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Napalm isn't a "chemical" weapon in the same sense as is generally meant when the military and government say "chemical" weapon.
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Sorry about the high emotion level,Lebell, but seriously, can you define a chemical weapon for me then? Napalm, as far as I can tell, is toxic to the touch, kills people by removing oxygen from the air as well as burning them alive, and has other nasty toxic properties besides burning. It seems to me that it is only not a chemical weapon due to a technicality.
And if bullets contained a gel that burned the flesh off of enemies, I'd call it a chemical weapon too.
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To suggest that the Pentagon "lied" because it truthfully answered an incorrectly-stated question, is moronic.
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ok, let's set up the situation there.
1. The government uses napalm (which technically isn't napalm, but the government calls it that anyway) in MK77 -4 weapons.
2. The government changes the formula, comes out with the MK77-5 weapons, and decides on its own not to call it napalm any more. (Apparently, the official name is "fuel gel".)
3. The Sydney Herald, using an embedded reporter, observes the MK77-5 being used. The soldiers call it napalm. They say in a story that napalm is being used:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/...749944836.html
4. The pentagon replies, saying:
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Your story ('Dead bodies everywhere', by Lindsay Murdoch, March 22, 2003) claiming US forces are using napalm in Iraq, is patently false. The US took napalm out of service in the early 1970s. We completed destruction of our last batch of napalm on April 4, 2001, and no longer maintain any stocks of napalm. - Jeff A. Davis, Lieutenant Commander, US Navy, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense.
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So the Navy, fully away that MK77-5 bombs had been dropped on the enemy, told the Herald that their story was "patently false."
Misleading? The security group GlobalSecurity.org thinks so:
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But John Pike, director of the military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org, said: "You can call it something other than napalm but it is still napalm. It has been reformulated in the sense that they now use a different petroleum distillate, but that is it. The US is the only country that has used napalm for a long time. I am not aware of any other country that uses it." Marines returning from Iraq chose to call the firebombs "napalm".
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You can draw your own conclusions. However, I'm going to dial down the rhetoric here and focus on the facts, and I do not think that concluding that the pentagon lied is moronic. It's a reasonable conclusion based on the facts presented.