Геноцид также официальная русская политика?
Is genocide the official policy of Russia?
Genocide is definitely official Israeli policy.
הוא בהחלט רצח עם המדיניות הישראלית הרשמית.
الإبادة الجماعية وبالتأكيد السياسة الإسرائيلية الرسمية.
Genocide
Discussion: White Phosphorus Lies – In These Times
http://www.ww.inthesetimes.com/article/discuss/2412/#35353
White Phosphorous Lies
Did the Pentagon use chemical weapons indiscriminately in Fallujah?
By FRIDA BERRIGAN
Just when it seemed the Iraq war couldn’t get worse, the United States admitted on November 16 that forces in Fallujah did use white phosphorus (WP) as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants. However, the Pentagon continues to deny that soldiers used WP—a “spontaneously flammable” and “extremely toxic inorganic substance,” according to the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventative… return to article
White Phosphorous Lies
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2412/
NEWS » NOVEMBER 23, 2005
White Phosphorous Lies
Did the Pentagon use chemical weapons indiscriminately in Fallujah?
Just when it seemed the Iraq war couldn’t get worse, the United States admitted on November 16 that forces in Fallujah did use white phosphorus (WP) as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants. However, the Pentagon continues to deny that soldiers used WP–a “spontaneously flammable” and “extremely toxic inorganic substance,” according to the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine–against civilians.
This admission, a reversal of the military’s previous denials that the substance was used as a weapon at all, came after protests at the U.S. embassy in Rome that were sparked by the airing of Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre, a documentary by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta, on Italian television.
In the documentary, Torrealta, a news editor at Italian state media company RAI, interviews U.S. soldiers and Iraqi human rights advocates, and shows pictures of the havoc wreaked by white phosphorus. The film set off a firestorm of controversy about interpretations of the Geneva Convention: When is a device that can indiscriminately burn civilians to death a banned weapon and when is it a defensive mechanism for hiding troop movements? An Army fact sheet admits it is both, noting that while WP “is used primarily as a smoke agent,” it can “also function as an anti-personnel flame compound capable of causing serious burns.”
For Jeff Engelhart, a former Marine with the First Infantry Division that fought the Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, these questions of interpretation are moot. “I do know that white phosphorus was used. White phosphorus kills indiscriminately,” he says in the documentary.
On November 8, U.S. Marine Major Tim Keefe told Reuters that “suggestions that U.S. forces targeted civilians with these weapons are simply wrong.” But there is nothing simple about it.
Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons bans the use of incendiary weapons, meaning “any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons.” The United States has not signed the protocol. The Pentagon initially denied using WP as a weapon, arguing that while WP could “set fire to objects or cause burn injury to persons,” that is not the task for which the weapon is “primarily designed.” Rather, the military claims that WP–known as “Whiskey Pete,” or “Willy Pete” on the battlefield–is a legitimate tool for obscuring troop actions. Now military sources insist that WP is not a chemical weapon (banned under Geneva Conventions), but a conventional one.
From the military’s own reports, it is clear white phosphorus was used for multiple reasons in Fallujah. In the March/April 2005 issue of Field and Artillery Magazine, Captain James T. Cobb wrote an “after action” review of the November 2004 Battle of Fallujah, a battle he describes as the “most fierce urban fighting for Marines since the Battle of Hue City in Vietnam in 1968.”
Cobb and his co-authors continue, “White phosphorus proved to be an effective and versatile munition,” useful as “a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents … We fired ‘shake and bake’ missions at insurgents, using WP to flush out them out and HE [high explosives] to take them out.”
It is also clear that U.S. Marines fired WP indiscriminately in Fallujah. Darrin Mortenson, a reporter for the San Diego-area North County Times, was embedded with the Camp Pendleton Marines in Fallujah. In an April 11, 2004 article, Mortenson describes a daily pattern that escalated during the Battle of Fallujah. Nicholas Bogert, a 22-year-old mortar team leader, directs his team to fire countless rounds of “shake and bake” into Fallujah neighborhoods, “never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused.”
In a November 8 interview with “Democracy Now,” Torrealta said that he began his investigation after seeing photographs from the Studies Centre of Human Rights & Democracy in Fallujah, including detailed color images of residents, some dead in their beds, with their clothes largely intact, but their skin melted to the consistency of leather.
