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Saddam Hussein’s former defense Chief Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikritieh, cynically dubbed ‘Chemical Ali’ by the US government was hung yesterday by the US puppet government in Iraq. That is to say, yesterday, the US government hung a former Iraqi politician in an effort to justify its almost 7 year old invasion, occupation and wholesale destruction of Iraq and the genocidal murder of millions of Iraqi civilians.

The US government has long claimed that Saddam, and Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikritieh were responsible for the gassing of thousands of Iraqi Kurds in the town of Halabja in 1998 as part of the Iran-Iraq war. Strong evidence however suggests that the Iranians were responsible for the attack. Even stronger evidence exists to support the argument that the US government far-surpasses any other nation in the use of chemical and biological weapons against innocent civilians.

Dr Stephen C Pelletiere was the CIA’s senior political analyst during the Iran-Iraq War. In a Late Night Live interview in 2003 with the Australian broadcaster, Phillip Adams, Pelletier stated that he and his colleagues who investigated the gassing in Halabja did not believe that Saddam Hussein committed the atrocity.

Pelletier told Adams:

“Halabja was a battle between the Iraqis and the Iranians and the Kurds were … collateral damage”. “Halabja was a tragedy of war, it was not a war crime”. Pelletier goes on to say that Iraq did not have cyanide gas, Iran did.

“I examined the case very deeply afterwards … those of us who examined the bodies concluded that most of the Kurds who died, or the ones we examined, died of cyanide poisoning” … “it is spin doctoring” … “people who die in a battle are unfortunate victims.

Pelletiere wrote on January 31, 2003 in the NY Times:

“And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

“The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds’ bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

“These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned.”

Even if it were true that the Iraqi government used chemical weapons to quell the opportunistic Iraqi-Kurd rebellion during the Iran-Iraq war, it is common knowledge that the Regan and Thatcher governments (among others) provided them, in full expectation that they would be used as part of their grander plan to curb Iranian influence in the Middle East.

But what surely galls the most is the fact that the American government itself has committed much worse atrocities with the use of chemical weapons. We could cite the massive napalming of villagers during the Vietnam war for but one example, but it seems more appropriate to use an example from the Iraq invasion.

During the ‘battle of Fallujah’ in 2004, the US military reduced much of the city to rubble and used chemical weapons, poison gas and white phosphorous on the civilian population, killing an estimated 6000 thousands Iraqis. Of these, the army reported that 42 were insurgents.

In his story Fallujah Refugees Tell of Life and Death in the Kill Zone published on December 3, 2004 reporter Dahr Jamail states:

Burhan Fasa’a, an Iraqi journalist who worked for the Lebanese satellite TV station, LBC and who was in Fallujah for nine days during the most intense combat, said Americans grew easily frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English.

“Americans did not have interpreters with them,” Fasa’a said, “so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and [they] shot people because [the people] didn’t obey [the soldiers’] orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English.” He also added, “Soldiers thought the people were rejecting their orders, so they shot them. But the people just couldn’t understand them.”

A man named Khalil, who asked not to use his last name for fear of reprisals, said he had witnessed the shooting of civilians who were waving white flags while they tried to escape the city.

“I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks,” said Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, a resident of Fallujah. “This happened so many times.”

Other refugees recounted similar stories. “I saw so many civilians killed there, and I saw several tanks roll over the wounded in the streets,” said Aziz Abdulla, 27 years old, who fled the fighting last November. Another resident, Abu Aziz, said he also witnessed American armored vehicles crushing people he believes were alive.

Abdul Razaq Ismail, another resident who fled Fallujah, said: “I saw dead bodies on the ground and nobody could bury them because of the American snipers. The Americans were dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates near Fallujah.”

A man called Abu Hammad said he witnessed US troops throwing Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates River. Abu Hammed and others also said they saw Americans shooting unarmed Iraqis who waved white flags.

Believing that American and Iraqi forces were bent on killing anyone who stayed in Fallujah, Hammad said he watched people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. “Even then the Americans shot them with rifles from the shore,” he said. “Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot.”

White phosphorus is highly flammable and ignites on contact with oxygen. If the substance hits someone’s body, it will burn until deprived of oxygen.

Defence website Globalsecurity.org states that “phosphorus burns on the skin are deep and painful… These weapons are particularly nasty because white phosphorus continues to burn until it disappears… it could burn right down to the bone.”
half of Fallujah’s 120 moques were destroyed by the US military and air force. Night-time bombing raids hit a clinic inside the Sunni Muslim city, killing doctors, nurses and patients. Body parts were everywhere as god’s holy warriors dropped one tonne bombs on the already devastated city.

Dr. Khalid ash-Shaykhli, an official at Iraq’s health ministry, said that the U.S. military used internationally banned weapons during its deadly offensive in the city of Fallujah. He said that researches, prepared by his medical team, prove that U.S. occupation forces used internationally prohibited substances, including mustard gas, nerve gas, and other burning chemicals in their attacks in the war-torn city.

The health official announced his findings at a news conference in the health ministry building in Baghdad. The press conference was attended by more than 20 Iraqi and foreign media networks, including the Iraqi ash-Sharqiyah TV network, the Iraqi as-Sabah newspaper, the U.S. Washington Post and the Knight-Ridder service.

Today, doctors in Fallujah are seeing a massive rise in chronic deformities in infants

For an in depth investigation of the use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians in Fallujah by the US military see this Italian national Televsion documentary entitled ‘Fallujah – The Hidden Massacre‘