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The U.S. military used neutron weapons in the Battle of Baghdad, says a former
commander of Iraq’s Republican Guard. And at least one retired U.S. Army
officer is backing up his charge.
In an April 9 interview reported by Al Jazeera, Saifeddin Fulayh Hassan Taha
al-Rawi says that, “U.S. forces used neutron and phosphorus bombs during
their assault on Baghdad airport before the April 9, 2003, capture of the Iraqi
capital.”
The bombs incinerated about 2,000 elite Republican Guard troops but left the
buildings and infrastructure at the airport intact, he added.
(aljazeera.net)
The neutron bomb is designed to produce a minimal blast while releasing a
massive wave of neutron and gamma radiation, which can penetrate armor or
several feet of earth. This radiation is extremely destructive to living
tissue. (britannica.com) The bomb has been in the U.S. arsenal for decades but
has never been used in combat before.
While no major U.S. media have reported on the neutron bomb charge, David
Hambling, author of “Weapons Grade: How Modern Warfare Gave Birth to Our
High-Tech World,” says there’s something to it. Hambling notes that
the U.S. has already admitted to the use of phosphorus weapons in the Iraq
invasion.
Writing on April 13 for the Danger Room blog at Wired, Hambling says that from
the description al-Rawi gives in the Al Jazeera interview of a series of
explosions that killed the occupants of buildings without destroying the
structures, “Interestingly, there is a weapon in the U.S. arsenal
designed to do exactly that. ... The AGM-114N.”
Hambling continues, “On May 15th, 2003, just a few weeks after the action
at Baghdad airport, Donald Rumsfeld praised the new weapon. ... Although
officially described as ‘metal augmented’ or even
‘hyperbaric,’ the new warhead is not distinguishable from
thermobaric weapons which produce the same sort of enhanced blast with a lower
overpressure and longer duration for more destructive effects. Like many
thermobarics, the AGM-114N used finely powdered aluminum. The military are
generally quiet about thermobarics because they have received such bad press.
Human Rights Watch criticized them because they ‘kill and injure in a
particularly brutal manner over a wide area.’ “
Weapons that have been described as thermobaric include flame-throwers and
napalm. A BBC News article on March 4, 2002, said the U.S. was using
thermobaric weapons in Afghanistan, and described how they employ a combination
of heat and pressure, “distributing a very fine cloud of explosive
material throughout the target which is then ignited. The heat and pressure
effects are formidable—soldiers caught in the blast could have the air
sucked from their bodies and even their internal organs catastrophically
destroyed.”
Too bloody to report
Retired U.S. Army Captain Eric May, a former intelligence and public affairs
officer, believes that the U.S. military did use neutron weapons in the Battle
of Baghdad. May was one of the participants in Cindy Sheehan’s original
encampment outside George Bush’s Crawford, Texas, villa.
In an interview published by the Crawford, Texas, Lone Star Iconoclast
(lonestaricon.com), May says, “The biggest story of the war became a
non-event when the truth of the matter was that it was simply too bloody an
event to report.
“The bogus rescue of Private Lynch was merely a distraction from the
truth,” said May. “And the staged photo-op of the pulling down of
Saddam Hussein’s statue was nothing more than a way to cement into
people’s minds that it was an easy victory.”
Congressional hearings on April 24 heard testimony on “the histories of
Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch and Cpl. Pat Tillman ... as egregious examples of
officials’ twisting the truth for public relations in wartime.”
(“Government Challenged on Lynch and Tillman,” New York Times,
April 24)
Captain May says, “I think the Battle of Baghdad was emblematic of the
whole misadventure in the Middle East. There is nothing that I thought then
that I don’t think now has been validated by time. The American public
still doesn’t know that there was a Battle of Baghdad because the
media-military apparatus constructed the Private Jessica Lynch mess to hold
attention.”
May continues: “The best evidence that I have from international sources,
scientific sources, is that our position was becoming untenable at the Baghdad
airport and we used a neutron warhead, at least one. That is the big secret of
Baghdad airport.
“If one looks into international data, there are reportings of enhanced
radiation of some livestock, and of human metabolic effects—death and
disease. It explains why, after the Battle of Baghdad, we got fragmentary
stories of things like truckloads of dirt being moved out and moved in. It made
no particular sense at the time, until one puts it into perspective, as a
decontamination operation. Again, that part of the Battle of Baghdad, the fact
that we went nuclear, explains a lot of things that came out afterwards and
also explains why it is that it had to be covered up.”
Whether it was a neutron bomb or the AGM-114N, the Pentagon used some sort of
Weapon of Mass Destruction on Baghdad airport.
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