Chemical weapons in Iraq

[RC]

Well, here they are at last.

The US military has prevented an aid convoy from reaching the besieged city of Falluja, a doctor based in Baghdad who accompanied the convoy says.



"The Iraqi ministry of health asked us to go to Falluja. When we were on our way, the US army stopped our convoy, and carried out a search," said Dr Ibrahim al-Kubaisi.

"After we waited in the US base, located near Falluja, for four hours, a doctor told us that they had agreed with the Iraqi ministry of health to send a medical team to Falluja but only after eight or nine days.

"There is a terrible crime going in Falluja and they do not want anybody to know. I transferred four injured people from the Jordanian field hospital to a hospital in Baghdad.

"They told me that there is a crime in there; chemical weapons are being used. The corpses don't have traces of gunshots but black patches.

"US forces allow people to go into al-Hadra al-Muhammadiya area, in Falluja, but they prohibited anybody to enter al-Julan, al-Askari and al-Senai neighbourhoods

[Oryx]

RC

This is a very disturbing post. What is your source?

Oryx

[RC]

That's from Aljazeera, "US Army Blocks Aid Convoy For Falluja", page dated Nov. 30 but still up right now (2 pm our time).

http://english.aljazeera.net/

[RC]

Hey, did your hear the one about American helicoptors dumping body bags with their own inside into rivers and isolated areas?

[Maggie]

R.C.
Whatever would they be dumping bodies into rivers and isolated areas for ?
If there are indeed chemical weapons being used, how would anyone really know where they came from. If the weapons were there and available or if they were supplied by outside supporters after all this mess started ?

What a mess.

[RC]

Maggie
Re the body bags - I don't know why. The reports are that people in remote areas have seen bodies being dumped, have found them also in fishing nets.
As to chemical weapons, I think the idea is that the US army has used them.
?

[Maggie]

:cry:
Oh, s**t ! I haven't heard anything on the news. It makes sense now. If the chemical weapons were being used by insurgants it would be all over the headlines. I so hope this isn't true but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

My only hope is that the rest of the world remembers that half of us are not out there singing "Onward Christian Soldiers". If Bush were a Democrate he would have been snuffed by now. Us wimpy Dems can't seem to muster up the atittude that makes it O.K. to use guns, plots and subplots, or the mind set that it is "my way or the high way. This has been a hard four years for us "Godless" "Unpatriotic" Americans !

[Colyngbourne]

I think this is the appropriate thread - ganked from elsewhere today - Weapons of Mass Embarrassment planned

Gay bombs: US secret weapon plan

A US plan to develop a bad breath bomb and a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other has been revealed in newly declassified documents.

New Scientist's web site reports that the documents show the Pentagon considered a range of non-lethal chemical weapons aimed at disrupting enemy discipline and morale.

The "sex bomb" idea would cause a "distasteful but completely non-lethal" blow to morale, it states.

Also considered were concoctions that would be irresistible to wasps or angry rats to render enemy bases uninhabitable.

And there was the bad breath bomb idea - a weapon that caused "severe and lasting halitosis" to make it easier to sniff out spies.

Other ideas dating back to 1994 from the US Air Force Wright Laboratory in Ohio included making soldiers' skin react painfully to sunlight.

The lab sought Pentagon funding for research into what it called "harassing, annoying and 'bad guy'-identifying chemicals". The plans have been posted online by the Sunshine Project, an organisation that exposes research into chemical and biological weapons.

Spokesman Edward Hammond told New Scientists it was not known if the $7.5 millio research proposal was ever pursued.

[wshaw]

"They told me that there is a crime in there; chemical weapons are being used. The corpses don't have traces of gunshots but black patches.


Raed (http://raedinthemiddle.blogspot.com) - the friend of Salam Pax and original inspiration for his whereisraed blog - has repeated several claims that chemical weapons were used in Fallujah. Most recently he's posted pictures of victims dead in their beds with no apparent wounds.

I don't know if that's sufficient evidence to say there were chemical weapons used, but Raed is a very admirable source who has done very respectable research on casualties in Iraq.