We Are Better Than This
Torture is Un-American


With Thanksgiving just around the corner, I was looking for some good news to be grateful about, but stumbled instead Bush, Blair, Bombs and al-Jazeera in the WP. One segment discusses the US's admitted use of white phosphorus as a weapon. The secong paragraph below describes what this substance does to the victim:

White phosphorus, notes the BBC, is "a solid, waxy man-made chemical which ignites spontaneously ... and produces an intense heat, bright light and thick pillars of smoke." It is used "in munitions, to mark enemy targets and to produce smoke for concealing troop movements. It can also be used as an incendiary device to firebomb enemy positions."

The BBC explains that "if particles of ignited white phosphorus land on a person's skin, they can continue to burn right through flesh to the bone. ... Exposure to white phosphorus smoke in the air can also cause liver, kidney, heart, lung or bone damage and even death."

In the Persian Gulf, Islam Online says the Pentagon's admission vindicates its battlefield report from Fallujah a year ago that "US occupation troops are gassing resistance fighters and confronting them with internationally-banned chemical weapons."

While 80 countries have signed Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, the United States is not one of them, notes the BBC. The treaty bans signatories from using incendiary weapons against civilian targets.

"But America is a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which it ratified in 1997, and that agreement forbids the use of any substance to kill or harm either soldiers or civilians if it is being used mostly for its toxicity," says The Times of London.

For some strange reason, which I'm sure Agen could explain and fix, the whole quote was treated like a link, when I moved it to the block quote. I have no idea how to fix it, and have reached the point in my life that I don't much care if it is wrong. I do care, however, when my country is disgraced by using tactics more suitable for terrorists. I also grieve for those victims. I promise, however, to find something for which to be thankful.

[UPDATE from Agen - 1:24pm PST] I care enough to fix the HTML, as well as work on fixing our policies!