the same.’ Proximity to the other is an event that arrests the subject in its naïve freedom and makes it stand in front of the other in a state of guilt, under accusation, responsible. Even though in proximity the other is outside the grasp of the subject, unmediated by a concept, the subject remains in an ethical relation with the other. Proximity is contact without grasp. It is a relation of vulnerability, sensibility to the unique. ‘Proximity, difference which is nonindifference, is responsibility’, the impossibility of abandoning the other.


1ac – GenocideAnd, the U.S. is key – our link is not one of omission, but one of commission

First, By denying use of DU, continuing to use and manufacture the weapon, and ignoring the genocide it is supported by the US government through its inaction – US key to action.

Vetleson 2K (Arne Johan Vetleson: Department of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, 2000, Journal of Peace Research, Vol 37, No 4, p. 522, “Genocide: A Case for the Responsibility of the Bystander,” JSTOR #!tylerd)

But this is not the whole picture. Actions are also omitted, endured, neglected, and the like; and Ricoeur takes these phenomena to remind us that on the level of interaction, just as on that of subjective understanding, not acting is still acting: neglecting, forgetting to do something, is also letting things be done by someone else, sometimes to the point of criminality. (Ricoeur, 1992: 157) Ricoeur's systematic objective is to extend the theory of action from acting to suffering beings; again and again he emphasizes that 'every action has its agents and its patients' (1992: 157). Ricoeur's proposed extension certainly sounds plausible. Regrettably, his proposal stops halfway. The vital insight articulated, albeit not developed, in the passages quoted is that not acting is still acting. Brought to bear on the case of genocide as a reported, ongoing affair, the inaction making a difference is the inaction of the bystander to unfolding genocide. The failure to act when confronted with such action, as is involved in accomplishing genocide, is a failure which carries a message to both the agent and the sufferer: the action may proceed. Knowing, yet still not acting,

means granting acceptance to the action. Such inaction entails 'letting things be done by someone else' - clearly, in the case of acknowledged genocide, 'to the point of criminality', to invoke one of the quotes from Ricoeur. In short, inaction here means complicity; accordingly, it raises the question of responsibility, guilt, and shame on the part of the inactive bystander, by which I mean the bystander who decides to remain inactive.

The U.S. is the only possible actor – only we know the locations of DU munitions

Fahey 04 (Dan Fahey has a masters in IR from Tufts University, March 24 2004, “Unresolved Issues Regarding Depleted Uranium And the Health of U.S. Veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom,” online: http://www.wise-uranium.org/pdf/duunris.pdf #!tylerd)

DoD has withheld information regarding the use of DU in Iraq, in notable contrast to the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). One year after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, DoD has not publicly released information about the locations and exact quantities of DU munitions shot or otherwise released in Iraq. This raises the question of whether U.S. or allied servicemembers, as well as Iraqi civilians, might inhabit or work in areas contaminated by DU dust and debris. If DoD has information about where it shot DU, and it has conducted environmental assessments of these areas, it should demonstrate its proactive, responsible behavior by making this information publicly available.


1ac – GenocideThus the plan: The United States Federal Government should withdraw all spent and unspent depleted uranium munitions in Iraq including cleaning and/or decontaminating areas contaminated by depleted uranium in Iraq.


1ac – GenocideContention Three is Solvency –

Three avenues of clean up – mechanical, chemical, biological

ICBUW 10 (International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons, last edited: May 03 2010, “Depleted Uranium: Frequently Asked Questions,” online: http://www.bandepleteduranium.org/en/a/8.html#11 #!tylerd)

How can you clean up sites where DU has been used? The short answer is – with difficulty. Once you have removed the larger fragments by hand, there are three main methods: mechanical, chemical and biological. Mechanical removal involves digging up the contaminated soil and landfilling it. Chemical methods include leaching out the uranium using liquid and a substance that binds to the uranium, while biological methods utilise certain bacteria and plants. The biological option is currently the focus of much research. It has been found that certain plants called hyper-accumulators naturally absorb and store large quantities of certain heavy metals. Once grown on a

site the plants can be picked and securely landfilled or burnt and the ash collected.


Topicality – “Presence” Includes Equipment/WeaponsMilitary presence includes equipment and weapons

Lutz 7 (Catharine, professor of anthropology at Brown University, “Bases, Empire, and Global Response”, http://www.forusa.org/fellowship/winter07/catherinelutz.html) Showers

Military bases are “installations routinely used by military forces.” They represent a confluence of labor (soldiers, paramilitary workers, and civilians), land, and capital in the form of static facilities, supplies, and equipment. Bases are just the most visible part of the larger picture of U.S. military presence overseas. This picture of military access includes U.S. military training of foreign forces, often in conjunction with the provision of U.S. weaponry, joint exercises meant to enhance U.S. soldiers’ exposure to a variety of operating environments from jungle to desert to urban terrain and interoperability across national militaries, and legal arrangements made to gain overflight rights and other forms of ad hoc use of others’ territory as well as to preposition military equipment there.


Topicality – “Presence” Includes Environmental Damages“Presence” includes armaments that continue to cause environmental damage

Xalxo, ‘7 – doctorate in Moral Theology in Rome from Accademia Alfonsiana and Pontifical Gregorian University [Prem Xalxo, Complementarity of human life and other life forms in nature: a study of human obligations toward the environment with particular reference to the Oraon indigenous community of Chotanagpur, India, Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 2007, googlebooks //adi]

In search for the examples of the horrifying effects of war and artillery practices on human beings and environment, one needs not go far. In south of Chotanagpur, Oraons and other hilly indigenous communities for decades have been bearing the burnt of the artillery practices by the Indian army. A constant military presence in the homeland of the indigenous communities has displaced local residents from their homes and land to accommodate target ranges and training grounds. Those activities often involve the use of fuels, explosives , and toxic substances which have direct impact on the indigenous communities and natural surroundings . The heavy army vehicle destroys the standing crops of the indigenous communities and many of their livestock are killed by inadvertent gunfire. The use of live arms and artillery creates a deafening sound pollution. The plight of the indigenous communities of Chotanagpur caused by arms and artillery practices of Indian army demonstrate that war, actual or its mere preparations, is a major contributor human interconnected relationship with fellow human beings and nature.


Topicality – “Presence” is InfluencePresence is the ability to exert influence – whether physically or virtually

Billman, 2K – lieutenant colonel, usaf, and national defense fellow general ridgeway center for international security studies university of pittsburgh [Gregory, “The Space of Aerospace Power – Why and How,” http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA394062&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf ]

This chapter discusses presence, its relationship to influence, and how this relationship affects an adversary. This discussion is done from both general military and specific aerospace perspectives. Webster’s dictionary defines presence as “the state or act of being present.” “Present” denotes being “alert to circumstances,” and “readily available.” An entity is present when it is physically “ close at hand ,” or even perceived to be so . Hence, an entity can be present when it is physically so, or merely notionally so. This chapter deals with “presence” in two way s. First, it discusses the capability of military forces to be “present” in, near, or over an area of interest to the US. Second, it discusses two concepts of presence -- real and virtual -- and how they relate to the space dimension of aerospace power. Presence allows influence.

The interpretation is backwards – presence is anything but physical presence

Thomason, ‘2 – Project Leader, Institute for Defense Analysis [James, “Transforming US Overseas Military Presence: Evidence and Options for DoD,” July, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.122.1144&rep=rep1&type=pdf]

In everyday parlance, to “be present” means that an entity is in a particular place at a particular time. It is the opposite of absence. Being present in this sense does not necessarily mean that the entity is exerting a significant effect up on the immediate surroundings . By contrast , in everyday language, to “have presence” or “have a presence” means that an individual is able to exert and usually is exerting a significant effect on the immediate surroundings .


Topicality – “Presence” Can be InvisiblePresence includes invisible occupation

Roberts, ‘6 – Montague Burton Professor of International Relations, Oxford University; Fellow, Balliol College. This article is a product of research conducted under the auspices of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War [Adam, “TRANSFORMATIVE MILITARY OCCUPATION: APPLYING THE LAWS OF WAR AND HUMAN RIGHTS”, American Journal of International Law, July 2006, 100 A.J.I.L. 580, lexis //adi]

There was a precedent, of sorts, in Iraq: the "safe haven" established in northern Iraq in 1991. The U.S.-led military intervention that began on April 17, 1991, resulting in the establishment of the zone, enjoyed neither the specific authorization of the UN Security Council, nor, initially, the consent of the Iraqi government, whose forces had only a few months before been repulsed from Kuwait. After the initial phase, northern Iraq was protected from Iraqi government incursions almost entirely through the establishment of a U.S.-initiated air exclusion zone. The history of this protected zone illustrates certain transformative possibilities of foreign military involvement. However, the zone never assumed the character of anything approaching a full occupation regime. Initiated to enable large numbers of refugees from the region to return home, it resulted in the application of enough coalition military pressure to keep Hussein's [*605] forces out of northern Iraq, enabling the Iraqi Kurds to develop their own administrative structures in the region. Here, indeed, was a transformation facilitated by a foreign military role: but that role took the form of a short-term military presence on the ground, followed by a more remote one in the air that could not be viewed as an occupation.


Topicality – “Presence” Includes DUBsDU is the last refuge of military presence placed years ago

Wagner and Popovic, ’98 – Attorney, International Program, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund (formerly Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) Attorney, Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe; Director, U.N. Program, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund [J. Martin, Neil A.F., “Environmental Injustice on United States Bases in Panama: International Law and the Right to Land Free form Contamination and Explosives”, Virginia Journal of International Law, Spring 1998, 38 Va. J. Int'l L. 401, lexis //adi]

In further support of that trend, more than sixty countries, as well as several sub-national governments (states) within the United States, have adopted environmental rights provisions in their constitutions. n343 In some cases, judicial tribunals have interpreted the provisions to prohibit environmentally harmful activities. n344 Whether the right is framed as the right to a secure, healthy, and ecologically sound environment, an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity, an environment adequate for health and well-being, or simply a healthy environment, the degradation, contamination and hazards the U.S. military has left on its Panama bases violate that right. Unsafe water, unexploded [*483] ordnance, contaminated soil, depleted uranium, and chemical weapons - which constitute but a sampling of the devastation on Panama bases - cannot be reconciled with the Panamanian people's right to a satisfactory environment. The Right to Life An important component of the right to a satisfactory environment is the right to be free from life-threatening environmental hazards, which reflects the environmental dimension of the right to life. n345 The right to life represents the most basic human rights doctrine, the essential and non-derogable prerequisite to the enjoyment of all other rights. n346 The right to life figures prominently in all the basic international human rights instruments and enjoys worldwide recognition. n347 The U.S. government's recent ratification of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) formalizes U.S. obligation to recognize and protect the right to life. Environmental problems that endanger life - directly or indirectly - implicate this core right. n348 The highest courts of several countries have specifically recognized that environmental contamination may violate the right to life. n349 These authorities support the recognition that life-threatening environmental hazards on closed bases, including unexploded ordnance, lead contamination, chemical weapons, and other toxic remnants of U.S. military presence may violate the Panamanian people's right to life.


Framework – Media/Body Counts BadWe have an ethical obligation to expose the deaths that the normal media sources ignore – our discourse about “depleted” uranium in this round begins to expose the evils that the media and government hide in their use of fantastical imagery and immediate death counts.


WHAT is a war casualty? The answer appears painfully obvious. It asserts itself not through argument but, more viscerally, through photographs: a torso shredded by a road-side bomb; a bloodied peasant spread-eagled in a ditch; a soldier (cigarette dangling nonchalantly)

smashing his boot into a dead woman's head. Yet such images account only for immediate, visually arresting fatalities . What about those casualties that don't fit the photographic stereotypes, casualties that occur long after major combat has been concluded, casualties whose belatedness and dispersal make them resistant to dramatic packaging? The news media, in thrall to speed and spectacle, lack the attention span to follow war-inflicted catastrophes that take years or generations to exact their toll. Public debate is overdue on war's hidden human and environmental costs, a debate that acknowledges the changes in the ways that contemporary wars kill. We also need more scholarly inquiry into the ways that military euphemisms like "precision" warfare, "surgical" strikes, "smart" wars, and now "depleted" uranium have helped legitimize recent, high-tech conflicts while concealing their long-term toxic impact. The rhetoric of precision has lulled us into regarding the fatalities of war as swift, immediate killings. But, ironically, the increasing reliance of American and British forces on "precision" warfare has coincided with the integration of depleted uranium into their missiles, bullets, and tank armor. Ever since the Persian Gulf war of 1991, a new kind of fatal, environmental imprecision has been built into "precision" warfare . The gulf war was

history's first depleted-uranium conflict. Arguably, not since Hiroshima and Nagasaki have humans unleashed a military substance so tenaciously hostile to life itself. Depleted uranium possesses a durability beyond our comprehension -- it has a radioactive half-life of 4.51 billion years.

