U.S. VETERAN REVEALS ATOMIC BOMBS DROPPED

ON AFGHANISTAN AND IRAQ

PART III

NUKING TORA BORA

willthomasonline.net exclusive

On Tuesday evening, November 12, 2001, Babrak Khan, a Jalalabad resident and former guard at a

nearby base for Islamic militants, saw the distinctly bearded and emaciated Osama bin Laden

standing in front of a guesthouse. The next day, Osama and his al-Qaeda and Taliban followers

headed into the nearby Tora Bora mastiffs.

American bombing of the region intensified. The 11th day of Ramadan - November 26, 2001 - saw

Osama seated deep inside a cave complex with a glass of hot green tea in hand. Mohammed Akram,

who occasionally cooked for bin Laden, was fixing dinner in another cave when a huge bomb

exploded, blowing him 30-feet backwards. Two of his colleagues were killed, and Mohammed, along

with another Saudi and a Kurdish fighter, decided not to hang around.

Osama bin Laden fled Tora Bora around December 1, heading for Pakistan's Parachinar region.

Eastern Afghanistan's intelligence chief, Pir Baksh Bardiwal was astounded when the Pentagon

failed to use convenient helicopter Landing Zones to insert U.S. forces to block the most obvious exit

routes.

But the Americans did not know the ailing terror financier had left Tora Bora. When Osama bin Laden

phoned back to the enclave on December 10, urging his followers to keep fighting, U.S. intelligence

officers picked up his transmission and conclued that Osama bin Laden was still in his caves.

[Christian Science Monitor Mar 4/02]

Which might also explain why a USAF C-130 had dropped the heaviest bomb in their conventional

inventory - a 15,000 pound “Daisy-Cutter” - against Tora Bora the previous day. [London Times Dec

10/01]

THERMOBARBARIANS

Rushed into production after 9/11, at least eight BLU-118Bs were quickly deployed into the Afghan

theater. The Global Security website confirms the first field-test of this new weapon: “On or about

March 3, 2002 a single 2,000-pound thermobaric bomb was used for the first time in combat against

cave complexes in which al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters had taken refuge in the Gardez region of

Afghanistan.” [globalsecurity.org]

Guided by U.S. Special Forces “lasing” cave complexes with invisible laser pointers, the Navy's new

polymer-bonded “thermobaric” bomb would be more accurately termed a “thermobarbaric” terror

weapon.

"It works as a combination of a shock wave and a fuel explosion," explained CENTCOM Commander

Matthew Klee. "The first explosion spreads flammable aerosols through the underground complex.

Then, the second ignites the fuel” - crushing the internal organs of everyone caught in the blast zone.

“Instead of boom, this bomb goes BOOOOOOOM!” thundered Air Force spokesman Captain Joe

Della Vedova. “This thing kills the earthworms.” [Las Vegas Review Jan 21/02]

Over the March 1, 2002 weekend, the Pentagon tested two more “experimental” BLU-118B MOABs

during Operation Anaconda. Was this “Mother Of All Bombs” also the Mother Of All Deceptions?

“This sort of cover-story makes it easy for, say, reporters, to believe they have witnessed a fuel-air

explosion, when in fact it was a very small, low-yield, nuclear weapon,” George Paxinos pointed out

at the Information Clearing House. Why else would “the USA suddenly publicly announce in 2001

and 2002 its intention to use this sort of weapon against the Taliban hiding out in caves, when in war,

you do not usually go out and broadcast your intentions… to your enemy?”

And why, Paxinos pondered, would this “intense propaganda effort” to alert Americans and the world

to Washington's new Massive Ordnance Air Burst Weapon emphasize that the resulting blast

“produces a fireball and a mushroom-cloud almost indistinguishable from that of a small tactical

nuclear weapon?”

And why did CNN, among other networks, parrot Washington's nonsensical assertions that an airburst

bomb originally designed “to be used against large formations of troops and equipment” would

now be deployed against “deeply buried targets"? The network helpfully hinted, “Officials suggest

perhaps the Iraqis might even mistake a MOAB blast for a nuclear detonation." [CNN Mar 11/03]

“This is a cover-story,” Paxinos asserted. We were “being prepared for the pre-emptive use of tactical

nuclear weapons.”

