By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness
May 4, 2004

There is a woman who is the Director of an important Iraqi scientific establishment focused on the control and prevention of radiological hazards for the entire country. She has a brand new facility rebuilt and equipped by an international health organization. Her staff is conducting surveys of the communities impacted by the Tuwaitha Nuclear Facility, the primary location of Saddam’s nuclear program, which was looted in the days after the war. They are looking for areas of depleted uranium contamination caused by U.S. bombardments from both the 1991 war and the latest conflict in 2003. According to this woman, there are no problems. Everything has been cleaned up and no one needs to worry. She is a very nice lady. She even took me on a tour.

The problem is that she appears to be lying through her teeth. Her statements don’t make sense. When I tell her of a building that is rumored to be contaminated by D.U., she says to me, “Oh really, we’ll have to check on that.” When I ask her later if her staff was able to do so, her shoulders touch her ears and she opens her hands.

“We can’t go there,” she says, almost apologetic, “We can’t get permission.”

When I check with the U.S. soldiers who staff the checkpoint next to the building in question, they shrug their shoulders too. “If they are part of a government ministry (they are),” they tell me, “They shouldn’t have any problem getting permission to go there.”