In the third debate Kerry was asked if "our children or grandchildren will ever be as safe as we were" and then Kerry, and Bush in response, went on about "defeating the terrorists" and how the speaker could do it better.

What an opportunity they blew!
It is an illusion that we are less safe today than we were (at least in the US - no doubt Americans are a lot less safe today in Iraq than we were two years ago, but thats 43's doing).

Americans need to wake up - we are dying at the same rate we were on Sept 10, 2001!

We die of unwashed hands in hospitals (90,000 Americans/year - see Wall Street Journal "Hospitals Could Use a Hand With Basic Hygiene" Nov 3, 2004), from hospital medication errors(98,000/year), from our doctors not treating us with the acknowledged "standard of care" for the condition we have(79,000/year) - those three alone kill nearly 270,000 Americans annually - a 9/11 sized event every four days! If planes were flying into major buildings every four days we would be clamoring for action. These are events for which we have no more protection individually than we have from terrorism, yet they are easier to address.

We are dying of food poisoning, vehicle accidents, homicide by other Americans, and soon, from the ordinary flu, because someone obsessed with Iraq and imagined threats from Arab immigrants couldn't task homeland security to make the flu vaccine ordering redundant - couldn't buy and give away, or resell the excess: buying two hundred million doses would have cost about $1.2B, at least half of which would have been recovered from the expected sales. And of course we wouldn't have paid Chiron for their useless redundant share, if as happened, Chiron got careless and let their entire run get contaminated.

(What would be "funny," if it weren't so serious, is that if some terror group wanted to kill a lot of Americans, a really good way to do it would have been to sabotage a flu vaccine production line. If that was suspected, Arabs and Muslims all over the world would be being snatched, taken to that camp in Jordan, and tortured until they "confessed." Funny then that Chiron CEO Howard Pien is not in some dark cell, with denials of knowledge of his whereabouts by the authorities, as post 9/11 life proceeded for so many.)

Every dollar we spend on bombs to fight terrorists is a dollar that won't be spent on reducing the real threats to American lives. The threats above can be dramatically reduced by the investment of a few billion dollars, once, in systems and training that more than pay for themselves in saved medical bills. But these threats are NOT solvable by market forces alone; once you are dead, you can't choose another hospital for your next illness. The solution is enactment and enforcement of standards, and publicity for violations. The WSJ article states that the handwashing guidelines compliance at some hospitals is just 20%!

This is very important: the majority of the SARS deaths in Canada were the result of improper hygiene on the part of hospital staff! They didn't do it on purpose, and the staff and their families were the major victims. The staff lacked training on how to agressively prevent the spread of infection, including how to glove-up, and how to use masks. In fact they lacked individualized masks - ones selected for their face size, then tested with a smelly chemical spray - (if you can smell this you just got infected).

After all, how many of us prefer that our kids die from American carelessness rather than the bombs of angry, agrieved foreigners?

I am looking for ideas, for ways to get people to have a realistic sense of the threat terrorism actually poses to their lives.

If people felt the same degree of fear for the accidental causes of death (over which they have little or no individual control) as they do for terrorism they would never leave their house – and in that house never take a shower, since they are more likely to fall in the bathtub than be killed by a terrorist.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), rollover crashes account for 33% of all passenger vehicle fatalities - more than 10,000 Americans are killed each year in rollover crashes! This is triple the September 11th death toll, and unlike that attack, relentlessly kills us each and every year.

But there actually is a preventative measure that greatly reduces this toll – Electronic Stability Control (ESC) systems eliminate the majority of deaths from rollovers in single vehicle accidents.

On a common sense basis, if Americans had a good grasp of the relative threat, they would have voted for a presidential candidate who declared s/he would immediately withdraw from Iraq, had no intention whatsoever of using the American military might to attack “terrorists” outside of our country but promised to immediately enact a law to require all new vehicles be equipped with electronic stability control. If that promise was kept it would save more American lives each year than the current war on terror. It would also be a lot cheaper and not antagonize the rest of the world.

