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| CHLORINE GAS EFFECT |
In 1950 my classmates and I attended Stockport Swimming Pool, UK, weekly, to learn to swim. The pool was cold and heavily chlorinated to prevent the spread of Poliomyelitis. The safe level is 1 to 3 parts of chlorine to one million parts of water. Goggles were rare; most swam without eye protection. ALL the children emerged with distinctly reddened, bloodshot eyes. The irritation lasted from one to two hours. Our clothes and towels smelled of chlorine for five or six hours.
I suffered red-eye at most swimming pools in those days - and it also occurs in some pools today. Chlorine makes eyes bloodshot and makes clothes smell of bleach.
The BBC and ITV newsreels from Douma, Damascus, Syria showing injured children who had suffered chlorine gas attacks this week, featured about five youngsters. The film-clips were repeated many times. The children were being hosed down to remove the chlorine and were filmed in close-up. I did not see any children with bloodshot or reddened eyes. I think those film-sequences were faked. Thank heaven that the film makers did not deliberately put chlorine into children's eyes.
I have no doubt that Assad and his troops are committing many awful, appalling acts of war in their efforts to overcome their enemies (I just heard that 15 nations are involved) in the Syrian civil war. I have no doubt that ISIS and other terrorists and rebel factions are committing equally terrible acts. The ISIS troops and attacks are not shown on UK media; we only see clips of "victims of Assad", always featuring innocent children, suffering Assad attacks - as if the government attacks are without provocation or reason, against unarmed citizens. If the opposition or enemy is unarmed and do no harm - then how have they kept this vicious war going for 7 years, since March 2011?
My interpretation of the UK news is tending more and more to doubt that the conflict is being reported in an unbiased manner. I wholly agree that the ban on chemical weapons must be globally enforced - with force if necessary. But I imagine that the majority of UK citizens don't like or need to be fed fake-news and propaganda by our media and government.
UPDATE 17 APRIL 2018:
Robert Fisk, The Independent 16/4/18
UPDATE 17 APRIL 2018:
Robert Fisk, The Independent 16/4/18
Fisk visits Douma
This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking
place of smashed apartment blocks -- and of an underground clinic whose images
of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb
Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I
track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the ‘gas’ videotape
which horrified the world – despite all the doubters – is perfectly genuine.
War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the
same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly
uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen
starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on
a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion,
it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eye witness
himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of
Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as “terrorists” – the regime’s word
for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing
this right? Which version of events are we to believe?
By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7
April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry, which
will be attempting to provide a definitive answer to that question in the
coming weeks.
France, meanwhile, has said it has “proof” chemical weapons were
used, and US media have quoted sources saying urine and blood tests showed this
too. The WHO has said its partners on the ground treated 500 patients “exhibiting
signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”.
At the same time, inspectors from the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently blocked from coming here
to the site of the alleged gas attack themselves, ostensibly because they
lacked the correct UN permits.
Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is
not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked amid the ruins
of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were
usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular
jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s
homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living
rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked
through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still
contained Russian – yes, Russian – rockets and burned-out cars.
So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas – or no
gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for
evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with
whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive. I walked
across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to
haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I
sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer
walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the
siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see,
of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black
hijab.
I first drove into Douma as part of an escorted convoy of
journalists. But once a boring general had announced outside a wrecked council
house “I have no information” – that most helpful rubbish-dump of Arab
officialdom -- I just walked away. Several other reporters, mostly Syrian, did
the same. Even a group of Russian journalists – all in military attire – drifted
off.
It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his
subterranean clinic – “Point 200,” it is called, in the weird geology of this
partly-underground city – is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his
lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated
a cut above her eye.
“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred
metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was
a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at
night -- but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come
into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here
suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a ‘White
Helmet’, shouted ‘Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over
each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are
people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
Oddly, after chatting to more than 20 people, I couldn’t find
one who showed the slightest interest in Douma’s role in bringing about the
Western air attacks. Two actually told me they didn’t know about the
connection.
But it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and
Nazir Abu Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in
Douma, although the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam
[the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”. They shrugged
when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the infamous Douma
attack.
The White Helmets – the medical first responders already
legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played
a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign
Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their
wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left
outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty
military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I
doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and
files, bedding and mattresses.
Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not
happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma
abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised
and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed
groups when the final truce was agreed.
There were food stalls open and a patrol of Russian military
policemen – a now optional extra for every Syrian ceasefire – and no-one had
even bothered to storm into the forbidding Islamist prison near Martyr’s Square
where victims were supposedly beheaded in the basements. The town’s complement
of Syrian interior ministry civilian police – who eerily wear military clothes –
are watched over by the Russians who may or may not be watched by the
civilians. Again, my earnest questions about gas were met with what seemed
genuine perplexity.
How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in
Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed
to recall? It did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through
these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma lived so
isolated from each other for so long that ‘news’ in our sense of the word
simply had no meaning to them. Syria doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy –
as I cynically like to tell my Arab colleagues – and it is indeed a ruthless
dictatorship, but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among
them, from reacting with a few words of truth. So what were they telling me?
They talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They
talked about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the Syrian
government and Russian bombing. The Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices
before they left, but the massive buildings inside the security zones they
created had almost all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian
colonel I came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see
how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he cryptically
observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as Britain”. Ah yes, Mrs May, I
remembered, whose air strikes had been so intimately connected to this place of
tunnels and dust. And gas?
…and
this just in 17th April 2018:
Here is Lord West, former First Sea Lord,
speaking to the BBC this morning, his thoughts on why he thinks the chemical
weapons attack on Douma was a false flag.
Just now , I was looking at footage of the destroyed "
Chemical Weapons Factory " and what do we see ?? People standing around
with fire hoses putting out the fires and they are standing right in the middle
of the destroyed heaps of rubble that was a supposed chemical weapons factory,
and they were WEARING NO GAS MASKS, NO HAZMAT SUITS, NO PROTECTION OF ANY SORT
. Dozens of people standing there with cameras and film equipment and non of
them were wearing any protective gear either. HMM , WHY are they NOT FALLING
OVER DEAD ??? WHY isnt everyone in the area NOT FALLING OVER DEAD ?????
- 4. Chlorine is an important chemical in water purification, in disinfectants, in bleach and in mustard gas. Chlorine is also used widely in the manufacture of many products and items directly or indirectly, i.e. in paper product production, antiseptic, dyestuffs, food, insecticides, paints, petroleum products, plastics, medicines, textiles, solvents, and many other consumer products. It is used to kill bacteria and other microbes from drinking water supplies. Chlorine is involved in beaching wood pulp for paper making, bleach is also used industrially to remove ink from recycle paper. Chlorine often imparts many desired properties in an organic compound when it is substituted for hydrogen (synthetic rubber), so it is widely use in organic chemistry, in the production of chlorates, chloroform, carbon tetrachloride, and in the bromine extraction. APPLICATIONS
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