Yet Bradbury shamelessly persisted with his lies despite the fact that Queensland Health had shown that last year the defects noted in seven of 255 births in the local Livingstone Shire were well below the state-wide average of 3.6 per cent.

In an effort to try and cover his slimy backside Bradbury claimed that Mr Beazley had recently admitted in a Rockhampton radio interview that when he was defence minister in 1993 he knew that depleted uranium had been “fired at sea” in the area. However, Mr Beazley office provided a transcript of the interview showing that Mr Beazley had claimed no such thing. Now that Beazley’s office has proved that Bradbury is a calculating liar can we expect his media mates to drop him? I doubt it.

There is nothing new about the lies that Bradbury is spreading about depleted uranium. Others like Maggie O’Kane of the UK Guardian have been just as bad. In he phony documentary How to Win Wars and Tell Lies which SBS broadcast on 14 May 1996 O’Kane parroted the same lies. That didn’t stop the Sun Herald declaring that “O’Kane shatters the myth that the Gulf conflict was a clean war.”

This was just another journalistic lie. No one ever — to my knowledge — was stupid enough to call the Gulf War clean. Wars are never “clean.” They are murderous affairs that kill, maim, mutilate and psychologically scar. They create widows and orphans; they are destructive of property and physical and emotional welfare, and sometimes even of moral values. Now for the truth –– the very thing the leftwing likes of Bradbury fear and detest the most

The story about cancer and depleted-uranium tipped shells first appeared in the New York Slimes about 16 years ago. The person responsible for this malicious propaganda was none other than Dr Eric Hoskins, O’Kane’s alleged expert. Yet O’Kane presented Hoskins as an independent and reliable ‘expert’ who could confirm her allegations. She never let on that the story originated with Hoskins. To put it bluntly, she and Hoskins rigged the interview to deceive viewers. This is the kind of ‘journalism’ that makes prostitution look respectable.

Depleted uranium is used in shells because it is the densest natural element we know of, denser than lead or other traditional munitions materials. It has a half-life of 4.6 billion years, which means that it has virtually no radioactivity. You would literally get more radioactivity standing next to O’Kane and Bradbury than you would from a uranium clad anti-tank shell.

Now Hoskins’ story was totally discredited by real scientists. For example, he claimed that “The material is extremely hard and abundant and provided free to weapons manufacturers by the nuclear industry.” “The material is extremely hard” is the only truthful thing in this statement. The rest is tripe. The American nuclear industry does not own enrichment plants and therefore cannot own a single a milligram of depleted uranium. (Some expert.)

Moreover, the material is widely used as an effective anti-radiation shield because its high density and negligible radioactivity makes it superior to lead. Now why didn’t Set-the-Record-Straight O’Kane tell us any of this? Come to think of it, why didn’t Bradbury do it?

Her lies on uranium tipped shells should have been enough to expose her mendacity and destroy her credibility. O’Kane’s ‘documentary’, like Bradbury’s Blowin’ In The Wind, was nothing but a thinly veiled attack on the United States by a vindictive leftwing ‘journalist.’ Her assertion that the “military claimed that you could blitz 18 million people and no one would get hurt” was and is an outrageous leftwing lie.

Lying comes naturally to leftists like Bradbury as does their support for sadistic leftwing thugs. In 1984 he produced Nicaragua: No Pasaran a film dedicated to the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas who had taken over Nicaragua. Missing was any reference to their KGB handlers, their support of terrorism, the political murders, their persecution and killing of the Miskito Indians, and so on. Any band of political gangsters can count on Bradbury for support so long as they are socialists. That’s why leftwing thugs can commit mass murder, mass torture, arbitrary arrest and grand larceny without a peep of protest from the progressive and freedom-loving Mr Bradbury.

The Black Book of Communism gives some of the lowdown on Bradbury’s Sandinista heroes.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor