-Caveat Lector- This is the sort of fascinating story I link to at http://leviathan.weblogs.com Every day. OK, enough grovelling for hits. The article is at http://www.irelandonsunday.com/current/news/article.tmpl$showpage?ps=318535926914106 Did the British poison their political POWs? By: Anne Cadwallader CR gas tested on Republican and Loyalist detainees in the Maze? IT WAS a cold, bright October morning in 1974 and the smoke was beginning to clear from the burning Nissan huts at Long Kesh internment camp. Republican internees and sentenced prisoners were exhausted, but still engaged in hand-to-hand combat with heavily armed British soldiers. The previous day, October 15, the inmates had set the camp on fire in a row that had begun over two missing pancakes from the daily food supply to the republican sentenced prisoners� compound. The flames blazed through the night. The next day dawned and on the football pitch where the battle was raging the soldiers suddenly fell back. Exhilarated, the prisoners began to believe they had won a temporary respite from the retaliatory beatings that were sure to come. It was then that the poison was dropped on their upturned faces from helicopters flying so close to the ground that the prisoners below could see the military pilots sitting at their controls. The small, grey, metal cans fell around them like confetti. Before they hit the ground, plumes of the previously unknown "CR gas" began flowing out as they scattered into small, smoking mini-clusters. Then the gas hit the prisoners faces. "My skin started burning so badly I fell to the ground and put my head into a puddle of dirty water. It was like my face was on fire. Men around me were choking, spitting and vomiting," says ex-prisoner Paddy McBride remembering that morning. "I never heard so many people screaming. They were clawing at their own faces. I could hear my own voice screaming. It was unbelievable," says Jim McCann, another ex-prisoner. "It was instantaneously effective. It completely disabled us. You couldn�t protect yourself from it," he says. "It was suffocating, it burned your face and eyes and lungs. It was the worst experience of my life. People around me lost consciousness," remembers Joe Barnes, another ex-prisoner. McCann and McBride can both clearly remember seeing with their own eyes the small grey canisters of gas, so many they nearly covered the ground. On one side of the cans was written "CR Gas". On the other side, "MoD" (Ministry of Defence). Fr Denis Faul called for an immediate investigation by the International Red Cross into the use of the gas and said the United Nations minimum standards for the care of prisoners had been violated and accused the British government of telling lies. Within a month, all the prisoners who had been subjected to the CR gas were blood-tested, both loyalist and republican. The tests were restricted to sentenced prisoners. The internees held in the same camp, who had not been gassed, were not blood-tested. Billy Hutchinson, who arrived in the jail shortly after the incident, says the gas was no respecter of political opinion. He believes men affected in the loyalist compound also died at an unexpectedly young age of cancers and heart disease. This has been confirmed by loyalist prisoner welfare organisations. The prisoners were never told why they had to undergo blood tests and were never given the results of the tests. About 200 had been affected by the gas. McCann and others now believe they were, in effect, being used as guinea pigs for a British government chemical weapons experiment. Skip forward 26 years and McCann is surfing the internet when, out of sheer curiosity, he types the words "CR Gas" in the search box of a British government web site and makes a few discoveries. What he found has led him to appeal to any former prisoner, republican or loyalist, to contact him at the Tus Nua offices in Turf Lodge so he can compile a database of the illnesses and premature deaths that may have resulted from the use of CR gas in October 1974. McCann has also contacted a professor of chemistry and has been told CR gas is considered ten times as powerful as CS gas, which was routinely used in the North during the 1970s. CR is the chemical code name for dibenzoxazepin. On January 11, 1999, the British government�s defence minister, John Spellar, said the gas has "severe short-term incapacitating effects that have been well documented in the medical literature". More interestingly, Spellar answered a question from the Labour MP, Kevin McNamara, who had asked him what quantity, strength and type of CR gas was deployed at the Maze prison on October 16, 1974. Spellar replied that: "As far as can be ascertained," only 200 "hand-held" spray devices containing 0.05% CR gas were held at the Maze on that date "but were not used". McNamara also asked about the prisoners having to undergo blood tests and was told the British government has "no record" of blood samples being taken at the prison at that time. In response to McNamara�s third question about what effectiveness the gas has in maintaining public order and the circumstances in which CR gas may be used, Spellar said: "CR may be deployed and authorised for use by the armed forces in certain special circumstances, particularly where it might enable the use of firearms to be avoided." In a written reply to a parliamentary question from Labour MP Ken Livingstone in March 1999, the British junior defence minister, Doug Henderson, said the use of CR gas had been authorised twice in the preceding two years, but declined to give details for security reasons. Livingstone also asked when the British army had used CR gas since 1968 and was told there are "no records of CR having been used operationally by the armed forces". McCann thinks that the use of CR gas in October 1974 at Long Kesh camp is perhaps being defined as an "experimental" deployment. In March 1999, in another parliamentary question, a British Home Office minister said CR gas was rejected for police use because "not enough is known about its chronic health effects and its carcinogenic and genotoxic potential. "It also poses particular problems in relation to decontamination because it retains its irritant characteristics in water. The simple decontamination procedures employed for CS involving the use of copious volumes of water would exacerbate the extent of contamination when used against CR." When McCann discovered this, he was able to tell Paddy McBride that by putting his face into a puddle of water, he had merely compounded the effects of the burning gas. McCann can reel off at least eight names of former republican prisoners who have since died of cancer in their late 40s and early 50s. "I actually hope I am wrong and that the use of the gas wasn�t a contributory factor in their early deaths," he says. The only way of discovering if the chemical experiment has resulted in premature death and disablement, however, is to contact as many of the 200 prisoners involved as possible and begin a comparative study. "Somewhere, on the shelves of some government department, lie the results of the blood tests. I believe we are entitled to know the results. They came out of our bodies. The British government, which proclaims its clean hands from the rooftops, broke the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners, at the very least. They should be held to account." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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