When it enters the environment, it effectively does so for all time. In the age of depleted-uranium warfare, we have an ethical obligation to challenge the military body counts that consistently underestimate (in advance and in retrospect) the true toll of waging high-tech wars. Who is counting the staggered deaths that civilians and soldiers suffer from depleted uranium ingested or blown across the desert? Who is counting the belated fatalities from unexploded cluster bombs that lie in wait for months or years, metastasizing into landmines? Who is counting deaths from chemical residues left behind by so-called "pinpoint" bombing, residues that turn into foreign insurgents, infiltrating native rivers and poisoning the food chain? Who is counting the victims of genetic deterioration » the stillborn, malformed infants conceived by parents whose DNA has been scrambled by war's toxins? The calculus of any conflict needs to incorporate such environmental casualties. They may suffer slow, invisible deaths that don't fit the news cycle at CNN or Fox, but they are casualties of war nonetheless. The proponents of "smart" wars often market them as humane because they appear to promise not just greater accuracy but greater brevity. The Iraq war has complicated that assumption, exposing the chasm between a hygienically "smart" war and the messy hazards of a drawn-out, urban-guerrilla conflict. Innumerable commentators have made this point. They typically overlook, however, the way technologies that purport to shorten a conflict may delay, disperse, and therefore obscure "precision" warfare's full fatal impact. Such technologies, when they compromise the environment, morph into long-term killers, creating landscapes that inflict lingering, off-camera casualties.


Framework – Future DeathsUtilitarianism is viable insofar as it counts “deaths by indirection” – unintentional deaths caused by DU munitions, among other things

Nixon 05 (Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson Professor of English at University of Wisconsin: Madison, February 18 2005, Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 51, Issue 24, pB7-B10, EBSCOhost, online: http://irgg.research.yale.edu/documents/ToolsofWar.pdf #!tylerd)

FORTY YEARS AGO, Rachel Carson - that indefatigable enemy of lethal euphemism - coined a phrase that best articulates the threat that "precision"

warfare poses. Carson spoke of *'death by indirection." She was referring not to war casualties but to the scattershot victims of "herbicides" and "pesticides," products she insisted ought to carry the label "biocides" instead. Carson's astute phrasing is as relevant as ever to our depleted-uranium age. From behind a linguistic cloak of bogus precision, today's "smart" warfare operates biocidally, dispensing widespread "death by indirection." It is easy to forget how advocates of the Vietnam War pitched it as the smart war of its day, with boasts of imminent victory via the "electronic battlefield" and of the insurmountable advantages that cluster bombs and chemical

weaponry would deliver. Carson died shortly after the United States began to deploy as instruments of war the dioxins she'd condemned as "biocides." Yet her Silent Spring foreshadowed the enduring consequences of those spraying runs: Thirty years after Vietnam received its last "dusting" of Agent Orange, that war's slow chemical slaughter continues, claiming 21st-century victims . A 2002 study recorded dioxin levels in the bloodstreams of Bien Hoa residents 135 times the normal level. The dioxins build up in the fatty tissues of pivotal human foods like duck and fish, gathering concentration as they move up the chain. So an old war's poisons pass from nature and from livestock into the cooking pot and from there into the next generation. Children born long after the war's end are still dying Agent Orange deaths of painful prematurity. The conventional view is that, as an April 2003 New York Times editorial put it, "during our dozen years [in Vietnam], the U.S. killed and helped kill at least 1.5 million people." Yet that "during" shrinks the toll: How many thousands survived the war years only to have their lives {or their

children's and grandchildren's lives) foreshortened by Agent Orange? Because depleted uranium carries both a chemical and a radiological threat, its long-term implications are even more severe. Depleted uranium, despite that reassuring adjective in its name, possesses 60 percent of natural uranium's radioactivity . Malcolm Hooper, a professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of

Sunderland, in England, has characterized depleted uranium as "a new weapon for indiscriminate, mutually assured destruction." During the gulf war alone, U.S. troops discharged munitions containing 340 tons of depleted uranium. That contributed significantly, in Hooper's view, to making the gulf war "the most toxic war in Western military history."


Health Effects – CancerEven tiny amounts of DU cause cancer – don’t believe their takeouts – they don’t assume the microparticle nature of DU.


As Dr. Bertell writes, "Heavy metal exposure (including uranium) can cause loss of cellular immunity, autoimmune diseases, joint disease such as rheumatoid arthritis, and diseases of the kidneys, circulatory system, and nervous system.... Decline in functional mitochondria is most damaging to the heart, kidney, brain, liver, and skeletal muscle, in that order." Loss of cellular immunity opens an organism up to viral, bacterial, and mycoplasmal invasions connected to a variety of diseases .Equally important, scientists have found that tiny amounts of DU too small to be toxic and only mildly radioactive seem to reinforce each other in terms of causing cancers and risk to offspring. The Armed Forces Radiobiological Research Institute has even admitted that DU can cause cancer .Humans are normally exposed to about 1.9 micrograms of uranium a day in food and water, with between one and two percent absorbed. The rest is passed in feces. Humans screen natural uranium quite effectively. But our screening system won't eliminate nano particles that are ceramic and enter through the lungs. These particles won't dissolve and won't lose their radioactivity


Health Effects – Cancer DeathsCancer from DU munitions alone could kill half a million Iraqis


We must also consider the real possibility of Iraq as an uninhabitable wasteland, with the residue of the DU aerosol blowing in the wind and flowing in the waters to adjacent lands, a residue with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Is this outlook too bleak? Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, director of the Oncology Center at the largest hospital in Basra said the following in 2003. "Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient.... We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer.... My wife has nine members of her family with cancer. " He went on to point out that these were families with no history of cancer. After Gulf War I, the United Kingdom's Atomic Energy Authority estimated that DU contamination could kill half a million Iraqis.


Health Effects – Birth DefectsDU exposure doubles the chance for birth defects


Soluble uranium oxide and all nanoparticles can cross the placenta, and these are particularly toxic to the rapidly developing embryo or fetus. At low doses, they damage the fetal brain, causing behavioral problems, such as aggressiveness and hyperactivity, and mental retardation. Other teratogenic effects are congenital malformations and diseases. The underdeveloped immune and hormonal systems of the fetus are more easily compromised than in a fully mature adult. One official epidemiological study did look at the health of the offspring of Gulf War veterans. This was a study of veterans in general and was not limited to those either with GWS or with known exposure to DU. This study of birth defects in the children of veterans in the United States, undertaken by Han Kang of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (36), focused on the first pregnancy after returning home from the Gulf War. Slightly less than 21,000 veterans, from all four branches, active and retired, were included in the study (about 70% of those to whom questionnaires were sent). Male Gulf War veterans were twice as likely, and female veterans almost three times as likely, to report children with birth defects than their counterparts who did not serve in the first Gulf War. Birth defects included webbed fingers and toes, heart murmurs, chromosomal abnormalities, and brain tumors. The researchers excluded developmental disorders, perinatal complications, and pediatric disorders from the study. Male veterans reported miscarriages more often, and the increase, 1.62 times, was statistically significant. Female veterans also reported more miscarriages, but the sample size of female veterans was too small to reach statistical significance. No attempt was made to relate these findings to DU or any other Gulf War exposure (36).


Health Effects – Other DiseasesRadiation causes misfolded proteins – leads to early onset of diabetes, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s


Some cellular mechanisms are of special interest here. For example, after a protein, sequenced by the DNA, is properly synthesized by the RNA, it has to undergo a process of folding. This gives it the proper three-dimensional shape to carry out its functions and chemical reactions. Biochemists now believe that proteins do not fold spontaneously into their final, active conformation (11). Proteins destined to be embedded in the cell membrane or to be secreted from the cell are synthesized in the endoplasmic reticulum, where templates, enzymes, and sugars promote some protein conformations and inhibit others. This is delicate work with sequential rounds of intricate modifications, overseen by the cell’s quality-control system. Free radicals can totally disrupt this process, forming unusual molecules; and in the presence of heavy metals, the process may use trace amounts of toxic metals to replace the normally used zinc and manganese. Improperly folded proteins can fail to be routed to the cell membrane or to a gland where, as hormones, they are needed to release biochemical signal molecules. Some diseases caused by misrouted proteins include cystic fibrosis, diabetes insipidus, and cancer (12). Widespread misfolding of proteins can lead to cellular stress, clogging of the system, and an accumulation of imperfect proteins. Many scientists now believe that accumulation and aggregation of misfolded proteins is responsible for neurodegenerative diseases, as well as early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes mellitus. In these diseases, proteins or protein fragments convert from normal, soluble conformations to insoluble, sticky fibers called amyloids. Amyloids coalesce into fibrillar aggregates that have a characteristic structure. The insoluble clumps can form either inside or outside cells. Misfolded proteins are a central pathogenic mechanism, and Gulf War veterans have manifested many of the symptoms of these neurodegenerative diseases.


Health Effects – A2: No Gulf War SyndromeTurn – masking – reductionist discourse about veteran’s health delays the search for a cure


Other heavy metals, in addition to DU, especially mercury, lead, arsenic, and cadmium, were used extensively in the Gulf War. They were contained in pesticides and herbicides; in vaccines, including anthrax and botulinum toxin; in nerve agents: sarin, cyclosarin, tabun, soman, VX, multiple seven, and novachuks (novichoks); and in chemicals released from the Kamasiyah toxic chemical depot, which was destroyed by bombing. Many veterans were also subjected to petroleum products and the horrendous oil well fires (3). Most had very little training for handling these hazardous materials, and no protective clothing or respirators. One focus of the dispute about Gulf War syndrome (GWS) has been whether or not the use in battle of DU weaponry could be one of the principal causes of the disabling syndrome. The first roadblock to clarifying this scientific hypothesis results from focusing on only one item at a time to which veterans were exposed in battle and attempting to “prove” that it was or was not one of the main causes of their serious illness. One could attempt to do this for each pesticide, vaccine, toxic chemical, and heavy metal separately, pretending to “prove” for each that it was not the cause. Such reductionist discourse confuses the true issues and delays research into treatment and legal recognition of harm caused. It leads one to the absurd conclusion that the veterans are not really sick—that the problems are all in their imagination. Influential papers by physicists and several semi-official governmental organizations have attempted to eliminate DU from consideration by just such analyses (4–8). These studies are not really independent, since each follows the guidelines, methodology, and risk estimates recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) (9).


Health Effects – A2: No Gulf War SyndromeGulf War syndrome present in areas outside US media influence


In reaching for psychological and historical generalizations, Showalter ignores the fact that each war has a unique chemical and radiological character. As the technologies of war change, so, too, does war's epidemiological and environmental aftermath. The inhabitants of the Basra region, where depleted-uranium weaponry was used most extensively during the gulf war, share disturbingly similar symptoms to America's ailing veterans. Are we to believe that the Basrans, too, contracted these symptoms from America's millennial media? After NATO planes deployed depleted-uranium-tipped missiles in the Balkan war, returning European troops reported a high incidence of what has come to be known as "peacekeepers' syndrome " or "Balkan syndrome." They show strong epidemiological similarities with America's gulf-war veterans and the Basrans. All three groups have experienced spikes in leukemia,

lymphomas, and other cancers, kidney disease, and premature mortality.


Health Effects – A2: No Gulf War Syndrome – Methodology IndictDon’t trust their takeouts – their science doesn’t account for cell mutations and mtDNA disruptions


Whether an assumption of homogeneous spread of the energy over the organ in question is reasonable under the circumstances, whether the estimates of the amount of radiation inhaled are accurate in the confusion of the battlefield, whether the cellular repair system is working, whether the clearance rate for heavy metals by the kidneys is normal, or even whether cancer is meaningful as the biological endpoint of concern for veterans—all makes no difference. These details seem to be irrelevant when applying this “objective” methodology. In this report I will show that this trusted methodology is especially inappropriate and misleading in the case of Gulf War syndrome. The mathematical equation contains no terms for dealing with cellular repair dysfunction, damage to mitochondrial DNA, and synergistic effects with a variety of toxic metals, halogens, and complex nanodebris. Inhalation of airborne nanodebris is especially difficult to measure, since this debris can theoretically remain in the air forever by Brownian motion, or can suffer multiple resuspension events if it does fall to the ground. In war, the build-up of this airborne debris is cumulative.


