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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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November 21st,
2005 - U.S. is Slow to Respond to Phosphorus Charges |
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U.S. is Slow
to Respond to Phosphorus Charges By Scott Shane New York Times November 21, 2005 Washington, Nov. 20 - On
Nov. 8, Italian public television showed a documentary renewing persistent
charges that the United States had used white phosphorus rounds, incendiary
munitions that the film incorrectly called chemical weapons, against Iraqis
in Falluja last year. Many civilians died of burns, the report said. The half-hour film was
riddled with errors and exaggerations, according to United States officials
and independent military experts. But the State Department and Pentagon have
so bungled their response - making and then withdrawing incorrect statements
about what American troops really did when they fought a pitched battle
against insurgents in the rebellious city - that the charges have produced
dozens of stories in the foreign news media and on Web sites suggesting that
the Americans used banned weapons and tried to cover it up. The Iraqi government has
announced an investigation, and a United Nations spokeswoman has expressed
concern. "It's discredited the
American military without any basis in fact," said John E. Pike, an
expert on weapons who runs GlobalSecurity.org, an independent clearinghouse
for military information. He said the "stupidity and incompetence"
of official comments had fueled suspicions of a cover-up. "The story most people
around the world have is that the Americans are up to their old tricks -
committing atrocities and lying about it," Mr. Pike said. "And
that's completely incorrect." Daryl G. Kimball, director
of the Arms Control Association, a nonprofit organization that researches
nuclear issues, was more cautious. In light of the issues raised since the
film was shown, he said, the Defense Department, and perhaps an independent
body, should review whether American use of white phosphorus had been
consistent with international weapons conventions. "There are legitimate
questions that need to be asked," Mr. Kimball said. Given the history of
Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons in Iraq, he said, "we have to
be extremely careful" to comply with treaties and the rules of war. At a time when opposition to
the war is growing, the white phosphorus issue has reinforced the worst
suspicions about American actions. The documentary was quickly
posted as a video file on Web sites worldwide. Bloggers trumpeted its
allegations. Foreign newspapers and television reported the charges and
rebuttals, with headlines like "The Big White Lie" in The
Independent of London. Officials now acknowledge
that the government's initial response was sluggish and misinformed. "There's so much
inaccurate information out there now that I'm not sure we can unscrew
it," Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Defense Department spokesman who has
handled many inquiries about white phosphorus, said Friday. The State Department
declined to comment for the record, but an official there said privately that
the episode was a public relations failure. The Italian documentary,
titled "Falluja: The Hidden Massacre," included gruesome images of
victims of the fierce fighting in the city in November 2004. American and
Iraqi troops recaptured the city from insurgents, in battles that destroyed
an estimated 60 percent of the buildings. Opening with prolonged shots
of Vietnamese children and villages burned by American use of napalm in 1972,
the film suggested an equivalence between Mr. Hussein's use of chemical
weapons in the 1980's and the use of white phosphorus by the American-led
forces. It incorrectly referred to
white phosphorus shells - a munition of nearly every military commonly used
to create smoke screens or fires - as banned chemical weapons. The film showed disfigured
bodies and suggested that hot-burning white phosphorus had melted the flesh
while leaving clothing intact. Sigfrido Ranucci, the television correspondent
who made the documentary, said in an interview this month that he had
received the photographs from an Iraqi doctor. "We are not talking about
corpses like the normal deaths in war," he said. Military veterans familiar
with white phosphorus, known to soldiers as "W. P." or "Willie
Pete," said it could deliver terrible burns, since an exploding round
scatters bits of the compound that burst into flames on exposure to air and
can burn into flesh, penetrating to the bone. But they said white
phosphorus would have burned victims' clothing. The bodies in the film
appeared to be decomposed, they said. In their first comments
after the Nov. 8 broadcast, American officials made some of those points. But
they relied on an inaccurate State Department fact sheet first posted on the
Web last December, when similar accusations first surfaced. The fact sheet said American
forces had used white phosphorus shells "very sparingly in Falluja, for
illumination purposes, and were fired "to illuminate enemy positions at
night, not at enemy fighters." The Americans stuck to that
position last spring after Iraq's Health Ministry claimed it had proof of
civilian casualties from the weapons. After the Italian
documentary was broadcast, the American ambassadors to Italy, Ronald P.
Spogli, and to Britain, Robert H. Tuttle, echoed the stock defense, denying
that white phosphorus munitions had been used against enemy fighters, let
alone civilians. At home, on the public radio program "Democracy
Now," Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, an American military spokesman, said,
"I know of no cases where people were deliberately targeted by the use
of white phosphorus." But those statements were
incorrect. Firsthand accounts by American officers in two military journals
note that white phosphorus munitions had been aimed directly at insurgents in
Falluja to flush them out. War critics and journalists soon discovered those
articles. In the face of such
evidence, the Bush administration made an embarrassing public reversal last
week. Pentagon spokesmen admitted that white phosphorus had been used
directly against Iraqi insurgents. "It's perfectly legitimate to use
this stuff against enemy combatants," Colonel Venable said Friday. While he said he could not
rule out that white phosphorus hit some civilians, "U.S. and coalition
forces took extraordinary measures to prevent civilian casualties in
Falluja." Ian Fisher contributed
reporting from Rome for this article. Correction: Nov. 29, 2005, Tuesday: An article on Nov. 21 about
an Italian documentary film accusing the United States of misusing white
phosphorus munitions in Iraq referred imprecisely to footage of napalm use in
Vietnam. The film shows United States Air Force jets dropping napalm on
Vietnamese villages and includes famous footage from 1972 of Kim Phuc Phan
Thi, a 9-year-old girl, fleeing after napalm burned her clothing off. But the
aircraft that dropped the napalm on her village in 1972 was South Vietnamese,
not American. External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/21/international/21phosphorus.html |