White Phosphorus Use Ignites Debate

White Phosphorus Use Ignites Debate
Critics say the U.S. killed Iraqi civilians with the incendiary weapon. The Pentagon denies it.

By John Daniszewski and Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writers



BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR: Explosions brighten the night sky over Fallouja during last year's offensive against guerrillas. Troops used white phosphorus, nicknamed "Willie Pete," in the battle.
(Patrick Baz / AFP/Getty Images)


BAGHDAD — Omar Ibrahim Abdullah went for a walk to get away from the heavy fighting in Fallouja a little over a year ago and, by his account, came across such a grotesque sight that he's been unable to banish it from his memory.

The United States had mounted a full-scale offensive to pacify the rebel-controlled Iraqi city, and Abdullah said he was eager to escape the Askari district, where he lived. He walked south toward the Euphrates River and stumbled on dozens of burned bodies that he said were colored black and red.

"They must have been affected by chemicals," he said, "because I had never seen anything like that before."

The corpses, he said, had suffered burns from the U.S. military's use of an incendiary chemical known as white phosphorous.

The Pentagon and other U.S. officials at first denied, and later admitted, that troops had used white phosphorus as a weapon against insurgents in Fallouja during that fiercely fought campaign. Its use became public because of questions raised by an Italian television documentary Nov. 8, which alleged that civilians had been targeted "indiscriminately" and that hundreds had died.

But even though U.S. officials have admitted using the substance against enemy fighters, they have denied the allegations of Fallouja residents such as Abdullah that its use was widespread and civilians were among those killed.


snip


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-phosphorus28nov28,0,6777069.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Admitting they used WP on insurgents, but not on Iraqi citizens.

Folks, they're one and the same.

...the Pentagon probably takes the position if it walks upright and is not a member of the coalition, it's an insurgent.

on enemy soldiers is also forbidden. As I recall, the Pentagon falls back on the sophistry that WP is not officially defined as a chemical weapon even if it is used as one.

This concentration on civilians is a deliberate attempt to confuse the issue and divert blame.

If I'm a "Hippie Go Home" a la Pro-Anti-Bush Crawford people...then let it be so...

Am ashamed of our nation...:cry:

by completely ignoring the Geneva Conventions and using all manner of horrific weapons -- white phosphorous, depleted uranium, napalm, cluster bombs, bunker-busting mini-nukes, and lord knows what all else . . . what we do to civilian populations with these weapons surpasses even what the Nazis did when they bombed cities and towns . . .

someday, BushCo will have pay for the international war crimes and the crimes against humanity they've perpetrated in OUR name! . . .

(apart from in the Soviet Union) to enemy cities and towns and therefore civilian concentrations.

You only have to remember, Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki...

What agreement or treaty did we sign?

:(

I know the US took out the hospital before that went in but some doctors did stay. It was out of some of the Iraq blogs.

This story has been out there for a few weeks in the British and Italian press.

it happened.

I guess the NYT just doesn't have the same resources as the average blogger.

IMO, there are several pretty nasty problems with recent Monbiot's article.
-- In a guerilla war, there is no good way to tell combatants from civilians. This means that once certain weapon is used in this kind of conflict, we must assume that civilians are affected. So, Mr.Monbiot makes no sense whatsoever when he claims that "there is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians".
-- The way thermobaric weapons work (see wiki), there is no such thing as "35% thermobaric novel explosive (NE)". The weapon is either 100.00% thermobaric - or not. So, Mr.Monbiot should simply say that thermobaric weapons were used in Falluja. In fact, technically, thermobaric weapons are highly effective in the urban guerilla war because they are designed to burn out everything inside given closed space.
-- Finally, Mr.Monbiot is not that different from Hitchens when he talks about "military crimes". His article clearly suggests that attack on Falluja was brutal, but it does not prove anything about military crimes. In fact, he does not even mention the Geneva Conventions which were likely to be violated in Falluja. This is a legal issue and it needs to be treated as such!

1. GU 11/22/2005. George Monbiot. Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5338507-103390,00.html
<u>There is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians</u>. The claim was made in a documentary broadcast on the Italian network RAI, called Falluja: the Hidden Massacre. It claimed that the corpses in the pictures it ran "showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh ... The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact." These assertions were supported by a human-rights advocate who, it said, possessed "a biology degree".
I, too, possess a biology degree, and I am as well qualified to determine someone's cause of death as I am to perform open-heart surgery. So I asked Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield, to watch the film. He reported that "nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt". They had turned black and lost their skin "through decomposition". We don't yet know how these people died.
But there is hard evidence that white phosphorus was deployed as a weapon <u>against combatants</u> in Falluja. As this column revealed last Tuesday, US infantry officers confessed that they had used it to flush out insurgents. A Pentagon spokesman told the BBC that white phosphorus "was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants".
An assault weapon the marines were using had been armed with warheads containing "about <u>35% thermobaric novel explosive (NE)</u> and 65% standard high explosive". They deployed it "to cause the roof to collapse and crush the insurgents fortified inside interior rooms". It was used repeatedly: "The expenditure of explosives clearing houses was enormous."

2. Wiki on thermobaric weapons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon

http://www.juancole.com/2005/11/white-phosphorus-round-up-george.html

Murderin' shellshocked, looks like, from what I'm seeing around here,

Think yourselves lucky I'm not (yet) the regular insurgent type.