How can parents put their children in their car for a trip to the mall (if that car lacks ESC), or take them to visit grandma in the hospital or nursing home (where they may easily pick up a life threatening drug-resistant staph infection), or take them to a picnic or fast food restaurant where their chances of contracting a fatal foodborne illness exceed their risk from terrorism? (After eating contaminated food, people can develop anything from a short, mild illness, often mistakenly referred to as "food poisoning," to life-threatening disease. CDC estimates that 76 million Americans get sick, more than 300,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 people die from foodborne illnesses each year.)

So even if you have no idea how to address this knowledge gap, I am interested in how participants in this forum feel about the risks they face every day – what is it that lets us ignore things that kill a lot of our fellow citizens, and might kill us, (though probably not today)?

accidental deaths are not the direct result of one human killing other humans.

So you think the doctor who doesn't want to wash his hands because it will take too long, and thereby infects a patient with a lethal infection, did not kill that patient?

Or the driver who knowingly violates a no-cell-phone law, whose inattention kills a pedestrian, is not one human directly killing another?

More broadly, are events whose consequences are known fatal, and which have generally agreed procedural remedies known to save the vast majority of at-risk lives truely accidents?

If a construction company knowingly violates OSHA standards, say the one that calls for putting a RED TAG on the power switch for a machine in which a person is working (to warn that turning on the power will likely lead to injury or death), that company may be found criminally liable. Such deliberate inaction kills.

In the most deadly (for Israelis) year of the current Palestinian Intifada more Israelis died and more were injured in vehicle accidents than were killed or injured by bombs or other terrorist actions.

What is it about the terrorist actions that provokes counterproductive responses from politicians and the voters that elect them?

Consider a typical fatal accident: a mother and children are broadsided by an inattentive driver; their car flips, the mother is trapped in the front seat, the car is perhaps on fire, or maybe the mother can just smell gas fumes; there are no sounds from the back seat - are the children unconscious, or dead? Is being in a restaurant when a bomb goes off really scarier than this? Which threat is it more to our interest (and better for our longevity) to prevent?

What if the driver of the other car was drunk - again - and driving without a license, which was suspended at some previous conviction? Can that really be called an accident? Should we work less hard to prevent similar crashes? - i.e. is it more important, or more sensible to try to stop any and every terrorist, anywhere in the world, than it is to reduce the preventable-death rate in the US? And if that answer is yes, what if, as is true, we can save a thousand times as many American lives with the money we are spending hunting terrorists if we redirect it to reducing preventable deaths?

I am not suggesting that we give up screening in our airports, or cargo ports. I am questioning our devotion of huge amounts of money for military actions of dubious (perhaps negative) returns, and asking how we can get voters to do risk analysis.

I will never forget the final line in an esteemed historian's TV documentary on the Johnstown flood (PBS, David McCullough): 'The moral of this story is that often people in positions of responsibility do not act responsibly.'

So much for James' query on accidental death versus non-accidental death.

For more information on the risk equation, get a hold of a book by David Ropeik, Peabody Award winning TV journalist now on staff at the JFK School of Government. It's called "Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What's Really Safe and What's Really Dangerous in the World Around You". The book is available through Amazon-dot-com. I heard him talk at a seminar on bioterrorism sponsored by Harvard & MIT. More info is available at
http://www.hcra.harvard.edu/ropeik.html

Thanks for the book pointer.
I don't understand the comment about "so much for James' query" - I saw no question mark so I saw a statement, not a query. Or did you mean that: "The moral of this story is that often people in positions of responsibility do not act responsibly" is a more concise reply?

Peoples' irresponsible behavior can be constrained - and since consumers are unable to be experts in all fields, the behavior of people in power needs to be overseen; that the FDA feels it can disparage foreign drugs as of unreliable quality, but accept the word of the CEO of the US company making half of the US flu vaccine in a foreign plant - without a new inspection of that plant which, when last inspected by FDA, was found to have serious contamination problems - shows the unlimited Bush admin belief in US CEO honesty (or betrays its laissez-faire approach to regulation).

