Another needless fatality of war: Santa Rosa’s Patrick O’Day. He and his wife had just married last year and were expecting their first child.
Patrick is believed to have been killed when his tank went off a bridge.
This was recorded on KTVU Channel 2 news on the morning of March 31, 2003, in San Francisco, CA.
Santa Rosa’s Patrick O’Day (Small – 2 MB)
Santa Rosa’s Patrick O’Day (Hi-res – 20 MB)

Looks like the Shrub is trying to win this war on the cheap — to the point where soldiers aren’t even being rationed enough food to eat.
Luckily, the Iraqi citizens are taking pity on our troops, despite the fact that several hundred of them have already been accidently killed by them.
Iraqi civilians feed hungry US marines

Iraqi civilians fleeing heavy fighting have stunned and delighted hungry US marines in central Iraq (news – web sites) by giving them food, as guerrilla attacks continue to disrupt coalition supply lines to the rear.
Sergeant Kenneth Wilson said Arabic-speaking US troops made contact with two busloads of Iraqis fleeing south along Route Seven towards Rafit, one of the first friendly meetings with local people for the marines around here.
“They had slaughtered lambs and chickens and boiled eggs and potatoes for their journey out of the frontlines,” Wilson said.
…”They told me they wanted to go to America after the war. I said where. They said California. I said why? They said the song Hotel California and they left singing Hotel California.”

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More on how our own troops are the ones placed in danger when depleted uranium is used in warfare. It isn’t safe to handle, etc. We know this now. But the Shrub Administration is letting our boys use it anyway.
US Forces’ Use of Depleted Uranium Weapons is ‘Illegal’
By Neil Mackay for the Sunday Herald.

Rokke said: ‘There is a moral point to be made here. This war was about Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction — yet we are using weapons of mass destruction ourselves.’ He added: ‘Such double-standards are repellent.’
The latest use of DU in the current conflict came on Friday when an American A10 tankbuster plane fired a DU shell, killing one British soldier and injuring three others in a ‘friendly fire’ incident.
According to a August 2002 report by the UN subcommission, laws which are breached by the use of DU shells include: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Charter of the United Nations; the Genocide Convention; the Convention Against Torture; the four Geneva Conventions of 1949; the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980; and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which expressly forbid employing ‘poison or poisoned weapons’ and ‘arms, projectiles or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering’. All of these laws are designed to spare civilians from unwarranted suffering in armed conflicts…
The use of DU has also led to birth defects in the children of Allied veterans…
Rokke said that coalition troops were currently fighting in the Gulf without adequate respiratory protection against DU contamination.

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For many US vets, war is not the answer

Adding to veterans’ anger and fuelling a growing sense of betrayal, last week the House of Representatives voted to approve a $25 billion cut in veterans’ benefits – including disability benefits – over the next 10 years at the same time as Mr Bush seeks massive tax cuts for a wealthy few.
“The President’s words about supporting the troops are quite empty, on two counts,” Erik Gustafson, who fought in the 1991 Gulf War, said of Mr Bush’s speech on Friday.
“One, there has been a series of miscalculations that put a lot of people in harm’s way unnecessarily, and secondly supporting our troops doesn’t mean turning our backs on our veterans, especially when we’ll be having a whole new generation of Gulf War veterans,” he said.
Mr Gustafson is executive director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Centre, which he set up in 1998 with an emphasis on improving living conditions for ordinary Iraqis.
Mr Pollack said the cuts to veterans’ benefits are “an indication of the lengths to which this administration is willing to go to fund their priorities, which are obviously aggressive wars and tax cuts for the rich”.
…Yet, these veterans say, the troops risk exposure to the depleted uranium used in anti-tank munitions, which the Pentagon insists has no adverse health effects but veterans’ groups charge was part of the toxic cocktail that caused Gulf War syndrome.
To those who say Gulf War syndrome is all in the mind, as a new Australian study has concluded, they point to the fact that the Veterans Administration has classified 164,000 Gulf War veterans as disabled – more than one-quarter of the 585,000 eligible for benefits.
About 9,600 Gulf War veterans have died of a variety of causes since returning from the war, according to Veterans for Common Sense.

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This issue is too important to sort of mention in passing so I did a quick google search on “veterans depleted uranium,” and I was overwhelmed with data from a host of reliable sources on the horrors of using shells laced with this stuff — FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED (US AND THEM).
This is similar to the recent discussions surrounding the use of nuclear weapons, as if using them was some kind of option — without any harm to the rest of the planet — something we figured out thirty years ago!
Well, here’s a useful report prepared for the 1999 Hague Peace Conference that will provide an overview of the depleted uranium situation. (I hate to just bring something up without providing some kind of background on it.)
Gulf War Veterans and Depleted Uranium
Prepared for the Hague Peace Conference, May 1999
By Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Ph.D., G.N.S.H.

The US has not yet conformed to the 1990 international recommendations which were used for this calculation, and it is still permitting the general public to receive five times the above general public amount, and the worker to receive 2.5 times the above occupational amount. The US may have used its domestic “nuclear worker” limits during the Gulf War, if it used any protective regulations at all. The military manual discusses the hazards of depleted uranium as less than other hazardous conditions on an active battle field!
…Uranium metal is autopyrophoric and can burn spontaneously at room temperature in the presence of air, oxygen and water. At temperatures of 200-400 degrees Centigrade, uranium powder may self-ignite in atmospheres of carbon dioxide and nitrogen… Depleted uranium was used extensively in place of tungsten for ordnance by the US and UK in the Gulf War.
There is no dispute of the fact that at least 320 tons of depleted uranium (DU) was “lost” in the Gulf war, and that much of that was converted at high temperature into an aerosol, that is, minute insoluble particles of uranium oxide, UO2 or UO3 , in a mist or fog. It would have been impossible for ground troops to identify this exposure if or when it occurred in war, as this would require specialized detection equipment. However, veterans can identify situations in which they were likely to have been exposed to DU. Civilians working at military bases where live ammunition exercises are conducted may also have been exposed…

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I can’t believe the U.S. is doing this again. We know now that are undisputed connections between some of the ‘Gulf War Syndromes’ of our own veterans and the United States’ use of depleted uranium during the first Gulf War.
This puts our troops that are over there in danger too!
USWAR/US-led troops used depleted uranium in Basra: report

US and American troops on Sunday used
depleted uranium during their shelling of Basra in southern Iraq,
news resources inside Iraq told IRNA.
They used the weapons to destroy Russian-made T-72 tanks, they
said, adding heavy clashes were going on among ground forces of the
warring sides at 14:00 Tehran time (9:30 GMT).
The Qatari TV broadcaster Al-Jazeera has said that at least 50
civilians had been killed in the bombardment of suburbs of Basra.

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