US Prepares to Use Chemical Weapons in Iraq

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday March 27, 2003 18:52 by Dominic Carroll - Clonakilty Against the War clonakiltyagainstthewar at eircom dot net

BBC Radio 4 reports that the Pentagon is preparing to use biological and chemical weapons in Iraq.

On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning (Thursday 27th March: 7.23am), the willingness of the US to use chemical weapons in Iraq was reported. Introducing the report, the programme’s presenter said: ‘Before the current conflict began, the American Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, was advocating the use of non-lethal chemical weapons as a better alternative to bombs and bullets if troops got bogged down in street fighting. That’s beginning to look more likely so such questions about the rules of engagement and weapons are taking on a greater significance.’

The item was presented by Tom Fielden, Science Correspondent for BBC Radio 4, who said strategists at the Pentagon and the Joint Non-lethal Directorate in Washington are keen to use ‘non-lethal’ chemical agents in Baghdad and elsewhere. ‘… that could be something like a riot-control agent like CS gas or pepper spray or something more powerful, like the gas used in the Moscow theatre siege last year which, if you remember, did actually manage to kill 120 hostages as well as incapacitating the terrorists … that’s the kind of thinking Donald Rumsfeld has been talking about and he very much looks at the rules of engagement, if you like as they stand now, as a bit of a straitjacket to that kind of modern military thinking which could actually lead to a reduction in casualties.’

David Eisenberg of the Transatlantic Defence Analysis Basic [?] outlined the administration’s thinking: ‘Well I think when the point comes that they are fighting on the outskirts of or the streets of Baghdad, they’re gonna say we have two alternatives here; you know, we can either call down on conventional ordnance, in which case a lot of people get killed, or we can fire off a round which will contain CS Gas, Tear Gas – well, there may be some other stuff such as phanatoline derivatives that has been under development in the United States – and we will knock these people out though we won’t kill them.’

Tom Fielden stated that the International Chemical Weapons Convention, to which the US is a signatory, specifically prohibits the use of chemical agents on the battlefield. ‘In fact, the only exception is for riot control by police forces … so it looks as if the American administration is adopting a rather loose interpretation of that convention – they’ve been trying to reinterpret it, if you like, based on this exemption that police forces have and the fact that the chemical agents that they are talking about are non-lethal. They would incapacitate rather than kill.’

Dr Alasdair Hay, Professor of Environmental Toxicology at the University of Leeds, was interviewed on the programme: ‘It will erode this Chemical Weapons Convention and I think blast a real hole in it, and that is going to affect all of us, and it may in fact provide some legitimacy for Iraq to enable it to retaliate, not just with similar agents but possibly even more lethal agents.’

The Labour MP, Alasdair Simpson, recently led an independent team of weapons inspectors to a biochemical base outside Washington that manufactures these weapons, and he was also interviewed on the programme: ‘Well, I think it’s somewhat bizarre that America clearly has an intention to use biochemical weapons that it claims to be fighting a war in order to destroy . . . as Tom Fielden said, they’re weapons that already killed 120 people in the Moscow theatre siege, and if you’re talking about using them in an urban setting where half of the people in Baghdad or Basra will be children, the likelihood is that there will be lots of casualties – there will be lots of people who will die from the use of these non-lethal weapons, and the use of them themselves is illegal.’

The BBC presenter argued that it would be surely better to put people to sleep than kill them. Alasdair Simpson replied: ‘I think this idea of gently putting people to sleep just belies what we’re talking about. Many of the weapons that America has been developing are about creating states of psychosis, creating nausea and vomiting, creating hallucinations, and that the excessive use of those is not a gentle sleeping agent. They are likely to be lethal and particularly so if they affect children. And they are illegal, and we have to keep coming back to this. Once you start to make up the rules as you go along, you just tear the whole framework of the International Chemical Weapons Convention apart. The base that I went to – when we talk about looking for more serious weapons in Iraq, the Edgeworth base openly acknowledged that the work that it’s doing is on anthrax, riacin, bottulinin, cholera and plague, as well as these so-called non-lethal weapons. So it seems so me that we currently have this crazy situation where there’s one set of rules for the rich and powerful and another for the rest.’

(Apologies for phonetic spellings of chemicals in this transcription from the broadcast)
The programme can be heard on the Web at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listen/listen.shtml
It’s item 3 of 6 (7–7.30am)