War Crimes Within War Crimes

The media couldn't have made a bigger pig's ear of the white phosphorus story. So before moving on to the new revelations from Falluja, I would like to try to clear up the old ones.

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 "Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre". It claimed 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 whom, 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, U.S. infantry officers confessed that they had used it to flush out insurgents. On Tuesday afternoon, a Pentagon spokesman admitted to the BBC that white phosphorus "was used as an incendiary weapon against enemy combatants." He went on to claim that "It is not a chemical weapon. They are not outlawed or illegal." This denial was accepted by almost all the mainstream media. U.N. conventions, the Times asserted, "ban its use on civilian but not military targets." But the word "civilian" does not occur in the Chemical Weapons Convention. The use of the toxic properties of a chemical as a weapon is illegal, whoever the target is.

The Pentagon argues that white phosphorus burns people, rather than poisoning them, and is therefore covered only by the protocol on incendiary weapons, which the U.S. has not signed. But white phosphorus is both incendiary and toxic. The gas it produces attacks the mucous membranes, the eyes and the lungs. As Peter Kaiser of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons told the BBC, "If ... the toxic properties of white phosphorus, the caustic properties, are specifically intended to be used as a weapon, that of course is prohibited, because ... any chemicals used against humans or animals that cause harm or death through the toxic properties of the chemical are considered chemical weapons."

The U.S. Army knows that its use as a weapon is illegal. In the Battle Book published by U.S. 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."

Last night the blogger Gabriele Zamparini found a declassified document from the U.S. Department of Defense, dated April 1991, and titled "Possible use of phosphorous chemical". "During the brutal crackdown that followed the Kurdish uprising," it alleges, "Iraqi forces loyal to President Saddam (Hussein) may have possibly used white phosphorous (WP) chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels and the populace in Erbil ... and Dohuk provinces, Iraq. The WP chemical was delivered by artillery rounds and helicopter gunships. ... These reports of possible WP chemical weapon attacks spread quickly ... hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled from these two areas". The Pentagon is in no doubt, in other words, that white phosphorus is a chemical weapon.

The insurgents would be just as dead today if they were killed by other means. So does it matter if chemical weapons were mixed with other munitions? It does. Anyone who has seen those photos of the lines of blind veterans at the remembrance services for the first world war will surely understand the point of international law, and the dangers of undermining it.