How true is the American claim and how wise is stirring up war tragedies?
The dispatch reports that the Embassy issued a written statement a day before to rebut the claims of the Americans using chemical weapons and to draw attention to the point that this news in Yeni Safak of 6 March was only put forward worldwide by President Hugo Chaves of Venezuela, the Cuban news agency and Turkey along with China and Iran. The press release also categorically rebuts the claim that the American forces had used mustard gas, nerve gas or chemical weapons in Felluce and stresses that the Al Qaeda webpage, “Islammemo.cc” is the source of this news. The Embassy press release goes on:
“The news in question was later used by the pro-Jihad website ‘Jihad Unspun’, notorious for disseminating wrong and misleading news. This fabricated claim was later quoted by the Cuban news service ‘Prensa Latina’, as well as the newspapers in Turkey, China and Iran. All this chain of events shows how fabricated news can turn out to be of worldwide interest due to uncertainties.”
Whether or not the Americans used chemical weapons in Felluce or elsewhere in Iraq is hardly interesting for a journalist who is apparently not an expert of these gases used by the police at times and those described as chemical weapons. It is certain, however, that the Americans in Iraq did not use the same poisonous gases in Felluce as Saddam used in Halepje two decades ago, but will a journalist not quote an eyewitness if he hears from him that some harmful gases were used in a certain trouble spot? Only a few days ago, the western media was full of exaggerated news of the Turkish police using harmful gases against women in Istanbul just because a couple of Turkish policemen most probably bought off by certain agents pretended to be kicking someone fallen on the ground during an illegal demonstration? Close scrutiny of the relevant films shows that the policeman in question was pretending to kick the woman on the ground in passing rather than delivering a vicious kick to hurt her.
It was not only Yeni Safak and other anti-Americans named by the Embassy press release that denounced the American troops for the Felluce massacre, but also the western media and the American and British peoples themselves. It was Milliyet that first put forward the claim of poisonous gas utilization in Iraq in the upsurge of excitement of the Turkish people over the horrible tragedies of the Felluce events. Here are some quotes from Can Dundar’s article in Milliyet back on 25 November 2004:
“A prominent member of the Nazzal tribe, who owns half of Felluje, told me over the phone about the latest situation in the town that 1500 resistance fighters defended Felluce for three weeks against 15,000 fully equipped American soldiers… Nazzal said, ‘Now Felluce is like an earthquake disaster zone; 6000 buildings have been flattened to the ground; nearly 5000 civilians were killed; Mass Destruction Weapons were used. They fired chemical weapons, phosphorus bombs, nerve gases. They mostly killed women and children, they bombed our hospital. In tears a friend of mine buried, in the yard of his house, his child who died after a week of starvation. Human history has not seen such a massacre. They make announcements over loud speakers in the town to distribute food, and then they take hostage the people who turn up by shoving them into tanks. They attack the resistance forces by using them as shields…”
Furthermore, it was the western media that reported about the American forces using cluster bombs and other horrible weapons in Iraq. In the first year of the Iraq war, Turkish security authorities received a short e-mail saying that in the first hours of the morning the CNN and/or BBC World had reported from Baghdad that the depleted uranium shells used by the American forces in Iraq had begun to be telling on the American soldiers themselves. Hundreds of American soldiers were now suffering from cancer because all the Iraqi tanks and war materials had been diffusing radiation. The writer of the e-mail (who happens to be the writer of this article, Vedat Uras,) remarked, “I was very pleased to read in the press that we were getting scrapped war materials from Iraq for our defence industry as they refuse to supply the special steel needed for it. But I now worry if these people are secretly poisoning us with radiation from these scrapped tanks.”