The White Death

The last paragraph is very important.

By Chris Floyd
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10960.htm
11/11/05 "Moscow Times" -- --

This week, the broadcast of a
shattering new documentary,provided fresh confirmation of a gruesome
war crime covered by this column nine months ago: the use of
chemical weapons by U.S. forces during the frenzied destruction of
Fallujah in November 2004.

Using filmed and photographic evidence, eyewitness accounts and the
direct testimony of U.S. soldiers who took part in the attacks, the
documentary -- "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre" -- catalogs the
American use of white phosphorus shells and a new, "improved" form
of napalm that turned human beings into "caramelized" fossils, with
their skin dissolved and turned to leather on their bones. The film
was produced by RAI, the Italian state network run by a government
that backed the war.

Vivid images show civilians, including women and children, who had
been burned alive in their homes, even in their beds. This illegal
use of chemical weapons -- at the order of the Bushist brass -- and
the killing of civilians are confirmed by former U.S. soldiers
interviewed on camera. "I heard the order to pay attention because
they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah," said one
soldier, quoted in The Independent. "In military jargon, it's known
as Willy Pete. Phosphorus burns bodies; in fact it melts the flesh
all the way down to the bone. ... I saw the burned bodies of women
and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a
radius of 150 meters is done for."

The broadcast is an important event: shameful, damning, convincing.
But it shouldn't be news. Earlier this year, as reported here on
March 18, a medical team sent to Fallujah by the Bush-backed Iraqi
interim government issued its findings at a news conference in
Baghdad. The briefing, by Health Ministry investigator Dr. Khalid
ash-Shaykhli, was attended by more than 20 major U.S. and
international news outlets. Not a single one of these bastions of a
free and vigorous press reported on the event. Only a few small
venues -- such as the International Labor Communications
Association -- brought word of the extraordinary revelations to
English-speaking audiences.

Yet this highly credible, pro-American official of a pro-occupation
government confirmed, through medical examinations and the
eyewitness testimony of survivors -- including many civilians who
had opposed the heavy-handed insurgent presence in the town --
that "burning chemicals" had been used in the attack, in direct
violation of international and U.S. law. "All forms of nature were
wiped out" by the substances unleashed in the assault, including
animals that had been killed by gas or chemical fire, said ash-
Shaykhli. But apparently this kind of thing is not considered news
anymore by the corporate gatekeepers of media "truth."

As we noted here in March, ash-Shaykhli's findings were buttressed
by direct testimony from U.S. Marines filing "after-action reports"
on web sites for military enthusiasts back home. There, fresh from
the battle, soldiers talked openly of the routine use of Willy Pete,
propane bombs and "jellied gasoline" (napalm) in tactical assaults
in Fallujah. As it says in the scriptures: By their war porn ye
shall know them.

This week, as in March, the Pentagon said it only used white
phosphorus shells in Fallujah for "illumination purposes." But the
documentary's evidence belies them. Although there are indeed many
white bombs bursting in air to bathe the city in unnatural light,
the film clearly shows other phosphorus shells raining all the way
to the ground, where they explode in fury throughout residential
areas and spread their caramelizing clouds. As Fallujah biologist
Mohamed Tareq says in the film: "A rain of fire fell on the city,
the people struck by this multicolored substance started to burn, we
found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the
clothes intact."

The slaughter in Fallujah was a microcosm of the entire misbegotten
enterprise launched by those two eminent Christian statesmen, U.S.
President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair: a
brutal act of collective punishment for defying the imperial will, a
high-tech turkey shoot that mowed down the just and unjust alike, an
idiotic strategic blunder that has exacerbated the violence and
hatred it was meant to quell. The vicious overkill of the Fallujah
attack -- where an estimated 1,200 civilians died while almost all
of the targeted insurgents slipped away beforehand -- alienated
large swaths of previously neutral Iraqis and spurred many to join
the resistance. It further entangled the United States and Britain
in a putrid swamp of war crime, state terrorism and atrocity,
dragging them deeper into a moral equivalency with the murderous
extremists whom the Christian leaders so loudly condemn.

Let's give the last word to Jeff Engelhardt, one of the ex-
servicemen featured in the documentary, who recently issued this
plea to his fellow U.S. soldiers on Fight to Survive, a new
dissident web site run by Iraqi War vets:

"I hope someday you find solace for the orders you have had to
execute, for the carnage you helped take part in, and for the pride
you wear supporting this bloodbath. Until then, you can only hope
for an epiphany, something that stands out as completely immoral,
that convinces you of the inhumanity of this war. I don't know how
much more proof you need. The criminal outrage of Abu Ghraib, the
absolute massacre of Fallujah, the stray .50 caliber bullets or 40mm
grenades or tank rounds fired in highly packed urban areas, 500-
pound bombs dropped on innocent homes, the use of 25mm depleted
uranium rounds, the inhumane use of white phosphorus, the hate and
the blood and the misunderstandings ... this is the war and the
system that you support."