Last Straw

In response to a blog of mine in which I made fun of George Bush Junior a friend of mine wrote to me, oh chris­ti­aan, it’s sad that you enjoy other’s people misery! This sur­prised me; to me Bush is not some other per­son. To me he’s a very import­ant per­son, a war crim­inal to be pre­cise. Below you’ll find pho­tos of real misery, of Iraqi people who have been burnt to the bone by chem­ical weapons because this per­son and oth­ers like him con­tinue to hold pos­i­tions of power, because the rest of us allow them to.

Back in June I wrote about an attemp­ted cover up by cow­ards in the Pentagon regard­ing the use of fire­bombs (a.k.a. Nap­alm) in Iraq.

Now RAI, Italy’s state-owned radio and tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing cor­por­a­tion, has broad­cast a doc­u­ment­ary—Fal­lu­jah — the hid­den mas­sacre—that details the use of white phos­phorus against Iraqi people dur­ing the U.S. assault on Fal­lu­jah in Novem­ber last year.

It’s avail­able online at RAI’s News 24 web­site or on Inform­a­tion Clear­ing House.

Apart from show­ing the hein­ous dam­age wrought by the U.S. bom­bard­ment of Fal­lu­jah, and the carnage to Iraqi people, some of whom lay sleep­ing, the doc­u­ment­ary also uses wit­ness accounts from former U.S. sol­diers, Fal­lu­jah res­id­ents, video foot­age and pho­to­graphs, to sup­port its claim that con­trary to U.S. State Depart­ment deni­als, white phos­phor­ous was used indis­crim­in­ately on the city, caus­ing ter­rible injur­ies to Iraqi people, includ­ing women and children.

In the doc­u­ment­ary a former U.S. sol­dier who fought at Fal­lu­jah com­ments, ‘I heard the order to pay atten­tion because they were going to use white phos­phorus on Fal­lu­jah. In mil­it­ary jar­gon it’s known as Whis­key 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 metres is done for.’

On top of this a doc­u­ment in the report claims to prove that the U.S. forces have used Mark 77 fire­bombs—the dir­ect suc­cessor to Nap­alm — in the bomb­ing of Iraq. As I poin­ted out in my blog in June, Col­onel James Alles, com­mander of Mar­ine Air Group 11, has already con­firmed its use on Iraqi sol­diers dur­ing the invasion:

We nap­almed both those [bridge] approaches. Unfor­tu­nately there were people there … you could see them in the [cock­pit] video. They were Iraqi sol­diers. It’s no great way to die. The gen­er­als love nap­alm. It has a big psy­cho­lo­gical effect.

Pho­tos sourced from RAI News 24.

Update, 29 Sep 2008, a few links added:

• Wiki­pe­dia | White phos­phorus use in Iraq
• Wiki­pe­dia | Mark 77 bomb
• U.S. Army hand­book pub­lished in 1999 stat­ing that the use of white phos­phorus burster bombs against enemy per­son­nel is “against the law of land warfare.”
• U.S. denies use of white phos­phorus in Iraq | 15 Novem­ber 2005
• Dept. of Defense spokes­man Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Ven­able con­firms white phos­phorus used in Iraq | 16 Novem­ber 2005
• Escal­at­ing rate of birth deform­it­ies in Fal­lu­jah caused by white phos­phorus? | 29 Septem­ber 2009