The more questionable US weapons

[Tesseract]

Especially the new Mark 77 Fire Bombs, that they say are close to naplalm, which they say they've destroyed. Also things like cluster bombs and fuel air bombs...which are indiscriminate as to who they kill. Theres also been the depleted uranium shells. And the worst of all the white phosphor (WP) shells that produce a wall of fire that they say melt the bodies of the people near it. It says that they used naplam and white phosphor in the attacks on Fallujah here:

 

http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2004/11/35013.php

[5614]

if this were true more reliable and well known news sources would have reported it and there'd be an international investigation and outcry.

[Tesseract]

No, I dont think so. The US never accepted the laws that say they cant

 

Its right here

"Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects"

Geneva, 10 October 1980

 

INCENDIARY WEAPONS (PROTOCOL III)

 

Article 1

 

Definitions

 

For the purpose of this Protocol:

 

1. "Incendiary weapon" means any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons through the action of flame, heat, or a combination thereof, produced by a chemical reaction of a substance delivered on the target.

 

(a) Incendiary weapons can take the form of, for example, flame throwers, fougasses, shells, rockets, grenades, mines, bombs and other containers of incendiary substances.

 

(b) Incendiary weapons do not include:

 

(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems;

 

(ii) Munitions designed to combine penetration, blast or fragmentation effects with an additional incendiary effect, such as armour-piercing projectiles, fragmentation shells, explosive bombs and similar combined-effects munitions in which the incendiary effect is not specifically designed to cause burn injury to persons, but to be used against military objectives, such as armoured vehicles, aircraft and installations or facilities.

 

2. "Concentration of civilians" means any concentration of civilians, be it permanent or temporary, such as in inhabited parts of cities, or inhabited towns or villages, or as in camps or columns of refugees or evacuees, or groups of nomads.

 

3. "Military objective" means, so far as objects are concerned, any object which by its nature, location, purpose or use makes an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

 

4. "Civilian objects" are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 3.

 

5. "Feasible precautions" are those precautions which are practicable or practically possible taking into account all circumstances ruling at the time, including humanitarian and military considerations.

 

Article 2

 

Protection of civilians and civilian objects

 

1.It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.

 

2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.

 

3. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.

 

4. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.

 

The US isnt a party to the protocol.

[ed84c]

Do the US still use Dum Dum bullets?

[Tesseract]

No, theyre illegal because of the Hague convention.

[ed84c]

Hague convention?

[ed84c]

and since when has illegal stopped the US?

[atinymonkey]

No, theyre illegal because of the Hague convention.

 

No, they are not illegal in the US Armed forces. The Hague Convention is only an agreement between the countrys that signed it, and America did not. Your confusing Americas loose agreement to abide by the rules in the Hague Convention with law.

 

In actual fact, in 80's the US saw fit to re-introduce 'Dum Dum' bullets for counterterrorist operations. The US figured the Hague Convention only applied when two nations were at war. Snipers in the US forces and Police use soft-point rounds, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Because they are nice guys.

[Tesseract]

Its not surprising.

[Encrypted]

lol...

 

napalm and the phosphor bombs sound scary though.

Do they really use it!!!!???

 

No news source is reliable in my opinion, especially after i watched fahrenheit9/11.

 

Encrypted

[husmusen]

There is no such thing as a war without hideous suffering often by those who least deserve it, while the generals hole up in nice safe bunkers and dine on officers food,drink officers coffee and smoke officers cigars.

 

I don't know why people think firebombs are evil and a bullet wound with earth contamination, and possibly rotting corpse juice, leading to 3 days of pain, delerium and death isn't.

 

Perhaps too many movies in which it's 'bang bang, people get funny expression and fall over'.

 

Not that I think napalm and firebombs et al are good.

I'm feeling just a tad cyncial today I fear.

 

Cheers.

[Glider]

"God only knows it's not what we would choose to do

forward he cried from the rear

and the front rank died

and the General sat, and the lines on the map

moved from side to side"

(Pink Floyd - Us and Them)

[blike]

No, they are not illegal in the US Armed forces. The Hague Convention is only an agreement between the countrys that signed it, and America did not. Your confusing Americas loose agreement to abide by the rules in the Hague Convention with law.

Indeed, although America did sign the Hague Convention IV, which prohibits the use of projectiles that cause unnecessary suffering.

