Since "Europeans" are used as ammunition in some of the writeups, I'd like to add a comment from the European angle:
The discussion about use of depleted uranium in Kosovo was indeed a scare, but I would't think it was designed to discredit the U.S. as Jurph would have it. Interesting conspiracy theories aside: can you think of a speculative journalist who wouldn't sell his mother to get his hands on a story like this:
"Secret Uranium Weapons Used Among Women And Children"
The imagined target reader/viewer for those journalists wouldn't know uranium from peanut butter, but they all agree that it sounds scary.
So what happended?
- Big headlines.
- Uninformed populistic politicians sense a chance for some prime time media coverage and appears quivering with righteous indignation demanding investigations and a ban on depleted uranium everywhere
- Informed but not so populistic scientists appear and tell everyone not to be worried in a way that makes people even more worried
- Media gets bored and finds another scandal, royal wedding or revolutionary new diet to put on their front pages.
In the wake of this pointless (and not very original) excercise, some investigations were actually made. One of them recently published in Sweden probably killed the discussion there for some time: Urine samples taken from Swedish KFOR (and UNPROFOR) soldiers showed less uranium traces than samples from soldiers who had stayed in Sweden during the same period of time. Explanation: The uranium content of Swedish soil is higher than that in Kosovo and if the KFOR soldiers had been exposed to uranium from DU shells, it would still be less than what they would get back home.
I don't claim to speak for all Europeans and would warn against thinking of Europeans as a homogenous group...