behind the news

Clearing Away the Fog of War – Or Adding to It?

November 9, 2005

War breeds rumors. As armies collide, bombs fall and casualties mount, it becomes more and more difficult to sort truth from untruth — and in the Middle East, with its culture of conspiracy theory, this is doubly true. Journalists in Iraq have to make difficult decisions every day about who and what to believe. Were there really bodies dumped in the Tigris? Did these children lose their legs because of American bombs? Were the dead innocent civilians or masquerading insurgents?

Yesterday brought us one example of such a story. Italian state television and, subsequently, the UK’s Independent and the BBC, reported that American forces had dropped white phosphorus bombs on Falluja during the epic battle that occurred there one year ago this week. That accusation, from what we can tell after viewing the documentary, is based on the accounts of two soldiers who were present at the battle, one of whom says he heard the order to drop the bombs; footage of white phosphorus shells being aimed not at the sky to illuminate battle (their normal usage) but at the ground instead; and, most damning, a lot of evidence of bodies burnt to the bone, apparently the result of chemical burns.

The images in the story are gruesome. As Jeff Englehart, one of the soldiers in the film, describes it, he saw “burned bodies, burned women, burned children … When [white phosphorus] makes contact with skin, then it’s absolutely irreversible damage, burning flesh to the bone.”

This is not the first time that this allegation has surfaced. Immediately after the battle in Falluja last year, some news accounts, including one in the San Francisco Chronicle, reported, “some artillery guns fired white phosphorous rounds that create a screen of fire that cannot be extinguished with water. Insurgents reported being attacked with a substance that melted their skin, a reaction consistent with white phosphorous burns.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Italian report is that it suggests the Pentagon may have been misleading about its use of such weapons. While the U.S. is not a signatory to the portion of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons banning the use of weapons such as napalm and white phosphorus against civilian targets, the Pentagon has repeatedly said that accusations that chemical agents were used are part of “widespread myths.” And in a statement issued last December it claimed, “Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Falluja, for illumination purposes. They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.”

However, the Pentagon has contradicted itself before on the use of such weapons. After initially denying that napalm had been used in Iraq, the Pentagon later admitted that MK77, a firebomb with effects similar to napalm, was used during the initial Iraqi military campaign of March and April 2003.

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Reuters sent out on its wire yesterday an article focusing on the U.S. military’s denial of the Italian accusation. Few picked up on it, and not a single outlet ran an independent piece reporting on the story.

For the moment, the only place the story seems to have gotten any play is on the Internet. And if it’s simply a wild conspiracy theory, then we guess that’s where it belongs.

But the images in the documentary are horrifying. Even though the film seems suspiciously like another piece of European anti-American propaganda (the documentary features a soundtrack of a woman wailing in Arabic), can the press really ignore those strangely dissolved bodies? They hardly seem like natural deaths, or the corpses of people caught in crossfire. It’s hard to look at the melted forms of women and children and not wonder if there isn’t some truth to the claim that, even if accidentally, white phosphorus was indeed dropped on the city.

And that’s why this story demands a closer look from the American press. We deserve to know whether or not the allegations have any merit — and whether or not the military has been misleading us about the weapons it’s using in Iraq.

Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.