6-19-05, 9:27 am
Last March, this website reported that official and media sources had uncovered the use of napalm by US military forces in Iraq.
We wrote:
'Weapons such as mustard gas, nerve gas, and napalm have been banned by international convention since the 1980s.
Ironically, it was the claim, later proven false, that Saddam Hussein possessed and sought to build stockpiles of these banned weapons that led to the US invasion of Iraq in March of 2003.
The US remains the lone hold out on the napalm ban agreement and the only country that continues to use the substance.
We received some e-mails from readers (some angry, some gentle) suggesting we had gotten the story wrong. Unfortunately, as it turns out, we were right.
Revelations this week in Britain showed that the US administration lied to the British government about using the internationally banned weapon napalm.
Despite persistent rumors of injuries among Iraqis consistent with the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, Adam Ingram, the Defense minister, assured Labour MPs in January that US forces had not used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq.
But Mr Ingram admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. 'The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you,' he told Mr Cohen. 'I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position.'
Mr Ingram said 30 MK77 firebombs were used by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the invasion of Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003.
The Iraq Analysis Group, a UK-based website that provides information related to the war in Iraq, provided detailed analysis of the use of napalm firebombs in Iraq. Mike Lewis, a spokesman for the group, is quoted as telling the Independent: 'The US has used internationally reviled weapons that the UK refuses to use, and has then apparently lied to UK officials, showing how little weight the UK carries in influencing American policy.'
Another story this website correctly addressed, well ahead of the mainstream media, in fact, ahead of even most other news sites, was the Downing Street Memo. While corporate news media hemmed and hawed about dealing with the story, we along with a handful of other web news sources pressed on demanding to know the truth and calling for an investigation.
The Downing Street Memo is a memo containing minutes of a July 2002 meeting of high-level British officials and advisors to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. This website published the memo just four days after it was first published in the British press. Read it here.
In this memo one British official reports his impressions of the Bush administration’s view on the Iraq war – well before Bush publicized his intentions, well before Congress authorized an invasion, and well before any ultimatum was laid out for Saddam Hussein to follow:
Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
For more of our take on the Downing Street Memo, click here.
But we could not have brought this story without the efforts of websites like and . We urge readers to support the call by for a thorough investigation into exactly what the White House was doing and thinking during its drive to war.
In all Bush’s war on Iraq has gotten 1,700 US military people killed, 12,500 wounded, and Iraqi civilian casualties into the tens of thousands, possibly even as many as 100,000.
It is time to end this war. We urge your support for troop withdrawal. Call or write your representatives (House and Senate) today to insist on their support for withdrawal.
--Send us your thoughts at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
