Wednesday 24th of April 2024
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history repeating sumpthin'...

GASpoison...

FROM CHRIS FLOYD.... As we all know, the use of chemical weapons is the most heinous crime that can be committed by a brutal, aggressive government: a brazen act of state terror, an offense against all humanity. Those who perpetrate such actions put themselves beyond the pale; indeed, they rank themselves with Hitler himself, as a succession of America’s highest officials has pointed out in recent weeks.

And that’s why the details of the infamous chemical attack in the Middle East resonate with stark moral horror. Especially chilling are the reports of some of the soldiers who actually took part in the chemical attacks, coming forward to offer evidence after the regime they served denied its obvious crime.  As one regime soldier noted, the chemical weapon involved in the attack “burns bodies; it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone. I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Anyone within a radius of 150 meters is done for.”

A document produced by the regime’s own military said the chemical weapon “proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions and as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents … We [were] using [chemical weapons] to flush them out and high explosives to take them out.” Another soldier involved in these chemical weapons attacks said: "There is no way you can use [it] without forming a deadly chemical cloud that kills everything within a tenth of a mile in all directions from where it hits. Obviously, the effect of such deadly clouds weren't just psychological in nature."

But of course, chemical weapons were only part of this attack on the rebel position – an attack absolutely replete with war crimes violations. Before assaulting the civilian quadrants with a barrage of chemical weapons, the regime cut off the city’s water and power supplies and food deliveries. One of the first moves in the attack was the destruction of medical centers; indeed, 20 doctors were killed, along with their patients – innocent women and children – in a savage blitz before the chemical weapons were unleashed. But why would even a regime full of rogue barbarians attack a hospital?  It’s simple, one of the regime’s “information warfare specialists” told the New York Times: hospitals can be used as “propaganda centers” by rebels trying to stir up sympathy for their cause.

Meanwhile, the BBC managed to penetrate the rebel-held areas and report on the results of the combined attack of chemical and conventional weapons:

“There are more and more dead bodies on the street, and the stench is unbearable … There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens.”

By the end of the attack, vast areas lay in ruins. More than 36,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and religious centers. Medical workers estimated the civilian death count at between 4,000 and 6,000, which, the Guardian noted, was “a proportionally higher death rate than in Coventry and London during the Blitz.”

As both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have said so eloquently, those responsible for such a crime must be punished. To look away from such an atrocity, to fail to hold those responsible to account would be, as these eminent statesmen tell us, a crime in itself, tantamount to ignoring the Holocaust or the massacres in Rwanda …

But of course the crimes enumerated above did not take place in Syria in August of 2013. They were part of America’s Guernica-like destruction of the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004: one of the most egregious – and most sustained – war crimes since the Second World War. The widespread use of chemical weapons in the decimation of Fallujah – including the flesh-eating horror of white phosphorous, the future-maiming deployment of depleted uranium and other chemicals, which have led to an epidemic of birth defects in the region – is well-documented and, after years of outright lies and evasions, now cheerfully admitted by the United States government. Using these chemical weapons – along with good old-fashioned mass-murdering conventional munitions just like mother used to make – the United States government slaughtered thousands upon thousands of innocent people in its berserker outburst against Fallujah. 

It goes without saying that the “international community” did not rise up in righteous indignation at this use of chemical weapons to slaughter far more civilians than even the Obama Administration’s wild exaggerations are claiming in Syria. It goes without saying that the drone-bombing Peace Laureate and his lantern-jawed patrician at Foggy Bottom have signally failed to criticize – much less prosecute! – the perpetrators of the Fallujah war crime, or make the slightest change in the system of military aggression that produced it. Instead they have expanded and entrenched this system at every turn, extending it far beyond the wildest dreams of Bush and Cheney.

Whatever his manifest crimes (and alleged exacerbations), Bashar Assad will remain a hapless piker next to these pious virtuosos of mass-murdering violence.

http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2351-chemistry-equations-the-pious-virtuosos-of-violence.html

not learning from the past...