What I meant was this: What sometimes appears to be accidental is, in fact, due to the negligence of someone who had some responsibility in the matter....

If it's a car accident, sometimes we can look to the driver, and sometimes we can look to the people who designed the intersection or the vehicle.

You are absolutely correct in saying that we cannot all be experts in everything, and this is one of the reasons we gravitate toward a republic or a representational democracy, so that we can send the best from among us to find expertise and bring it to bear on any given problem. As in the case of the flu vaccines, if our representatives do not seek out that expertise, or recognize or heed it when it is presented, then they abrogate their responsibility. This was the case in the Johnstown flood, in which the representative leader of a group of private industrialists who built a dam high up in the mountains so they could have a retreat for fishing and boating was told that the dam was in imminent danger of collapse, with tragic consequences. Armed with that knowledge, they did nothing.

This also brings up the all-important issue of accountability. If our "risk" of terrorism is not as high as our risk for dying from the flu, and yet all our national priorities are focused on terrorism and the simpler issues of creating and distributing effective flu vaccines are allowed to be dysfunctional, then our representatives have failed to act responsibly on our behalf on two counts. And we have failed, as a nation, to hold them accountable. Subsequently, we have been collectively negligent, and when the "dam" that is the Bush administration's modus operandi collapses, there will be only tragedy and weeping.

I took James' statement as a query because it was designed to throw in a counter-statement, or a rhetorical question that might have been written like this (and forgive me, James, I am not trying to put words in your mouth, but merely reflecting how I read your statement):

"When terrorists take an active homicidal step to inflict harm and injury on others, it is of a wholly diffferent grade, morally and otherwise, than the accidental deaths of day-to-day life."

We could debate this for a while in depth, but I think that such thinking seeks to put the focus exclusively on the terrorists, and that such a unilateral and rabidly-energized focus on the "doers" may actually be counter-instructive or counter-intuitive, given Ropeik's views on risk, and given my understanding of responsibility and accountability. As a single voter/citizen, I have no means of holding the terrorists accountable, but as a voter/citizen, I do have to ask a lot of questions about those in positions of responsibility, and whether they sought out the best expertise and acted on that expertise. Proactively, in the case of terrorism, clearly the 8/6/01 PDB and other sources of expert insight were not acted upon and, I submit to you, most of the actions of the Bush administration have been taken so as to avoid being held accountable in this and a wide range of other issues. Reactively, we have a range of issues and questions extending from "My Pet Goat" to the actions of the military on the morning of 9/11 to the actions of the Bush administration in fore-stalling the 9/11 Commission, in trying to counter its ability to arrive at the facts, and in expediting its suggested reforms.

We, as citizen/voters, buy into the lack of accountability by our collectively-rabid attention on "boogeymen", and we fail ourselves when we fail to demand that our leaders act responsibly.

We are being invited to put all of our attention on the terrorists, but this may be like blaming the dam for the deaths in Johnstown.

The day IS coming when most babies will be aborted...and a 'healthy'
baby will be abnormal. Who IS pro-life?

LIFE MAGAZIINE SPECIAL

http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf01.html

BODY BURDEN -- HUMAN CONTAMINATION

http://www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden/es.php

Human Breast Milk Toxic Study

http://www.sundayherald.com/print37667

Radiation & Public Health

http://www.radiation.org/index.html
------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.web-light.nl/VISIE/extremedeformities.html

EXTREME BIRTH DEFORMITIES
HOME PAGE
"Unborn children of the region [are] being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their DNA."

- Ross B. Mirkarimi, The Arms Control Research Centre, from his report: ‘The Environmental and Human Health Impacts of the Gulf Region with Special Reference to Iraq.’ May 1992

------------------------------------------------


2005 Project Censored:
Uranium Weapons

http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/4.html

UPDATE BY BOB NICHOLS: (Oklahoma City) Throughout the world people are familiar with the "smoking gun" solution so prized by murder mystery writers. Many think that once the smoking gun in any mystery is discovered, it is time for the "bad guys" to give up. Wish it were only so.

