White Phosphorus and Fallujah

We just want to make it easy on future sedition prosecutors.

White Phosphorus is an incendiary weapon. According to Wikipedia, these are the effects of white phosphorus on the human body.

Incandescent particles of WP cast off by a WP weapon's initial explosion can produce extensive, deep (second and third degree), painful burns. Phosphorus burns carry a greater risk of mortality than other forms of burns due to the absorption of phosphorus into the body through the burned area, resulting in liver, heart and kidney damage, and in some cases multi-organ failure.

The United States used white phosphorus as a weapon during the invasion of Fallujah.

The US-led assault on Falluja - a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency west of Baghdad - displaced most of the city's 300,000 population and left many of its buildings destroyed.

Col Venable told the BBC's PM radio programme that the US army used white phosphorus incendiary munitions "primarily as obscurants, for smokescreens or target marking in some cases.

"However it is an incendiary weapon and may be used against enemy combatants."

Of course the military claims that the weapon would only be used against enemy combatants. They said the same thing about napalm, if memory serves.



How did that work out?

An Italian documentary claims that the civilians suffered strange burns and wounds because of White Phosphorus and others have reported similar incidents.

Yet there are other, independent reports of civilians from Fallujah suffering burn injuries. For instance, Dahr Jamail, an unembedded reporter who collected the testimony of refugees from the city spoke to a doctor who had remained in the city to help people, encountered numerous reports of civilians suffering unusual burns.

One resident told him the US used "weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud" and that he watched "pieces of these bombs explode into large fires that continued to burn on the skin even after people dumped water on the burns." The doctor said he "treated people who had their skin melted"

This is what America has done to the people of Fallujah.

Repeating these facts is going to anger the Islamic world further (and who can blame them). It might even make the Iraqi resistance fight harder, leading to more deaths. This information also happens to be the truth. So if you do get around to arresting people for seditiously speaking the truth, we hope to make the list.