TORA BORA
TORA BORA
by William Thomas
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 in that city. The next day, Osama and his al-Qaeda and Taliban followers headed into the nearby Tora Bora mastiffs.
American bombing of the region intensified. On November 26, 2001—on the 11th day of Ramadan—Osama was seen deep inside the Tora Bora cave complex with a warm glass of green tea in hand. Mohammed Akram, who had occasionally cooked for bin Laden, says he was fixing dinner in a cave at the end of November, when a huge bomb exploded at the base and blew him some 30 feet back into the mouth of the grotto. Two of his colleagues were killed, and he, along with another Saudi and a Kurdish fighter, decided to flee.
Osama bin Laden fled Tora Bora around December 1, heading for Pakistan’s Parachinar region. Pir Baksh Bardiwal, the intelligence chief for eastern Afghanistan, was astounded that Pentagon planners didn't use readily available helicopter LZs (Landing Zones) insert U.S. forces to block the most obvious exit routes. By December 5, said Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies, "There are citizens all over the Middle East now saying that the US military couldn't do it—couldn't catch Osama.”
But the Americans did not know the ailing terror financier had left Tora Bora. According to several fighters and a Saudi financier, Osama bin Laden later phoned back to the enclave, urging his followers to keep fighting. He also promised to send one of his own sons, Salah Uddin, to replace him. According to the Christian Science Monitor, “Bin Laden's talk with his followers in Tora Bora just a few days after his departure may explain why US intelligence officials said that they thought they heard his voice on December 10, probably on a short-wave transmission.” [Christian Science Monitor Mar 4/02]
It may also explain why a USAF C-130 dropped the heaviest bomb in their conventional inventory—the 15,000 pound “Daisy-Cutter”—over the mountains of Tora Bora early on December 9, 2001. [London Times Dec 10/01]
THERMOBARBARIANS
Rushed into production after 9/11, at least eight BLU-118s were quickly deployed into the Afghan theater. The Global Security website confirms the initial test: “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.” [www.globalsecurity.org]
Guided by U.S. Special Forces “lasing” or “painting” cave complexes with invisible laser pointers, the Navy’s new shock-proof polymer-bonded BLU-118B “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 the U.S. Central Command’s 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 in the blast zone.
“Instead of boom, this bomb goes BOOOOOOOM!” exulted 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 “field-tested” two 2,000-pound BLU-118b “experimental” penetrators during “Operation Anaconda” in eastern Afghanistan. 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,” pointed out George Paxinos at the Information Clearing House. “Why should 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 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?” Paxinos pondered.
And why did CNN, among other networks, parrot Washington’s nonsensical assertions that an air-burst bomb “originally conceived… to be used against large formations of troops and equipment or hardened above-ground bunkers” would be employed against “deeply buried targets"—before adding, “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.”
Issued in March 2002, George Bush's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) pledged to “test” Nuclear Penetrator Missiles. “That's my hunch,” DU expert Tedd Weyman believes. “We tested the prototypes there.”
Paxinos and Weyman were right.
According to Hank, under the cover of more DU-tipped fuel-air bombs raising small mushroom clouds in thunderous explosions that sent radioactive dust over Jalalabad and nearby villages, the first nuclear bombs dropped against an enemy since Nagasaki were detonated by American forces in Afghanistan beginning in March 2002.
All told, the United States military detonated four 5-kiloton GBU-400 nuclear bombs in Tora Bora and other mountainous regions of Afghanistan. No longer was it necessary to spear a lance-shaped “penetrator” down through solid rock to detonate inside suspected caverns, tunnels and bunkers. “Coupling” the energy of a nuclear blast to the kinetic energy of a mountain of rock under severe compression would carry the shockwave down and outwards in a “3-D bubble,” as Hank described it, collapsing any open cavity — whether cave or human organs — in the vicinity.
At least one of these four nuclear detonations took place in the open air, alongside craggy karsts in order to obtain a seismographic 3-D “snapshot” of that mountain’s internal structure. 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 my informant 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 the shockwave 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 nuclear fire 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. “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.” A major conventional explosion, such as a huge C-130 or C5 Galaxy transport plane auguring in, he claimed, “would give you the same seismographical signature.”
Seismologist Keith Nakanishi and others 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 seismic picked up by a few, widely scattered seismic monitoring stations would be drowned out by the 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—and the Livermore scientists say that of these “thousands of seismic signals annually, some [are] quite similar to the signals that would be generated by a small underground nuclear blast.”
Even if major megaton-size nuclear weapons tests did cause earthquakes, could a “baby nuke” do the same. After disclaiming that possibility, the U.S. Geological Survey admits, 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 seismologists back this up by noting that a conventional 1,000 pound explosion set off by Israel in the Dead Sea shores 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. [www.llnl.gov]
Each of the four nuclear weapons dropped on Afghanistan set off a bedrock-amplified explosive force of 10,000 tons.
QUAKES
The initial nuclear explosion(s) 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—with 150 people killed and 500 houses destroyed.
"It is not unlikely that the use of powerful bombs led to the quake,” a geophysicist said.
Moscow thought so. A 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 US air strikes in that same region. [www.whatmatters.nu]
So did Kamran Ahmed. Reporting from Karachi, he wrote: “When bombs such as Daisy Cutters and other sophisticated bombs are dropped on the ground, stresses are induced in the earth’s crust. These stresses are released at weaker locations of the fault sooner or later. The bombings also increase the seismic activity in the area or areas that are connected below the earth through dense rock. The severe earthquakes that struck Afghanistan in March can be attributed to these bombings.”
