Palestine Think Tank Digest
Iraq – Another Hiroshima? Investigative report
Posted: 14 Oct 2008 11:49 AM CDT
Maurizio Torrealta, of RaiNews24, presents the premiere of an interview with a US war veteran who makes this denouncement: “we used an atomic bomb in Iraq in 1991.
“There were very few Italian news reporters, but there were Iranians, Russians, Japanese and Spanish ones. It makes one stop and think.” Maurizio Torrealta of RaiNews24 has presented today in a preview the latest investigation that reveals a disturbing scenario. The United States, during the Gulf War of 1991, and to be precise, on the final day of the conflict, had released an atomic warhead with five kilotons of power in the area of Basra, in southern Iraq.
An insidious ghost. To understand this power, the bomb dropped upon Nagasaki in 1945 was twenty-two kilotons, therefore, it is a ‘small nuclear warhead’. But this does not make what took place less serious. “An intervention on a Canadian site made by a United States veteran, which could be found on Internet, was the starting place for the investigation,” Torrealta reveals. “He told of an atomic warhead that was dropped over the area of Basra, near the border with Iran, during the operation called Desert Storm (the attack against Iraq lead by the USA in 1991, after the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam’s troops). From that moment we were alerted and we were able to get in contact with the USA veteran. We worked for a year in order to convince him to be interviewed on video and to tell his story, which has been confirmed in every detail. Then we compared his declarations with the surveys of the International Seismological Center (a German non-governmental organisation that monitors the seismographic events in the world). It could only just be a coincidence, but on the same day, the seismographs registered activity equal to that which could be caused by a bomb of this sort in the same area of the complaint of the USA veteran.”
This could resolve every doubt, couldn’t it? “The definitive proof would be taken from the survey of the waves of the seismic event, to understand if they are on the surface or if they are underground,” the journalist of RaiNews24 responded, “because in that case the mystery would be resolved, in that if they were surface waves, it would not be caused by an earthquake.” It would seem to be a very simple thing to check, but this is not the case. “To make this verification, we need the collaboration of various seismic centres, nine of them in the entire world, who would have registered the seismic event. The argument is delicate, and it unleashes particular ghosts. We are making our work available to everyone, inviting whoever has an information regarding this to collaborate with us, so that the truth can be ascertained.”
Another retaliation? Another important element that would support this thesis is that, as the journalist explains, “the annual mortality rate at Basra has gone from 32 in 1989 to more than 600 in 2002.”
It would seem like a complex investigation, but with the necessary perseverance, one is able to come to some results. “Yes, also because today we have only presented a preview of a far longer interview. The USA soldier narrates a great deal of things that still have to be verified,” Torrealta explains, “but that should not be ignored. For example, he claims that between the First and the Third of March 2002, in Afghanistan, a similar warhead was used. This is a declaration that cannot remain without verification and it is a call for everyone to carryout accurate investigations, to work together, with the necessary knowledge and ability. It would be terribly serious if, in the most absolute silence, an atomic bomb has been used. Radioactivity does leave a trace.”
This is a serious doubt that carries enormous repercussions, why, from a tactical or strategic point of view, would the USA have dropped an atomic bomb on the last day of the war, which had at that point been won? Why would they have done it against those Shias who, before being left to their own devices, had rebelled against Saddam by aiding the Coalition troops?
“It is one of our priorities to verify if the information by the soldier was true,” Torrealta replies, “then as to the reasons behind why this would have been done is not my task to state,” Torrealta said. “We have only made some conjectures. Two days prior to the end of the war, a Scud missile hit a US base, killing twenty-eight American soldiers. The Bush Sr. Administration has always declared that it would have used atomic weapons if it were being attacked with chemical or bacteriological arms. But the matter of the use of atomic weaponry, in that conflict, was ambiguous. The then Secretary of State, James Baker III, when addressing the question coined the phrase the `calculated ambiguity doctrine’: he neither denied nor confirmed the possible use of atomic weapons. It would not have been the only ret