 

Snipers in the US forces and Police use soft-point rounds, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Because they are nice guys

Police don't use expanding bullets. For lethal purposes, they use standard bullets. For riot control, they use plastic (sometimes called rubber) bullets. These bullets are mostly nonlethal and do not penetrate the skin. They can cause extreme bodily harm in some cases but are not the same thing as hollow or soft-tip bullets.

 

The US stopped using the bullets, but in 1985 the Judge Advocate General decided that expanding point ammunition is legally permissible for counterterrorist operations not involving the engagement of armed forces of another state.

 

In 1990, the Department of State, Army General Counsel, and Offices of the Judge Advocates General of the Navy and Air Force said, "The purpose of the 7.62mm "open-tip" MatchKing bullet is to provide maximum accuracy at very long range. ... Bullet fragmentation is not a design characteristic, however, nor a purpose for use of the MatchKing by United States Army snipers. Wounds caused by MatchKing ammunition are similar to those caused by a fully jacketed military ball bullet, which is legal under the law of war, when compared at the same ranges and under the same conditions. (The Sierra #2200 BTHP) not only meets, but exceeds, the law of war obligations of the United States for use in combat."

 

In short, they concluded that the open-tip bullet is more accurate at long range, and wounds are consistent with regular ammunition at the recommended range.

 

It shall cease to be binding from the time when, in a war between the Contracting Parties, one of the belligerents is joined by a non-Contracting Power.

 

Info here.

[Gilded]

Cerosin-remake of napalm, U-grenades and Daisy Cutters. Ehh. I can barely wait for the day U.S. pulls a salted/cobalt-shelled nuke attack.

[Guest Spandex]

if this were true more reliable and well known news sources would have reported it and there'd be an international investigation and outcry.

 

Was just passing and *had* to register and respond to this

 

Like the prisoner abuse scandals, many things these days appear online and take a long while to reach mainstream news, if they make it at all.

 

News organisations report what the government *says*.. and don't require evidence for it because they deem "what the government says" to BE news. Whereas things that contradict the government line require huge amounts of evidence before they can be published. There are severe penalties for people who ignore this, e.g. consider the immense trouble that ensued for the BBC and Andrew Gilligan after that one broadcast. It doesn't even matter that the substance of Gilligan's claim seems to be true (i.e. the document *was* "sexed up" and the government knew there were no WMD that could be fired in 45 minutes etc).

 

As an example, consider the recent Lancet paper about the increased death toll in Iraq. This presents carefully collected evidence and analysis, peer reviewed by experts and suggests the most likely figure is 98,000. The UK government stated that it "didn't accept" these figures... they were not required to produce rebuttals or reasoned argument. They did not have to address the evidence at all. They just make a statement and this is deemed "newsworthy" and the figures are largely forgotten.

 

Consider a hypothetical opposite case where a mainstream UK news station decided to broadcast it's main story as being "The reasons given for invading Iraq have turned out to be false, there must be another reason, probably oil and power". That station would be deemed hugely controversial, receive a great deal of government flak and have to produce a *lot* of evidence. All this despite it being an entirely reasonable interpretation of the facts. It's not guaranteed to be true of course, but it's at least as reasonable as reporting, unchallenged, the government's assertion that Saddam has WMD, whilst ignoring UN experts who are saying he hasn't. If you start digging for evidence, the oil/power idea becomes much more credible and WMD/Terrorists/Humanitarian/etc reasons become much less credible.

 

There's no conspiracy of course, just an imbalance in the weight of evidence required. The remarkable thing about all this is not that it occurs or the mechanisms by which it occurs... we should hardly be surprised if those with the power to do so seek to rubbish stories that show them in a bad light. What is interesting is that most people, including many of those involved, are unaware of it all. The idea of "conspiracy theories" is used to dismiss this sort of analysis out of hand. I hope you'd agree that my argument here doesn't require any secret meetings or conspiracy. Just the natural consequence of power that is able to exert influence over mass media.

 

I try to treat "news" (regardless of source) as scientifically as I can... requiring a body of evidence, bearing in mind vested interests and checking sources as far as possible. Of course it's hard and I usually fail as I have my own biases and it's just not possible to check all information any more than it's possible to personally reproduce all empirical data. But's it's often very easy to identify pairs of ideas that seem to contradict each other. The Iraq war has been a really good example of this. e.g. Can we be invading to help Iraqis and then be careless enough to kill 100,000 of them? Can we be invading to help them and yet forget to even keep an official count of how many we kill? Can we believe they had WMD and yet not prepare our soldiers to deal with WMD attacks? Can we believe the coalition has so far spent $250 billion because they cared about the fate of 26 million Iraqis when there are billions dying through poverty/disease that this money could have helped far more? etc.

