[This interview with Jane Williams, WHO report on Iraqi birth defects a whitewash, was first aired on

Redeye, Vancouver Cooperative Radio, CFRO 100.5 FM, on 5 October 2013, 9:05-9:20 a.m. Pacific Time; a
podcast is available at Rabble.ca (6 October 2013), http://rabble.ca/podcasts/shows/redeye/2013/10/who-reporton-iraqi-birth-defects-whitewash. The oral quality of the interview has been preserved in the transcript given
here.]

[Index: US aggression, Iraq]

[Date: October 2013]

WHO report on Iraqi birth defects a whitewash

Michael Keefer, interviewed by Jane Williams

JW

You're listening to Redeye on Vancouver Co-operative Radio, CFRO 100.5 FM.

In 2003, the United States led an invasion of Iraq, based on false allegations of their
possession of weapons of mass destruction. After a nine-year illegal occupation ended in
2012, the Iraq war dropped off the media radar, and Iraqis were left to deal with the
devastating aftermath. Among the many daily hardships, there has been a sharp increase
in cancer rates and babies born with congenital defects. Not only has this been underreported internationally, there has been a concerted effort to repress this information.
Michael Keefer is a professor emeritus of theatre studies and English at Guelph
University; he's also a graduate of the Royal Military College, and he joins me by phone
this-morning. Hello, Michael.
MK

Hello, Jane.

JW

Now the Iraqi Ministry of Health just released a report. What's it about, and who

is involved in conducting that study?

MK

Well, that's a bit of a mystery, because we know that the report comes from the

Ministrythere's no indication of authorship, so it's the Iraqi Ministry of Health with

the collaboration of the World Health Organization, WHO. And that came outI think it
was released on September the 11th.
And what's interesting about the report is that it has been, I would say,
universally condemned by researchers and scientists in the fields of toxicology and
epidemiology. In particular, there's a newly published article in the medical journal The
Lancet, Questions raised over Iraq Congenital Birth Defects Study.
Now what's scandalous about the study is that it in effect claims that there's no
problem, nothing significant going on, which is of course quite simply untrue. There
have been repeated peer-reviewed studies in medical journals carried out by scholars
from many different countries. And insofar as this report makes any mention of those, it
dismisses them as lacking in objectivity.
JW

So it's a study about birth defects?

MK

Yes, it's a study based onand this is one of the defects of the study, one would

have to sayit's based solely on interviews with mothers. Now there are several
problems with that, one being of course that in the case of many of the monstrous births
that have occurred in Iraqi hospitals, the mothers are simply informed that it was a
stillbirth: they're not told that the child was too horribly deformed for her to tolerate
seeing.
And of course in many cases as well where you have subtler forms of birth
defect, cardiac problems or other not monstrous sorts of deformations, the parents may
not be aware of a defect until some months after the birth. There's also the problem that
many of the people in Iraq, many of the women who have given birth to deformed
children were themselves very seriously contaminated by toxic agents like depleted
uranium, and are dead.
So there are many many reasons, methodological reasons, for saying this study is
based on, basically, the wrong methodology, the wrong research principles. And there's
at least one scientist with expertise in the field who has said, Look, I was consulted by
the researchers when they were starting their study, and he told them, Look, here's the
way to do it; don't do it that way. And they went ahead in what's, I think, a pretty
classic cover-up.

JW

But now you've been waiting a while to actually see the report, I understand.

MK

Yes. I should make it clearwell, you already did in introducing methat I'm

not myself a toxicologist or an epidemiologist. But I was one of 58 signatories of a letter

