Stop Making Sense

As you would expect by now, the US Military's immediate reaction to yesterday's Italian TV broadcast of chemical weapons used in the Falluja Massacre was deny, deny, deny.

But some of the denials are interesting in their own right.

They admit that white phosphorus was used, but claim it was only to light up combat areas. Yet here is a US Military witness' account:

"I do know that white phosphorus was used," said Jeff Englehart in the RAI documentary, which identified him as a former soldier in the US 1st Infantry Division in Iraq.

"Burned bodies. Burned children and burned women," said Englehart, who RAI said had taken part in the Fallujah offensive.

"White phosphorus kills indiscriminately."

How to account for the burned bodies?

Suggestions that US forces targeted civilians with these weapons are simply wrong," US Marine Major Tim Keefe said.

So they weren't targetted, they were just collateral damage. And that makes it OK, right?

The use of incendiary weapons against civilians was banned by the Geneva Convention since 1980.

The US Military also said US forces did not use any chemical weapons in Iraq but then confirmed that US forces had dropped MK 77 firebombs, which are supposedly OK because their chemical composition is "different from that of napalm". I guess it depends on what your definition of "chemical" is...?

It will be interesting to see what the Vast Left Wing Media Conspiracy makes of all this: so far their reports are just straight-up coverage of the allegation versus the denial.

As George Monbiot says:

We can expect the US and UK governments to seek to minimise the extent of their war crimes. But it's time the media stopped collaborating.

Monbiot also blows the lid on the lie that the US "doesn't do body counts":

Almost every week the Pentagon claims to have killed 50 or 70 or 100 insurgents in its latest assault on the latest stronghold of the ubiquitous monster Zarqawi. In May the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff said that his soldiers had killed 250 of Zarqawi's "closest lieutenants" (or so 500 of his best friends had told him). But last week, the Pentagon did something new. Buried in its latest security report to Congress is a bar chart labelled "average daily casualties - Iraqi and coalition. 1 Jan 04-16 Sep 05". The claim that it kept no track of Iraqi deaths was false.

The report does not explain what it means by casualty, or if its figures represent all casualties, only insurgents, or, as the foregoing paragraph appears to hint, only civilians killed by insurgents. There is no explanation of how the figures were gathered or compiled. The only accompanying text consists of the words "Source: MNC-I", which means Multi-National Corps - Iraq. We'll just have to trust them.

What the chart shows is that these unexplained casualties have more than doubled since the beginning of the Pentagon's survey. From January to March 2004, 26 units of something or other were happening every day, while in September 2005 the something or other rose to 64. But whatever it is that's been rising, the weird morality of this war dictates that it is reported as good news. Journalists have been multiplying the daily average of mystery units by the number of days, discovering that the figure is lower than previous estimates of Iraqi deaths, and using it to cast doubts on them.

Don't believe the hype. It's time these criminal warmongers were put behind bars.