Burning Flesh

It has now been documented that the U.S. used illegal incendiary weapons in the November assault on Fallujah. See the article by the Iraq Analysis Group: http://www.selvesandothers.org/article9437.html The outrage among Catholic bishops in the United States has been deafening, as I'm sure you're aware.

Protocol III of the 1980 UN convention on ’Weapons Which May Be Deemed To Be Excessively Injurious Or To Have Indiscriminate Effects’ states that:

It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.

"Residents who survived the attack reported seeing incendiary bombs used in the city. Abu Sabah, who lived in the Julan district of Fallujah which witnessed some of the heaviest attacks, said:

"They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud... then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them."

He said that pieces of these strange bombs explode into large fires that burn the skin even when water is thrown on the burns.

"Usually we keep the gloves on," said Army Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, Md., the senior officer in charge of the 1st Infantry Division’s Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center. "For this operation, we took the gloves off."

Some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.

Kamal Hadeethi, a physician at a regional hospital, said, "The corpses of the mujahedeen which we received were burned, and some corpses were melted." - "U.S. Drives into the Heart of Fallujah", San Franscisco Chronicle, Nov. 10, 2004.

Unfortunately, some of our Christian leaders chose to ignore burning human beings alive to focus on the dangers of stem cell research.

Let us pray that our blindness, which becomes more willful with each passing hour, will be healed before we forget what sight is.