The smoking guns are Sgt. Hector Vega, Sgt. Ray Ramos, Sgt. Agustin Matos and Cpl. Anthony Yonnone from New York's 442nd Guard Unit—they are the first confirmed cases of inhaled uranium oxide exposure from the current Iraq conflict. Dr. Asaf Durokovic, professor of Nuclear Medicine at the Uranium Medical Research Centre http://www.umrc.net/ conducted the diagnostic tests. The story was released April 3, 2004 in the New York Daily News. There is no treatment and there is no cure. http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/180333p-156685c.html

Leuren Moret reports, "In my research on depleted uranium during the past 5 years, the most disturbing information concerns the impact on the unborn children and future generations for both soldiers serving in the depleted uranium wars, and for the civilians who must live in the permanently radioactive contaminated regions. Today, more than 240,000 Gulf War veterans are on permanent medical disability and more than 11,000 are dead. They have been denied testing, medical care, and compensation for depleted uranium exposure and related illnesses since 1991."

Moret continues "Even worse, they brought it home in their bodies. In some families, the children born before the Gulf War are the only healthy members. Wives and female partners of Gulf War veterans have reported a condition known as burning semen syndrome, and are now internally contaminated from depleted uranium carried in the semen of exposed veterans. Many are reporting reproductive illnesses such as endometriosis. In a U.S. government study, conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs on post-Gulf War babies, 67% were found to have serious birth defects or serious illnesses. They were born without eyes (anophthalmos), ears, had missing organs, missing legs and arms, fused fingers, thyroid or other organ malformations."

"LIFE Photoessay:"
http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf01.html

Moret concludes, "In Iraq it is even worse where babies are born without brains, organs are outside the body, or women give birth to pieces of flesh. In babies born in Iraq in 2002, the incidence of anophthalmos was 250,000 times greater (20 cases in 4,000 births) than the natural occurrence, one in 50 million births. Takashi MORIZUMI's photos: in http://www.savewarchildren.org/ record the tragedy in Iraq."

For more information on the American President's continuing campaign of contaminating the land, check the World Uranium Weapons Conference,

http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/ ,

Check the Uranium Medical Research Center and Dr. Asaf Durakovic at http://www.umrc.net/ ,

and for updates on the related Nuclear Power Plants see Russell Hoffman's website at: http://www.animatedsoftware.com/hotwords/index.htm .

Write Leuren Moret, Independent Scientist and radiation specialist, City of Berkeley Environmental Commissioner, Past President, Association for Women Geoscientists: leurenmoret@yahoo.com

"Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War" by Leuren Moret, World Affairs Journal, July, 2004. http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/2004/DU-Trojan-Horse1jul04.htm

These YahooGroups host discussions about uranium munitions:
<mailto:du-list@yahoogroups.com>du-list@yahoogroups.com
<mailto:du-watch@yahoogroups.com>du-watch@yahoogroups.com
<mailto:pandora-project@yahoogroups.com>pandora-project@yahoogroups.com
<mailto:nucnews@yahoogroups.com>nucnews@yahoogroups.com
<mailto:abolition-caucus@yahoogroups.com>abolition-caucus@yahoogroups.com

"I am become Death,
the shatterer of worlds."

The line of Hindu scripture that flashed through Oppenheimer's mind at the moment "gadget," the first test bomb exploded above the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945.

Bhagavad-Gita Chapter 11
The Vision of the Universal Form
Lord Krishna is beseeched by Arjuna to reveal His universal form showing all of existence.