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/poison_gas_and_world_war_one.htm

counting the half a million dead...

An additional half million Iraqis died because of war and occupation between 2003 and 2011 according a new survey based on more rigorous research than those carried out in the past.

The study, which is the result of a collaboration between researchers from the US, Canada and Iraq, estimates that 460,800 Iraqis were killed during that period. Sixty per cent of the deaths were violent, with the remaining 40 per cent due to indirect causes linked to the collapse of infrastructure, the researchers claim. 

The casualty figures for Iraqi civilians has been a subject of furious debate since the early days of the US occupation with the US army at first claiming that it was not counting Iraqi dead in a vain attempt  to avoid the same controversy over body count as had happened in Vietnam.

Supporters of the US-led invasion appeared to consider that a lower figure for fatalities, even if it was over 100,000, justified the war while its critics believed that a higher number showed that the conflict had brought excessive and unnecessary suffering to Iraqis.

The latest figures are published in PLoS medical journal in an article entitled “Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003-11 War and Occupation...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/counting-the-cost-of-war-nearly-500000-iraqis-have-been-killed-according-to-new-survey-8883439.html

a revolution in killing — a WWI's invention...

 


A Revolution in Killing


The Technological Innovations of WWI


By Felix Bohr

A new era in warfare was born on the battlefields of Flanders in 1915. German troops launched a chlorine gas attack in the first ever large-scale use of chemical weapons. It was but one of the technical innovations seen during World War I, and not all of them were as deadly.

The man who would go down in history as the father of chemical warfare acted as his own guinea pig to test his invention. On April 2, 1915, Fritz Haber, the head of Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physical Chemistry, rode through a yellow-green cloud of chlorine gas on grounds used for troop exercises.

The experiment was successful. The scientist, himself a war enthusiast, began coughing convulsively; he grew pale and had to be carried away on a stretcher.

About three weeks later, German troops used chlorine gas for the first time on a mass scale during combat on the Western Front near the Flemish city of Ypres in Belgium, deploying a total of 150 tons of the substance. At first, French soldiers thought the shimmering cloud was intended as a diversionary tactic. But then, suddenly, they began flailing about with their hands in the air as they gasped for breath and collapsed on the ground. As many as 1,200 were killed and 3,000 wounded. Haber observed the event from a safe distance.

The Birth of Weapons of Mass Destruction

In military history, the deployment of chlorine gas in Ypres is considered the moment when weapons of mass destruction were born, and the rapid development of additional chemical weapons ensued. It was a development that revolutionized warfare and has manifested itself in many ways: from the use of toxic defoliants like Agent Orange in the Vietnam War to the more recent poison gas attacks in the Syrian civil war.

The use of chemical weapons in Flanders was the result of military desperation. The German army's initial invasion had already devolved into stationary trench warfare by the end of 1914 and was running out of munitions.

All sides were looking for a way to break through enemy lines at the time and they spent billions on the search. The result was an unprecedented advance in technology. Researchers invented mobile radio telephones, engineers constructed cannons capable of firing shells as far as 120 kilometers (74.5 miles) and fighter planes were flown into battle zones for the first time ever.

Even a century after Ypres, armed conflicts continue to spur technological advances. Wherever wars are fought, money flows into military innovations. The United States' War on Terror, for example, resulted in the addition of billions to the defense budget and also led to the development of killer drones and vastly complex surveillance technologies.

A Preparedness to Invest

Prior to World War I, German politicians and generals had rejected a number of defense projects, but the conflagration of violence that enveloped Europe in 1914 triggered a flood of investment. One example was the flamethrower, which had already been patented by a Berlin engineer all the way back in 1901. But it was first deployed on a large scale during the course of the war, in the February 1916 battle at Verdun. The jet of fire had a range of 35 meters (115 feet).

The tank also developed quickly during the Great War, though the allies were in the lead. In 1906, Austrian Kaiser Franz Joseph I had declared the Austro-Daimler armored vehicle to be useless. Just 10 years later, the British rolled with their tanks into the Battle of the Somme. The Central Powers followed up much too late and developed their own tanks.

