News » November 23, 2005

White Phosphorous Lies

Did the Pentagon use chemical weapons indiscriminately in Fallujah?

By Frida Berrigan

A 21st Tactical Air support squadron OV10 bronco aircraft fires white phosphorus rockets to mark a target for an air strike during tactical air control training.

Just when it seemed the Iraq war couldn’t get worse, the United States admitted on November 16 that forces in Fallujah did use white phosphorus (WP) as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants. However, the Pentagon continues to deny that soldiers used WP—a “spontaneously flammable” and “extremely toxic inorganic substance,” according to the Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventative Medicine—against civilians.

This admission, a reversal of the military’s previous denials that the substance was used as a weapon at all, came after protests at the U.S. embassy in Rome that were sparked by the airing of Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre, a documentary by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta, on Italian television.

In the documentary, Torrealta, a news editor at Italian state media company RAI, interviews U.S. soldiers and Iraqi human rights advocates, and shows pictures of the havoc wreaked by white phosphorus. The film set off a firestorm of controversy about interpretations of the Geneva Convention: When is a device that can indiscriminately burn civilians to death a banned weapon and when is it a defensive mechanism for hiding troop movements? An Army fact sheet admits it is both, noting that while WP “is used primarily as a smoke agent,” it can “also function as an anti-personnel flame compound capable of causing serious burns.”

For Jeff Engelhart, a former Marine with the First Infantry Division that fought the Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, these questions of interpretation are moot. “I do know that white phosphorus was used. White phosphorus kills indiscriminately,” he says in the documentary.

On November 8, U.S. Marine Major Tim Keefe told Reuters that “suggestions that U.S. forces targeted civilians with these weapons are simply wrong.” But there is nothing simple about it.

Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons bans the use of incendiary weapons, meaning “any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons.” The United States has not signed the protocol. The Pentagon initially denied using WP as a weapon, arguing that while WP could “set fire to objects or cause burn injury to persons,” that is not the task for which the weapon is “primarily designed.” Rather, the military claims that WP—known as “Whiskey Pete,” or “Willy Pete” on the battlefield—is a legitimate tool for obscuring troop actions. Now military sources insist that WP is not a chemical weapon (banned under Geneva Conventions), but a conventional one.

From the military’s own reports, it is clear white phosphorus was used for multiple reasons in Fallujah. In the March/April 2005 issue of Field and Artillery Magazine, Captain James T. Cobb wrote an “after action” review of the November 2004 Battle of Fallujah, a battle he describes as the “most fierce urban fighting for Marines since the Battle of Hue City in Vietnam in 1968.”

Cobb and his co-authors continue, “White phosphorus proved to be an effective and versatile munition,” useful as “a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents … We fired ‘shake and bake’ missions at insurgents, using WP to flush out them out and HE [high explosives] to take them out.”

It is also clear that U.S. Marines fired WP indiscriminately in Fallujah. Darrin Mortenson, a reporter for the San Diego-area North County Times, was embedded with the Camp Pendleton Marines in Fallujah. In an April 11, 2004 article, Mortenson describes a daily pattern that escalated during the Battle of Fallujah. Nicholas Bogert, a 22-year-old mortar team leader, directs his team to fire countless rounds of “shake and bake” into Fallujah neighborhoods, “never knowing what the targets were or what damage the resulting explosions caused.”

In a November 8 interview with “Democracy Now,” Torrealta said that he began his investigation after seeing photographs from the Studies Centre of Human Rights & Democracy in Fallujah, including detailed color images of residents, some dead in their beds, with their clothes largely intact, but their skin melted to the consistency of leather.

In the same program, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Boylan, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, said that the allegations of WP’s use against civilians was “tantamount to propaganda, falsehood and rumors.”

When asked about the photos of people burned to the bone while their clothing remained untouched, he theorizes that the damage could have been inflicted by a suicide bomber. “That can happen from massive explosions. If you look at the car bombs that the terrorists use today, you have the same effects from car bombs [or] from suicide vests.”

