Monday, November 29, 2004

Is the U.S. using napalm in Fallujah? Yes, according to England's Sunday Mirror:

US troops are secretly using outlawed napalm gas to wipe out remaining insurgents in and around Fallujah.

News that President George W. Bush has sanctioned the use of napalm, a deadly cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel banned by the United Nations in 1980, will stun governments around the world....

Since the American assault on Fallujah there have been reports of "melted" corpses, which appeared to have napalm injuries....


Al-Jazeera also makes this claim.

The Mirror says that the U.S. has acknowledged the use of napalm in Iraq. In fact, as this 2003 story from the San Diego Union-Tribune notes, what the U.S. has acknowledged is the use of Mark 77 firebombs. Not everyone thinks that's a significant distinction

American jets killed Iraqi troops with firebombs – similar to the controversial napalm used in the Vietnam War – in March and April as Marines battled toward Baghdad.

...What the Marines dropped, the spokesmen said yesterday, were "Mark 77 firebombs." They acknowledged those are incendiary devices with a function "remarkably similar" to napalm weapons.

Rather than using gasoline and benzene as the fuel, the firebombs use kerosene-based jet fuel, which has a smaller concentration of benzene....

"You can call it something other than napalm, but it's napalm," said John Pike, defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, a nonpartisan research group in Alexandria, Va....

Although many human rights groups consider incendiary bombs to be inhumane, international law does not prohibit their use against military forces....

"Incendiaries create burns that are difficult to treat," said Robert Musil, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a Washington group that opposes the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Musil described the Pentagon's distinction between napalm and Mark 77 firebombs as "pretty outrageous."

"That's clearly Orwellian," he added....


I don't know whether the Mirror story is true, and I'll admit I don't know if death from a permissible firebomb is less horrific than death from napalm. I'm just passing this on.

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