Gary Whiteford, Professor of Geography at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, renowned for his exhaustive study 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. [www.dawn.com]
In 50 years before atomic testing began, 68 easily detectable 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 large-scale nuclear war against the Earth, the ‘quake rate rose "suddenly and dramatically"—nearly doubly to an average 127 per year.
The same U.S. military that has long denied the cumulative dangers of “low level” radioactive fallout attributes that 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,” conclude Shigeyoshi Matsumae, President of Tokai University, and Yoshio Kato, Head of the University's Department of Aerospace Science. As Matsumae and Kato sensais 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.”
With more than one million people dead in earthquakes that could be related to nuclear tests, the U.S. Energy Department still maintains that even the biggest underground nuclear blasts have no impact beyond a radius of 15 miles. But these initial big reverberations are merely the first ripple of an ever-expanding wave. [www.ratical.org]
DIRTY DEEDS
"You might be able to drill down with a low-yield weapon, but [not far] enough to contain the blast," Union of Concerned Scientists Robert Nelson says."There's no such thing as a clean surgical strike — it's dirty."
Given the drastic reaction of the world community if the use of nuclear weapons by the United States against Afghanistan were discovered, the White House correctly gambled that the blast effects from each 5-kiloton nuclear blast set in and among the rugged mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border would be largely contained within those granite barriers — and masked by giant fuel-air bombs and “Daisy Cutters” conventional “bunker busters” detonated in gigantic blasts and small mushroom clouds around the time of each nuclear explosion, whose fallout would carry downwind over travelers, villages and larger population centers.
An Energy official who asked not to be named also acknowledged, "some fallout" was inevitable. But no Afghan peasant, doctor or local official owned a Geiger counter. Even if one could be found, it would already be clicking with the fallout from tons of Depleted Uranium particulates already scattered on Afghan winds. [FOX Feb 6/05]
WATCH THE BIRDIES
Conventional Fuel-Air Explosives were devastating enough. Concussed Taliban fighters pounded night and day north of Kabul were already dying from no visible injuries—except the blood flowing out of their mouths from internal bleeding. Near Rish-Khor military base in the Afghan northern capitol, birds sat on tree branches with blood coming from their beaks. One witness said, "'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 after-effects 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." [www.khalifa.com Oct 30/01]
Were these the symptoms of massive concussive blast effects and heavy metal poisoning from aerosolized nickel and uranium-hardened bomb casings?
Very likely. When American jets dropped aerial bombs at daybreak on Karam in the Surkhrod district of Nangarhar, 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 bomb tests 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.” (sic—sick?) [Afghan DU & Recovery Fund]
Perplexed by such uniquely “hot” material, 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 much more likely looking at severe contamination from actual nuclear weapons.
SOMETHING NEW THIS WAY COMES
By May 2002, many 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 Uranium Medical Research Center in Canada sent a team in-country to interview and examine civilians in heavily bombed Nangarhar province—“a strategic target zone” the BBC reported, “for the deployment of a new generation of deep-penetrating ‘cave-busting’ and seismic shock warheads.”
Based on the “radioactive, toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads” used by the coalition forces," the UMRC started looking for radiation poisoning. What the team 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 administered 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."
WHAT IS NDU?
Hazards from ingesting radioactive particles also reach out embrace the troops who fought in Afghanistan, and their spouses and subsequent offspring at home, as well as aid agency staffs based in the world’s most impoverished nation, and their spouses at home.
Problem was, reported Stephanie Hiller, 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 Spin Gar (Tora Bora) area, and Kabul up to 2,000% higher than the baseline of an unexposed population, Hiller and 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 frontline 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.
Other medical survey teams again 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 bombardment in Khost public health workers have reported some skin lesions. Those that developed the skin lesions died after their conditions were deteriorated.
“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.
In Pachir Wa Agam district near to Tora Bora targeted area, 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.
Mohammed Daud Miraki Assadullah, February 2003 Assadullah, whose wife had given birth to a deformed child that hardly resembled an infant said this to our survey team in Kabul: Zar Ghoon December, 2002 Sa'yed Gharib Mohammed Daud Miraki Any significant DU contamination is likely to migrate by air and water to wider and more populated areas. [European Parliament Verbatim Report of Proceedings Apr 9/02]
“Any significant DU contamination is likely to migrate by air and water to wider and more populated areas,” confirmed a European Union report. [European Parliament Verbatim Report of Proceedings Apr 9/02]
The father of one of the children in Paktia was not impressed by the price of a crucial pipeline “liberation” that would soon see a vengeful Taliban returning in force. "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 told the survey team in February 2003. “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."
The father of another victim of U.S. bombing attacks on Kunduz also told the team: " My wife was pregnant and we were happily waiting for the moment to see our second child,” Zar Ghoon said in December 2002. “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."
Chatting 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.
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.”
"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," said Nurullah Omar-Khail. [Afghan DU & Recovery Fund]
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.
“Any significant DU contamination is likely to migrate by air and water to wider and more populated areas,” states a European Union report. [European Parliament Verbatim Report of Proceedings Apr 9/02]
But Hank believes that Afghanistan’s radioactive water table included more than DU contamination, and can be traced to fallout washing down from the mountains where four nuclear weapons were detonated. “Rain runs downhill,” he says.
Dr. Durakovic told the BBC. "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]
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 sea-change in U.S. war fighting. “Using tactical nukes is now an acceptable doctrine until otherwise notified,” Hank said.
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.”
Photo Captions
Osama bin Laden's life at (above ground) Tora Bora compound -nypost.com
Heavy airstikes in Tora Bora mimic mini-nukes -Getty
Dr. Asaf Duraković -bnzh.hr
La mitad de los niños de Afganistán corre riesgo de desnutrición por escasez de alimento -newsweekespanol.com
Nuclear Detonation -indiatimes.com