Just the tip of USA’s chemical iceberg
There are relatively gentler methods of mass killing, but they are not employed. This suggests something compellingly sadistic about those determining killing methods, not those ordered to use them. Perpetrators seldom admit to war crimes; false flag operations are now routine, planting fake evidence on others.
The US President Franklin Roosevelt had condemned the use of gas by ‘any civilised nation’. He however clarified, “US would reply in kind if the enemy dared to use such weapons first”. That obviously meant keeping poison gas in reserve in case of instant retaliation. In fact, during World War II, an American ship carried 2000 mustard bombs to Italy, something kept secret from the crew. It was bombed and sunk by the Germans, killing them all. The gas poisoned the waters and the harbour area, killing thousands of civilians as well, filling hospitals to overflowing.
An American investigative writer recently narrated how his grandfather, a pharmacist who joined the military, was given a factory task he hated – filling shells with poison gas, used in World War II. He wept telling his grandson about his experience.
The Americans weren’t particularly secretive about their chemical warfare production in those times. They had some 250 sites in 40 US states, and three ‘territories’ for the purpose, according to a 2012 National Academy of Sciences report. To date, cleaning up the havoc caused onsite remains unfinished.
Yet the US always claimed that poison gas was a despicable weapon only employed by equally despicable enemies such as the Nazis and Al-Qaeda, a blanket term for Arabs and other unfriendly Muslims.
In 1981, dengue fever broke out in Cuba, not the low-hygiene kind of country where water-borne and other infectious diseases are easily spread. Castro blamed it on the CIA. It killed almost 200 people, about half of them children. It was not until 1988 that a Cuban exile leader admitted he’d brought the germs into Cuba. Then a dengue epidemic occurred in Nicaragua for the first time in its history, affecting 50,000 people and killing several dozen. It occurred during the peak of the CIA’s war against the Sandinista government.
Following low-level flights over Cuba by the US government spray planes, the island again suffered from a disease – this time of crops and vegetation. The UN headquarters being on the US soil is helpful; the latter can exert undue influence, and it successfully blocked a UN investigation into the matter.
The very day that US Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the chemical attack by the Syrian government as “cowardly” and “obscene”, was the self-same day declassified documents revealed how CIA and Saddam’s Iraq had collaborated in chemical attacks against Iran towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Donald Rumsfeld personally dealt with the chemical weapons sales. The highly-respected Foreign Policy journal said it was “tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.”
The US has no compunctions about using its own people as guinea pigs. Some experimental vaccines were given to more than 100,000 US troops in Iraq. As the Gulf War ended, the US Army deliberately exploded an Iraqi chemical weapons depot. But not till 1996 did it admit that over 20,000 US troops were exposed to VX and sarin nerve agents. One or both were certainly the cause of new, hitherto unknown diseases.
In Iraq 2004, apart from reducing Fallujah to rubble, the US troops used white phosphorous chemical weapons, forcing 300,000 to flee. A participating marine, among others, told the story: “I heard the order… they were going to use white phosphorus… it in fact melts the flesh all the way down to the bone… I saw the burned bodies of women and children.”
The Pentagon, of course, vehemently denied it. The smaller the population, the easier it is. With a five million population in 2000, Libya was a cinch. Syria waits helplessly.
And who can forget Vietnam? From 1962 to 1974, the USA dumped over 75 million litres of the most poisonous chemicals over South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Herbicides and defoliants mixed with jet fuel, a hundred times more lethal than domestically sold products.
The US first targeted food crop fields to starve and drive out rebels and rural populations, followed by defoliation of forests. In South Vietnam alone, 25 million acres of agricultural land was completely destroyed. Almost five million Vietnamese were exposed – including 400,000 were killed or maimed, a million with permanent health problems, half a million born with severe birth defects. Rates of miscarriage and stillbirths went through the roof among both women and livestock.
All just the tip of USA’s chemical iceberg.
Vietnam’s irreversible legacy continues into the fourth generation – victims living helpless, painful, dependant, meaningless lives. It endows euthanasia with new sacredness.
