Posted on 2-3-2003
US
Prepares Toxic Gases For Iraq
By Geoffrey Lean and Severin Carrell, Independent UK, 02 March
2003
The US is preparing to use the toxic riot-control agents CS
gas and pepper
spray in Iraq in contravention of the Chemical Weapons Convention,
provoking the first split in the Anglo-US alliance. "Calmative"
gases,
similar to the one that killed 120 hostages in the Moscow theatre
siege
last year, could also be employed.
The convention bans the use of these toxic agents in battle,
not least
because they risk causing an escalation to full chemical warfare.
This
applies even though they can be used in civil disturbances at
home: both CS
gas and pepper spray are available for use by UK police forces.
The US
Marine Corps confirmed last week that both had already been
shipped to the
Gulf.
It is British policy not to allow troops to take part in operations
where
riot control agents are employed. But the US Defence Secretary,
Donald
Rumsfeld, has asked President Bush to authorise their use. Mr
Bush, who has
often spoken of "smoking out" the enemy, is understood to have
agreed.
Internal Pentagon documents also show that the US is developing
a range of
calmative gases, also banned for battlefield use. Senior US
defence sources
predict these could be used in Iraq by elite special forces
units to take
out command and control bunkers deep underground.
Rear Admiral Stephen Baker, a Navy commander in the last Gulf
War who is
now senior adviser to the Centre for Defence Information in
Washington,
told The Independent on Sunday that US special forces had knock-out
gases
that can "neutralise" people. He added: "I would think that
if they get a
chance to use them, they will."
The Pentagon said last week that the decision to use riot control
agents
"is made by the commander in the field".
Mr Rumsfeld became the first senior figure on either side of
the impending
conflict to announce his wish to use chemical agents in a little-noticed
comment to the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee
on 5
February – the same day as Colin Powell's presentation of intelligence
about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to the UN.
The Defence Secretary attacked the "straitjacket" imposed by
bans in
international treaties on using the weapons in warfare. He specified
that
they could be used "where there are enemy troops in a cave [and]
you know
there are women and children in there with them". General Richard
Myers,
chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke of using them
against human
shields.
The revelations leave the Bush administration open to charges
of double
standards at a time when it is making Iraq's suspected arsenal
of chemical
and biological weapons the casus belli. Charles Kennedy, leader
of the
Liberal Democrats, said last night: "This all adds to the confusion
over
how the war will be conducted. If the argument with Saddam Hussein
is over
disarming him of weapons of mass destruction, it is perverse
of the US to
push the boundaries of international chemical warfare conventions
in order
to subdue him."
Leading experts and Whitehall officials fear that using even
pepper spray
and CS gas would destroy the credibility of the Chemical Weapons
Convention, provoke Iraqi chemical retaliation and set a disastrous
legal
precedent. Professor Julian Perry Robinson, one of the world's
foremost
authorities on the convention, said: "Legally speaking, Iraq
would be
totally justified in releasing chemical weapons over the UK
if the alliance
uses them in Baghdad.
"When the war is over and these things have been used they will
have been
legitimised as a tool of war, and the principle of toxic weapons
being
banned will have gone. The difference between these weapons
and nerve gas
is simply one of structural chemistry."
The Ministry of Defence has warned the US that it will not allow
British
troops to be involved in operations where riot control agents
are used, or
to transport them to the battlefield, but Britain is even more
concerned
about the calmatives. This is shown by documents obtained by
the
Texas-based Sunshine Project under the US Freedom of Information
Act. These
reveal that the US is developing calmatives – including sedatives
such as
the benzodiazapines, diazepam, dexmeditomide and new drugs that
affect the
nervous system – even though it accepts that "the convention
would prohibit
the development of any chemically based agent that would even
temporarily
incapacitate a human being".
A special working group of the Federation of American Scientists
concluded
last month that using even the mildest of these weapons to incapacitate
people would kill 9 per cent of them. It added: "Chemical incapacitating
weapons are as likely as bullets to cause death."
The use of chemical weapons by US forces was explicitly banned
by President
Gerald Ford in 1975 after CS gas had been repeatedly used in
Vietnam to
smoke out enemy soldiers and then kill them as they ran away.
Britain would
be in a particularly sensitive position if the US used the weapons
as it
drafted the convention and is still seen internationally as
its most
important guardian.
The Foreign Office said: "All states parties to the Chemical
Weapons
Convention have undertaken not to use any toxic chemical or
its precursor,
including riot-control agents. This applies in any armed conflict."
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