Veterans, familiar with White Phosphorous is it a "Chemical Weapon"?

[greblc]

I don't think so. My guess is NATO feels the same way.

Other non-vets feel free to weigh in.

[TrogL]

1. Nothing about their use of it as a weapon in my training

We treated it as a "dangerous good".

[MnFats]

5. might be worthwhile to ask those it was used on..

....and had flesh burned away down to the bone.
....sorry Mr. bush if that's unpatriotic

[TrogL]

7. We did have extensive training on how do deal with it

when exposed to it, but that was in the same training module as mustard gas - another banned substance.

[personman]

2. According to the Geneva Conventions, when used on people, yes.

Unless you call them enemy combatants because it's the loop hole excuse for everything. I'd imagine because noone who wrote those thought anyone would be so evil as to change what they call their prisoners or the enemy just to evade human rights laws. Disgusting.


-personman

Edit: I'm no veteran and have no military experiance. So correct me if I'm mistaken here.

[tocqueville]

3. it's an academic question

http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/htmlall/57JMM8?OpenDocument&View=defaultBody&style=custo_print

WP falls under the category of "inhuman weapons"

[dogman]

4. Good info here.

This is a site randi Rhodes talked about and hhas good info and other links. I wondered too since gunpowder is a chemical mix. i think the larger problem here is how it was used.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/wp.htm

[greblc]

8. I agree. If civilians were targeted it's a problem.

Knowing that insurgents and civilians can be indistiguishable what do you do?

[Zen Democrat]

6. White Phosphorus is a killer if used on humans.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4441902.stm

If particles of ignited white phosphorus land on a person's skin, they can continue to burn right through flesh to the bone. Toxic phosphoric acid can also be released into wounds, risking phosphorus poisoning.

.....Exposure to white phosphorus smoke in the air can also cause liver, kidney, heart, lung or bone damage and even death.

A former US soldier who served in Iraq says breathing in smoke close to a shell caused the throat and lungs to blister until the victim suffocated, with the phosphorus continuing to burn them from the inside.

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Some have claimed the use of white phosphorus contravenes the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. This bans the use of any "toxic chemical" weapons which causes "death, harm or temporary incapacitation to humans or animals through their chemical action on life processes".

Professor Paul Rogers, of the University of Bradford's department of peace studies, told the BBC that white phosphorus could probably be considered a chemical weapon if deliberately aimed at civilians.

[kentuck]

9. In my Army training, it was one of the most cruel WMD...

If you got it on you skin, it would eat holes in your body all the way to the bones...Terrible,terrible WMD..

[TahitiNut]

10. Willie Pete is a chemical weapon. Yes.

So's napalm. I've only personally seen WP used for flares, but I saw napalm used "defensively" one February morning in '69. I wasn't close enough myself (thank God) to see any krispy kritters, though. The ridge line was probably a bit less than a klick away.

[CHIMO]

11. Pentagon Reverses Position and Admits U.S. Troops Used White Phosphorous A

Pentagon Reverses Position and Admits U.S. Troops Used White Phosphorous Against Iraqis in Fallujah


GEORGE MONBIOT: The Chemical Weapons Convention could not be clearer. There are two kinds of chemicals listed under it: One is the scheduled chemicals, such as phosgene and mustard gas and VX gas which cannot be used under any circumstances; then there is all other toxic chemicals which may be used for purposes which do not depend on the use of their toxic properties. However, the moment you use one of those other chemicals for its toxic properties against human beings, you are in breach of the convention. And what we saw very clearly from that extract in Field Artillery magazine was that they were firing these munitions directly at the combatants in Fallujah in order to exert the toxic effects of those munitions upon those combatants to flush them out so they could then be killed. In doing so, the U.S. Army was acting in direct contravention of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It committed a war crime.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes. I'll coach you from what he said. He was an embedded reporter with the Marines during the siege of Fallujah, which, as you say, took place in April 2004. And his article goes as follows: “’Gun up,’ Millikin yelled, grabbing a white phosphorus round from a nearby ammo can and holding it over the tube. ‘Fire!’ Bogert yelled, as Millikin dropped it. The boom kicked dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call ‘shake and bake’ into a cluster of buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week.” Now, the key term there is into a cluster of buildings. In other words, again they were not using this white phosphorus for the purposes of illumination or for the purposes of smoke screening, both of which are legal uses of white phosphorus in war. They were using it as a weapon in order to flush the insurgents out of those buildings. Doing so is in breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, the corporate media has picked it up pretty well comprehensively, and they have messed it up pretty well comprehensively. The misreporting of this issue is second almost to none that I've ever come across before. They have managed to mix up the use of white phosphorus against military versus civilian targets. For example, repeatedly, I'm saying, in the media, that it's a war crime if it's used against civilians but not if it’s used against the military. The Chemical Weapons Convention does not mention the word civilian. It does not mention the word non-combatant. There is no distinction made. If you use white phosphorus as a weapon against human beings, that is a war crime. It doesn't matter whether those human beings are civilians. It doesn't matter whether they are military. It remains a war crime.

They've mixed up several other things, as well. And the result of this is that if we're not careful, we can see excuses made for the use of this weapon as a weapon of war. And the whole point of the Chemical Weapons Convention is to prevent that from recurring. If we look back to the first World War and saw how mustard gas and phosgene were used and saw in the subsequent commemorations of that war these lines and lines of men with their hands on each other's shoulders walking along, because they could not see, because they had been blinded by this gas or their lungs had been destroyed by this gas, the undermining of the Chemical Weapons Convention threatens to bring about the kind of gas warfare which we saw in the first World War and which we saw in the war between Iran and Iraq. It's absolutely essential that we get this story right and we make it completely impossible for states such as the United States or, indeed, any other, to use poison toxic chemicals as a weapon of war and to use it ever again.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/17/1515223