"Exterminate the brutes!" (updated)

As the white phosphorus story penetrates the national consciousness, George Monbiot of the Guardian argues that everything we know is wrong. Monbiot suspects that the bodies shown on Italian television -- the ones displaying intact clothing covering melted flesh and bone -- may not have been the corpses of white phosphorus victims.

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.

Monbiot posits that thermobaric weapons created the horrifying enigma of these cadavers. Alas, this theory doesn't hold water; thermobaric weapons would have ignited clothing as well as flesh.

The Islamic press has often reported that U.S. troops used chemical and even nerve agents in Fallujah and elsewhere. Most Americans would classify these claims as hyperbolic allegations from an unreliable source -- although given the lies told by the Pentagon, the administration, and our major press organs, I'm not sure just what constitutes a reliable source these days. That said, I've seen no indication that soldiers in Fallujah wore the protective gear required for the use of nerve agents.

WP remains the likeliest culprit. The Pentagon now admits that earlier denials of this weapon's use were lies. Administration defenders have retreated behind the protection of these three points:

1. WP is not a chemical weapon.
2. WP was not used on civilians.
3. We did not ratify any treaty prohibiting use of WP.

Point 1 has been effectively demolished by the revelation that American military intelligence categorized WP as a chemical weapon when Saddam Hussein used it. Even without that document, the photographic evidence sufficed. As I've asked several times, what sort of incendiary melts bone yet leaves cloth intact?

Regarding Point 2: Right-wing sites insist that civilians had evacuated Fallujah, an assertion derived from wishful thinking or propaganda. In an earlier post, I published a photo of a woman in her kitchen who died from WP. The RAI documentary shows many other civilian casualties. Monbiot says that "between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians might have been taking refuge."

Memory being short, many tend to forget that in the spring and summer of 2004, numerous reports revealed that the United States had turned back evacuees, thus forcing fleeing civilians back into a death trap.

Brig. Gen. Jack Egginton told the New York Times on April 30: "The big problem now is that friendlies, civilians and bad guys are all mixed together." A refugee told the Guardian on April 30: "The U.S. snipers are on every roof and minaret. They don't care who they shoot. They are shooting old people, women and children."

Dahr Jamail's respected Iraq Dispatches site, which accurately reported the use of unusual new weaponry in Fallujah, offers persuasive eyewitness accounts of actions taken against civilians:

Burhan Fasa'a, an Iraqi journalist who worked for the Lebanese satellite TV station, LBC and who was in Fallujah for nine days during the most intense combat, said Americans grew easily frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English.

"Americans did not have interpreters with them," Fasa’a said, "so they entered houses and killed people because they didn't speak English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and [they] shot people because [the people] didn't obey [the soldiers’] orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English." He also added, "Soldiers thought the people were rejecting their orders, so they shot them. But the people just couldn't understand them."

A man named Khalil, who asked not to use his last name for fear of reprisals, said he had witnessed the shooting of civilians who were waving white flags while they tried to escape the city.

"I watched them roll over wounded people in the street with tanks," said Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, a resident of Fallujah. "This happened so many times."

Later, we read:

Believing that American and Iraqi forces were bent on killing anyone who stayed in Fallujah, Hammad said he watched people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to escape the siege. "Even then the Americans shot them with rifles from the shore," he said. "Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over their heads to show they are not fighters, they were all shot."

Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein reported witnessing similar events. After running out of basic necessities and deciding to flee the city at the height of the US-led assault, Hussein ran to the Euphrates.

"I decided to swim," Hussein told colleagues at the AP, who wrote up the photographer's harrowing story, "but I changed my mind after seeing US helicopters firing on and killing people who tried to cross the river."

Hussein said he saw soldiers kill a family of five as they tried to traverse the Euphrates...

From an April 29 Guardian report by Lee Gordonof:

It was when I saw little Ali's ruined body that I stopped being just a reporter. . The scene was a makeshift field hospital in Fallujah. A missile fired at the hospital has left the walls of the room Ali lies in pockmarked with shrapnel. Glass crunches underfoot. Four-year-old Ali is lying in a cot, the mattress matted with dried blood. He is bleeding from a horrific groin wound and his left leg has been amputated above the knee. His left arm is bandaged and bleeding, his face badly cut. His father brushes away the flies buzzing around Ali's wounds. It is a scene of almost utter hopelessness. Ali is one of the only survivors of an extended family, bombed the day before by a jet, probably an F-16. He might live, but only if he is evacuated to a Baghdad hospital within hours. Ambulances have tried to evacuate him and other seriously wounded casualties. They were turned back at U.S. checkpoints by troops carrying out orders: no one in and no one out.

One can go on, but the point is made: In Fallujah, bloodthirsty American invaders -- many of them ignorant "Christians" from our more barbaric states -- murdered indiscriminately, making no attempt to distinguish civilian from insurgent. The declaration that all the victims were insurgents is nothing more than a face-saving ex post facto lie.

What of point 3 -- the squabble over treaties? The right-wing argument is exemplified by this squib in the Sarasota Herald Tribune:

Pentagon officials say white phosphorus is not banned by any treaty that the U.S. has signed. It is covered by Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons, which prohibits its use as an incendiary weapon against civilian populations or in air attacks against enemy forces in civilian areas. Eighty countries signed the protocol; the U.S. didn't.

You can dismiss as a propagandist any news reporter or commentator who restricts the debate to the 1980 Convention without making any reference to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. One cannot pretend that history stopped after a certain arbitrarily-chosen year; otherwise, one could argue that the U.S. Constitution allows slavery or prohibits alcohol.

Fortunately, Monbiot recognizes the existence of the 1993 convention. But even if the Bush apologists somehow managed to wipe away all trace of that year, we would still have a problem. Karen Parker, Chief Counsel of the Association of Humanitarian Lawyers, offered an interesting observation to The Cat's Blog:

The comment "Washington is not a signatory to an international treaty restricting the use of the substance [WP] against civilians," assumes that therefore civilians may be targeted by WP weapons. This is an outrageous assumption because civilians may NEVER be the target of military operations -- whether using bows and arrows or white phosphorous, or any other weapon. This rule is not dependent on specific treaties but is a fundamental part of the laws and customs of war.

Once again, the matter comes down to the admixture of civilian and "insurgent." In Iraq, we do not face a regular army; we face a popular uprising against an occupation. In such an uprising, the fighters hide within the masses like rebar within a wall.

Most Iraqis hate us. Even the puppet leaders we installed via bogus elections have publicly asked for the removal of American forces.

A generation fed revisionist lies about Vietnam has had to learn anew an old truth: We can conquer a country, we can even exterminate an entire civilization -- but we cannot "liberate" a nation whose inhabitants want nothing more than our absence.

We can only kill them. All of them. Including the people we intended to liberate.