Lord Krishna said: I am terrible time the destroyer of al beings in all worlds, engaged to destroy all beings in this world; of those heroic soldiers presently situated in the opposing army, even without you none will be spared. Bhagavad-Gita 11:32

Radioactive Contamination in America

Mina Hamolton

Iraq's alleged nuclear threat sinks into the dustbin of history. Americans can stop worrying about atomic perils? Wrong.
Americans are at risk from American-as-apple-pie, Stars-and-Stripes, and made-in-USA, WMDs.

A just-released study, Danger Lurks Beneath: The Threat to Major Water Supplies from US Department of Energy Nuclear Weapons Plants, details the danger. Written by Dr. Marvin Resnikoff, a high energy, nuclear physicist, who has been studying nuclear hazards for 28 years and published by the public interest group, the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, this book will curl your hair.

Danger Lurks Beneath shows EVEN IF THE US NUCLEAR ARSENAL IS NEVER USED a deadly plague has been released upon the land and water. Though most of the 13 nuclear weapons factories are currently shutdown (a situation President Bush would love to change), the contamination is spreading.

The process of manufacturing nuclear bombs is not dramatic. Unlike an actual nuclear exchange no humans are burned to a crisp, no cities are pulverized. But the ingredients for a nuclear bomb must be mined, sheared, heated, melted, liquefied, transformed into gas, spun, fashioned into metal, nuked, chopped up, put through chemical baths, extracted - all the while unleashing a host of poisons.

The hazard isn't just to the citizens living nearby to the factories. The poisons threaten us all.

Imagine the distance between Boston and New York. It's a five-hour, pedal-to-the-metal highway jaunt. It's also the alarming distance toxins have migrated away from the Hanford nuclear weapons factory in Washington.

Mussels and oysters found on the Washington coast are contaminated with radioactive poisons that flowed down to the coast from Hanford, 200 miles upstream. This is one of many devastating findings in Danger Lurks Beneath.

How can we take in the enormity of what's happened and is still happening?

We learn that four major rivers and many minor rivers are already contaminated or at risk. The Columbia River in Washington, the Snake River in Idaho, the Tuscaloosa River in Georgia, the Rio Grande in New Mexico, the Great Miami River and Ohio Rivers in Ohio.

How do we wrap our minds around four major rivers at risk? What does it mean for people who swim, fish or drink from those rivers? What about people picnicking alongside those rivers? Are the grasses along the banks safe? Is the sediment toxic?

The risk is not a hypothetical, let's-worry-in-ten-years matter. At the Fernald nuclear weapons factory in Ohio the plant managers deliberately poured - via a buried pipeline -tons of uranium into the Great Miami River. Yes, TONS. And this is a river that flows into the Ohio River from which many municipalities draw drinking water.

Ohio communities are not the only ones whose water supplies are threatened. One water reservoir has already had to be shutdown, the Great Western reservoir in the suburbs of Denver. It's contaminated by runoff from the Rocky Flats factory. Now a second nearby water reservoir, Standley Lake, is also polluted by radioactivity.

The information in Danger Lurks Beneath is so shocking we want to comfort ourselves, assure ourselves, Hey we don't live there or near there. Problem: The toxins are seeping into the food chain in sinister ways. For example, ever eat farm-fed trout? That delicious, fresh trout staring up from your plate was probably grown in water drawn from the Snake River aquifer in Idaho. The nearby Idaho nuclear weapons factory is polluting the aquifer.

For the first time in 2000, plutonium was detected in two locations in this aquifer. A host of other nasty chemicals and radionuclides had already been found in this vital water source.

Not that the trout are contaminated, at least, as far as we know. But here's an indicator of how real the threat is: several years ago a trout farmer tried to sell his Idaho hatchery business to the company, W.R. Grace. He was turned down. What were W.R. Grace's reasons? They didn't want a fish farm that gets its water from a source above which nuclear waste is buried. (1)

W.R. Grace was not whistling in the dark. It's a company that knows about nuclear hazards. Back in the 1960's, Grace ran a now-defunct nuclear reprocessing factory in West Valley, NY.

