I'd be grateful if you would please stop with the ad hominem attacks.TheStatutoryApe said:You really like to twist people's words around and quote out of context don't you?
I suggest you review the posts in this thread they portray a litany of crimes.TheStatutoryApe said:And if there were crimes commited I would like to see the evidence if anyone can furnish it. I want to know about these things
You will find it in one of the links I have already posted. If you doubt it's veracity check with the chemistry forum to see if WP + water produces an exothermic reaction (causing burns) plus phosphoric acid exacerbating same. It does not seem particularly strange to me that dry clothes should remain unaffected though this is totally irrelevant to the main issues which I have already elaborated on in full first for you and then for Russ and still haven't received a response from either of you and so as I stated in a mail a while ago from this point I refuse to get dragged down side alleys irrelevant to the main point.Evo said:No I wasn't questioning the combustion temperature, I was questioning the claim you made Where are you reading this?
Pathophysiology: Agents that cause chemical injuries are classified on the basis of their mechanism of action. Most offending agents produce secondary exothermic reactions, which exacerbate the injury. The chemical classification scheme includes such categories as oxidizing agents, protoplasmic poisons, desiccants, and vesicants.
Oxidizing agents can denature tissue proteins and often cause cell damage via cytotoxic effects. Protoplasmic poisons, such as HF, can form salts with cellular proteins. Chemical agents classified as desiccants dehydrate cells generally via an exothermic reaction. Vesicants cause physiologic reactions that cause the release of tissue amines.
In addition, acids with a pH lower than 2 cause coagulative necrosis upon contact with the skin. On the other hand, alkali agents with a pH higher than 11.5 cause liquefactive necrosis, allowing deeper penetration of the chemical. However, chemical classification is not an easy task because chemical agents can often be classified into more than 1 category.
Well at least you agree they are dead and I'm sure we can agree that something nasty caused those injuries that killed them so that just leaves whether we can reach agreement that people who inflict that kind of anguish and death on innocent civilians deserves to rot in hell.Evo said:No, I am not qualified to determine what the circumstances were that caused death from looking at a picture. That would be foolish.
Well at least you agree they are dead and I'm sure we can agree that something nasty caused those injuries that killed them so that just leaves whether we can reach agreement that people who inflict that kind of anguish and death on innocent civilians deserves to rot in hell.
Why on Earth do we need to use dangerous chemical agents that can horribly disfigure and kill people for any purpose?
I agree that this is the real issue, and well said. I just don't like watching people being unjustly accused of crimes and I think that the accusation of crimes commited is what this thread has become about even if that was not Skyhunter's intentions.
Here's an extract of a good article I found which goes to the crux of the matter and responds well to the semantics being raised on this forum,Anttech said:So who comitted the crimes? Or do you not think there was any crime yet aggree with LYN that "someone" used "dangerous chemical agents that can horribly disfigure and kill people for any purpose?"
If you do aggree with this statement then, forgeting what chemicals were used, its semantics anyway, who did this?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/11/9/174518/797First, I think it should be a stated goal of United States policy to not melt the skin off of children.
As a natural corollary to this goal, I think the United States should avoid dropping munitions on civilian neighborhoods which, as a side effect, melt the skin off of children. You can call them "chemical weapons" if you must, or far more preferably by the more proper name of "incendiaries". The munitions may or may not precisely melt the skin off of children by setting them on fire; they do melt the skin off of children, however, through robust oxidation of said skin on said children, which is indeed colloquially known as "burning". But let's try to avoid, for now, the debate over the scientific phenomenon of exactly how the skin is melted, burned, or caramelized off of the aforementioned children. I feel quite confident that others have put more thought into the matter of how to melt the skin off of children than I have, and will trust their judgment on the matter.
Now, I know that we may be melting the skin off of children in order to give them freedom, or to prevent Saddam Hussein from possibly melting the skins off of those children at some future date. These are good and noble things to bring children, especially the ones who have not been killed by melting their skin.
I know, as well, that we do not drop "chemical weapons" on Iraq. We may, in the course of fighting insurgents in civilian neighborhoods, drop "incendiaries" or other airborne weaponry which may melt the skins off of children as an accidental side effect of illuminating their neighborhoods or melting the skins off their neighbors. In that this still can be classified as melting the skins off of children, I feel comfortable in stating that the United States should not condone the practice. (This may mean, when fighting in civilian neighborhoods, we take nuanced steps to avoid melting the skin off of children, such as not dropping munitions that melt the skin off of children.)
And I know it is true, there is some confusion over whether the United States was a signatory to the Do Not Melt The Skin Off Of Children part of the Geneva conventions, and whether or not that means we are permitted to melt the skin off of children, or merely are silent on the whole issue of melting the skin off of children.
But all that aside, there are very good reasons, even in a time of war, not to melt the skin off of children.
First, because the insurgency will inevitably be hardened by tales of American forces melting the skin off of children.
Second, because the civilian population will harbor considerable resentment towards Americans for melting the skin off of their children.
Third, BECAUSE IT ****ING MELTS THE SKIN OFF OF CHILDREN.
And, unless Saddam Hussein had a brigade or two consisting of six year olds, we can presume that children, like perhaps nine tenths or more of their immediate families, are civilians.
These are, admittedly, nuanced points. "But Hunter", I can hear many Americans say, "isn't it a natural byproduct of a war of preemption, er, I mean liberation, to melt the skin off of children?"
Why yes, yes it is. Melting the skin off of children is an inevitable part of urban warfare, which is one of the reasons that most military planners and foreign policy leaders prefer to avoid putting themselves in positions where melting the skin off of children comes into play. George Herbert Walker Bush, when contemplating whether or not to engage in the urban warfare that would, in all likelihood, melt the skin off of children by exposing United States forces to a situation where city defenders would be interspersed with those said civilians, choose the course of not putting his forces in a position where melting the skin off of children would prove necessary.