DU expert Tedd Weyman points to George Bush's revised Nuclear Posture Review. Issued in March

2002, the new NPR pledged to test Nuclear Penetrator Missiles. “That's my hunch,” Weyman

believes. “We tested the prototypes there.”

Paxinos and Weyman were right.

According to Hank, under the cover of massive DU-tipped bombs that raised dirty mushroom clouds

in thunderous explosions that rained radioactive dust over Jalalabad and nearby villages, the first

nuclear bombs dropped since Basra in 1991 were detonated by American forces in Afghanistan

beginning in March 2002. Before their field tests were concluded, United States forces would explode

four 5-kiloton GBU-400 nuclear bombs in Tora Bora and other mountainous regions of Afghanistan.

In order to obtain a seismographic “snapshot” of a mountain's internal structure, at least one of these

four nuclear detonations took place alongside a craggy karst in the open air.

Hank's buddies, who were on the scene, told him what happened far from scrutinizing media eyes in

the remote mountains of northern Afghanistan. As he paraphrased their reports: “Back our guys

away from the general area - 'Don't look that way for two or three seconds' - and oops! we blew that

up.”

With shockwaves rippling through the mountains, and fallout spreading through mountain passes,

Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters knew that something momentous had occurred. But killing a few of the

enemy in collapsing rock and a nuclear fireball actually proved counterproductive, Hank related. “It

drove others deeper into less accessible areas. It backfired.”

JUMPING NEEDLES

Wouldn't seismographic needles jump on distant dials, I asked Hank?

They did, he replied. But pinning down the source of such blasts in nearly impossible.

“You may hear something, but you would not be able to designate it because there was too much

else going on. There's no way you could call it,” Hank explained. A major conventional explosion,

such as a huge C-130 or C5 Galaxy transport plane auguring in, “would give you the same

seismographical signature.”

Keith Nakanishi and other seismologists at the Lawrence Livermore nuclear bomb labs agree that

detecting, locating, and identifying a clandestine nuclear explosion is particularly challenging in the

Middle East, where unusual tremors picked up by a few, widely scattered seismic monitoring stations

would be drowned out by a large number of earthquakes and mining and oil drilling explosions. Add

to this cacophony, waves of cruise missile strikes and massive bombs dropped by American

warplanes.

Nevertheless, the Livermore seismologists state that among “thousands of seismic signals annually,

some [are] quite similar to the signals that would be generated by a small underground nuclear

blast.”

If major megaton-size nuclear weapons tests cause earthquakes, could a “baby nuke” do the same.

The U.S. Geological Survey admits that even “deep mining can cause small to moderate quakes,

and nuclear testing has caused small earthquakes in the immediate area surrounding the test

site.” [earthquake.usgs.gov]

The Livermore scientists also note that a conventional 1,000 pound explosion set off by Israel on the

shores of the Dead Sea on November 8, 1999 resulted in a quake of magnitude of 2.6 on the Richter

scale. A 2,000-kilogram explosive detonated two days later, caused a 3.5 quake. [llnl.gov]

Each of the four nuclear weapons dropped on Afghanistan set off a bedrock-amplified explosive force

QUAKES

The blasts in Tora Bora were immediately followed by a severe earthquake that “struck northern

Afghanistan and was felt as far away as India,” the People's Weekly World reported. Even in this

earthquake-prone region, the long-lasting and powerful tremors were unprecedented, killing 150

people killed and destroying 500 houses.

“It is not unlikely that the use of powerful bombs led to the quake,” one geophysicist said.

Moscow thought so, too. An ITAR-TASS report speculated that the 7.2 Richter-scale 'quake that

struck northern Afghanistan “may have been caused by the powerful fuel-air and bunker-penetrating

bombs used in earlier U.S. air strikes in that same region.” [whatmatters.nu]

Reviewing the stresses “induced in the earth's crust” by powerful explosions, Kamran Ahmed

reported from Karachi, “The severe earthquakes that struck Afghanistan in March can be attributed to

these bombings.”

But were the quake-triggering blasts nuclear?