demanding the publication of this WHO report on Iraqi birth defects.
That letter was made public in May of this year [2013]and the signatories, by
the way, include professors of obstetrics, and gynecology, and environmental
toxicology, epidemiology, environmental health, neuroscience, genetics, you name it,
from universities in Iraq, of course, but also from the U.S., the United Kingdom,
Canada, the Netherlandsin other words, a very serious group of international
scientistsas well as human rights activists.
And the response to that letter was thoroughly negative. The group that
organized that first letter sent out a follow-up letter in late July, reiterating international
concern over the fact that this report was being mysteriously delayed. And of course
now that the report has come out, it's quite clear that there have been major political
influences exerted on the WHO and the Iraqi Ministry of Health.
And by the way, one needs to say that in a formal sense the occupation of Iraq
may be over, but the country is still overrun with so-called contractorsin effect, with
U.S. militaryand it still has that gigantic embassy complex that is a giant blemish in
the middle of Baghdadand it still has of course a very strong U.S. military presence.
So it's by no means a properly independent country, or one whose health ministry
wouldn't be subject to the pressures exerted by the U.S. and the U.K.
JW

Now you mentioned a number of peer-reviewed studies that tell a very different

story. What kind of thing do they say about the kinds of birth defects that you can see in
Iraq?
MK

What they say quantitatively is that the numbers of birth defects have risen

catastrophically. There were already in theBefore the invasion of 2003, you

remember, there was the Gulf War of 1991, after which the Pentagon acknowledged that
it had used something like 320 tons of depleted uranium munitions in Kuwait and Iraq.
Following that war, there were studies indicating that rates of birth defects in southern

Iraq in particular had more than doubled, and childhood cancer rates werehad
increased in a very disturbing way.
There are subsequent reports indicating much much greater increases in birth
defects prevalencesseventeen-fold, according to one study.
So it's a major health disaster, and of course, one can see why, because what you
have here is a heavy metal that is radioactive, of course, the by-product of civilian
nuclear plants. It's radioactive; it is used by the military because it's extremely dense and
it's what's called pyrophoric.
Now, the density means that it punches right through steel armour or through
concrete or through stone walls; but when it's fired out of a tank barrel, a depleted
uranium shell in effect is already on fire. When it hits something, it goes through it, and
fragments into, in many cases, microscopic particles, many of them less than 5 microns.
Now a micron is one-millionth of a meter. So these are tiny tiny particles of radioactive
material, and of course, anything behind the armour plate or the wall is killed
incinerated, or killed by the shock waveand the stuff is then dissipated.
Because it has formed these tiny particles, they get carried everywhere. So it's
literally impossible, unless you're wearing a hazmat suit, to enter into a depleteduranium-contaminated setting in an Iraqi city or a former battlefield, wherever that was,
without inhaling or ingesting particles of depleted uranium. And once it's inside your
body, every radioactive emission from a uranium atom is going to hit something.
So every time one of these particles emits, say, an alpha particle, it's doing
damage to you. People can excrete some of it, but of course as it goes through your
kidneys it gives you kidney damage. The results have been well known since the 1990s,
that DU exposure immediately produces very serious lung damage, kidney damage,
produces cancers, and there's now a long series of studies of the genetic abnormalities
produced by depleted uranium as well.
JW

Now then, it took a long time for the report to be released. Now that it has been

released, what kind of response has there been in the media to it?
MK

Well, I'm glad to say that there seems to be a gathering chorus of condemnation.

There was a piece just yesterday I think in the Huffington Post; there have been other
essays, articles, appearing elsewhere.

You see, what's involved here is that theBasically, it's a corruption of science,
and it's a corruption of the international agency whose job is to provide leadershipI'm
quoting here from the WHO websiteproviding leadership on global health matters,
shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidencebased policy options, and so on.
And they also say, providing collective defence against transnational threats.
It's not clear what they mean by that, but one would think that a country that is
showering defenceless victims with depleted uranium is a transnational threat.
Unfortunately, the principal disseminator of depleted uranium weapons is the
United States, which has been quite clearly twisting people's arms to prevent the
obvious consequences in international law. I mean, it'sthese areThe invasion was a
war crime. The use of these munitions is quite clearly a war crime. And so the agency
that ought to be doing its job, the WHO, is part of the structure of cover-up.
JW

Well, thanks so much for talking to me this-morning, Michael.

MK

Thank you very much.

JW

I've been speaking with Michael Keefer. He's Professor Emeritus of Guelph

University, and a graduate of the Royal Military College, and he joined us this-morning
from Toronto.