Danger Lurks Beneath shows that the contamination from nuke weapons factories is widespread and it's traveling along unknown and unmapped pathways. We're fooling ourselves if we think we're safe -- anywhere.

The information is this book would be easier to swallow if there were a villain, an archenemy like Saddam to blame. But these villains are US government employees making extraordinarily dumb decisions, decisions driven by a blind dedication to so-called national security.

During four decades worth of bomb making the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor the Department of Energy adopted an out-of-sight, out-of-mind policy. Dump the waste where nobody can see it. Pump poison into aquifers, pipe it to rivers, dump it into streams, ponds and trenches, site burial grounds in swamps. And, all the while, lie about what you're doing.

This WMD threat makes Saddam's "nuclear" menace look like a cupcake. Ditto North Korea's or Iran's.

Don't expect President Bush to make jokes about this threat. No way is he going to engage in a comic routine looking under the desk in the Oval Office for by-products of the US's bomb building spree.

Ralph Nader, Dennis Kucinich, John Kerry, the US Congress, the media and any sane member of the human species should be trumpeting the findings of this report across the land. Will they? Are they?

Are we?

(1) Perspectives of a Former Idaho Trout Farmer, www.ieer.org/sdafiles.

To obtain a copy of Danger Lurks Beneath go to www.ananuclear.org. If you don't feel up to the 270-page study, an Executive Summary is available. Also you can download individual chapters on nuclear factories nearest you or your family and friends.

Mina Hamilton is a writer based in New York City. She is a Contributing Editor to Danger Lurks Beneath: The Threat to Major Water Supplies from US Department of Energy Nuclear Weapons Plants. She can be reached at minaham@aol.com.

-----------------------------------------

Atomic Age Timeline Animation:
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/poifu/poifu.swf

* See also: NucNews Links and Archives (by date) at http://nucnews.net * (Posted for educational and research purposes only, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107) *

I do not see how we can succeed, as the citizens of this nation, without education as to the risk. The media that most people get their information from is geared toward building the highest audience at the lowest cost, and are not inclined to spend time informing that audience. I was hoping that Kerry would speak to the risk of terrorism (along the lines of 'we have nothing to fear but fear itself' - not like I set the bar high or anything) but he got caught up declaring that he would 'fight it better' than Bush, thereby making the general misperception worse.

Congress has been as much an offender as the news organizations. They have been reluctant to challenge the administration's spending priorities, and, like the reds-under-the-beds days of HUAC, are not standing up against civil liberties deprivations that have yet to uncover a single terrorist operation - indeed they more likely incensed people who were otherwise well-inclined toward the US, having extended-family members living here (now deported) and hoping to go to school or live here themselves someday.

I guess those last words should point me to a partial answer - start with columnists, editors & congress; I have made efforts over the last three years, in letters to columnists & calls to my Representative & Senators' offices. I have seen changes in newspaper columns, and I think that one Senator has shifted (not claiming credit, but rather coincidence). I still would like to hear ideas about reaching larger numbers of people; if each person tells ten, and convinces two that makes three that appreciate the risk and seven more receptive the next time; and it only takes twenty-eight levels to reach everyone over twelve (I can dream, can't I?).

Now that everyone who opposes the administration is disloyal, how do we reinstate non-violent protest? There are so many issues that threaten our national security: environment, local control of public schools, going it alone in the world as in NPAC(what are those letters for that Chaney group) and spin doctors who seem skilled enough to make double-speak seem as simple as pig latin. Did anyone hear about the 300 women in New Mexico who went out and lay down in a field? How can we gather these stories, so that groups can act locally and not be hurtful to the loved ones of the people who have been sent away to "defend freedom" ? I'm stuck as how to be effective. If we take to the streets, the spin doctors say at the very least, "oh, some of those silly old people from the sixies, looks like they still haven't grown up". At the worst a small group of thugs are sent to turn the edges of the gathering into a violent scene as was recently done at the peaceful march in Chilie. Any ideas out there?