Gary Whiteford, Professor of Geography at the University of New Brunswick in Canada is renowned

for his exhaustive research correlating nuclear tests and earthquakes. Looking at “killer earthquakes”

that kill at least 1,000 people, Dr. Whiteford found that 63% of those earthquakes occurred within one

to three days after a nuclear blast test. [dawn.com]

In 50 years before atomic testing began, 68 earthquakes of more than Richter 5.8 occurred every

year. When hundreds of atomic bombs started going off in what can only be described as a largescale

nuclear war against the Earth, the quake rate rose "suddenly and dramatically" - nearly

doubling to an average 127 major quakes per year.

TheU.S. military attributes the telltale increase to "coincidence." But Whiteford comments, "The

geographical patterns in the data, with a clustering of earthquakes in specific regions matched to

specific test dates and sites do not support the easy and comforting explanation of `pure

coincidence.' It is a dangerous coincidence."

“Abnormal meteorological phenomena, earthquakes and fluctuations of the earth's axis are related in

a direct cause-and-effect to testing of nuclear devices,” concurs Shigeyoshi Matsumae, President of

Tokai University, and Yoshio Kato, Head of the University's Department of Aerospace Science.

As Matsumae and Kato point out: “On June 19, 1992, the United States conducted an underground

nuclear bomb test in Nevada. Another test was conducted only four days afterwards. Three days

later, a series of heavy earthquakes as high as 7.6 on the Richter scale rocked the Mojave desert

176 miles to the south. They were the biggest earthquakes to hit California this century. Only 22

hours later, an "unrelated" earthquake of 5.6 struck less than 20 miles from the Nevada test site

itself. It was the biggest earthquake ever recorded near the test site and caused one-million dollars of

damage to buildings in an area designated for permanent disposal of highly radioactive nuclear

wastes only fifteen miles from the epicenter of the earthquake.” [ratical.org]

So far, more than one million people have died in earthquakes that could be related to nuclear tests.

[ratical.org]

WATCH THE BIRDIES

Meanwhile, Taliban fighters pounded night and day north of Kabul were dying from no visible injuries

- except the blood flowing out of their mouths from internal bleeding. Near the Rish-Khor military

base in the Afghan northern capitol, birds sat on tree branches with blood running from their beaks.

As one eyewitness later recounted, "'We were amazed to see all these birds sitting quietly on

branches. But when we shook the tree the birds fell down and we saw blood coming out of their

mouths. Then we climbed the trees to see those that were still stuck on tree branches, all of them

had bled from their mouths. Two of the birds appeared to be partly melted into the trees branches'."

According to PhD Mohammed Daud Miraki, who collected many first-hand accounts on the aftereffects

of heavy U.S. bombing, “many dead Taliban soldiers had severe discoloration of the skin,

orange, without being burned, while others had their rifles melted in their hands.”

A medical doctor named Wazir reported, "Most of the victims have had respiratory problems and

internal bleeding for which there is no apparent cause." [khalifa.com Oct 30/01]

Were these symptoms caused by the massive concussive blasts of fuel-air bombs?

Very likely. When American jets dropped bunker busters at daybreak on the mud homes of Karam,

the village was completely destroyed in massive craters. Many residents were killed from what

appeared to be internal concussive injuries.

But other victims of American bombing exhibited symptoms of radiation sickness. In describing

“another bizarre, yet tragic scene,” Dr, Mohammed continued, “Many Taliban soldiers that survived

the bombing in the north have died after returning to their native villages in the south and southeast

of the country. They had no physical injury upon their death, however, died from internal bleeding

and other bizarre symptoms including uncontrolled vomiting, diarrhea, and blood loss in urine and

stool. Their families were shocked with disbelieves.” [Afghan DU & Recovery Fund]

Perplexed by such symptoms, and uniquely “hot” munitions debris, medical teams and technical

experts thought they were looking at “enhanced” Non-Depleted Uranium from a new generation of

radioactive cannon shells, bomb and missile casings.

In fact, they were very likely looking at severe contamination from actual nuclear weapons.

SOMETHING NEW THIS WAY COMES

By May 2002, many more critics of the indiscriminate bombardment of Afghan cities and villages

suspected that new weapons were being tested. That month, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, founder and

director of Canada's Uranium Medical Research Center, sent a team in-country to interview and

examine civilians in heavily bombed Nangarhar. This province, the BBC reported, had become “a

strategic target zone for the deployment of a new generation of deep-penetrating 'cave-busting' and

seismic shock warheads.”

