Shock and Awe
Robert Fisk - the multi-award winning journalist wrote an opinion peice in the Independent on Sunday that had an interesting aside burried in it:

A British scientist, Chris Busby, has been digging through statistics from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment which measures uranium in high-volume air samples. His suspicion was that depleted uranium particles from the two Gulf wars - DU is used in the anti-armour warheads of the ordnance of American and British tanks and planes - may have spread across Europe. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but here's something very odd.

When Busby applied for the information from Aldermaston in 2004, they told him to get lost. When he demanded the information under the 2005 Freedom of Information Act, Aldermaston coughed up the figures. But wait.

The only statistic missing from the data they gave him was for the early months of 2003. Remember what was happening then? A little dust-up in Iraq, a massive American-British invasion of Saddam's dictatorship in which tons of DU shells were used by American troops. Eventually Busby, who worked out all the high-altitude wind movements over Europe, received the data from the Defence Procurement Agency in Bristol - which showed an increase in uranium in high-volume air sampling over Britain during this period.

Well, we aren't dead yet - though readers in Reading will not be happy to learn that the filter system samplings around Aldermaston showed that even they got an increase. Shock and awe indeed.

Scary stuff. This means that the fall-out of the resource wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are having in impact beyond the lives and money, right into the air we breathe. It is as if this system, not content with pitching us to fight one another for the ever declining stock of oil, is content for the fall out of the fighting to infect the bodies of the globe and into future generations - it is as Cheney says, a war that will not end in our lifetimes...