The Gates of Hell (Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque)

[dutchdemocrat]

Behind the Phosphorus Clouds are War Crimes Within War Crimes (Guardian)

Although George Monbiot gives perhaps undeserved short shrift here to the Italian documentary that reignited the controversy over the American use of incendiary weapons in Fallujah, he has unearthed – along with blogger Gabriele Zamparini – smoking gun evidence of even more barbarity in the Bush-ordered destruction of the city: the use of thermobaric weapons, whose effects are even more horrendous and uncontrollable than white phosphorus.

Of course, the Pentagon has now admitted the use of WP as an attack weapon in Fallujah – after lying about this for more than year – although they say that no civilians were deliberately targeted. But surely the main point of the entire scandal is that American forces knowingly used these chemical weapons in populated areas – a practice that was bound to kill civilians, whatever the tactical intention might have been. And since Monbiot notes that there were some 30,000 to 50,000 civilians in the city – which the Americans openly treated as a "free-fire zone," pretending that it was empty of non-combatants – it is difficult to see what his problem is exactly with the WP angle of story, beyond some disagreement with some of the Italian documentary's more subjective claims. For in the end, the basic facts seem clear, and Monbiot is in agreement with them: The Americans used white phosophorus and thermobaric weapons in areas teeming with civilians during the attack on Fallujah.



In any case, here are some of the hot goods unloaded by Monbiot and Zamparini.

The US army knows that its use as a weapon is illegal. In the Battle Book, published by the US Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, my correspondent David Traynier found the following sentence: "It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets." But we shouldn't forget that the use of chemical weapons was a war crime within a war crime within a war crime. Both the invasion of Iraq and the assault on Falluja were illegal acts of aggression. Before attacking the city, the marines stopped men "of fighting age" from leaving. Many women and children stayed: the Guardian's correspondent estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were left. The marines treated Falluja as if its only inhabitants were fighters. They levelled thousands of buildings, illegally denied access to the Iraqi Red Crescent and, according to the UN's special rapporteur, used "hunger and deprivation of water as a weapon of war against the civilian population".

SNIP

Full Article Here:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=294&Itemid=1

[occuserpens]

1. These hysterical 35%

There are several nasty problems with the recent Monbiot's article.
-- In a guerilla war, there is no way to tell combatants from civilians. This means that once certain weapon is used in this kind of conflict, we must assume that civilians are affected. So, Mr.Monbiot makes no sense whatsoever when he claims that "there is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians".
-- The way thermobaric weapons work (see wiki), there is no such thing as "35% thermobaric novel explosive (NE)". The weapon is either 100.00% thermobaric - or not. So, Mr.Monbiot should simply say that thermobaric weapons were used in Falluja. In fact, technically, thermobaric weapons are highly effective in the urban guerilla war because they are designed to burn out everything inside given closed space.
-- Finally, Mr.Monbiot is as incompetent and hysterical as Hitchens when he talks about "military crimes". His article clearly suggests that attack on Falluja was brutal, but it does not prove anything about military crimes. In fact, he does not even mention the Geneva Conventions which were likely to be violated in Falluja. This is a serious legal issue and it needs to be treated as such!

1. George Monbiot. Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5338507-103390,00.html
There is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians. The claim was made in a documentary broadcast on the Italian network RAI, called Falluja: the Hidden Massacre. It claimed that the corpses in the pictures it ran "showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh ... The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact." These assertions were supported by a human-rights advocate who, it said, possessed "a biology degree".
I, too, possess a biology degree, and I am as well qualified to determine someone's cause of death as I am to perform open-heart surgery. So I asked Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield, to watch the film. He reported that "nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt". They had turned black and lost their skin "through decomposition". We don't yet know how these people died.
But there is hard evidence that white phosphorus was deployed as a weapon against combatants in Falluja. As this column revealed last Tuesday, US infantry officers confessed that they had used it to flush out insurgents. A Pentagon spokesman told the BBC that white phosphorus "was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants".
An assault weapon the marines were using had been armed with warheads containing "about 35% thermobaric novel explosive (NE) and 65% standard high explosive". They deployed it "to cause the roof to collapse and crush the insurgents fortified inside interior rooms". It was used repeatedly: "The expenditure of explosives clearing houses was enormous."

2. Wiki on thermobaric weapons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon