Yeah, I recall meeting a US guy in Nepal high on Annapurna circuit trek (meaning the person was not as close-minded as many that didn't travel much, he did intensively over whole world before) around 2008, he was praising US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan stating something about how local population would make great christians. He was a Texan and big supporter of GW Bush. That left me speechless for a while.
Sample of 1, but it clearly showed me that with some people, you just can't get the message across. Doesn't matter how smart they are, what they experienced, it just doesn't work. I tried (not too hard though) and failed.
> In March 2003 [..] it reportedly took International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) officials only a matter of hours to determine that these documents were fake. IAEA experts discovered indications of a crude forgery, such as the use of incorrect names of Nigerien officials.
The CIA and foreign intelligence services did do some good work to try to correct that particular false narrative - something originally spread from Iran's intel service no less (which sounds a lot like the discredited 2016 'dossier' which came from questionable Russian sources). But they clearly didn't do enough. Probably because they were on the brink of getting new massive sweeping powers.
Probably because Obama said we have to look forwards and not backwards, and Europe was probably in love with him that they just said "ok!", and Russia and China were thinking "that's fine with us because it means we'll get away with doing similar things!"
Obama seemed to have the dream of stopping the partisan bickering and reuniting the country, prosecuting the former presidential administration would not have helped with that (not that this dream/mission got anywhere close to reality in his 8 years).
Another reason was prosecuting them would've meant subsequent administrations would look for any wrongdoing they could use against the previous admin. (Well, this is what the GOP did anyway, say with Benghazi).
As far as I know, the US have never investigated a member of their government for war crimes, and have always shielded any US army person investigated in another country. It is a very simple policy: by definition, the US is carying out just wars, so there can be no war crimes perpetrated by the US army. At most, regrettable mistakes can be admitted to.
This applies even when international courts have found the US guilty, since the US does not recognize the authority of international courts against them. See the case of the mining of Nicaragua's harbors https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States
If the half-life is that long, exposure to direct environmental radiation is probably not that big of a concern- the sieverts will be very low- and the main harm comes through ingesting, inhaling, etc. I would wonder if things like dust abatement, water filtration, and food washing would be used to manage the issue in the future.
As a point of comparison, regular U-238 is present at low levels all over the place in Colorado, it's naturally in the rock & soil. As long as the amounts are low, the radiation is low, and it mostly stays put, it's not a big problem.
this is a factual comment. most of DU's toxicity is chemical in nature. that doesn't make the pictures of deformed babes any easier to behold, tho. also, alpha emitters are basically harmless until they're ingested/inhaled.
Yes, I hope my comment is not taken as defending DU as being OK. I was specifically replying to the idea of this becoming some kind of new Chernobyl exclusion zone.
You're kidding right?
Before the US invasion, the largest protests in the world happened all over the world against it and it didn't do anything.
> Social movement researchers have described the 15 February protest as "the largest protest event in human history"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...