Health Effects – A2: Body Filters UraniumDU dust overloads body filters and cannot be addressed because of its size


The human body is normally exposed to uranium in food and water at a rate of about 1.9 micrograms a day, but only about 1 to 2 percent— between 0.019 and 0.038 micrograms (19 to 38 nanograms)—is absorbed through the intestines. The output of natural uranium in feces is 1.862 to 1.881 micrograms daily. Physiologists consider the entire gastrointestinal tract to be external to the body (like the hole in a donut), so this fraction of ingested uranium in water and food is not considered internal contamination. The 19 to 38 nanograms of natural uranium that is absorbed through the intestinal wall is considered to be internal to the body. It passes through the hepatic portal system and is screened by the liver, then either sent directly to the kidneys to be excreted in urine or circulated in the blood. Circulating uranium is usually stored in bone, to be excreted at a later time. These outcomes vary according to the solubility of the uranium compounds in food and water. However, these estimates are typical for natural uranium The human body has an excellent screening system for natural uranium reducing the ambient average environmental concentration of 1 part per million to about 38 parts per billion internally. However, this gastrointestinal and liver screening system does not operate to screen out the uranium or other metals that enter the body through the lungs, are ceramic, and have an aerodynamic diameter in the nanometer range. Gulf War exposures to inhaled DU were likely well above the normal 19 to 38 nanograms per day and added considerable stress to the body, regardless of the other stresses present in this toxic war. Nanoparticles (whether uranium, steel, iron, or aluminum) pose an especially difficult problem for the body’s screening and filtering ability. They pass through the lung-blood barrier, the blood-brain barrier, and the placenta, and they are too small to be filtered out by the kidneys and excreted from the body (26). They take a long time to dissolve in the body fluid, and only the dissolved portion can be chemically active or eliminated in urine. Because of the variable times needed for dissolving the ceramic forms, the negative effect of the radioactive heavy metal is ongoing. Ceramic uranium may never dissolve, and it does not lose its radioactive properties.


Health Effects – A2: Low DU Levels in PatientsDon’t buy their takeout – DU can stay in the body for years without being detected


Ceramic particles most likely do not bind to bone but continue to circulate in blood and lymph fluid, irradiating blood and lymph vessels and surrounding tissues. Nanoparticles can even “hide” within cells, disrupting biochemical activities. If the ceramic DU does dissolve, it can bind to the phosphate in DNA or can be stored in bone, irradiating the stem cells involved in blood formation. DU can easily penetrate the blood-brain and reproductive barriers, contaminating brain tissue, seminal fluid, or the uterus, damaging the developing embryo or fetus. Because of their small size, DU particles resist filtering out by the kidneys. The observed DU in urine eight or nine years after exposure may well be only the tip of the iceberg.


Health Effects – Impact Calculus – Precautionary PrincipleWe only need to win a small risk of the fact that DU munitions are bad – the precautionary principle requires proof of the user

Furitsu, ‘8 – M.D. Ph.D., Science Team, ICBUW [Katsumi, “Some comments on the health effects of Depleted Uranium Weapons”, 4/2 //adi]

We do not have scientifically reliable epidemiological evidence, which can clearly prove the health effects of DU weapons . However, the existing peer-reviewed data is a warning to us that we should take concrete measures, even without fully understanding every process and causal relationship between the use of uranium weapons and damage to human health and the ecosystem, before it is too late. The issue of DU weapons should be discussed seriously based on the 'precautionary principle'. The burden of proof should be placed on the users, the military and governments, if they continue to insist that “DU is safe”.


International Law – Gas WeaponsDU weapons breach international protocol on gas weapons


The special investigator of the UN Sub-Committee on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has declared DU munitions illegal under existing humanitarian law. DU weapons also produce a toxic metal fume that violates the Geneva Protocol on the Use of Gas in War, which the US signed in 1975


International Law – Gas Weapons – A2: U.S. Not Signed OnThe U.S. is signed on to the law that bans gas weapons


It is not disputable that DU powder produces an invisible metal fume. This alone is a violation of the Geneva Protocol on the Use of Gas (metal fumes constitute a gas) in War (Geneva, 1925), which was ultimately signed, with reservation (i.e., use for crowd control), by President Ford for the United States on January 22, 1975, and was proclaimed in the United States on April 29, 1975. The United Kingdom signed the protocol on April 9, 1930. The commitment to this Geneva Protocol was clearly known by the United States and United Kingdom before the 1991 war against Iraq (40).


International Law – Laundry ListDU munitions breach international law in multiple instances

Parker, ‘3 – J.D. (honors, Univ. San Francisco, 1983), Diplome (cum laude, Strasbourg, 1982), non-governmental delegate to UN Commission on Human Rights and its Sub-Commission since 1982. This paper is prepared for the International Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg, Germany, 16 - 19, 2003 [Karen, “The Illegality of DU Weaponry”, http://www.traprockpeace.org //adi]

Some argue that use of DU weaponry, while in violation of existing norms, would not constitute a war crime or crime against humanity.24 I disagree. War crimes and crimes against humanity are defined in the Nuremberg Charter, in the “grave breach” articles of the Geneva Conventions and Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions, and in other sources as set out in international treaties on war crimes and crimes against humanity.25 In the 4th Geneva Convention (protection of civilians), for example, grave breaches include “willful killing . . . or inhumane treatment, . . . willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health” of civilians -- which is exactly what DU weapons do.26 Article 85 of Protocol Additional I adds indiscriminate attacks affecting civilians and other acts that necessarily occur with the use of DU weaponry to the enumeration of “grave breaches.” The genocidal effects on people long after hostilities cease is another ground for consideration of DU weapons use as a crime against humanity.


International Law – Four TestsDU weapons are a clear violation of all the guidelines set out by international law

Parker, ‘3 – J.D. (honors, Univ. San Francisco, 1983), Diplome (cum laude, Strasbourg, 1982), non-governmental delegate to UN Commission on Human Rights and its Sub-Commission since 1982. This paper is prepared for the International Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg, Germany, 16 - 19, 2003 [Karen, “The Illegality of DU Weaponry”, http://www.traprockpeace.org //adi]

DU weaponry fails all four tests. (1) It cannot be "contained" to legal fields of battle and thus fails the territorial test. Instead the DU is air-born far a-field of legal targets to illegal (civilian) targets: hospitals, schools, civilian dwellings and even neighboring countries with which the user is not at war. (2) It cannot be “turned off” when the war is over. Instead, DU weaponry continues to act after hostilities are over and thus fail the temporal test. Even with rigorous clean-up of war zones, the air-born particles have a half life of billions of years and have potential to keep killing and injuring former combatants and non-combatants long after the war is over. (3) It is inhumane and thus fails the humaneness test. DU weaponry is inhumane because of how it can kill -- by cancer, kidney disease, etc. -- and long after the hostilities are over when the killing must stop. DU is inhumane because it can cause birth (genetic) defects such as cranial facial anomalies, missing limbs, grossly deformed and non-viable infants and the like, thus effecting children who may never be a military target and who are born after the war is over. The tetragenic nature of DU weapons and the possible burdening of the gene pool of future generations raise the possibility that the use of DU weaponry is genocide. (4) It cannot be used without unduly damaging the natural environment and thus fails the environment test. Damage to the natural environment includes contamination of water and agricultural land necessary for the subsistence of the civilian population far beyond the lifetime of that population. Clean up is an inexact science and, in any case, extremely expensive -- far beyond the ability of a poor country to pay for. One of the more useful provisions of treaty-based humanitarian law is the "Martens Clause" to the Hague Convention of 1907 that is repeated in subsequent humanitarian law treaties. The Marten's Clause provides that in situations where there is not a specific treaty provision (which is the case with DU), the international community is nonetheless bound by "the rules of the principles of the law of nations, as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, from the laws of humanity and the dictates of the public conscience."14 There is a huge anti-DU international effort from a wide array of groups representing every facet of civil society. The existence of the anti-DU network is legally relevant to the finding that DU is illegal, and buttresses arguments that use of DU weaponry is a war crime or crime against humanity and may play a decisive role in stopping proliferation of these weapons.15


International Law – Cruelty/Unconfirmed EffectsDU weapons breach international law – they are inherently cruel and have an unconfirmed extent of death dealing

Clark, No Date – writer for the International Action Center [Ramsey, “International Appeal to Ban Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons”

DU weapons are not conventional weapons. They are highly toxic, radioactive weapons. All international law on warfare has attempted to limit violence to combatants and to prevent the use of cruel and unfocused weapons. International agreements and conventions have tried to protect civilians and non-combatants from the scourge of war and to outlaw the destruction of the environment and the food supply in order to safeguard life on earth. Consequently, DU weapons violate international law because of their inherent cruelty and unconfirmed death-dealing effect. They threaten civilian populations now and for generations to come. These are precisely the weapons and uses prohibited by international law for more than a century including the Geneva Conventions and their Protocols Additional of 1977.


International Law – Indiscriminate HarmDU weapons violate i-law – indiscriminate harm

Ware, ’97 – Director of the Wellington office of the Peace Foundation, a peace education activity in New Zealand schools and communities; Vice-President of the International Peace Bureau, in which he is most active on their Disarmament for Development Program; Consultant to the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy and the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) for which he is responsible for the programmes promoting Nuclear Weapon Free Zones and a Nuclear Weapons Convention; New Zealand Coordinator of the World March for Peace and Nonviolence which started in New Zealand on 2 October 2009 and is travelling around the world promoting nuclear abolition, an end to war and the prevention of violence at all levels of society; Co-Founder and International Coordinator of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (PNND), which engages legislators from across the political spectrum in nuclear disarmament issues and initiatives; and Board member or advisor of a number of other international organisations including Abolition 2000, Middle Powers Initiative, Peace Boat, Mayors for Peace and the Global Campaign for Peace Education [Alyn, published in Metal of Dishonor: Depleted Uranium, International Action Center, New York, 1997 //adi]

The use of DU weapons creates aggravated suffering. DU particles, when ingested by military personnel, are known to create health problems which can persist over long periods of the individuals’ lives, if not for the remainder of their lives.12 However, the difficulty with this argument is that the users of the DU weapons may insist that there are situations when there is no alternative to DU use in order to achieve the military objective, and that such suffering is therefore necessary. The fact that there is no militarily useable metal as hard as uranium could support the User’s argument. The prohibition against indiscriminate harm is perhaps more applicable as it cannot be derogated by military necessity. DU shells spread DU over vast areas with the DU remaining potentially lethal for thousands of years. Whilst the initial impact of the DU weapon may be contained within the targeted area, the spread of DIJ after impact cannot be so contained. Upon impact a high velocity projectile of uranium metal partially burns up and generates huge numbers of micrometer-size particles of uranium oxide. Like dust, they can be carried great distances by the wind.13 Protected civilians, even if some distance from the target, are thus threatened.


International Law – NoncombatantsDU munitions violate i-law – harm noncombatants


In addition the offspring of military personnel who ingest DU from weapons can also be affected.14 Offspring are noncombatants, and the indiscriminate harm that DU would cause them would thus be contrary to humanitarian principles. One problem with the indiscriminate harm argument is that any States accept that some damage to civilians may occur as part of “collateral damage” when military facilities and personnel are targeted. In order for the indiscriminate harm argument to be shown to prohibit DU weapons, disproportionate damage to civilians in relation to the military purpose would need to be proven.


International Law – Neutral StatesDU munitions violate i-law – dust and water pollution can affect neutral states


The fact that the spread of DU through wind and water systems would not be able to be contained could violate the laws protecting neutral states. DU users would no doubt argue that such spread of DU to neutral states is unintentional and therefore not prohibited. The principal international treaty regarding neutrality, the 1907 Hague Convention V Respecting the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers and Persons in Case of War on Land, does not discuss unintentional violations of neutrality, but neither does it specifically say that violations of neutrality must be intentional.


