kilometres, opened a sustained barrage over the next eight hours. They
were supported by US Navy aircraft which dropped 40,000 pounds of
explosives and napalm, a US officer told the Herald. But a navy
spokesman in Washington, Lieutenant Commander Danny Hernandez, denied
that napalm - which was banned by a United Nations convention in 1980
- was used.
"We don't even have that in our arsenal," he said.
The navy admitted to using napalm as late as 1993 in training
exercises on the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico, but the last
cannister of a vast US naval stockpile was reportedly destroyed in a
public ceremony in April 2001.
....
The Pentagon subsequently issued a statement to the Herald:
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.