In any event, street fighting in neighborhoods where there are, indeed, children -- as is evidenced by their skin, lying over there -- may or may not be a wise military decision. But it is certainly true that the whole child-melting decision, pro or con, should be treated with some gravity, and perhaps methods of combat which do not melt the skin off of children should be considered.
Because melting the skin off of children, as it turns out, is a very good way to turn the opinion of the American population against a war in general:
As LYN stated there is a difference between Manslaughter and Murder One. That is to say there is a difference between intentionally killing someone and killing them due to neglegence.Anttech said:So who comitted the crimes? Or do you not think there was any crime yet aggree with LYN that "someone" used "dangerous chemical agents that can horribly disfigure and kill people for any purpose?"
If you do aggree with this statement then, forgeting what chemicals were used, its semantics anyway, who did this?
There are two very different pictures being painted here. One where the soldiers were trying to flush out enemy combatents and the side effects of the methods being used wound up killing innocent civilains, which all of us have stated is an unacceptable outcome. Then you have the picture of "thugs" ransacking the city, targeting anything and everything that moves, and burning them to death.
Even if one were to accept the military are that stupid both manslaughter and murder 1 are both crimes. The people responsible for these crimes should be brought to book.TheStatutoryApe said:As LYN stated there is a difference between Manslaughter and Murder One. That is to say there is a difference between intentionally killing someone and killing them due to neglegence.
As I said many posts ago in a response to Evo I'd be quite happy to see the US commanders try to argue that they were simply stupid and not malicious in a court of law and let the judges decide.TheStatutoryApe said:There are two very different pictures being painted here. One where the soldiers were trying to flush out enemy combatents and the side effects of the methods being used wound up killing innocent civilains, which all of us have stated is an unacceptable outcome. Then you have the picture of "thugs" ransacking the city, targeting anything and everything that moves, and burning them to death.
When you have the battalion doctor casually dropping a few WP or HE shells into a city for a bit of a thrill then there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with the approach to tackling insurgents.TheStatutoryApe said:[edit]I[/e] agree that something wrong was done and something ought to be done about it. I have never disagreed with this. I have only disagreed with the charge that civilians were intentionally targeted and that white phos was used as a weapon directed at targets. If these claims can be substantiated I would like to see it. It would definitely change my view of these events. So far though I have only seen claims and no evidence.
You must have missed the post that the person that posted an answer in the chem forum was wrong and has been notified that he was wrong. So you are referring to incorrect information.Art said:You will find it in one of the links I have already posted. If you doubt it's veracity check with the chemistry forum to see if WP + water produces an exothermic reaction (causing burns) plus phosphoric acid exacerbating same.
That's precisely how I do think of it. If foreign troops came to my country and did that I would devote the rest of my life to paying them back and I wouldn't be mollified by being told how free I was and how grateful I should be that I now had a vote. I wonder how americans on here would react if a foreign occupying army did that to their children. Would they still maintain their cool detachment, their love of semantics and their "well that's war" attitude? Somehow I don't think so.Anttech said:Art nice link, although I laughed, I shouldn't have.. because this whole thing is ****ing despicable, and since we should "do to those as we want done to us" Imagine that was one of (y)our children!
There are no crimes, it's hearsay.Art said:Even if one were to accept the military are that stupid both manslaughter and murder 1 are both crimes. The people responsible for these crimes should be brought to book.
They know what they're using and the side effects. It's a war, incase you missed that.As I said many posts ago in a response to Evo I'd be quite happy to see the US commanders try to argue that they were simply stupid and not malicious in a court of law and let the judges decide.
This is getting ridiculous.When you have the battalion doctor casually dropping a few WP or HE shells into a city for a bit of a thrill then there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with the approach to tackling insurgents.
Bystander said:I'm all for deleting the entire thread, too.Art said:Per Evo's earlier mail let's try to keep the quality of this debate at the standard you would expect on a science forum.
Bystander said:WP is stored under water. That means that there is NO reaction, or, more specifically, that your link is of dubious veracity. "First aid," or treatment of WP victims includes immersion of the affected body parts in water for debridement (vigorous) to remove phosphorus embedded in tissues.Art said:You will find it in one of the links I have already posted. If you doubt it's veracity check with the chemistry forum to see if WP + water produces an exothermic reaction
Bystander said:I've requested of a couple other participants of this thread that they keep the speculative nonsense down here rather than cluttering serious forums.
Bystander said:You've drawn a number of inferences, incorrectly, from this source. 1) you have assumed that no reaction occurs below the autoignition temperature; 2) you have assumed that there is no heat source (see 1)Art said:(causing burns) plus phosphoric acid exacerbating same. It does not seem particularly strange to me that dry clothes should remain unaffected though this is totally irrelevant to the main (snip). Here you go. In this link it actually states 35 C.
Quote:
Ignition temperature : Ignition temperature or ignition point is the temperature at which the fire starts. Below the ignition temperature, even if a combustible substance is present along with oxygen, the fire will not start. Therefore a substance has to be heated to its ignition temperature before it starts burning. For example, the ignition temperature of white phosphorus is 35°C (snip)
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/04/11/military/iraq/19_30_504_10_04.txtArt said:Say 'cheese'
Every day since they started firing rounds into the city, other Marines have stopped by the mortar pit to take a turn dropping mortars into the tube and firing at some unseen target.
Like tourists at some macabre carnival, some bring cameras and have other troops snap photos of their combat shot. Even the battalion surgeon fired a few Saturday, just for sport.
Everyone wants to "get some," the troops explain, some joking that Fallujah is like a live-fire range.
Some have started to think of what happens after all the guns go silent.