Environment – NondisclosureDU kills the environment – DoD failure to release info

Al-Azzawi 06 (Dr. Souad N. Al-Azzawi Assoc. Prof. / Mamoun Univ. for Science & Technology, August 21 2006 [last modified], “Depleted Uranium Radioactive Contamination In Iraq:An Overview,” online: http://www.brusselstribunal.org/pdf/DU-Azzawi.pdf #!tylerd)

Depleted Uranium (DU) weaponry has been used against Iraq for the first time in the history of recent wars. The magnitude of the complications and damage related to the use of such radioactive and toxic weapons on the environment and the human population mostly results from the intended concealment, denial and misleading information released by the Pentagon about the quantities, characteristics and the area’s in Iraq, in which these weapons have been used. Revelation of information regarding what is called the Gulf War Syndrome among exposed American veterans helped Iraqi researchers and Medical Doctors to understand the nature of the effect of these weapons, and the means required to investigate further into this issue. The synergetic impact on health due to the post Gulf War I economical sanctions and DU related radioactive contamination raised the number of casualties in contaminated areas as in southern Iraq. Continual usage of DU after Gulf War I on other Iraqi territories through the illegal No-Fly Zones and the major DU loaded Cruise Missiles attack of year 1998, all contributed in making the problem increasingly complex. During 2003, military operations conducted in Iraq by the invading forces used additional rounds of DU in heavily populated areas such as Baghdad, Samawa and other provinces . It is only fair to conclude that the environment in Iraq and its population have been exposed continuously to DU weaponry or its contaminating remains , since 1991. Accordingly millions of Iraqi’s have received higher doses of radioactivity than ordinary background levels. As a result a multi-fold increase of low level radiation exposure related diseases have been registered since 1995. An increase of children’s leukemia, congenital malformations, breast cancer etc…


Environment – RadioactivityUS use of DU weapons in Iraq has a radioactive effect far greater than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Katsuma 03 (Yagasaki Katsuma: Group of Peace Education Against Nuclear Weapon, University of the Ryukyus, August 2003, “Depleted Uranium Shells, The Radioactive Weapons,” online: http://www.ratical.org/radiation/DU/KYagasakiOnDU.pdf #!tylerd)

Contrary to nuclear weapons, DU munitions do not use either nuclear fission or fusion . Since they are not weapons that cause destruction by

producing extraordinary amount of energy, they should be distinguished from “nuclear weapons”. Yet they will disperse radiation in the environment causing grave damage. Looking into DU munitions in terms of radiation they produce, they have two characteristics. (A) First, the used amount of radioactive atoms of DU weapons dispersed into environment in the real wars was far beyond that of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is estimated that in the First Gulf War, 320 to 800 tons of DU were used, scattering indeed 14,000 to 36,000 times more radiation than in Hiroshima. In the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, at least 500 tons of DU shells were said to be dropped. (B) Second, while most of the radiation released by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had very short half-life periods, DU has an extremely long half-life of 4.5 billion years. Dose amount of DU will last in the same level of as ever even after tens of thousands years. Residents in the DU-affected area will have to live forever, for generations to generations, under threat of radiation. Humankind has never experienced such horrible damage of war. Any radioactive weapons, as well as nuclear

weapons must never be allowed to use.


Environment – Dispersal/Widespread EffectsDU weapons disintegrate and disperse – effects are widespread

Fahey 99 (Dan Fahey, writing for the Laka foundation, has a masters in IR from Tufts University, May 1999, DEPLETED URANIUM A POST-WAR DISASTER FOR ENVIRONMENT AND HEALTH, “Depleted Uranium Weapons:Lessons from the 1991 Gulf War,” online: http://www.energiasostenible.org/upload/documents/DULakaFound.pdf #!tylerd )

LESSON 1: Depleted uranium weapons contaminate impact areas with extremely fine radioactive and toxic dust. U.S. Army testing found

that 18 to 70% of a depleted uranium penetrator rod burns and oxidizes into extremely small particles during impact.13 The impact of one 120mm depleted uranium penetrator fired from an American Abrams tank therefore creates between 900 and 3,400 grams (roughly 2 to 7 pounds) of uranium oxide dust. U.S. Army testing further found “[t]he DU oxide aerosol formed during the impact of DU into armor has a high percentage of respirable size particles (50 to 96%),” and 52 to 83% of those respirable size particles are insoluble in lung fluids .14

Respirable size particles (less than 5 microns in diameter) are easily inhaled or ingested. Insoluble particles are not readily excreted from the body, and may remain in the lungs or other organs for years.15 U.S. Army research recently found that some respirable size uranium dust remains suspended in the air for hours after an impact .16 As demonstrated in the 1970’s by the release of depleted uranium

during the manufacture of DU ammunition near Albany, New York, depleted uranium dust can be carried downwind for 40 kilometers (25 miles)

or more.17 Most of the dust created by an impact comes to rest inside, on, or within 50 meters of the target. However, U.S. Army testing also discovered depleted uranium dust can be resuspended by the wind, or the movement of people and vehicles.18


Environment – DU Permeates to HumansDUBs find multiple paths through the environment to humans – American administration responsible.

Al-Azzawi 08 (Dr. Souad N. Al-Azzawi Assoc. Prof. / Mamoun Univ. for Science & Technology, June 15 2008, “Crimes of the Century: Occupation & Contaminating Iraq with Depleted Uranium,” online: http://www.brusselstribunal.org/pdf/DU-Azzawi2.pdf #!tylerd)

American and British armed forces fired DU bullets and projectiles for the first time against the human population and environment in Iraq during Gulf War I, 1991[36]. About 320 tons of DU expenditure was used to destroy the withdrawing Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Large areas in both Kuwait [37] and Southern Iraq are contaminated by the shell casing, fragments, shrapnel, and microscopic DU oxides. Figure 6 shows contaminated areas in southern Iraq as in 1991[38]. Figure 6 Contaminated areas in southern Iraq after Gulf War I

1991 The Pentagon refused to release any information about the nature, amount, and locations of these weapons inside Iraq. Exposure of American troops to these weapons during combat, maneuvering, handling, storing, wind blown towards Kuwait, DU oxides and re-suspended direction in Iraq is NW-SE [40]. Figure 6 shows sand storms directions towards Kuwait [39]. Figure 7 Sandstorms

directions in studied area towards Kuwait [39] Not knowing much about the nature of those weapons, the destroyed artilleries between the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border and Southern and Western Basra city up to Nasrya were kept in place for about four years. The DU contaminated tanks and artilleries are continuous sources of radioactive contamination. The American Administration is totally responsible for the increased exposure of the human population and other ecological species to DU oxides and particles through daily direct contact with the destroyed tanks, the continuous exposure to contaminated dust storms towards heavily populated Basra city, the contaminated food chain where these artilleries acted as good water conduits for the natural grasses and vegetation cover for the sheep to graze on, and other related environmental pathways[40] Radioactivity measurements related to DU contamination started in Iraq after two years of contaminating the area. Detection of Kharange, Shamia Airfield, Jabal Sanam, and Gudairat Al-Audhaimi areas, west and south of Basra City, were done in 1993 by a team from Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and Science College of Baghdad University [41].


Environment – Water/SoilDU weapons pervade the environment – spread through water and soil

Washington Post 03 (Eric Pianin, March 19 2003, “Impending War Threatens Gulf: Environmentalists Say Damage to Ecosystem Could Eclipse 1990-1991 Gulf War,” online: http://www.envirosagainstwar.org/media/washpost.pdf #!tylerd)

Environmentalists are particularly concerned about the use of armor-piercing munitions that are tipped with depleted uranium — a heavy metal that can penetrate tanks but also spreads radioactive dust to soil and water. During the 1991 conflict, US forces fired 320 tons of depleted uranium, most of it from cannons mounted on Air Force A-1- Thunderbolt IIs, or Warthogs. Much of that radioactive material was spread across Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, often in the form of tiny fragments that some civilians picked up as souvenirs. Defense Department officials last week said there is little evidence that depleted uranium poses a serious threat to public health or the environment, while stressing the metal's extraordinary capability of penetrating enemy armor. "Nobody goes into a war and wants to be even with the enemy," Army Col. James Naughton of the US Army Materiel Command told reporters.


Environment – ContaminationDU rounds create risk in multiple ways – intact rounds, water contamination, dust

UNEP 03 (United Nations Environment Program, 2003, “Desk Study on the Environment in Iraq,” online: http://postconflict.unep.ch/publications/Iraq_DS.pdf #!tylerd)

Overall, it is likely that significant amounts of DU rounds have been fired (around 290 metric tons were reportedly fired during the 1991 Gulf

War111), with additional DU released into the environment from the burning of armour plating. This may involve any or all of the following potential risks to the environment and human health, based on UNEP’s findings in the Balkans:112 – Inhalation of DU dust at the time

of munition impact, leading to a potentially serious additional health risk to anyone in the immediate vicinity who survived the initial blast and subsequent

fire; – Widespread, low-level contamination of the ground surface by DU; – Presence of intact DU penetrators buried in soft ground (which might be dug up and handled by unprotected individuals, leading to a low-level but unnecessary beta radition dose to the skin); – Presence of DU penetrator fragments on the ground surface (which might be picked up and handled by unprotected individuals, including ‘souvenir’ hunters, leading to a

low-level but unnecessary radiation dose); – Possible migration of DU into ground water (and from there into drinking water supplies), through corrosion and dissolution of penetrators and penetrator fragments.


Environment – Danger Lasts Many YearsSystemic environmental contamination perpetuates radioactive danger for hundreds of years.

MTP 03 (KAHAE Military Toxics Project, June 2003, “"Depleted" Uranium Munitions:Nuclear Waste as a Weapon,” online: http://www.kahea.org/lcr/pdf/Depleted_Uranium_Fact_Sheet.pdf #!tylerd)

Immediate battlefield exposures of combat and cleanup personnel to "depleted" uranium are only the tip of the toxic and radioactive iceberg. Continuing environmental exposures present a much longer-term danger to civilians in post-conflict areas. The Royal Society (the British national academy of sciences) recently concluded that because DU may move into the environment – especially water sources –

over many decades, "contaminated land might be a concern for hundreds of years" and "contamination of water supplies or other sensitive components of the environment…might only become apparent after a number of years or more likely decades." Environmental

contamination at production and testing sites is addressed above; here we review conflict and post-conflict exposures . Firing of DU munitions can immediately contaminate air, soil, and water with ingestible particles of toxic and radioactive "depleted" uranium. Unless shells and fragments are removed from areas of use, they will continue to release DU into the environment for years or decades. Corrosion of spent shells adds to amounts of mobile DU dust in environment. If not cleaned up, it may contaminate food or water supplies, or be resuspended into the air and carried by wind. Activities such as construction or plowing may be hazardous to people in the area. Children living in affected areas are particularly at risk of playing in DU contaminated areas, and ingesting contaminated soil.


K Impacts – Right to ExistenceUsing DU munitions in Iraq functions as genocide—denies the right of existence of an entire group


Looking closer, we find that the word genocide has two lives: its common meaning and its legal substance. Commonly, genocide is taken to mean the total annihilation of a people. Nothing less counts, hence scepticism in using the word. On rapid reading, UN General Assembly Resolution 96 of 1946 authorising the drafting of a genocide convention suggests the same understanding: “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.”1 But this definition bears reading again, for it is not the fact of annihilation that constitutes the crime of genocide, but rather denial of the right of existence of an entire given group. This nuance is important.Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention —now the legal standard2 — makes this point clear by focusing on the concept of intent, supplementing this with the important phrase, “in whole or in part”, thus grounding genocide not in numbers annihilated, but in the iniquity of a rationality that intends massively destructive consequences. This qualification is what ensures that the Genocide Convention is a preventative mechanism and not simply a reactive instrument. It also means that guilt is a moral determination. Indeed, in origin the term itself — coined in the inter-war period by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish legal scholar — emerged from the effort to make “barbarity” and “vandalism” crimes under international law. It is intent to destroy that is the basis of the crime of genocide , illustrated in definable acts that constitute — or would — genocide.


K Impacts – GenocideThe aftereffects of DU munitions constitute genocide against the Iraqi people


On whether the distinction between civilian and military targets has been respected and upheld, with credible studies reporting as many as 1,000,000 Iraqi civilian deaths since 2003 alone, a number that is increasing rapidly, US use of force would appear clearly indiscriminate.12 Alternatively, the use of depleted uranium (DU) ordnance — about 2,000 tons to date since 2003, around 10 times what was used in the 1991 Gulf War —illustrates unequivocally indiscriminate and disproportionate force in that DU, which is airborne and waterborne, has a half-life of 4.7 billion years, causing sterility, cancer, leukaemia and birth defects, as well as rendering swathes of Iraqi land permanently lethal and unusable. Indeed, the United States has not only attacked living Iraqis, but also the unborn generations of Iraq. Shuna Lennon makes an important point when stating: “desire to bring about the illegal result is not an essential component of intention, and that bringing something about because it is a means to a quite different end can be sufficient.”13 This illustrates the principle noted above of knowingly undertaking an act where the perpetrator claims either not to have known, or desired, the consequent outcome. In the instance of DU, it is simply unconvincing that US commanders could be unaware of the disproportionate and indiscriminate impact of its use. At best, it illustrates grave disregard for human life, and at worst oblique intention or direct intention. A strong argument could be made for the case of direct intent on the basis that many targets of US DU use are not military vehicles or other heavily armoured installations but rather civilian districts in Mosul, Basra, Samawa and Baghdad, among other towns and cities.14


K Impacts – Equivalent to a Huge Nuclear WarUsing depleted uranium munitions is the equivalent of nuclear war against Iraqis—83,000 Nagasaki bombs

Hecht 6 (Gabrielle, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan, “Nuclear Ontologies,” http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=%22gabrielle+hecht+is%22&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8) Showers

Until very recently, the principal ontological border of nuclearity for health purposes was the notion of the “permissible dose”: the idea that below a certain threshold, health effects of radiation exposure are statistically negligible. Always controversial, this notion now seems conclusively refuted. A National Research Council report released in June 2005 concludes that there is “no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial.”21 The regulatory consequences of this challenge to an established nuclear ontology remain to be seen. Yet whatever they may be, they will certainly make waves in the virulent contemporary debate over the nuclearity of depleted uranium (DU) munitions, first deployed against Iraqi tanks in the 1991 Persian Gulfwar and used again in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and the current Iraq war. Some scientists, activists, and former military personnel question DU munitions’ legality as well as their morality. They emphasize the nuclearity of DU weapons, calling them “dirty bombs,” “weapons of mass destruction” – or, at the extreme, “nuclear weapons.” For them, DU’s nuclearity has to do with its radioactivity, its persistent toxicity, and its effect on civilians living near places where DU munitions were used. Some activists have even coined a new term –“atomicity” – to designate the number of radioactive particles released; hence the much-quoted phrase “800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs.”22 Nuclear nightmare narratives have resurfaced, ranging from reports of increased childhood leukemia rates in Basra to lurid accounts of horrifying birth defects among Afghani children and the babies of DU-exposed US veterans. The US and UK governments – along with the IAEA and the WHO – downplay the nuclearity of DU weaponry and deny any proven causality between birth defects and DU exposure. At least until the recent NRC report, they asserted that the radiation levels released by DU munitions fall within permissible dose ranges, and would not cause discernible health effects.


