A week ago, Israel flip-flopped and
admitted that it used phosphorous bombs during its attacks on Lebanon.
Phoshorous is nasty stuff -- it reacts with the air, burning people literally to the bone. Robert Fisk reports seeing dead babies, pulled from drawers in morgues, bursting into flames upon contact with the air.
And now Fisk reports that Israel seems to have used something else in the war this summer -- some type of munition that contains enriched uranium.
More over the fold.
Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas - until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air.
I saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into flames. Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon during the summer - except for "marking" targets - even after civilians were photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with phosphorous munitions.
Fisk claims that many Lebanese believe that both the U.S. and Iran were able to use the war this summer as an excuse to test some new secret weapons:
Many Lebanese, however, long ago concluded that the latest Lebanon war was a weapons testing ground for the Americans and Iranians, who respectively supply Israel and Hizbollah with munitions. Just as Israel used hitherto-unproven US missiles in its attacks, so the Iranians were able to test-fire a rocket which hit an Israeli corvette off the Lebanese coast, killing four Israeli sailors and almost sinking the vessel after it suffered a 15-hour on-board fire.
So what were these new weapons that Israel used which left behind enriched Uranium?
Well, nobody knows yet:
According to Dr Chris Busby, the British Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed "elevated radiation signatures". Both have been forwarded for further examination to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire for mass spectrometry - used by the Ministry of Defence - which has confirmed the concentration of uranium isotopes in the samples.
Dr Busby's initial report states that there are two possible reasons for the contamination. "The first is that the weapon was some novel small experimental nuclear fission device or other experimental weapon (eg, a thermobaric weapon) based on the high temperature of a uranium oxidation flash ... The second is that the weapon was a bunker-busting conventional uranium penetrator weapon employing enriched uranium rather than depleted uranium." A photograph of the explosion of the first bomb shows large clouds of black smoke that might result from burning uranium.
So apparently our government, in league with the Israeli government, is trying out new mysterious weapons on civilian populations which may not only be illegal, but which may permanently pollute our air, water, and soil with radioactivity. And who is holding them accountable?
Nobody.
And "they hate us for our freedoms". Right .......
Coming clean about this kind of nonsense, and committing ourselves to putting an end to it, will go a long ways toward restoring peace around the world.
But who's going to do that? Republicans?
No.