Sarah wrote: << The Americans are planning to use so-called E-bombs. They emit a high energy pulse that destroys electronic equipment. They're going to be used to isolate Saddam's command and control centres from his army, and also to destroy the electronics he will need to launch his weapons of mass destruction. >>
I assume this is a reference to the High Powered Microwave bomb. I recently read a piece about these in the guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,896930,00.html An extract from this article is below: << in the past few weeks, it [HPM bomb] has been sold to the American public as a weapon of mass non-destruction - the Mother Teresa of bombs. "What's good about it," the Pentagon says, "is that it doesn't harm people." Regurgitating PR releases, the American press has hailed HPM as a humane "wonder weapon". The only danger, apparently, is to those with pacemakers or on life-support systems. [...] Although not primarily an anti-personnel device, those who have been exposed to HPM report that its effect is agonising. The radiation penetrates below the skin, boiling nerve cells. It can blind. It induces uncontrollable panic (early research into HPM was as a crowd control agent). >> Still, at least it doesn't harm people, eh? Any side in a war will seek to minimise the more horrifying aspects of its arsenal, whether it's the UK, the USA or Iraq. Information about this is extremely closely guarded, for good reasons. Otherwise, the truth about "gulf war syndrome" would be known by now - and yet it isn't, save for dark mutterings about depleted uranium. Few people involved want to raise their heads above the parapets. I have spoken to a doctor who worked in a hospital in Saudi Arabia during the last Gulf War; the hospital dealt with a lot of casualties from the war, particularly those exposed to chemical/biological weapons. All the medical staff were sent on extra training to recognise and learn how to deal with injuries caused by exposure to such weapons. This doctor told me that the USA dropped napalm during that war, and that he had personally treated its victims. I had no reason to believe he was lying. It is pretty much accepted that reporting on the Gulf War was controlled to an unprecedented degree by the military; the "pool system" employed to give journalists access to any sort of news ensured that it was extremely difficult and dangerous for any journalist to deviate from the party line by attempting to strike out on their own and find out what was really happening. That is why there was such a striking lack of dead bodies (of any side) in news footage - this went to cement the myth of a war of few casualties. It only came out later that the reason so few Iraqi casualties had been found was that thousands of bodies had been buried by bulldozers along the road to Basra (some of them quite possibly still alive). All this to say something very simple: if people in the West were told about and shown the carnage wrought on civilians by war, fewer people would support it. Azeem in London