K Impacts – Systemic ImpactIngesting one particle from DU munitions is the equivalent of having one X-ray per hour for life

Bhagwat 4 (Vishnu, Chief of Naval Staff in India, “Silent WMDs,--Effects of Depleted Uranium,” http://www.grassrootspeace.org/bhagwat_du_29feb04.pdf) Showers

We need not ennumerate the DU munition types used in Iraq 199, Kosovo 1999, Afghanistan 2001-04 and Iraq 2003. They have been dispensed by all air / ground and sea systems on innocent civilians. DU burns intensely and is very hard. It releases Uranium Oxide. The aerosol contains particles of 0.5-5 microns in size, once they are in the air or dust they are inhaled or ingested, including from contaminated soil. Once in the lungs one such particle is equivalent tohaving one X’Ray per hour, for life. Because it is impossible to remove, the victim is gradually irradiated. Still births, birth defects, leukemia, damaged central nervous systems and other cancers have been common in children born since 1991. Child leukemia has risen 600 % in areas of Iraq as reported by the Netherland Visie Foundation. Beyond just the health consequences, DU munitions are in fact, weapons of ‘Silent’ Mass Destruction in so far as the consequences of their usage are vast, indiscriminate and violate all Human Rights Conventions . Tora Bora , Kabu , Paktia , Karises or underwater supply tunnels have been contaminated forever. All this has been documented in a comprehensive paper “ Uranium wars : The Pentagon steps up its use of Radio-active Munitions,” by Marc W. Herold to whom this paper owes sincere acknowledgement.


K Impacts – Nuclearised PlanetContinued use of “depleted” uranium weapons will turn the planet into a combatant – we will constantly be under attack by a radioactive and toxic environment.


Perhaps the greatest challenge we now face is to reinstate a more expansive vision of what it means to be secure. What span of time will we allow to define our national security and our security as a species? At home and across the planet, in wartime and in peace, environmental safeguards must be reasserted, safeguards on which our health, freedoms, and international standing depend. The current fixation on meeting terror with high-tech military terror has shrunk our vision of what constitutes sustainable security. If we improved the fuel efficiency of America's cars and light trucks by a mere 2.7 miles per gallon, we would be liberated from the need to import any oil from Saudi Arabia. Such a bold but feasible move to conserve energy would also help reintegrate a viable environment into our vision of how to protect America in the long term. We cannot afford to shrink the threats to our future to the real but reductive threat of terrorism. If we continue to glorify poisonous weapons of fake precision, belated war deaths will become increasingly widespread, as will the political consequences of the accompanying blow-back rage. We will face an unbounded war, as the planet itself metastasizes into a combatant: the ultimate, toxic hyperpower, a force of random, abiding retribution


K Impacts – A2: UnintentionalEven if DU munitions weren't deployed maliciously, they're intent through negligence at best


In criminal law there are traditionally five levels to intent, differentiated according to different degrees of foresight and criminal desire: 1) Purposive intent, where an unlawful consequence is foreseen, desired and planned for. In this category it is not strictly required that the actus rea — the given act or set of acts constituting genocide — is present, though if it is it adds significantly to the weight and charge of the offence; 2) Oblique intent , where simply the consequences can be seen as an assured outcome of a given act or set of acts; 3) Knowingly, where the accused knows or reasonably should know the certainty of theoutcome of a given act or set of acts; 4) Recklessness , where the consequences are seen to be possible but the act or set of acts is undertaken anyway; and 5) Negligence , where liability is centred on a firm sense that the consequences should have been foreseen but where the accused did not foresee the consequences.


Levinas – Obligation to the SufferingBeing aware of suffering creates an obligation to solve itSmith 3 (Michael, associate professor of French at Berry College, “Emmanuel Levinas' Ethics of Responsibility,” http://www.kennesaw.edu/clubs/psa/pdfs/Smith_2003_PSA.pdf) Showers

One of the most surprising aspects of Levinas’s ethics—perhaps “meta-ethics,” or better yet “proto-ethics,” would be a preferable term, since Levinas’s philosophical work is really a revamping of philosophy that replaces ontology by ethics: his “ethics” is not simply layered onto thinking-as-usual—one of the most surprising aspects of this protoethics, then, is that there is no parity between my situation and yours from an ethical standpoint. You are always better than me. I am responsible, not only for my transgressions, but for yours as well! There are two aspects or stages of Levinas’s ethical thought: my relation to you (as if you were the only other person in the world) and my relation to you seen in relation to the other of you, my other. Your other may have conflicting claims, so that I am put in the position of comparing incomparables, to the extent that each person is a world. From the relation of me to my other, you, love is enough. To realize the intention of love in a broader sociality, justice is necessary. Justice, the harsh name of love, must realize love’s intentions, and in doing so may lose sight of its original intent, become alienated into a self-serving institution. This risk, in Levinas’s view, is one that must be taken. Here Levinas seldom develops his thought along the lines of strict reasoning. One senses that the stays of being are relaxed and we would have no possible means of directing our thought beyond this point without a certain “inspiration.” Knowledge is no longer sought after: it is inescapable. We are the “hostage” of the other. No discussion, even as brief a one as this, can be complete without some mention of the face. This is a term that Levinas elevates to status of a philosopheme, a term endowed with a specific philosophical role. The face does not refer to the plasticity of a visual form in Levinas, nor is it just the look of the other, since the face speaks in Levinas. It is perhaps the phenomenal basis, or as Levinas sometimes says, the “mise-enscène” or theatrical “production” of the appearance of the person, and it is the way in which we may become aware of God. I quote: “The face puts into question the sufficiency of my identity as an I, it compels me to an infinite responsibility.”4 It is by substitution for the other, or by taking on the fate of the other, that I embrace a responsibility for which I never signed up. Here Levinas diverges from the usual notion of responsibility, since the ethical meaning of responsibility is bound up with the notion of freedom. We are not to imagine that Levinas is involved in some sort of Skinnerian “beyond freedom,” but Levinas does enter a realm that is distinct from the dialectic of promise and promise-keeping and freedom such as we find in the thinking of Jean-Paul Sartre, for example. This taking up of responsibility is not a virtue (virtue in the sense of strength), nor is it a weakness (as suggested by the late Michel de Certeau), but precisely the carrying out of the mitzvah, or commandment of God. We should not expect gratitude, for this would entangle us in an endless dialectic of quid pro quos. (It is interesting to note in passing that Levinas praises the institution of money, despite its possible abuses, because if frees us from having to have a personal relation with each person with whom we deal in life. We can carry on without this burden.) If we should expect anything, it is rather ingratitude. There is an impersonal—transpersonal?—sense in which action, good conduct, is nothing more nor less than a going beyond the bog of being. What is ethical behavior? It is (I quote) “the original goodness of man toward the other in which, in an ethical dis-inter-estedness—word of God—the inter-ested effort of brute being persevering in its being is interrupted.”5

http://www.kennesaw.edu/clubs/psa/pdfs/Smith_2003_PSA.pdf


Levinas – Precedes CalculationsEthical responsibility for the other is always already present before other calculations

McFadden 10 (Ronan, MA Comparative Literature at the Centre for Intercultural Studies, “INTERRUPTED DISCOURSE AND ETHICAL JUDGEMENT IN JONATHAN LITTELL’S THE KINDLY ONES,” http://www.ucl.ac.uk/opticon1826/currentissue/articles/Article_A_H_-_McFadden_Publish-CE_Final_.pdf)

So can we conclude that, while The Kindly Ones is about the Holocaust, we lack a universal perspective from which to judge its ethical impact? In his book, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Robert Eaglestone points towards a universal ethics beyond contingent systems, extrapolating this perspective from Emmanuel Lévinas’s idea of ethics as an ‘unconditional responsibility’ by which we are ‘fundamentally responsible for others before we can theorise this relationship, and before we can place the other in relation to our own being’ (Eaglestone 1997, 138). Ethics, then, in terms of a responsibility for other humans, is already present before any attempt to structure our relationships. In language, this call to ethical responsibility takes the form of what Lévinas calls the saying : ‘the fact that before the face [of the other] I do not simply remain there contemplating it, I respond to it...It is difficult to be silent in someone’s presence’ (quoted in Eaglestone 1997, 141). Lévinas argues that before analysing the other person, before having anything in particular to say, we are compelled to make conversation because of the everpresent call to ethical responsibility. The feeling of needing to make conversation is called the saying , and is evidence, for Lévinas, of the ethical call . The second component of language that Lévinas discusses is the said, which is ‘the saying incarnated into a concrete world of meanings and history’ (Eaglestone 1997, 145). As the saying leads to the said, entering into a fixed linguistic system, its ethical origin is forgotten ‘because it designates, and, in designation, denies the transcendence of the saying’ (Eaglestone 1997, 145). Opposed to the saying, the said is not ethical, because it limits the saying within a structural linguistic universe.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/opticon1826/currentissue/articles/Article_A_H_-_McFadden_Publish-CE_Final_.pdf


Levinas – Logic of GenocideUS refusal to admit genocide perpetuates the logic that allows genocide to be committed

Schiff 8 (Jacob, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, “The Trouble with `Never Again!': Rereading Levinas for Genocide Prevention and Critical International,” http://mil.sagepub.com/content/36/2/217.full.pdf)

One symptom of this problem is how hard it is for us to talk about ‘genocide’. A finding of Power’s depressing study is that ‘U.S officials spin themselves (as well as the American public) about the nature of the violence in question and the likely impact of an American intervention.’42 Calling a genocide a genocide carries with it serious consequences; above all, it requires us to act .43 In our state of (perhaps manipulated) denial, we employ at least three tactics to evade this requirement. One is to call instances of genocide something else – civil war, ethnic strife, ethnic violence, and so on. This is the sort of tactic to which Power refers . Another, used to great effect during the genocide perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs against Muslims,44 and then by Rwandan Hutus against Tutsis,45 is to locate the causes of these events in intractable ancient ethnic or tribal hatreds about which nothing can be done. A third is to substitute for ‘genocide’ a number of adjectives that effectively push the phenomenon beyond the limits of our politics altogether, beyond even the limits of thought.46 Power herself refers to genocide as ‘the unknowable’, noting that ‘[before] it begins, genocide is not easy to wrap one’s mind around. A genocidal regime’s intent to destroy a group is so hideous and the scale of its atrocities so enormous that outsiders who know enough to forecast brutality can rarely bring themselves to imagine genocide.’47 Israel Charny and Chanan Rapoport (1982) call genocide ‘unthinkable’.48 This constellation of descriptors – ‘unknowable’, ‘unthinkable’, ‘hideous’, ‘atrocity’, ‘enormous’, ‘unimaginable’ – all point to a similar tactic of denial, of refusal to acknowledge that politics could be infected by such a thing as genocide.49 After all, politics is ‘ supposed ’ to be about redemption – that, anyhow, is the seduction of which redemptive language is the symptom. The way we talk – or don’t talk – about genocide signals a retreat into bad faith. While they work in contradictory ways, these aspects of redemptive politics may be mutually reinforcing: the drive for redemption reflected in our political claims contributes to our flight from responsibility; and our flight from responsibility, by leaving so much undone, maintains the urgency of those redemptive aspirations. In the meantime, genocide remains a persistent feature of world politics. Perhaps it is time for us to ‘believe the unbelievable’. Perhaps redemption through politics is a dangerously seductive illusion. Perhaps we need politics that resist our redemptive aspirations, and ways of articulating claims that reflect that resistance.

http://mil.sagepub.com/content/36/2/217.full.pdf


Levinas – Ethical ResponsibilityWe have an ethical responsibility to do all we can to protect the Other.

