Antiwar.com Blog

“WMDs at last?” asks warbot site The Command Post hopefully. Fox News (surprise! I bet you didn’t see that one coming….) is reporting that one entire shell might have had……sarin gas in it! WOO Hoo! See, America was imminently threatened, you anti-war doubters!!

Oh, the shell was rigged as an IED (aka roadside bomb) and exploded releasing “a small amount of agent” according to General “Change the Channel” Kimmitt. No mass destruction occurred, for which we can all be grateful, and apparently the danger of the “agent” floating from Iraq to the US is minimal.

Before all you warfloggers out there get all excited about this “WMD” it might be helpful to know what WMD is:

Chemical weapons, which are not WMD, are blistering, choking, or toxic agents. Mustard gas possessed by Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt and other nations is World War I technology. Horrible as they are, these are strictly battlefield weapons, requiring large, clumsy holding tanks, and depend on favourable winds. Winston Churchill authorized using poison gas against “primitive tribesmen” – Kurds in Iraq and Afghans – when he was British home secretary. Benito Mussolini’s Italy used mustard gas in Ethiopia and Libya.

Choking gas, like chlorine, is also a tactical battlefield agent. French troops without gas masks defending a 4-km front at Verdun in 1916 were hit by 60,000 chlorine gas shells, yet held their lines. So did Canadian troops in Flanders, also without masks, who heroically fought off superior German forces.

World War II vintage

Nerve gases, like Sarin and VX, are World War II vintage. Though deadly, they, too, are tactical agents designed for area denial and neutralizing high value targets. Using nerve gas requires specialized vehicles or aircraft with highly complex dispensing systems. Gas is dependent on temperature, humidity and wind. The Soviets tried various nerve agents in Afghanistan, but found them ineffective and dangerous to their own troops.

Nerve agents would be extremely lethal if released by terrorists in a large building, mall or airport but, again, they are weapons of localized destruction, not mass destruction. In 1995, a Japanese cult released nerve gas in Tokyo’s subway, killing 12 people.

Nerve gas was not used during WW II because of its unreliability and lack of wide area lethality. Many gases are unstable and have limited shelf lives. Iraq and Iran used poison gas during the 1980-88 Gulf War – killing or maiming many soldiers but achieving no strategic breakthroughs.

So, who in the region of the Middle East actually possesses real Weapons of Mass Destruction? Ask Mordechai Vanunu.

---

UPDATE BBC: However, a senior coalition source has told the BBC the round does not signal the discovery of weapons of mass destruction or the escalation of insurgent activity.

He said the round dated back to the Iran-Iraq war and coalition officials were not sure whether the fighters even knew what it contained.

via The LeftCoaster

---

UPDATE: Rumsfeld ruins millions of wargasms in progress.

Like this one, for example.

A suicide car bomb exploded next to the car of Abdel-Zahraa Othman, a Shia Muslim widely known as Izzadine Saleem, as he waited to clear a US checkpoint outside the Green Zone.

Mr Saleem had been in a convoy of five vehicles when an adjacent car exploded, Mohammed Laith, a witness, said. There was no immediate official confirmation from the council but the witness said that Mr Saleem, his driver and assistant were among those killed.

Six Iraqis and two US soldiers were also injured in the bombing outside the coalition’s compound, which is known as the green zone, US Army Colonel Mike Murray said.

Smoke rose from the site of the blast, on the west side of the Tigris river, as firefighters and around 10 ambulances attended the scene.

Mr Saleem, a writer, philosopher and political activist, served as editor of several newspapers and magazines. He was the leader of the Islamic Dawa movement in the southern city of Basra, and was one of 25 council members to have held the organisation’s rotating presidency.

Ahmed Chalabi, who you will undoubtedly be relieved to know was apparently not anywhere near the explosion, lost no time in blaming the attack on Sunni Arabs in Fallujah:

”We, the allies of U.S., are hampered by law from protecting ourselves, but the terrorists are free to roam around and they have been given sanctuary in Fallujah,” Ahmad Chalabi said hours after the suicide bombing that killed Saleem, also known as Abdel-Zahraa Othman.

”The garage is open and car bombs are coming repeatedly,” he said.

”We are all now threatened, and I believe that drastic action must be taken by Iraqis,” he said without elaborating.

Chalabi didn’t say exactly what “action” Iraqis must take.

