May 19, 2003
The Envelope, Please
The award for most overlooked major news story of recent memory goes to the Christian Science Monitor's smash-up expose of the radioactive legacy left by the United States' "Depleted" Uranium munitions.
Just a few days after the Pentagon insisted, of the DU remains, that, "There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq," and that, "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 afterward;" the Monitor found "significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad," even while it "saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away."
The story paints a grim picture of the environmental and public health horrors awaiting the brave people of Iraq (as well as "coalition" forces), and should have landed on the front page of every major paper in the country.
Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you ask? The Monitor has found the smoking gun, all right. Yet four days later, a search of Google News finds that only Common Dreams has picked up the story.
Gotta love that free press...
The other nominees? How about Martin Luther King III's and Greg Palast's "Jim Crow Revived In Cyberspace" (AKA "Literally Not Counting Niggers"), the LA Times' survey of hospitals finding that the war killed at least 1,700 civilians in Baghdad alone (which dovetails with the jump of Iraq Body Count's running total to over 4,000), and the UN's recent warnings that Iraqi agriculture is "on the brink of collapse" and that more than twice as many children -- to 300,000 -- as before the invasion "face death from acute malnutrition".
Posted by Eddie Tews at May 19, 2003 08:06 PM
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