When the current Bush administration demands another $600 million search for physical evidence of weapons of mass destruction, they create social evidence of their efficacy as a power elite. They have spent $300 million so far.

It is a shame that their priorities do not extend to spending equal sums, or perhaps just instead, on improved health care for Gulf War veterans and victims, or perhaps on building schools, here or in Iraq.

It is a shame that they do not search so assiduously for physical evidence of depleted uranium contamination and biological evidence of its effects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, or in the bodies of our military personnel. Depleted uranium is used in some military munitions.

They were exposed during the first Gulf War, as well as daily in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is truly a weapon of mass destruction, which will continue to kill and maim long after we are dead, thousands of years in fact.

Most tragically, its worst effects are on children, and the unborn.

This grotesque contradiction between the nature of physical and social evidence sought strikes me as epitomizing the big lie this administration has been perpetrating for far too long.

Russell Jabaut, Durham