BY ROHAN PEARCE
The main argument made by the US government to justify its planned invasion of Iraq is that, as George Bush told reporters at a March 13 press conference: “[Iraq] is a nation run by a man who is willing to kill his own people by using chemical weapons.”
But the Iraqi regime is not the only government to have used chemical and biological weapons on its own citizens. The US Department of Defense (DoD) revealed in January: “In the 1960s, the Department of Defense conducted a series of chemical and biological warfare vulnerability tests on naval ships known collectively as Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense [SHAD].”
The DoD believes that “there were more than a hundred individual tests planned under the SHAD program with unrelated names, but the lack of test results may indicate that many tests were never actually executed”.
Although the DoD has previously maintained that SHAD was the full extent of chemical and biological weapons tests on humans, an October 9 Associated Press article revealed that documents released by the department on October 8 show other tests included deadly nerve agents in Alaska and spraying bacteria over Hawaii”.
The weapons tested by the Pentagon on civilians and military personnel included both sarin and VX nerve gases (the US government has accused Iraq of possessing both sarin and VX).
Another weapon tested was the spraying of the bacteria Bacillus globigii over a Hawaiian island in 1965 to simulate a biological weapons attack.
On September 24, Project Sunshine, an anti-biological and chemical weapons group, accused the Pentagon of “conducting a chemical weapons research and development program in violation of international arms control law”, following an 18-month investigation by the group. According to Project Sunshine, the DoD continues to breach the international Chemical Weapons Convention as well as the department's own regulations and has attempted to block access to evidence of its chemical weapons program.
From Green Left Weekly, October 16, 2002.
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