AP reports:

Fighters loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr drove Italian forces from a base in the southern city of Nasiriyah on Sunday and attacked coalition headquarters there with grenade and mortar fire as tensions in the Shiite region escalated. Two U.S. soldiers died elsewhere.

Gunmen also killed three Iraqi women working for the U.S.-led coalition. Two Iraqi fighters were killed and 20 were wounded in battles in Nasiriyah, mostly at two bridges crossing the Euphrates River, residents said.

The Italian troops evacuated as their base came under repeated attack. Portuguese police were called out to support the Italians, seeing action for the first time since the force of 128 deployed to Nasiriyah in November, a Portuguese duty officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

At least 10 Italians were wounded, one of the critically, contingent spokesman Lt.-Col. Giuseppe Perrone told The Associated Press by phone. He said the Italians relocated to the nearby Tallil airbase.

Elsewhere in Nasiriyah, a convoy transporting the Italian official in charge of the city, Barbara Contini, came under attack as it neared the headquarters of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, Perrone said. Two Italian paramilitary police were wounded.

Earlier today the Italians were talking about pressuring Bush about an exit strategy. I guess now we know why.

JAG lawyers are blaming Bush administration political appointees, specifically Douglas Feith, for blocking them from the Iraqi prison system because they insisted on humane treatment and Geneva Convention protections for detainees, setting the stage for the torture chambers that developed in the military detention facilities in Iraq.

As the military’s uniformed lawyers, JAG officers are in charge of instructing military commanders on how to adhere to domestic and international rules regarding the treatment of detainees.

“If we — ‘we’ being the uniformed lawyers — had been listened to, and what we said put into practice, then these abuses would not have occurred,” said Rear Admiral Don Guter (ret.), the Navy Judge Advocate General from 2000 to 2002.

Specifically, JAG officers say they have been marginalized by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, and William Haynes II, the Pentagon’s general counsel, whom President Bush has nominated for a judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Feith, predictably, denies it. However, a group of JAG officers consulted the New York City Bar Association twice in 2003, a measure of their extreme concern.

Matters got so frustrating that in May and October 2003, eight senior JAG officers took the rare step of going outside the chain of command to meet secretly with the New York City Bar Association, warning of a “disaster waiting to happen”.

“They felt that there had been a conscious effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity surrounding these detention facilities, and that it had been done to give interrogators the broadest possible latitude in their conduct of operations,” Scott Horton, former chair of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights, told ABCNEWS. Horton’s meeting with the JAG officers was first reported by Salon.com.

This “atmosphere of legal ambiguity,” JAG officials told ABCNEWS, began in early 2002, when the Bush administration decided the Geneva Conventions’ rules for humane treatment of prisoners did not apply to the war on terror, and to the suspects seized in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo. For the war in Iraq, the Geneva Conventions were supposed to apply … but JAG sources say there was little to no clarification of that.

“When you say something down the chain of command like, ‘The Geneva Conventions don’t apply,’ that sets the stage for the kind of chaos that we’ve seen,” said Rear Admiral John Hutson (ret.), who was the Navy Judge Advocate General from 1997 to 2000.

Feith responds with this joke: “There has not been, ever, any ambiguity about the strong support that the leadership of this department gives to the Geneva Conventions.” They “strongly support” the Geneva Conventions, they just don’t think they apply to anyone they capture or detain.

Rep. Steve Buyer, (R-Ind.), a JAG in the Army Reserves, wanted to offer his services in Iraq. But even though the Army wanted him there, Pentagon political appointees vetoed him going. Buyer told ABCNEWS’ John Cochran that he tried to convey to his Pentagon civilian contact how important it was to ensure against the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and detainees, telling him: “You have to get somebody that’s qualified in international law and the Geneva Conventions to serve in that brigade … I’m pretty shocked that this never happened.”

Buyer was referring to the 800th Military Police Brigade, seven of whose reservists are now facing charges in the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

Buyer isn’t the only one to question why there didn’t seem to be a significant JAG presence for interrogations at detention centers like Abu Ghraib. Horton says the JAGs who reached out to the New York City Bar Association complained about a new “practice” of keeping JAGs away. And Admiral Guter says when he was Navy JAG from 2000 until 2002, “JAGs were clamoring for assignments of this kind of importance, so I know they were available. And if they’re available and you don’t send them, then I have to say you don’t send them on purpose.”

Funny post of the DaY:

Click the flag

We all owe Laurie Mylroie and Osama bin Laden an apology.