Tamir 09 (Michal Tamir, LL.M., is former legal assistant to Israeli Supreme court, Texas Hispanic Journal of Law & Policy; Spring 2009, Vol. 15 Issue 1, p71-92, 22p, “RACIAL PROFILING: WHO IS THE EXECUTIONER AND DOES HE HAVE A FACE?” EBSCOhost academic search premier #!tylerd)

Levinas' fundamental contribution, the ethics of responsibility, concerns the ethical relationship between the individual and the others. He distinguishes between the "Other," an irreducible, entirely not understandable construct, and the "other" as used colloquially to distinguish between an individual and her surroundings. It is easiest to understand Levinas' contribution in the first person. The encounter between me and the Other is an encounter that reveals my ethical responsibility towards him. When I see a person in front of me there is something about his presence that makes it wrong to kill him. In that, the basic ethical imperative "Thou shall not kill" is manifested. To

Levinas, this is not a passive relationship in which my only responsibility is not killing the other; I am responsible even if I did not directly cause the death. I must try to prevent harm to others. If I see people suffering on television, my urge to help them expresses my responsibility for the Other. Fundamental to Levinas' analysis is the idea that the Other cannot be known; any knowledge about the Other

makes him familiar and, thus, no longer an Other. The Other cannot be known in the same way an object is known and thus Levinas' philosophy militates against any attempt to reduce the Other to a knowledge profile. The fact that I cannot know the object that I am responsible for means I cannot know what exactly I should do to fulfill such a responsibility . Thus I cannot formulate clear boundaries for my responsibility towards the Other. This borderless responsibility for the Other is what Levinas calls the "infinite responsibility" for the Other. "^


Levinas – Sanctity of LifeGenocidal mindset makes life not worth living – destroys the sanctity of life.

Alford 90 (C. Fred Alford, Ph. D UT is a prof. of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, March 1990, Political Psychology, Vol. 11 No.1, pp 5-27, “The Organization of Evil,” JSTOR #!tylerd)

At the end of this train of genocidal thought lies not only the destruction of the evil other, but goodness itself, and with it the meaning of life. The slaughter of innocents so fills the world with evil that there is no escape from its contamination. Only the destruction of self and world-or rather, only an act of destruction that finally sees no difference between them, as the metaphor of the corporate body comes to be taken literally-can protect the self from the evil it has unleashed. Here is the link between envy and ideological reversal. Both eliminate goodness in the world, making it a fearful and worthless place to live. But, whereas the former does so by rejecting and attacking goodness directly, the latter does so by so filling the world with one's own badness that goodness is displaced, driven out, swamped. Like Richard, the bad crowds out the good. Greenberg and Mitchell( 1983, p. 126) describe the consequences this way: As a result of his rages. . . the child imagines his world as cruelly depopulated, his insides as depleted. He is a sole survivor and an empty shell. However, unlike the child, who has his mother's continued presence to reassure him that his badness need not obliterate all goodness in the world, the Nazi doctor has his victims, whose silent witness confirmed his deepest fears: that he is alone in a wholly evil world, made so by his own badness


Imperialism K Add-OnUse of depleted uranium weapons is imperialist dumping – NIMBY policy has been taken to a new level


When Dietz cautioned against integrating depleted uranium into conventional warfare, his alarm was grounded in experience. During the late 1970s, he was employed to monitor depleted-uranium fevels outside an Albany, NY, factory that produced cannon shells for the Air

Force. New York State authorities, on learning that radiation levels near the factory had reached 10 times permissible state standards, shut down the plant. The subsequent cleanup cost more than $100-million. Dietz underscored the hypocrisy of such stringent domestic

regulation when the United States was creating, in the Persian Gulf, an infinitely more toxic environment for its troops and for the region's inhabitants. "To protect the health of Americans, we shut down a factory for discharging the equivalent of about two 30-mm. shells into the atmosphere per month," Dietz says. "How can we justify using a million such shells in Iraq and Kuwait, most of it in only four days of war?" WHAT ACCOUNTS for depleted uranium's sudden surge in military popularity? As a byproduct of nuclear testing and nuclear power, depleted uranium is extremely cheap -- indeed, better than free. Half a century of nuclear-weapons and nuclear-power production has left the Department of Defense with over a billion pounds of nuclear waste in storage. The department is delighted to offload some of that waste onto arms manufacturers, gratis, in the form of depleted uranium . The result is a seductive kind of alchemy: Weapons manufacturers magically cut their production costs while the Defense Department magically rids itself of a five-alarm waste product that no American wants buried in his backyard. The result is a kind of anti-environmental recycling that converts highly toxic waste into even more deadly explosive forms. By expanding its depleted-uranium arsenal, America is effectively exporting nuclear waste to foreign soil - nuclear waste that contains plutonium, for which there are no safe levels. This nuclear waste also contains the uranium

isotope 236, which does not exist in nature and has caused concern among epidemiologists. Foreign war zones may appear far off; and, yes, foreign civilians bear the brunt of the noxious load. However, they do not bear that load alone: American troops also become victims of depleted uranium's slow-motion slaughter. In 2001 Asaf Durakovic, former chief of nuclear medicine at the Vetera8ns Administration Hospital in Wilmington, Del., published (in the peer-reviewed journal Military Medicine) the results of his research that found depleted uranium and the more radioactive isotope, uranium 236, in the urine and bone tissue of 62 percent of sick gulf-war veterans. Durakovic had taken his samples nine years after the war had ended.


Proliferation K Add-On“Depleted” uranium weapons are considered nuclear when created by “terrorists”, but are considered conventional when used by world nuclear powers. The dichotomy between nuclear and conventional is thus blurred – actions are considered moral for superpowers but immoral for others.

Hecht 3 (Gabrielle Hecht is Associate Professor of History at UMich, 2003, History and Technology, Vol. 19, pp 1-8, “Globalization meets Frankenstein? Reflections on Terrorism and Technopolitics in the Nuclear Age,” online: http://courses.ttu.edu/hist5323-hahn/Readings/Hecht_2003.pdf #!tylerd)

Just as the stark dichotomies posited by the Cold War world got fuzzier the closer you examined them, so too for today's dichotomies. Consider my personal favorite: the line between nuclear and non-nuclear. I've argued that even during the Cold War it was not in fact all

that clear what was nuclear diplomacy and what wasn't. But in those good old days, you knew what nuclear weapons were (or at least you thought

you did). Now, it's not so apparent. Do munitions loaded up with depleted uranium count as "nuclear"? Not if you're NATO or the US. using them in the Balkans or the Gulf War. But if you're a terrorist contemplating packing a bomb with radioactive material purchased on the black market, you've violated a fundamental taboo . By crossing the nuclear/non-nuclear divide, you've committed an act of pollution: you've made a "dirty bomb." (One does wonder which bombs are the clean ones.} What qualifies such bombs as "dirty" is not so much the technical infraction of mixing the 'nuclear' with the "conventional.'* but rather the technopolitics of who's doing the mixing, how, and to what ends. The stubborn persistence of global technopolitical hierarchies figures here in important ways, most interestingly in the ''how"

part: calling these bombs "dirty" signals not just moral outrage at technological pollution, but also disdain for the inability of the bomb builders to produce a "real" nuclear weapon. My point, of course, is not that it should be acceptable for terrorists lo make radioactive weapons of

any kind, or that Saddam Hussein should be allowed to develop weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it's that the current shape of global technopolitics has deep roots in the dialectics between nuclear and post-colonial rupture-lalk, between nuclear and post-colonial technopolitics. These dialectics have defined the parameters for global power relations, and shaped geopolitical subjectivities in multiple registers and in ways whose significance we have barely begun to grasp. If we are indeed in a "post-" or a "post-post-" Cold War world, then it's the same kind of "post-ness" that we find in the "post-colonial." The infrastructures and discourses of Cold War technopolitics continue to shape the parameters of global and local action, just as the infrastructures and discourses of colonialism do. We ignore those roots—and the contradictions they produce—at our peril.


U.S. Key – Systemic DeathThe U.S. stonewalls it’s responsibility for 11% of the Iraqi population – it’s our problem and we’ve got to fix it.


I suspect the military-industrial complex will stonewall admitting the effects of DU for as long as possible to avoid accepting responsibility, not to mention liability, for their reckless actions. When John Hanchette, a founding editor of USA Today tried to publish stories about DU, he received a phone call from the Pentagon asking him to desist. He was later replaced at USA Today. The World Health Organization's chief expert on radiation and health had his report on DU suppressed. Dr. Asaf Durakovic, then a colonel in the U.S. Army, was asked to lie about the risks of DU to humans. So the stonewalling will continue, even as cancers rage among our soldiers and Iraqi civilians, even as our soldiers die, or commit suicide to escape the horrific pain, even as birth defects proliferate across Iraq and among our veterans. But what of that? DU is a moneymaker for corporations like ATK. And turning DU into munitions helps the government solve a big problem-what to do with mountains of DU it must store and, by law, keep out of the environment. What better solution than giving it free to the munitions makers, who then sell the munitions back to Uncle Sam at a handsome profit? Everyone wins. Unless we continue to fight for the truth, and to cry out for justice, our soldiers and Iraqi civilians will suffer and die in increasing numbers. Estimates of how many may die in Iraq are truly staggering - up to 11% of Iraq's 27 million population. This is a massive crime against humanity that remains in the shadows.


U.S. Key – Moral Imperative*We have a moral imperative to clean up DU munitions – we must correct the atrocities of the government

Hammill, ‘7 – Hamill has taught in prisons for fourteen years, in artist-in-residency programs for twenty years, and has worked extensively with battered woman and children. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, two Washington Governor’s Arts Awards, the Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing, and the Washington Poets Association Lifetime Achievement Award for poetry. He co-founded Copper Canyon Press with Tree Swenson and was Editor there from 1972 through 2004. In January 2003, he founded Poets Against War, editing an anthology with the same name, Poets Against the War (Nation Books, 2003). His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages [Sam, “What Country is This” Poets Against War Newsletter, Autumn 2007, http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/newsletter/2007/what_country.asp //adi]

We, the People, are not innocent. We cannot wash the blood from our hands. This is our government water-boarding prisoners in our little gulag in Guantánamo, Cuba— Cuba, whose government we have attempted to overthrow time and time again since the infamous Bay of Pigs, a country that has suffered from our embargoes and other anti-Cuban policies for half a century. We are not innocent. We cannot pretend to separate ourselves from our government. We are our government. We are representative of our long inglorious history of violence against others, of relentless imperialism, from the slave trade that financed our revolution (along with French money) to making Latin America safe for the United Fruit Company and Standard oil; from our genocide practiced against Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries to the poisoning of Vietnam with Agent Orange and the poisoning of Iraq with depleted uranium.


U.S. Key – Ethical ObligationDoD DUB policy is predicated off moral obligation

Fahey 01 (Dan Fahey has a masters in IR from Tufts University, December 10 2001, “USE, EFFECTS AND LEGAL STANDINGOF DEPLETED URANIUM MUNITIONS,” online: http://doc.danfahey.com/Legal.pdf, #!tylerd)

Ironically, the U.S. Department of Defense’s own conduct acknowledges the fact that depleted uranium can cause environmental harm. Cleanups or containment of current and former manufacturing, testing, and training ranges undertaken by the Defense Department within the United

States are solidly grounded in municipal law requirements. The military’s prompt remediation of insignificant amounts of DU expended in Vieques and Japan reflect not a customary practice rooted in a sense of legal obligation, however, but sensitivity to the moral and

political ramifications of the release of depleted uranium in communities actively opposing the U.S. military presence and activities.


U.S. Key – LocationsDoD holds all info about DU use in Iraq

Fahey 04 (Dan Fahey has a masters in IR from Tufts University, March 24 2004, “Unresolved Issues Regarding Depleted Uranium And the Health of U.S. Veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom,” online: http://www.wise-uranium.org/pdf/duunris.pdf #!tylerd)

DoD has withheld information regarding the use of DU in Iraq, in notable contrast to the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). One year after the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, DoD has not publicly released information about the locations and exact quantities of DU munitions shot or otherwise released in Iraq. This raises the question of whether U.S. or allied servicemembers, as well as Iraqi civilians, might inhabit or work in areas contaminated by DU dust and debris. If DoD has information about where it shot DU, and it has conducted environmental assessments of these areas, it should demonstrate its proactive, responsible behavior by making this information publicly available.