During the war years, the military budget of the German Reich grew by 505 percent, and the technical advances weren't by any means restricted to weapons. The telephone, for example, became the most important means of communication during World War I. On average, each army corps received 5,000 calls a day. By 1917, the German army had installed a 920,000-kilometer (571,000 mile) long network of cables for its field telephones. The fact that the lines could easily be cut in trench warfare promoted the deployment of radio equipment. The world's first "mobile phones" weighed 50 kilograms (110 pounds).

Each side reacted swiftly to progress made by the other. At the beginning of the war, aircraft squadrons were primarily used to conduct surveillance on the front. But 1915 proved to be a watershed moment. French fighter pilot Roland Garos installed a machine gun on his Morane-Saulnier monoplane. In response, the Germans developed the Fokker fighter plane, which included synchronization gear that enabled it to fire in the direction of flight through the arc of its spinning propeller without hitting the blades.

The Allies initially responded with outrage to the Germans' deployment of chlorine gas in Flanders, calling it a barbaric act. But they, too, began to deploy poison gas beginning in September 1915. All told, the parties to the conflict used 112,000 tons of chemical weapons between 1914 and 1918.

Fritz Haber, the father of the poison gas war, got promoted to the rank of captain as a result of the Germans' successful attack near Ypres. It was reported that he responded to the promotion with tears of joy.

For additional coverage of the World War I centenary, please click here.

Translated from the German by Daryl Lindsey

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-wwi-brought-the-birth-of-modern-warfare-a-944738-druck.html

 

 

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robbed of your pants? use the kill switch...

 

It’s a propaganda video; unvarnished but telling—a man in combat fatigues wearing a black balaclava moves along a mesh wire fence opening boxes of what appear to be American ordnance, crates of hand grenades and other weapons.

It’s a scene played out for international consumption: a piece of digital PR in support of Islamic State insurgents in Syria.

The US government is immediately defensive about the possibility that one of its air drops to Kurdish allies may have fallen into enemy hands. But analysts are quick to point out that such things can happen. They have happened before.

Several months earlier in northern Iraq, smiling insurgents posed for pictures next to captured American Humvees. At the time, the then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made a desperate plea to the American government for more weaponry, but his call unsettled some in the US who worried aloud about the stability of the Iraqi army. 

Watching such developments from his office in Boston, Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain began thinking about the need for smarter weapons: weapons that could be disabled remotely if and when required. His inspiration was right in front of him.

‘I was reflecting on the fact that companies like Apple have implemented kill switches for iPhones,’ says Zittrain, the director of the prestigious Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

‘If somebody boosts the phone from you, all is not lost. You can remotely disable it using your own Apple credentials to make it a much less enticing target to steal.

‘My thought was that if this was good enough for iPhones, why wouldn't [weapon] supplying nations and Iraq itself want to be able to turn stuff off from afar rather than have it used against them, as it was to capture the Mosul Dam.’

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/futuretense/the-kill-switch/6279544

see also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/1107

 

agent orange was no citrus...

The US Senate struck down a bill on Monday that would extend Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits to thousands of US Navy veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange while serving during the Vietnam War.

Agent Orange was an herbicide used by the US government during its war on Vietnam to defoliate the landscape so it could more easily target Vietcong troops. Exposure to the chemical has been linked to cancer and other ailments.

During the war, US troops were told the chemical was harmless, and those who were exposed to it have had difficulty getting benefits from the government. By 1993, nearly 20 years after the war ended, the Department of Veterans Affairs had only compensated 486 of the 39,419 soldiers who tried to file for disability benefits over their exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, Sputnik News reported.

The bill, H.R. 299, or the "Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act," would have extended VA benefits to thousands of people who were exposed to Agent Orange while serving on warships off the coast of Vietnam.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/201812121070633024-Senate-Kills-Bill-Benefits...

 

 

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