September 25 2002

WE'VE HEARD PLENTY from President George W. Bush about Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons. We've heard less about how the president intends to neutralize those weapons if American forces invade Iraq. During the first Gulf War, the U.S.-led coalition employed a simple strategy to destroy Hussein's chemical and nuclear weapons capabilities: bombing. If Bush follows his father's blueprint, we could be in for an environmental disaster. And that's not to say we didn't cause one last time.

In the course of the 1991 invasion, coalition pilots bombed a nuclear reactor and as many as five chemical-weapons plants, though you wouldn't have known it from reading the daily papers because the attacks received such limited coverage.

The reactor we destroyed, which probably employed bomb-grade enriched uranium, was located on the outskirts of Baghdad, according to Bennett Ramberg, a nuclear power expert who analyzed Hussein's atomic capabilities for the State Department. With the reactor we got lucky: the Iraqis pulled most of the fissionable material out of the plant before we obliterated it, so there was only a minor release of radioactive particles. "The radiological consequences were limited to the actual site, the innards of the small reactor, and there was no contamination beyond the site itself," says Ramberg, now vice chair of the Center for Government and Public Policy Analysis, a southern California think tank.

Has Hussein rebuilt his nuclear plants? Probably not. Ramberg and most other analysts don't think he's been able to bring new reactors on line because of the United Nations sanctions that have been in place since February 1991. So there's no chance of setting off a Chernobyl-type meltdown. Though, Ramberg figures Hussein still has some radioactive material.

Producing chemical or biological weapons is far easier than building a nuclear program, according to Amy Sands, deputy director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. So it's not surprising that most independent military analysts contend Hussein has replenished his stockpiles of sarin and mustard gas.

In Gulf War I, American pilots bombed several chemical weapons facilities. One expert says it's impossible to determine what kind of damage this caused – or how another bombing campaign would play out. "The problem is that everything, even in hindsight, is speculative," says Saul Bloom, executive director of Arc Ecology, a San Francisco group focused on the military-environment nexus. "That's because the information on biological and chemical agents in Iraq remains classified. We don't know how well they did in terms of containing the pollutants."

At the time, Pentagon spokespeople claimed the temperatures generated by the exploding bombs would be so hot as to render the lethal chemical weapons harmless. Super-high-temperature incineration is one of the preferred methods for the disposal of chemical weapons – when U.N. inspectors destroyed Hussein's nerve gas caches after the war, they used incineration and a process called caustic hydrolysis – so that assertion makes a certain amount of sense. Still, there's little scientific consensus on what happens when a 1,000-pound bomb plops onto a mustard-gas factory.

Bloom thinks neurotoxic gases released by U.S. bombing could be the key ingredient in Gulf War syndrome, the mysterious collection of ailments that's plagued troops who fought in the conflict. "You've got to wonder about the cocktail of contaminants the troops and people living in the combat area were subjected to," Bloom muses, noting that depleted uranium, the heavy metal thought to be responsible for Gulf War syndrome, seems to be a slow-acting agent. (A.C. Thompson)

Backlash against the backlash

On Sept. 9, in what activists claim is a confession of guilt, a San Jose Macy's offered a fired Palestinian clerk a $125,000 settlement to end her discrimination lawsuit against the department store.

Alia Atawneh, a 29-year-old Palestinian American who worked as a clerk in the Westfield Shopping Valley Fair in San Jose, is currently in Jordan, but the San Jose Mercury News reported Sept. 11 that she is considering the offer. Macy's pink-slipped another Palestinian woman, Hiam Yassine, shortly after Atawneh, and her suit is ongoing.

Macy's West spokesperson Rina Neiman said, "The accusations that two employee terminations last fall were based on discrimination are completely false."

Macy's isn't the only business to face discrimination charges. Since Sept. 11, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has charted an unprecedented rise in workplace-discrimination filings.

According to EEOC program analyst Linda Li, in the past year 50 formal charges of racial discrimination against employers have been filed in its San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose offices in a new category called type Z – a process created to measure charges related specifically to the events of Sept. 11. On a national level there were 610 cases filed under type Z, and allegations of religious intolerance have more than doubled since last Sept. 11, with 687 charges filed.

Locally the firings have fueled a growing antidiscrimination movement. A coalition of grassroots groups in the South Bay spent the spring organizing boycotts and protests in front of Macy's. "People think hate crimes have decreased because we hear less about the name-calling and beatings," says Raj Jayadev, a member of San Jose's Justice for Alia and Hiam Coalition. "But the most life-altering hate crimes are the ones done by bosses, corporations."