U.S. Key – DUB UnacceptabilityDoD failure to address “depleted” uranium loans it legitimacy

Fahey 04 (Dan Fahey has a masters in IR from Tufts University, June 20 2004, “THE EMERGENCE AND DECLINE OF THE DEBATE OVER DEPLETED URANIUM MUNITIONS,” online: http://www.wise-uranium.org/pdf/duemdec.pdf #!tylerd)

The failure of the D epartment of Defense to honestly assess and openly address the health and environmental effects of its use of DU munitions during the 1991 Gulf War is probably the single most important factor in the emergence of DU as a social, political, and scientific issue. During the 1990s (and continuing today), U.S. military officials repeatedly lied and misled the public about the scope and severity of exposures to U.S. veterans, and as each misdeed was exposed by activists and publicized through the media, the DU issue gained credibility and visibility. Without a clear pattern of demonstrated negligence on the part of the U.S. government, the DU issue would have been unable to establish legitimacy, credibility, and saliency.


U.S. Key – ResponsibilityThe U.S. has a responsibility to clean up what it left in Iraq

Richwine, ‘4 – staff writer for Reuters [Lisa, “”Activist Urges Depleted Uranium Clean-Up in Iraq”, 5/24, //adi

WASHINGTON - The U.S. military should clean up depleted uranium ammunition scattered across Iraq to prevent future health problems such as cancer and birth defects, a leading anti-nuclear activist said on Friday. The Pentagon said it had not found any evidence the material, which is so dense it can pierce steel tanks, causes long-term health consequences. An ongoing study of 1991 Gulf War veterans has shown no ill effects. But Dr. Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, linked depleted uranium to higher rates of cancer and birth defects in Iraq following the Gulf War. Depleted uranium ammunition is being used by U.S. troops in Iraq and could seriously harm civilians living there in the decades to come, said Caldicott, founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, an anti-nuclear group that shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. "We should be taking responsibility for what is happening over there," she told reporters at the National Press Club.


U.S. Key – 1ACU.S. is the only responsible actor

Peterson, ‘3 – writer for CSM and DU activist [Scott, “Remains of toxic bullets litter Iraq”, 5/15, http://www.csMonitor.com/2003/0515/p01s02-woiq.html //adi]

BAGHDAD (15 May 2003) -- At a roadside produce stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, business is brisk for Latifa Khalaf Hamid. Iraqi drivers pull up and snap up fresh bunches of parsley, mint leaves, dill, and onion stalks. But Ms. Hamid's stand is just four paces away from a burnt-out Iraqi tank, destroyed by -- and contaminated with -- controversial American depleted-uranium (DU) bullets. Local children play "throughout the day" on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road. No one has warned the vendor in the faded, threadbare black gown to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven't been told not to play with the radioactive debris. They gather around as a Geiger counter carried by a visiting reporter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout. The Monitor visited four sites in the city -- including two randomly chosen destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles, a clutch of burned American ammunition trucks, and the downtown planning ministry -- and found significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad. In the first partial Pentagon disclosure of the amount of DU used in Iraq, a US Central Command spokesman told the Monitor that A-10 Warthog aircraft -- the same planes that shot at the Iraqi planning ministry -- fired 300,000 bullets. The normal combat mix for these 30-mm rounds is five DU bullets to 1 -- a mix that would have left about 75 tons of DU in Iraq. The Monitor saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away. There, a 3-foot-long DU dart from a 120 mm tank shell, was found producing radiation at more than 1,300 times background levels. It made the instrument's staccato bursts turn into a steady whine. "If you have pieces or even whole [DU] penetrators around, this is not an acute health hazard, but it is for sure above radiation protection dose levels," says Werner Burkart, the German deputy director general for Nuclear Sciences and Applications at the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. "The important thing in any battlefield -- especially in populated urban areas -- is somebody has to clean up these sites ." Minimizing the risk Fresh-from-the-factory DU tank shells are normally handled with gloves, to minimize the health risk, and shielded with a thin coating. The alpha particle radiation emitted by DU travels less than an inch and can be stopped by cloth or even tissue paper. But when the DU material burns (usually on impact; or as a dust, it can spontaneously ignite) protective shields disappear, and dangerous radioactive oxides are created that can be inhaled or ingested. "[The risk] depends so very much on how you handle it," says Jan Olof Snihs, of Sweden's Radiation Protection Authority in Stockholm. In most cases dangers are low, he says, unless children eat toxic and radioactive soil, or get DU oxides on their hands. Radioactive particles are a "special risk associated with a war," Mr. Snihs says. "The authorities should be aware of this, and try to decontaminate places like this, just to avoid unnecessary risk." Pentagon officials say that DU is relatively harmless and a necessary part of modern warfare. They say that pre-Gulf War studies that indicated a risk of cancer and of causing harm to local populations through permanent contamination have been superseded by newer reports. "There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq," said Lt. Col. Michael Sigmon, deputy surgeon for the US Army's V Corps, told journalists in Baghdad last week. He asserted that children playing with expended tank shells would have to eat and then practically suffocate on DU residue to cause harm. But there is a growing chorus of concern among United Nations and relief officials, along with some Western scientific experts, who are calling for sites contaminated with DU be marked off and made safe. "The soil around the impact sites of [DU] penetrators may be heavily contaminated, and could be harmful if swallowed by children," says Brian Spratt, chair of the working group on DU at The Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific institution. Heavy metal toys? Fragments and penetrators should be removed, since "children find them fascinating objects, and can pocket them," says Professor Spratt. "The science says there is some danger -- not perhaps a huge danger -- of these objects. ... We certainly do not say that these things are safe; we say that cleanup is important." The British Ministry of Defense says it will offer screening to soldiers suspected of DU exposure, and will publish details about locations and quantities of DU that British troops used in Iraq -- a tiny fraction of that fired by US forces. The Pentagon has traditionally been tight-lipped about DU: Official figures on the amount used were not released for years after the 1991 Gulf War and Bosnia conflicts, and nearly a year after the 1999 Kosovo campaign. No US official contacted could provide DU use estimates from the latest war in Iraq. " The first thing we should ask [the US military] is to remove that immediately," says Carel de Rooy, head of the UN Children's Fund in Baghdad, adding that senior UN officials need urgent advice on avoiding exposure. The UN Environment Program last month called for field tests. DU "is still an issue of great concern for the general public," said UNEP chief Klaus Töpfer. "An early study in Iraq could either lay these fears to rest or confirm that there are indeed potential risks." US troops avoid wreckage During the latest Iraq conflict Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and A-10 Warthog aircraft, among other military platforms, all fired the DU bullets from desert war zones to the heart of Baghdad. No other armor-piercing round is as effective against enemy tanks. While the Pentagon says there's no risk to Baghdad residents, US soldiers are taking their own precautions in Iraq, and in some cases have handed out warning leaflets and put up signs. "After we shoot something with DU, we're not supposed to go around it, due to the fact that it could cause cancer," says a sergeant in Baghdad from New York, assigned to a Bradley, who asked not to be further identified. "We don't know the effects of what it could do," says the sergeant. "If one of our vehicles burnt with a DU round inside, or an ammo truck, we wouldn't go near it, even if it had important documents inside. We play it safe." Six American vehicles struck with DU "friendly fire" in 1991 were

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 68Juniors DUBs Affdeemed to be too contaminated to take home, and were buried in Saudi Arabia. Of 16 more brought back to a purpose-built facility in South Carolina, six had to be buried in a low-level radioactive waste dump. Television footage of the war last month showed Iraqi armored vehicles burning as US columns drove by, a common sign of a strike by DU, which burns through armor on impact, and often ignites the ammunition carried by the targeted vehicle. "We were buttoned up when we drove by that -- all our hatches were closed," the US sergeant says. "If we saw anything on fire, we wouldn't stop anywhere near it. We would just keep on driving." That's an option that produce seller Hamid doesn't have. She says the US broke its promise not to bomb civilians. She has found US cluster bomblets in her garden; the DU is just another dangerous burden, in a war about which she remains skeptical. "We were told it was going to be paradise [when Saddam Hussein was toppled], and now they are killing our children," she says voicing a common Iraqi perception about the risk of DU. "The Americans did not bother to warn us that this is a contaminated area." There is a warning now at the Doura intersection on the southern outskirts of Baghdad. In the days before the capital fell, four US supply trucks clustered near an array of highway off-ramps caught fire, cooking off a number of DU tank rounds. American troops wearing facemasks for protection arrived a few days later and bulldozed the topsoil around the site to limit the contamination. The troops taped handwritten warning signs in Arabic to the burned vehicles, which read: "Danger -- Get away from this area." These were the only warnings seen by this reporter among dozens of destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles littering the city. "All of them were wearing masks," says Abbas Mohsin, a teenage cousin of a drink seller 50 yards away, said referring to the US military cleanup crew. "They told the people there were toxic materials ... and advised my cousin not to sell Pepsi and soft drinks in this area. They said they were concerned for our safety." Despite the troops' bulldozing of contaminated earth away from the burnt vehicles, black piles of pure DU ash and particles are still present at the site. The toxic residue, if inhaled or ingested, is considered by scientists to be the most dangerous form of DU. One pile of jet-black dust yielded a digital readout of 9,839 radioactive emissions in one minute, more than 300 times average background levels registered by the Geiger counter. Another pile of dust reached 11,585 emissions in a minute. Western journalists who spent a night nearby on April 10, the day after Baghdad fell, were warned by US soldiers not to cross the road to this site, because bodies and unexploded ordnance remained, along with DU contamination. It was here that the Monitor found the "hot" DU tank round. This burned dart pushed the radiation meter to the far edge of the "red zone" limit. A similar DU tank round recovered in Saudi Arabia in 1991, that was found by a US Army radiological team to be emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. Their safety memo noted that the "current [US Nuclear Regulatory Commission] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year." The normal public dose limit in the US, and recognized around much of the world, is 100 millirems per year. Nuclear workers have guidelines 20 to 30 times as high as that. The depleted-uranium bullets are made of low-level radioactive nuclear-waste material, left over from the making of nuclear fuel and weapons. It is 1.7 times as dense as lead, and burns its way easily through armor. But it is controversial because it leaves a trail of contamination that has half-life of 4.5 billion years -- the age of our solar system. Less DU in this war? In the first Gulf War, US forces used 320 tons of DU, 80 per cent of it fired by A-10 aircraft. Some estimates suggest 1,000 tons or more of DU was used in the current war. But the Pentagon disclosure Wednesday that about 75 tons of A-10 DU bullets were used points to a smaller overall DU tonnage in Iraq this time. US military guidelines developed after the first Gulf War -- which have since been considerably eased -- required any soldier coming within 50 yards of a tank struck with DU to wear a gas mask and full protective suit. Today, soldiers say they have been told to steer clear of any DU. "If a [tank] was taken out by depleted uranium, there may be oxide that you don't want to inhale. We want to minimize any exposure, at least to the lowest level possible," Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official told journalists on March 14, just days before the war began. "If somebody needs to go into a tank that's been hit with depleted uranium, a dust mask, a handkerchief is adequate to protect them -- washing their hands afterwards." Not everyone on the battlefield may be as well versed in handling DU, Dr. Kilpatrick said, noting that his greater concern is DU's chemical toxicity, not its radioactivity: "What we worry about like lead in paint in housing areas -- children picking it up and eating it or licking it -- getting it on their hands and ingesting it." In the US, stringent NRC rules govern any handling of DU, which can legally only be disposed of in low-level radioactive waste dumps. The US military holds more than a dozen NRC licenses to work with it. In Iraq, DU was not just fired at armored targets. Video footage from the last days of the war shows an A-10 aircraft -- a plane purpose-built around a 30-mm Gatling gun -- strafing the Iraqi Ministry of Planning in downtown Baghdad. A visit to site yields dozens of spent radioactive DU rounds, and distinctive aluminum casings with two white bands, that drilled into the tile and concrete rear of the building. DU residue at impact clicked on the Geiger counter at a relatively low level, just 12 times background radiation levels. Hot bullets But the finger-sized bullets themselves -- littering the ground where looters and former staff are often walking -- were the "hottest" items the Monitor measured in Iraq, at nearly 1,900 times background levels. The site is just 300 yards from where American troops guard the main entrance of the Republican Palace, home to the US and British officials tasked with rebuilding Iraq. "Radioactive? Oh, really?" asks a former director general of the ministry, when he returned in a jacket and tie for a visit last week, and heard the contamination levels register in bursts on the Geiger counter. "Yesterday more than 1,000 employees came here, and they didn't know anything about it," the former official says. "We have started to not believe what the American government says. What I know is that the occupiers should clean up and take care of the country they invaded." US military officials often say that most people are exposed to natural or "background" radiation n daily life. For example, a round-trip flight across the US can yield a 5 millirem dose from increased cosmic radiation; a chest X-ray can yield a 10 millirem dose in a few seconds. The Pentagon says that, since DU is "depleted" and 40 per cent less radioactive than normal uranium, it presents even less of a hazard. But DU experts say they are most concerned at how DU is transformed on the battlefield, after burning, into a toxic oxide dust that emits alpha particles. While those can be easily stopped by the skin, once inside the body, studies have shown that they can destroy cells in soft tissue. While one study on rats linked DU

