White Phosphorus in Fallujah: A War Crime?

In military jargon it’s called Willy Pete. It’s contained in many everyday items: fertilizers, soft drinks, toothpaste, pesticides, cleaning compounds and fireworks, to name a few. The military applications are many: smoke screens, marker shells, incendiaries, hand grenades, smoke markers, colored flares, and tracer bullets.

It’s the incendiary form of white phosphorus that was used in Fallujah, killing civilians and insurgents alike.

The battle for Fallujah took place in November 2004. Ever since the battle, there have been reports of victims with horrific burns, bodies burned to the bone, the city almost flattened along with it’s inhabitants. These stories have been largely ignored in the US media, but they refused to die. The flames were fanned recently when RAI TV in Italy aired its documentary, “Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre,” and the deffication has finally hit the oscillating circulator.
“In the film, eyewitnesses and ex-US soldiers say white phosphorus bombs were used in Fallujah. Rai says this amounts to the illegal use of chemical weapons and says they were used indiscriminately against civilian populations.”

The accusations have been flying that what happened in Fallujah in November 2004 amounted to the use of chemical weapons against the people of Iraq.

When finally confronted with eyewitnesses, photos and testamony of US soldiers, the US military at first lied through their teeth:

““Suggestions that U.S. forces targeted civilians with these weapons are simply wrong,” U.S. Marine Major Tim Keefe said in an e-mail to Reuters on Tuesday. “Had the producers of the documentary bothered to ask us for comment, we would have certainly told them that the premise of the programme was erroneous.”“

Less than a week later:

But the Pentagon was caught in a lie after it was revealed that an official Army publication called Field Artillery magazine had disclosed that the Army had in fact used white phosphorous as a weapon.

The magazine, in its March-April issue, reported “[White Phosphorous] proved to be an effective and versatile munition… [and] as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes.”

The magazine went on to report “We fired “shake and bake” missions at the insurgents, using WP [White Phosphorous] to flush them out and HE [high explosives] to take them out.”

On Tuesday, Lt. Col. Barry Venable, another Pentagon spokesperson, admitted on the BBC that white phosphorous was used as an offensive weapon to target insurgents.

White phosphorus is not banned by international law per sae. The minute the US used it against people as a weapon, that changed everything:

GEORGE MONBIOT: The Chemical Weapons Convention could not be clearer. There are two kinds of chemicals listed under it: One is the scheduled chemicals, such as phosgene and mustard gas and VX gas which cannot be used under any circumstances; then there is all other toxic chemicals which may be used for purposes which do not depend on the use of their toxic properties. However, the moment you use one of those other chemicals for its toxic properties against human beings, you are in breach of the convention. And what we saw very clearly from that extract in Field Artillery magazine was that they were firing these munitions directly at the combatants in Fallujah in order to exert the toxic effects of those munitions upon those combatants to flush them out so they could then be killed. In doing so, the U.S. Army was acting in direct contravention of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It committed a war crime.
[Geoge Monbiot is a reporter for the Guardian in the UK]

I expect that this story will not go away anytime soon. The military insists that white phosphorus is legal, period. The truth is, we used a chemical weapon on Iraqis. Under Bush we torture, we lie, we rape, and now we burn the flesh off of children. That’s Bush’s moral highground.

Democracy Now! transcript from Nov 8 2005: U.S. Broadcast Exclusive – “Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre” on the U.S. Use of Napalm-Like White Phosphorus Bombs
Democracy Now! transcript from Nov 17, 2005: Pentagon Reverses Position and Admits U.S. Troops Used White Phosphorous Against Iraqis in Fallujah.