The British broadcasters failed to mention that each of these new weapons was tipped with more

than one ton of NDU.

Alerted to the “radioactive, toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads used by the

coalition forces," the UMRC team started looking for radiation poisoning. What they found was, in

their words, “astonishing” and “astounding”.

Identifying “several hundred people suffering from illnesses and conditions similar to those of Gulf

veterans,” the team began administering tests. "Without exception, every person donating urine

specimens tested positive for uranium internal contamination,” UMRC reported. But the readings

were off the scale of previous known DU exposures: "The results were astounding: the donors

presented concentrations of toxic and radioactive uranium isotopes between 100 and 400 times

greater than in the Gulf veterans tested in 1999.”

A control group three uncontaminated Afghans averaged 9.4 nanograms of uranium per litre of urine.

The average for 17 randomly selected patients Jalalabad, Kabul, Tora Bora and Mazar-i-Sharif was

315.5 nanograms. A 12-year-old boy living near Kabul displayed 2,031 nanograms.

The maximum permissible level for members of the American public is 12 nanograms per litre.

A follow-up UMRC visit to Afghanistan in September 2002 bore out the earlier findings. But

conditions were much worse, with "a potentially much broader area and larger population of

contamination."

Dr. Durakovic told the BBC he was "stunned" by the results. “I'm certainly not saying Afghanistan

was a vast experiment with new uranium weapons. But use your common sense."

NDU OR NBF? (NUCLEAR BOMB FALLOUT)

The consequences of ingesting radioactive particles were already reaching out to embrace the

residents, troops and aid agency staffs in the world's most impoverished nation - as well as their

spouses and subsequent offspring at home.

The baffling problem was, reported Stephanie Hiller, that while hundreds of tested Afghan people

presented symptoms resembling those of DU-exposed Gulf War veterans - none of the civilians

tested at Nangarhar showed any trace of Depleted Uranium.

The editor of Awakened Woman visited some of the six sites examined by the UMRC team in and

around Kabul, where U.S. bunker buster bombs were detonated. With bioassays identifying uranium

internal contamination in the Spin Gar (Tora Bora) area, and Kabul up to 2,000% higher than an

unexposed population, the UMRC reported: "The isotopic ratios of the uranium contaminant

measured in Afghan civilians show that it is not Depleted Uranium (DU). The isotopes of uranium

found in the Afghan civilians' urine is Non-Depleted Uranium."

Field surveyors found that the bulk of the radioactive contamination occurred in the Tora Bora,

Bagram frontline, as well as frontlines north of Kabul, Shaikoot, Paktia, Paktika, Mazar-i-Sharif, and

Kunduz - where massive bunker busters and fuel-air bombs were detonated, perhaps in part to mask

striking health effects from four nuclear blasts.

Other medical survey teams also reported that in bombardments of the Tora Bora, Shaikoot and

Bagram frontline, “large number of antiaircraft weapons and rifles had melted… Many Taliban

soldiers were seen with blood coming out from their mouths, noses and ears.” Those who returned to

their villages “started to vomit blood and had bloody stools. Subsequently, many have died from their

conditions.”

After the bombardment in Khost, public health workers reported seeing skin lesions. In a manner

resembling the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Afghan people who developed skin lesions

died after their conditions deteriorated.

In Pachir Wa Agam district near Tora Bora, “women started to suffer from a deadly condition. Several

months after the bombing, women of the area would become angry by petty things and that anger

turns into rage, which subsequently causes the women to collapse and die. My team also reported

that many children are born with no limbs, no eyes, or tumors protruding out from their mouths and

their eyes,” its leader related.

“Subsequent to the contamination, newborn children have physical deformities, and those that do not

have physical deformity are suffering from Mental Retardation. These cases are reported from

Paktia, Nangarhar, Bagram, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz,” the UMRC stated.

