A Rhetorical Trick
Jun 17th, 2005 at 10:04 pm by Susie
If you’re a longtime reader, you remember I brought up the use of napalm when we bombed Fallujah:
American officials lied to British ministers over the use of “internationally reviled” napalm-type firebombs in Iraq.
Yesterday’s disclosure led to calls by MPs for a full statement to the Commons and opened ministers to allegations that they held back the facts until after the general election.
Despite persistent rumours of injuries among Iraqis consistent with the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, Adam Ingram, the Defence minister, assured Labour MPs in January that US forces had not used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq.
They claim it wasn’t used on civilian targets. And of course they have so much credibility, we should believe them.
MK is a combination of kerosene jet fuel and polystyrene. When it hits, it sticks and leaves ghoulish results. The British signed a treaty to not use it as a quote forbidden conventional weapon. The United States did not. You are one hard working woman posting on this on Friday night whereas I am left in relative dust tomorrow morning. Good job, SM.
Well, of course it wasn’t used on civilian targets. We don’t target civilians, ergo it couldn’t have been used on them!
It’ll be interesting to see if this becomes the straw that breaks Tony Blair’s back. If he played any role at all in holding this back before their elections, this will probably be the end of him.
Five or six weeks ago I saw pictures that some Doctor took in Fallujah. Three photos showed severe burn victims one of which was still alive. I have seen this before in Vietnam. It was napalm. There is absoletly no doubt in my mind. I can still smell the burning flesh. No is no other smell like it in the world. I would love for some idiot Repuglican to tell me I am wrong. Nothing else burns so bad as to melt body parts together. Shame on Bushco to allow the use of these weapons. One more reason these Neo-cons need to be impeached.
Here is the promised followup. Big story with links to incidents and press plus specs for MK here
As i recall from military training, napalm was used to momentarily deprive the target of oxygen (the incendiary aspects were considered a “beneficial side effect”) while the gel “firebomb” type was used almost exclusively as an incendiary bomb.
In the “miliary-industrial complex”, one is encouraged to make the distinction between the two in order to defuse potentially adverse political side effects.
This whole story is bizarre. As you can read here, this story (about the use of MK77) was in the American press (to a limited extent, of course) in August, 2003, and the Australian press, from which the story came, first carried it in March, 2003. Furthermore, the U.S. military confirmed it publicly at the time: “”I can confirm that Mark-77 fire bombs were used in that general area,” said Colonel Mike Daily, of the US Marine Corps.” Their “defense” is that the use was legal. Was it legal because, as is now claimed, it was just used against military targets? No. It was legal because, although napalm was banned by a U.N. convention in 1980, the U.S. did not sign the agreement.
Yet, surprisingly, the phrase “U.S. using chemical weapons in Iraq” (or, better yet, “U.S. using WMD in Iraq”) never appeared in the U.S. press to my knowledge.
Using nasty chemical weapons against an enemy? Umm . . . gee. I seem to remember a certain case for regime change being made over the use of chemical weapons.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/featuredposts.html#a002838
Huffington links to TBRNews.org who:
has an internal pdf. file from the D.O.D. which establishes that nearly 9000 Americans have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom, but that the official number has been held to 1713 by designating as Iraq deaths only those who perish on Iraqi soil. The remainder, he says, are military personnel who have died en route to Germany or in German hospitals– casualties of the war, but not listed in the official death toll.
also:
There’s more at the site. Harring also asserts more than 5500 American military personnel assigned to Iraq have deserted, most to Ireland and Canada.
The DOD wouldn’t lie about stuff like this, would they?
This TBRNews bit has been around for a whie now, and is almost certainly nonsense. First of all, “TBRNews” sounds great, they’re no more of a “news” organization than Left I on the News, as far as I can tell from their website. Second of all, despite the claim, there is no pdf file on the linked page, and the linked page talks about a “guess” of 7000; I’m not sure where the 9000 comes from. Basically, as far as I can tell, it’s nonsense, but it seems to be a meme that won’t die.
Please let’s have higher standards than this. There are too many ACCURATE criticisms of the government to delve into inaccurate or completely unsupported ones.
It’s just slightly odd how the US government seems to want to hide the details of the flights repatriating the bodies, and generally downplay the funerals in the national media.
It wouldn’t be easy, but there’s still local reporting of military funerals, and somebody could compare that with the official figures. The “hidden deaths” hypothesis is testable.