In the same program, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, said that the allegations of WP’s use against civilians was “tantamount to propaganda, falsehood and rumors.”
When asked about the photos of people burned to the bone while their clothing remained untouched, he theorizes that the damage could have been inflicted by a suicide bomber. “That can happen from massive explosions. If you look at the car bombs that the terrorists use today, you have the same effects from car bombs [or] from suicide vests.”
Boylan may assert that the use of WP is legal and worth the price paid by civilians. But James Nachtwey, the award-winning war photographer, wrote in 1985 that if everyone “could see for themselves what white phosphorus does to the face of a child … they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point where that happens to even one person, let alone thousands.”
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Frida Berrigan is a senior program associate with the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative and a member of the Campaign for a Nuclear Weapons Free World.
“We” did not mean to destroy an “enemys” ability to fight. There was no justification for attacking Iraq. Iraq had not in any way threatened us, and until we bombed their populace into madness, there were no “terrorists” in any part of Iraq that Saddam Hussein controlled. There may have been a few in the Northern Fly Zone in which Hussein had no control. Dictators have a tendency to keep “terrorist” activity at a minimum. Totalitarian Idealogues are generally terrorists in uniforms or facsimilies thereof. Hussein was a dictator.
No matter what a bastard Saddam Hussein was/is that is not an excuse to murder tens or hundreds of thousands of people who happen to have had the bad luck to be born into a time and place when he was dictator and the U.S. presidency was being controlled by control freak zealots with a “blueprint” to take over the planet (totalitarian idealogues).
That’s why the whole democracy thing got started---so scores of people were not jerked about by the whims of one man and/or a small pack of wolves with a military at their command.
I agree that some munitions should be banned. I think we should join the treaty to end the use of cluster bombs and land mines and that we should sign back onto the ABM treaty and start some talks about nuclear disarmament (at least take our missiles off hair-trigger alert). I think we should never under any circumstance use munitions with radiological material.
But my point is that the attack itself was illegal, and the occupation is oppressive and irresponsible, and illegal. Iraqis don’t even have a reliable supply of food, water, electricity, medical supplies, and gas yet. Is that part of the plan to kill “the enemy” so that the one or two people in Iraq who are not “fair game” to our military may be “liberated”.
If we were spending six billion a month to buy resources and hire Iraqis to fix what we bombed, we wouldn’t have so many “enemies” to test our new array of weapons and every old munition that we pilfered from every old supply warehouse on every old base we could get our hands on. The sheer amount of ordinance the U.S. is and has been lobbing at cities and small towns for the last three years is outrageous.
Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.
Saddam Hussein had no weapons of destruction.
Saddam Hussein was not a buddy of Bin Laden.
Saddam Hussein was no threat to us or any of his neighbors.
If Americans could just get these simple facts through their heads they would see the abomination of what we’re doing in Iraq. That “spreading democracy” is such crap that I can’t believe people who are capable of reading and writing are falling for it. There may be one or two Iraqis benefitting from the rampant graft and corruption in Iraq who need our protection, but other than that the Iraqi people do not want us to “liberate” them because they do not want to be the victims of air strikes, snipers, WP, the butt of a rifle, etc., and because didn’t ask us to liberate them in the first place.
Posted by wileywitch on Nov 25, 2005 at 1:38 PM
On the question of the definition of “terrorism”:
Chomsky has been saying it for decades: when “they” murder innocent civilians in cold blood it is terrorism. When “we” do it is a justifiable and morally pure. Check out his classic discussions of Reagan’s self-proclaimed “year of the war on terror” (sometime in the early 1980s, I forget which year), where he shows that the three main candidates for the prize of carrying out the most deadly terrorist act were the CIA, the CIA and Mossad/CIA.
If there were any justice in this world, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the whole crew would be clapped in irons and shipped off to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes - for THE supreme war crime, actually (as established at the Nürnberg Tribunal). And they should be happy to stand trial there, where they’d face life in prison, and not in Washington, where they’d be facing the death penalty (yes, these laws are on the books in the USA as well...).
Posted by Anarcho-Sozi on Nov 27, 2005 at 3:52 PM
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