A man named Assadullah told the team in February 2003 that his wife had given birth to child so

badly deformed he hardly resembled an infant. "When I saw my little boy with those monstrous red

tumors, I thought to myself, why is it difficult for Americans to understand that they are hated in our

country?” Assadullah said. “If I do this to the child of an American family, that family has the right to

pull my eyes out of my eye sockets. I like to tell the Americans that they love to live their lives of

luxury at the expense of our extermination." [European Parliament Verbatim Report of Proceedings Apr

9/02]

Zar Ghoon is the father of another victim of U.S. bombing attacks on Kunduz. In December 2002 he

told the medical survey team, "My wife was pregnant and we were happily waiting for the moment to

see our second child. When the baby was born, it was hardly a human… When my wife saw the

baby she went into shock and died after five hours "

Speaking with a field volunteers near Tora Bora in April 2003, Sa'yed Gharib lost it. Screaming in

grief and rage he shouted, "What else do the Americans want? They killed us, they turned our

newborns into horrific deformations, and they turned our farmlands into graveyards and destroyed

our homes. On top of all that their planes fly over and spray us with bullets.”

"Tell America, we are not fools. Your words and actions are those of evil. We do not have airplanes

like you do, however, we have one thing that you do not have: principles and morals. We will never

do anything remotely similar to American children what Americans have done to our children and

families," declared Nurullah Omar-Khail. [Afghan DU & Recovery Fund]

According to Mohammed Daud Miraki's extensive public health survey, “Most of the people that

developed various health problems have died; others suffer from conditions such as kidney

disease/failure, confusion, and loss of immunity and painful joints.”

Dr. Durakovic told reporters, "If UMRC's Nangarhar findings are corroborated in other communities

across Afghanistan, the country faces a severe public health disaster... every subsequent generation

is at risk." [BBC May3/03]

By October 2002, Afghan doctors citing rapid deaths from internal ailments were accusing the

coalition of using chemical and radioactive weapons. The symptoms they reported (hemorrhaging,

pulmonary constriction and vomiting) could have resulted from radiation contamination. [LeMonde

Diplomatique Mar/02]

But inhalation, ingestion or wound-contamination by Depleted Uranium particles does not lead to

such acute radiation poisoning symptoms immediately after exposure. Nor would “surface water, rice

fields and catch-basins adjacent to and surrounding the bombsites have high values of uranium, up

to 27 Xs normal,” as the UMRC found.

Hank believes that Afghanistan's water table contains much more radioacative contamination than

can be ascribed to DU and NDU contamination. The effective genetic sterilization of that country's

southern region can also be traced to fallout washing down from the mountains where four American

nuclear weapons were detonated. “Rain runs downhill,” he says.

ROUTINE USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS?

If not exactly “routine”, Hank says, the undisclosed use of five nuclear weapons against Iraq and

Afghanistan has resulted in a dangerous shift in U.S. war fighting. As he put it, “Using tactical nukes

is now an acceptable doctrine until otherwise notified.”

Iran and the rest of the world, beware. In calling America a “Nuclear Rogue,” the New York Times

warned, “Nuclear weapons are not just another part of the military arsenal. They are different, and

lowering the threshold for their use is reckless folly.” [New York Times Mar 11/02]

As Alok O'Brien concludes, “There is no longer time to pretend that everything will be alright, and that

all thinking and feeling people need to unite in their hopes and dreams and reclaim the earth and

their birthright before it is too late.”

With th td ti i I d t i t i t W hi t ' f l

With the countdown continuing on Iran - and any constraints against Washington's use of nuclear

weapons already removed by the detonation of five low-yield nuclear bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan

- the time to act is now.

Photo Captions/Credits

Part 1

1. B2 drops B61-11 nuclear bomb casing wired.com

2. Daisy Cutter nd.edu

Part 2

1. B61-11 nuclear bomb telegraph.co.uk

2. Bush Sr. todaysgolfer.co.uk

3. MOAB mushroom cloud usatoday.com

4. Basra survivors flee American bombing ccmep.org

5. Baghdad hit by huge bombs abc.net.au

6. al-Rasheed military facility hit in southeast Baghdad AFP

7. B52D bomber defensetech.org

8. Basra before it was blown up fromthewilderness.com

Part 3

1. Tora Bora blast resembles tactical nuclear detonation cooperativeresearch.org

2. Tora Bora blast (insert) Dec 15/01 photo by Kevin Frayer AP/CP

3. Bagram Airport blast Oct 30/01 september11news.com

4. Geroge Bush must give nuclear strike orders watch.windsofchange.net

5. radiation victim (Iraq) Mar 25/04 mindfully.org

6. radiation victim (Iraq) Mar 25/04 mindfully.org