Page 117 - Encyclopedia Of Terrorism

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develop operatives fluent in local languages. Under use of modern chemical agents in warfare took place
the U.S.A. Patriot Act of 2001, the CIA can now during World War I when in 1915 the German Army
gather intelligence from secret grand jury testimony launched a surprise attack with chlorine gas against
and private records, including credit card statements French troops deployed near the city of Ypres. The
and phone records, domestically, without a warrant. Germans had placed thousands of cylinders of the gas
The agency can also monitor conversations between along a front several miles long. When the wind blew
lawyers and clients and can more easily conduct wire- toward the French trenches, the Germans opened
taps and searches in the name of national security. The the cylinders enabling the chlorine to be borne by that
America Civil Liberties Union and similar groups wind into the French positions. The effects were
claim these new powers bring the CIA back to the immediate and horrendous as thousands of troops
days of Operation CHAOS. choked in the deadly green cloud.
The attack touched off an immediate round of mea-
See also WILLIAM BUCKLEY; COUNTERTERRORISM;
sures and countermeasures, and soon the French and
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, U.S.; FEDERAL BUREAU OF
their British allies were using war gases of their
INVESTIGATION; PATRIOT ACT
own against the Germans. Chemists manufactured
Further Reading weapons such as mustard gas (named because of its
faint odor) that burns and blisters any tissue exposed
Baer, Robert. See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground to it, and phosgene, a deadly choking gas. By the time
Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism. New York: the war ended in 1918, chemical warfare had caused
Crown, 2002.
Central Intelligence Agency. War on Terrorism. http://www. more than 100,000 deaths.
cia.gov/terrorism/index.html. Most military planners regarded chemical weapons
Gerecht, Rueul Marc. “The Counterterrorist Myth.” with distaste, since they did not mesh well with tradi-
Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2001. tional codes of arms and warfare. After the war, the
Hersh, Seymour M. “What Went Wrong: The C.I.A. and general revulsion felt by many leaders toward the use
the Failure of American Intelligence.” The New Yorker. of chemical weapons was reflected in the Geneva
October 8, 2001. Convention of 1925, signed by all the World War I
combatants except Russia. This treaty banned the
use of chemical or biological agents in warfare, but it
CHEMICAL TERRORISM did not ban the manufacture or possession of these
weapons. Many nations continued to keep them stock-
piled for possible use and to deter their use by others.
Chemical weapons are just what their name It is interesting to note that some groups opposed the
implies: devices that use chemicals to inflict death treaty because they regarded chemical warfare as
or injury. Chemical weapons can be dispensed using more humane than other forms of combat using high
bombs, artillery shells, aircraft sprayers, or missiles explosives and other deadly technologies that charac-
carrying hundreds of small “bomblets” that are spread terized modern warfare.
over a large area when they are ejected from canisters. Italy used chemical weapons in Ethiopia in the
Chemical weapons have typically been used in large- mid-1930s, but they were not used on a large scale in
scale warfare by organized armies; however, the pro- World War II, if one excludes the use by the Nazis of
spect of the use of chemical weapons by terrorists poison gas at extermination camps such as Auschwitz-
against civilian populations raises an entirely new Birkenau to murder most of the Jewish population of
problem. occupied Europe. The Japanese also conducted exper-
iments with chemical and biological weapons on pris-
oners of war. Most experts believe that it was only fear
THE USE OF CHEMICAL
AGENTS IN WARFARE of massive retaliation in kind that kept these weapons
from being used on a large scale in World War II.
Like their biological counterparts, chemical weapons Egypt used chemical weapons in Yemen in the
have an ancient history. Early records document the 1960s, and Iraq used them against Kurdish dissident
use of smoke and incendiary chemicals against cities groups in its own territory and in the Iran-Iraq War in
during the Greek and Roman eras. The first large-scale the early 1980s, but these weapons do not appear