 

With regards to the specific claim about phosphor weapons etc.. I'm personally inclined to believe it for several reasons:-

1. It's well known the US has chemical weapons of various sorts (and they refuse to be party to laws and protocols restricting them)

2. I've seen at least a couple of eyewitness reports online (which could be fabricated I know).

3. The people denying them have a vested interest in doing so and have denied many other similar things that turned out to be true.

 

I reckon I'd put my certainty at about 60%... always open to doubt

[Gilded]

I just realized that this is very simple. Bush is putting the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in good use, with a few modifications: The more awful civilian casualties get, the more certain it is that it won't make it to the news.

[atinymonkey]

Indeed, although America did sign the Hague Convention IV, which prohibits the use of projectiles that cause unnecessary suffering.

The US signed a few conventions that were a suppliments to the original Hauge Convention, such as 'The Hauge Convention on Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption' in 1994. Such suppliments carry the tag that the respondants will be :-

 

Guided by the principles concerning the protection of cultural property during armed conflict, as established in the Conventions of The Hague of 1899 and of 1907 and in the Washington Pact of 15 April, 1935

 

Police don't use expanding bullets. For lethal purposes, they use standard bullets. For riot control, they use plastic (sometimes called rubber) bullets. These bullets are mostly nonlethal and do not penetrate the skin. They can cause extreme bodily harm in some cases but are not the same thing as hollow or soft-tip bullets.

I specified Police Snipers, who seem to use them on occasions where hostages and firearms are involved. I think the SAS used hollow tips in Iranian embassy, I suspect that anti terrorist activities allow the use of prohibited ammo types. Google doesn't provide immediate results though, so I can't substanciate that. Perhaps it's only the Army.

 

The US stopped using the bullets, but in 1985 the Judge Advocate General decided that expanding point ammunition is legally permissible for counterterrorist operations not involving the engagement of armed forces of another state.

 

Which means they are 'legal' in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Slovenia, Mozambique etc.

[Artorius]

IMO expanding bullets in scenario's of counterterrorism are perfectly logical.In hostage situations the abilty to quickly incapacitate the terrorist is vital to a succesfull outcome(The liberty of the hostage/s and their numbers are reflected on this success)

Simply injuring a terrorist, will result in the loss of life of as many hostages as possble.In the time available and amunition supply at the terrorists disposal.

[Sayonara]

Especially if they're actually holding a gun to a hostage at the time.

[-Demosthenes-]

...The US figured the Hague Convention only applied when two nations were at war....

It is important to note that the US isn't fighting a nation.

[atinymonkey]

IMO expanding bullets in scenario's of counterterrorism are perfectly logical.

 

For hostage situations' date=' I tend to agree.

 

It is important to note that the US isn't fighting a nation.

 

I made that point by saying the use of hollow points is 'legal' in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, Slovenia, Mozambique etc.

[-Demosthenes-]

But it's more important than that. Terrorist groups aren't a part of a nation so they are not given this protection. This is not a "hollow point" that's what it was written to accomplish.

[atinymonkey]

But it's more important than that. Terrorist groups aren't a part of a nation so they are not given this protection.

All of humanity is given the same rights and protection. Whatever is done to wrong the least of us diminishes us all. You cannot pick and choose the members of a society, or pick the members of humanity. Labeling one man as a terrorist and the other as a freedom fighter creates a line that is distinguishable only by perspective.

 

I find your point of view oddly inconsistent coming from a resident of a country founded by rebellion and insurgence.

 

This is not a "hollow point" that's what it was written to accomplish.

I think you may be confusing the term 'hollow point'. I was not inferring you were making a hollow (empty) point, I was referring to the ammunition know as 'dum dums' which are cartridges with a hollowed out point (hence 'hollow point').

[-Demosthenes-]

All of humanity is given the same rights and protection. Whatever is done to wrong the least of us diminishes us all. You cannot pick and choose the members of a society, or pick the members of humanity. Labeling one man as a terrorist and the other as a freedom fighter creates a line that is distinguishable only by perspective.

 

I find your point of view oddly inconsistent coming from a resident of a country founded by rebellion and insurgence.

It was written to protect people of a nation, not a rebellion or terrorist group, dispite what you or I think, thats what is in the treaty.

So obviously you can lable people as terrorists.

[Sayonara]

They are "people of a nation".