Posted on 04/15/2003 1:11:24 PM PDT by Seti 1
Syria tells Washington to look closer to home
Every day at least one member of the US administration points an accusing finger at Damascus. Today it was the turn of White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. "Syria is indeed a rogue nation".
In a telephone conversation with the Spanish Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, President Bush has urged that diplomatic pressure be mounted on Syria not to harbor chemical weapons.
Syria’s response has been what it has been ever since the US began to turn up the heat days into the invasion of Iraq, accusing Damascus of harbouring Saddam Hussein loyalists to possessing a cache of undisclosed weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
“The American accusations are baseless,” reiterated Syrian foreign minister, Farouq al-Shara. Another government spokeswoman went a step further, stating that “there could be WMDs in the Middle-East. But in Israel and not in Syria.”
The reference to its neighbour was intended to underline the what many in the region feel are the double-standards that the US is adopting.
Israel has long been suspected to have an undisclosed nuclear programme, but it hasn’t come under the scanner as yet.
It has the most advanced nuclear weapons program in the Middle East. David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, clandestinely established the program in the late 1950s to meet the perceived threat to the nascent state. The program allegedly is centered at the Negev Nuclear Research Centre, outside the town of Dimona. Based on estimates of the plutonium production capacity of the Dimona reactor, Israel has approximately 100-200 nuclear explosive devices. Officially, Tel Aviv has declared that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East; however, it has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
Israel has yet to subject itself to any kind of international inspection of its Dimona nuclear reactor. It signed an international agreement in 1998 for cutting down its production of nuclear materials like plutonium but experts believe that by itself is not enough to guarantee that it does not have a nuclear capability.
The agreement it signed makes it obligatory on Israel to prove that it no longer produces any nuclear fissionable materials. But it need not any longer, given that its reactors must have over the years produced hundreds of kilograms of plutonium. Worse still, since the half life of plutonium is 24,000 years, the stock of plutonium already produced would remain at Israel’s disposal for hundreds of years.
Nor is Tel Aviv a signatory to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC). Israeli specialised military units are accused of having sabotaged water wells with typhoid and dysentery bacteria in Acre (near Haifa), Palestine during the 1948 war.
Israel has signed but not ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Some reports have suggested an offensive programme is located at the Israel Institute for Biological Research in Nes Ziona. In October 1992, an El Al airliner carrying a cargo of approximately 50 gallons of dimethyl methylphosphonate (a widely used simulant for defensive research but also a possible precursor of sarin nerve agent) destined for the Institute crashed in Amsterdam. Israel said this material was being imported to test gas masks.
The double-standards in weeding out proscribed weapons does not end here. Israel’s Supreme Court has recently given its army the nod to use Flechette tank shells, which spray thousands of dards over hundreds of metres, ripping apart anyone in the killing zone.
Its set the alarm bells ringing and even the Physicians for Human Rights, an Israeli advocacy group says that the use of such shells was in contravention of the Geneva convention covering the rules of warfare.
It is said that the shells have already killed 10 innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000. The Israeli army argues that the shells are only used selectively in its fight against terrorism. According to Jane’s Defence Weekly, the British military journal, Israel acquired the Flechette shells from none other than the US in the 1970s.
The US also has not been practising what it has been preaching about proscribed weapons.
On April 1, it dropped cluster bombs in the Iraqi town of al-Hilla, killing 33 civilians including many children. In the words of the Amnesty International, the human-rights body, “the use of cluster bombs is a gross violation of international humanitarian law.”
The war in Iraq bears testimony to more such violations by the US. The international chemical weapons convention, ratified by the US in 1997 insists that “each state party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare.”
But this didn’t deter the US President from sanctioning the use of tear gas in the war, large quantities of which were even shipped to Iraq. Bush is permitted to give the sanction by an executive order published in 1975 by the then US president Gerald Ford, which overrides within the US the 1925 Geneva protocol on chemical weapons. It means that Bush cannot be impeached on the score within the US, even though his action is in violation of international law.
Last year the British newspaper, the Guardian, carried a report saying that scientists on both sides of the Atlantic were concerned that the US was developing a new generation of weapons that undermine and possibly violate international treaties on biological and chemical warfare.
The scientists, specialists in bio-warfare and chemical weapons, say the Pentagon, with the help of the British military, is also working on "non-lethal" weapons similar to the narcotic gas used by Russian forces to end last October's Moscow theatre siege.
The report was based on a paper published in the scientific journal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by Malcolm Dando, professor of international security at the University of Bradford, and Mark Wheelis, a lecturer in microbiology at the University of California, which focussed on recent US actions that have served to undermine the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
In July 2002, the US blocked an attempt to give the convention some bite with inspections, so that member countries could check if others were keeping the agreement. Dando and Wheelis claim that this was done to cover up its own research work on biological weapons.
These include CIA efforts to copy a Soviet cluster bomb designed to disperse biological weapons, a Pentagon project to build a bio-weapon plant from commercially available materials to prove that terrorists could do the same thing, and Defence Intelligence Agency research into the possibility of genetically engineering a new strain of antibiotic-resistant anthrax. The authors also highlighted a programme to produce dried and weaponised anthrax spores, officially for testing US bio-defences, but far more spores were allegedly produced than necessary for such purposes and it is unclear whether they have been destroyed or simply stored. -- Al Jazeera
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
| To find all articles tagged or indexed using Bush Doctrine Unfold , click below: | ||||
| click here >>> | Bush Doctrine Unfold | <<< click here | ||
| (To view all FR Bump Lists, click here) | ||||
...or Saudi Arabia for that matter.
And Tom Daschle was said to be deeply, deeply saddened over this news...
Bashir Assad is in his mid-late 30's.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.