Northwestern Debate Institute 2010 69Juniors DUBs Afffragments in muscle tissue to increased cancer risk, health effects on humans remain inconclusive. As late as five days before the Iraq war began, Pentagon officials said that 90 of those troops most heavily exposed to DU during the 1991 Gulf War have shown no health problems whatsoever, and remain under close medical scrutiny. Released documents and past admissions from military officials, however, estimate that around 900 Americans were exposed to DU. Only a fraction have been watched, and among those has been one diagnosed case of lymphatic cancer, and one arm tumor. As reported in previous articles, the Monitor has spoken to American veterans who blame their DU exposure for serious health problems. The politics of DU But DU health concerns are very often wrapped up in politics. Saddam Hussein's regime blamed DU used in 1991 for causing a spike in the cancer rate and birth defects in southern Iraq. And the Pentagon often overstates its case -- in terms of DU effectiveness on the battlefield, or declaring the absence of health problems, according to Dan Fahey, an American veterans advocate who has Monitored the shrill arguments from both sides since the mid-1990s. "DU munitions are neither the benign wonder weapons promoted by Pentagon propagandists nor the instruments of genocide decried by hyperbolic anti-DU activists," Mr. Fahey writes in a March report, called "Science or Science Fiction: Facts, Myth and Propaganda in the Debate Over DU Weapons." Nonetheless, Rep. Jim McDermott (D) of Washington, a doctor who visited Baghdad before the war, introduced legislation in Congress last month requiring studies on health and environment studies, and clean up of DU contamination in the US. He says DU may well be associated with increased birth defects. "While the political effects of using DU munitions are perhaps more apparent than their health and environmental effects," Fahey writes, "science and common sense dictate it is unwise to use a weapon that distributes large quantities of a toxic waste in areas where people live, work, grow food, or draw water." Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the issue, Iraqis worry about DU. "It is an important concern.... We know nothing about it. How can I protect my family?" asks Faiz Askar, an Iraqi doctor. "We say the war is finished, but what will the future bring?"


Solvency – Microbial CleanupFungi are excellent cleaners – they stabilize uranium isotopes and stop radiation poisoning.

Melville, ‘8 – writer for ScienceAGoGo, a science news reporting service [Kate Melville, “Fungi Enlisted To Clean-Up Depleted Uranium”, May 6th, 2008 //adi]

The process involves a combination of environmental and biological factors. First, the unstable uranium metal gets coated with a layer of oxides. Moisture in the environment also "corrodes" the depleted uranium, encouraging fungal colonization and growth. While the fungi grow, they produce acidic substances, which corrode the depleted uranium even further. Some of the substances produced include organic acids that convert the uranium into a form that the fungi can take up or that can interact with other compounds. Ultimately, the interaction of soluble forms of uranium with phosphate leads to the formation of the new uranium minerals that get deposited around the fungal biomass. "We have shown for the first time that fungi can transform metallic uranium into minerals, which are capable of long-term uranium retention," the researchers concluded. "This phenomenon could be relevant to the future development of various remediation and revegetation techniques for uranium-polluted soils."


Solvency – Microbes Ext: Stops Animal/Plant UptakeMicrobe cleanup ends plant/animal uptake and stops uranium leaching


In the new study, the researchers found that free-living and plant symbiotic (mycorrhizal) fungi can colonize depleted-uranium surfaces and transform the metal into uranyl phosphate minerals. "The fungal-produced minerals are capable of long-term uranium retention, so this may help prevent uptake of uranium by plants, animals, and microbes. It might also prevent the spent uranium from leaching out from the soil," explained Gadd.


Solvency – Microbes Ext: Microbes Perfectly SuitedMicrobes are natural agents that effectively clean up DU without environmental damage


There has been little investigation into how an affected environment could be cleaned up after a conflict, but recent work, published in Current Biology, by researchers at the University of Dundee in Scotland indicates that nature may be able to lend a hand. "This work provides yet another example of the incredible properties of microorganisms in effecting transformations of metals and minerals in the natural environment," said Dundee's Geoffrey Gadd. "Because fungi are perfectly suited as biogeochemical agents, often dominate the biota in polluted soils, and play a major role in the establishment and survival of plants through their association with roots, fungal-based approaches should not be neglected in remediation attempts for metal-polluted soils."


Solvency – Microbes – A2: Tests Inconclusive/Abiotic FactorsOxalate deposits on DU prove – microbes sterilize depleted uranium

Fomina et al, ‘8 - 1 Division of Molecular and Environmental Microbiology, College of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 5EH, Scotland, UK 2 Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) Daresbury Laboratory, Daresbury, Warrington, Cheshire WA4 4AD, UK 3 Macaulay Institute, Craigiebuckler, Aberdeen AB15 8QH, Scotland, UK 4 School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK [Marina Fomina, “Role of fungi in the biogeochemical fate of depleted uranium”, Current Biology, Volume 18, Issue 9, R375-R377, 6 May 2008 //adi]

During the initial phases of DU decomposition it was impossible to distinguish between the impact of abiotic and biotic factors. However, we found both acidification and chelation to be involved in the dissolution of DU corrosion products. All the test organisms could acidify agar medium to pH3–4, while DU-exposed fungi excreted low molecular weight carboxylic acids (including gluconic, oxalic, succinic, malic, and formic acids), with the spectrum varying with different species. Oxalic acid, a strong metal chelator [6], was produced by DU-treated fungi to 0.05–1.4 mM, and DU appeared to promote oxalate excretion. The role of oxalate in ligand-promoted DU dissolution may be more significant than acidification, and most DU-exposed fungi (Beauveria caledonica, Hymenoscyphus ericae and Rhizopogon rubescens) showed increased accumulation of uranium with increasing amounts of excreted oxalate


Solvency – Microbes – A2: Still RadioactiveMicrobes turn DU into more thermodynamically stable uranyl phosphates


Our findings have provided a new insight into likely geochemical pathways for DU in the environment and highlighted a role for fungi in DU transformations (Figure 2). Fungi are particularly important in the soil, especially those soils that are metal-rich and acidic, while the majority of terrestrial plant species depend on symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi. We have shown for the first time that fungi can transform metallic uranium into meta-autunite minerals, which are capable of long-term uranium retention [8]. Thus, an important geochemical consequence of fungal DU decomposition is the formation of more thermodynamically stable uranyl phosphate minerals. This phenomenon could be relevant to the future development of various remediation and revegetation techniques for uranium-polluted soils.


Solvency – Microbes ListMicrobes used in experiments –


Organisms The selected fungi have previously shown efficient mineral dissolution and toxic metal transformations [S1]. These included an ectomycorrhizal fungus Rhizopogon rubescens Tulasne (provided by Dr. H. Wallander); an ericoid mycorrhizal fungus Hymenoscyphus ericae (Read) Korf & Kernan (provided by Prof. A. Meharg) a soil saprotroph and entomopathogen Beauveria caledonica Bissett & Widden (provided by Dr. D. Genney); and a wood-rotting fungus Serpula himantioides (Fries:Fries) Karst (provided by Dr. N. White).

For best results, try these –


The role of oxalate in ligand-promoted DU dissolution may be more significant than acidification, and most DU-exposed fungi (Beauveria caledonica, Hymenoscyphus ericae and Rhizopogon rubescens) showed increased accumulation of uranium with increasing amounts of excreted oxalate.


Solvency – Plant CleanupPlants can clean DU

Geological Society of America, ‘4 – geological activist group [Geological Society Of America (2004, November 8). Tumbleweeds Good For Uranium Clean-Up. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 19, 2010, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2004/11/041108021040.htm //adi]

Among the plants that sucked up lots of DU was Indian mustard (Brassica juncea), she reports. But that plant it is not well suited to deserts and needed irrigation. Better adapted to the dry environs, she said, were Russian thistle (Salsola tragus), the grain crop quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) and purple amaranth (Amaranthus blitum). “Our goal is to use plants with the least amount of water and the minimum amount of care,” said Ulmer-Scholle. They also found that sprinkling the ground with citric acid enhanced the plants’ ability to absorb DU. Russian thistle is a non-native plant to North America and is considered a nuisance in most parts of the western US. It springs up almost anywhere soils have been disturbed and each plant scatters its hundreds of seeds by detaching from its roots and tumbling along the ground in the wind. Using tumbleweeds and other unpopular plants for DU clean-up needn’t spread noxious weeds either, Ulmer-Scholle explained. It turns out that the plants tested do their best DU absorbing before they flower and long before they set seeds. So part of the trick to using weeds to clean up DU is to harvest the plants before they flower, she said. The fact that plants absorb uranium is not news, since old uranium prospectors used to use Geiger counters on junipers to find buried uranium lodes. But finding a plant that grows fast on little water and can be easily harvested to carry away the depleted uranium – that’s another story. “We tried it here (in Southern New Mexico) and also in a natural uranium mine site in northern New Mexico,” she said. The weeds picked up even more uranium in more contaminated soils. “So we got more where there was more in the soils.” As for why some plants absorb uranium, that’s still a mystery, says Ulmer-Scholle. It could be that the plants use the metal to create pigments. One way she hopes to test that possibility is to grow native plants used for dyes, she said.


Plan Popular – Activist GroupsPolitical activist groups support the plan – cause governmental embarrassment

Wexler, ‘6 – B.A. with Honors, 1998, University of Michigan; J.D. with Honors, 2002, University of Chicago Law School. Admitted to Maryland Bar, 2002. Clerk for the Honorable Thomas Reavley, United States Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit [Lesley, 20 Ariz. J. Int'l & Comp. Law 561, lexis //adi]

This model is also being applied by the nascent movement to ban depleted uranium bullets and armor. A loose international coalition of like-minded NGOs is emerging. n145 Studies and reports detailing the possible harms of [*581] depleted uranium are proliferating. n146 Striking visual images of victims are being presented, n147 as are appeals to recognize the heightened vulnerability of children to depleted uranium's carcinogenic effects. n148 Comprehensive critiques of the government's defenses and studies on depleted uranium are being issued. n149 Activists are calling for a comprehensive ban. n150 The movement is also beginning to recognize the need to contest the claims concerning depleted uranium's military utility. n151 Shame is being directed at the United States for its involvement in the use and sale of depleted uranium. n152 The opponents of depleted uranium weapons have the same potential of creating a wide coalition of support ranging from the medical field, to veterans, to environmental and human rights groups.


Plan Popular – GOPPlan’s popular – gives the GOP a way to say they pulled out of Iraq

Kennedy, ‘6 – Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Harvard Law School [Duncan, “Iraq: The Case for Losing”, Brooklyn Journal of International Law, 2006, 31 Brooklyn J. Int'l L. 667, lexis //adi]

One basis of my prediction of events to come is the idea that the future of the Republican Party is at stake in Iraq. The administration rightly calculates, I imagine, that the United States has been defeated, and that they have to find a way to radically reduce our military presence in Iraq that doesn't make it look as though the Republicans are the authors of a national catastrophe. A catastrophe, that is, when looked at from the "rah! rah!" jingoistic point of view, the point of view of identification with American military power. Bush is not running for re-election, but the congressional elections are coming up in a year. After that, Republican presidential candidates will have to have a line about what happened.


Plan Unpopular – GOPPrevious DUB legislation killed by GOP – no GOP support.

Common Dreams 4 (Thomas D. Williams, published in the Hartford Courant, November 1 2004, “Weapons Dust Worries Iraqis,” online: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1101-01.htm #!tylerd)

With many of the causes of these illnesses still eluding researchers, several lawmakers, at the urging of veterans groups, pushed for legislation to study depleted uranium further, to see if there is a connection with gulf war and other wartime illnesses. It called also for cleaning up depleted uranium munitions firings. In the Republican-controlled Congress, the measures quietly died this fall inside the House Health Subcommittee. Congress and three presidential administrations have either remained silent on the dispute or have dismissed the environmental and health concerns raised.

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