US Accused Of Using Neutron Bombs Against Iraq

April 9, 2007
AlJazeera

The former commander of Iraq's Republican Guard has accused the US of using non-conventional weapons in its war against the Middle East country.

Saifeddin Fulayh Hassan Taha al-Rawi told Al Jazeera that US forces used neutron and phosphorus bombs during their assault on Baghdad airport before the April 9 capture of the Iraqi capital.

Al-Rawi is one of the most wanted associates of Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi leader, still on the run. "The enemy used neutron and phosphorus weapons against Baghdad airport... there were bodies burnt to their bones," he said.

The bombs annihilated soldiers but left the buildings and infrastructure at the airport intact, he added.

A neutron bomb is a thermonuclear weapon that produces minimal blast and heat but releases large amounts of lethal radiation that can penetrate armour and is especially destructive to human tissue.

About 2,000 elite Republican Guard troops "fought until they were martyred", according to al-Rawi.

He said the Iraqi military command was surprised by the speed of the US land offensive, expecting air bombardment to last much longer.

"We had not expected the enemy to launch its land offensive from the very first or second day. We expected the air raids to last at least a month," he said.

"The land offensive came at the same time as the air offensive. That was a situation we did not expect," he told Al Jazeera.

Al-Rawi, who carries a $1m US bounty on his head, was also the jack of clubs on the deck of cards of 55 most wanted Iraqis distributed by the Pentagon before the invasion in 2003.

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Battle of Baghdad Cover-Up Four Years Later, Interview With CAPTAIN ERIC MAY :

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.

A book published about the Battle of Baghdad, David Zucchino’s Thunder Run, starts on the morning after the Battle of Baghdad started, mid-way through the battle! It was a propaganda book.

The truth is that the battle started April 5, the night that Baghdad Bob said that they had counterattacked us at the Baghdad Airport and there was a sustained fight that went on for several hours.

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.

You can’t go to a country to try to make sure that nobody tries to start a war with WMDs against you and WMD ’em. It’s a highly embarrassing position to be in.

I think Baghdad laid bare that we really weren’t going into a limited war at all, we were going into a world war, and were prepared to use nukes.

Incidentally, since the nuking of Baghdad Airport, the Bush Administration has retrofitted our military doctrine to allow for the use of tactical nukes in that sort of situation.

ICONOCLAST: If there was, indeed, a neutron warhead used, would it not have saved the lives of many of our soldiers and, actually, been the proper thing to do if we were losing that battle?

I am thinking of the American lives Truman probably saved by ending World War II the way he did.

CAPTAIN MAY: From a strictly tactical point of view, using a neutron warhead killed the Iraqis who were in the open, while giving U.S. forces, who were inside armor, a chance at survival.

Had I been one of the commanders on the battlefield at Baghdad Airport, I would have preferred the neutron option to being overrun and destroyed by the Iraqi forces.

But war is never simply tactical. As Clausewitz, the Prussian military philosopher, puts it, "War is a continuation of politics by other means."

It’s on the political level that the nuking of Baghdad Airport was a disastrous decision.

Unlike the nuking of Japan, which was admitted to the American people, the nuking of Baghdad was kept from them, meaning that we had decided to keep them in the dark about the conduct of the war.

Further, the Arab world knows very well what we did in Baghdad, and that only added to their hatred for the United States, so the big picture of the Baghdad Airport neutron bomb is that we saved ourselves from limited military failure, but thereby caused ourselves unlimited domestic and foreign disaster.

It’s one of history’s great ironies that the Bush Administration was screaming that WMDs would be used on us in the Iraq war, and then when all is said and done, WMDs were used — not on us, but by us.

The Battle of Baghdad is one of the many events of this war that simply show that our government has lied to us and that the media has been embedded by that government in the very worst connotations of that word.

In fact, the word embedded should have never been admitted into the lexicon of the American media were it not for the fact that they were in bed with the government.

More On The Neutron Bomb (added by me), From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_bomb