Boylan may assert that the use of WP is legal and worth the price paid by civilians. But James Nachtwey, the award-winning war photographer, wrote in 1985 that if everyone “could see for themselves what white phosphorus does to the face of a child … they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point where that happens to even one person, let alone thousands.”

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• Reader Comments

  Check out this documentary!  You can find a few sites that have it if you run a google search.  I will warn you that it is very disturbing.  There are people whose skin has been burned down to the bone, while their clothes remain.  Many are women and children.  There are others who have become ill from breathing it in.  Anyone still naive enough to think we have the moral high ground in this conflict needs to see this documentary.

  Posted by Disseminator on Nov 23, 2005 at 8:56 AM

  “But James Nachtwey, the award-winning war photographer, wrote in 1985 that if everyone “could see for themselves what white phosphorus does to the face of a child … they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point where that happens to even one person, let alone thousands.”

  Ok. But isn’t this ttue of war in general, whether just or not? Isn’t having limbs and life torn from someone (a child or anyone, really) just as terrible? Or having bullets rip through your flesh, leaving one multilated, dead or dying?

  One might think that terrorism is the most vile sort of war. After all, it targets innocent civilians. But surely ALL wars kill many many innocents. . .

  Posted by wolf on Nov 23, 2005 at 3:32 PM

  So what are you saying, Wolf???!!!

  Is war okay or isn’t it?

  And as far as WP is concerned: it pains me as a total rejecter of the notion of a death penalty even to pose this question, but is there a difference between a firing squad that shoots its victim through the heart and one that sprays WP on the victim so as to cause an indescribably painful death? It seems that you would answer this question in the negative.

  And why is terrorism, which can target only a limited number of civilians, more vile than the war machines of national armies, with their access to the multitudes? Was 9/11 (probably an inside job, but that is not the issue here) more vile than Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Dresden? to name just a few of the most well-known examples of atrocities commited by the “democratic” powers… Let’s forget Indo-China, Indonesia, Central America, etc., etc.

  Posted by Anarcho-Sozi on Nov 23, 2005 at 4:54 PM

  Wolf,
  How do you distinguish between bad ‘terrorists’ and acts of violence committed by states? What exactly distinguishes the two? The identity of the actors who carry out the violence? The saction of a powerful state for some acts of violence, and the lack of state sanction for other kinds?  How would you describe the overthrow of regimes of which the US dispapproves? Terrorism?  Prudent preventative action? What exactly?

  When is an act of violence a crime and when is it an act of war? Who says so, and who gets to define it? Let me be clear-the people who murdered civilians by flying planes into the WTC and the Pentagon etc, are, in my opinion, criminals. Pure and simple.
  
  But I don’t believe that the US can claim the sole right to define acts of violence, as ‘terrorism’ on the one hand, and acts committed by itself and in its name, as justifiable war, just because it is the most militarily powerful country in the world. It is true that the US can do (almost) what it likes. But it doesn’t make it right, and in case you hadn’t noticed, most people in the world have observed the distinction the US draws between what the rest of the world may do, and what is permitted to itself. That is the real big problem the US has, and even if you don’t think it matters, it does matter. The real elites in the US, as opposed to pathetic apologists for power scribling away for the Murdoch press understand this quite well. The rest of us are waiting for the people of the US to understand this as well, and then we might get a real debate that involves a conversationbetween equals, as opposed to the bellowing and bullying that characterises the conduct of the US’ relations with the rest of the planet.

  Posted by Jane Doe on Nov 23, 2005 at 10:53 PM

  Though I think that it vital to know what is being done by the U.S. government in the name of the United States citizenry at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer, and it is important that it be documented; it sometimes strikes me as a national pathology to argue about technicalities while innocent people are being massacred in an illegal occupation that followed an illegal aggressive attack that has no legal justification whatsoever.

  It is not my intention to criticize this article---I believe that there is a need for it to be written, read, and discussed. But in the big picture, this and similar articles about other violations seem analogous to making an issue about whether a serial killer violated the law by shooting hunters in duck season.

  Posted by wileywitch on Nov 23, 2005 at 11:57 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 75 posts.

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