Jon Stewart pushes VA to help veterans sickened after post-9/11 exposure to uranium

WASHINGTON (AP) — Comedian Jon Stewart is pressing the Biden administration to fix a loophole in a massive veterans aid bill that left out some of the first U.S. troops who responded after the Sept. 11 attacks and got sick after deploying to a base contaminated with dangerous levels of uranium.

Special operations forces deployed to Karshi-Khanabad, or “K2,” in Uzbekistan about three weeks after the 2001 attacks. K2 was a former Soviet air base that U.S. forces used to strike Taliban targets inside Afghanistan in the earliest days of the war. The base was a former chemical weapons processing site and littered with Soviet-era debris, including demolished bunkers, missile parts and highly radioactive uranium powder, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

It’s not clear why uranium powder was on the ground or how it got there. But it’s worrying those who served at K2. Thousands of K2 veterans in the years since have reported complex medical conditions, some of which are known to be connected to radiation exposure.

“Imagine you’re stationed inside the meth lab on ‘Breaking Bad,’” Stewart said in an interview with the AP. “These guys were exposed to a toxic soup of basically an exploded chemicals and nuclear weapon facility.”

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