OxBlog

Sunday, March 02, 2003

# Posted 6:07 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

AMERICA'S DIRTY TRICKS: The Guardian has published an NSA memo which apparently indicates that the US is bugging the office and home telephones of other nations' UN representatives.

No comment yet from the NYT, WaPo or Reuters. But according to the Independent, US prepares to use toxic gases in Iraq. That's the real headline. But the article says that what the plans to do is use pepper spray to control crowds. Yes, the same pepper spray that police use everywhere. But which is banned according to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), since it may lead to chemical escalation.

On the toxic front, the article mentions that US Special Forces may use variants of the knock-out gas with which Russian commandos accidentally killed a couple hundred hostages in a Moscow theater last October. The gas would be used in bunker raids. While I have some definite reservations about violating the CWC, I have to imagine that the Special Forces are slightly more competent than their Russian counterparts, and won't be killing be people by accident. After all, we have bombs that can do that.
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