US 'used' chemical weapon in Falluja

[totalmotorcycle]

What do you think? A bunch of baloney or do you think there might be some truth to it?





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US 'used' chemical weapon in Falluja
Tuesday 08 November 2005, 21:57 Makka Time, 18:57 GMT

There have been allegations the US used outlawed weapons



Italian state television has aired a documentary alleging that the US used white phosphorous shells "in a massive and indiscriminate way" against civilians during the November 2004 offensive in Falluja.


The report on Tuesday said the shells were not used to illuminate enemy fighters at night, as the US government has said, but against civilians, and that it burned their flesh had "to the bone".


The documentary by RaiNews24, the all-news channel of RAI state television, quoted ex-marine Jeff Englehart as saying he saw the bodies of burnt children and women after the bombardments.


"Burned bodies. Burned children and burned women. White phosphorous kills indiscriminately. It is a cloud that, within ... 150m of impact, will disperse and will burn every human being or animal."


There have been several allegations that the US used outlawed weapons, such as napalm, in the Falluja offensive. On 9 November 2004, the Pentagon denied that any chemical weapons, including napalm, were used in the offensive.


Reporter

Abd al-Adhim Muhammad, an Aljazeera reporter in Baghdad who covered Falluja battles until the closure of Aljazeera offices in Iraq in September 2004, said there was a lot of talk inside Iraq about the use of non-conventional weapons by the US army in Iraq.



"The amount of people who used to confirm to us that the US army had been using non-conventional weapons against Falluja city was enormous, but it was impossible to confirm," he said.



"The city was sealed off and families left; so basically only the resisting fighters were inside the city. They were mostly denied admission into hospitals, so we could not verify the information from the medical fraternity, but yes everybody was saying that burnt bodies were scattered on Falluja's streets."



On its website, the US government has said it used phosphorous shells "very sparingly in Falluja, for illumination purposes". It noted that phosphorous shells were not outlawed.



"They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters," the government statement said.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman on Tuesday said white phosphorus was a conventional weapon. He said he did not know if the US army used it in Falluja in 2004.

[9000white]

good!!! now add some napalm to the show.

[Kal]

Not sure what to make of that news report.

WP has all the properties of napalm including the ability to burn underwater. Technically it is banned for use on humans, but is allowed on the battlefield as a 'marker and illumination'.

I'm inclined to believe thats exactly what they were doing here, using high tragectory shells to illuminate the city during the street to street fighting at night.

Trouble is those shells do have to come down somewhere.

[Nibblet99]

good!!! now add some napalm to the show.

*cough* I thought you weren't supposed to use napalm anymore....

of course that doesn't necessarily mean it isn't being used I suppose, just not televised

[flynrider]

That report is really stretching it. White Phosphorous (Willie Pete) rockets and artillery shells have been in common use all over the world since at least the 1950s. You could call it a "chemical weapon" in the same sense that you could call any standard explosive a "chemical weapon". They are made of chemicals, but so is a Hostess Twinkie.

This is clearly an attempt by a reporter to make a story out of nothing. I suppose I could claim that Iraq used "chemical weapons" since they had bombs that used TNT and plastic explosives.

[macktruckturner]

we use them every single night - calling for Illum rounds is standard practice when you're getting RPGs shot at you in the middle of the night and you're dismounted in a palm grove. They typically burn out completely a minute or two before they hit the ground, though the carrier is still hot enough to burn the hell out of you. As with all things, there is a failure potential - and a round could not pop in the air as it's supposed to, land on the ground, and pop there, burning whatever it lands on. It's called collateral damage, war is hell.

[LMJ]

I'll believe some pretty far-fetched stuff, but this is just BS that betrays either an agenda or total ignorance of how uncontrollable war is (unfortunately the same kind of ignorance Don Rumsfeld exhibited while planning this whole mess).

Crap like that's just part of being in a warzone. Defoliation in Vietnam was chemical warfare. This is just an accident that happens when you've got live ordance and cilivians in close proximity. Assuming the casualties aren't inflated to begin with.

[tcreeley]

I read in the paper today they used white phosphorous in Fallujah-- The US never did sign the treaty syaing they would use it---just like suspending the Geneva Convention and torture Iraq, the "black sites" and Guantonomo. This is not the "America" I grew up in. People in Maine don't believe in this. It is the necon take over- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeldt, Carlyle financiers, oil companies "world monopoliztion process".

Like Bush said, 'we don't [u]torture[/u], what we do is legal- we use inhumane legal interrogation techniques to inflict pain---etc,etc. ...like his eyes [u]glittered[/u] when he talked about the texas death penalty back in 2000 debating Gore.

At least it is a sign of health that the country is turning against him!

tcreeley

[rdeviney]

WP's been around a long time, and like Macktruckturner said, it's no more a chemical weapon than anything else created in a factory. In Vietnam we'd use WP grenades for a host of things: from burning off a clearing to destroying disabled vehicles to render them useless.