How the US took Fallujah

Here's what they're doing in our name.

Information Clearing House has the video which ran on Italian television about the truth of the US taking of Fallujah.

Watch it, if you can stand it.

The Bush Administration would prefer that this remain safely ensconced in Italy, but the cat is already out of the bag, in the form of this article in the UK Independent:

Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city.

[snip]

In December the US government formally denied the reports, describing them as "widespread myths". "Some news accounts have claimed that US forces have used 'outlawed' phosphorus shells in Fallujah," the USinfo website said. "Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes.

"They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters."

But now new information has surfaced, including hideous photographs and videos and interviews with American soldiers who took part in the Fallujah attack, which provides graphic proof that phosphorus shells were widely deployed in the city as a weapon.

In a documentary to be broadcast by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, this morning, a former American soldier who fought at Fallujah says: "I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it's known as Willy 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."

Photographs on the website of RaiTG24, the broadcaster's 24-hours news channel, www.rainews24.it, show exactly what the former soldier means. Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.

A biologist in Fallujah, Mohamad Tareq, interviewed for the film, says: "A rain of fire fell on the city, the people struck by this multi-coloured substance started to burn, we found people dead with strange wounds, the bodies burned but the clothes intact."

The documentary, entitled Fallujah: the Hidden Massacre, also provides what it claims is clinching evidence that incendiary bombs known as Mark 77, a new, improved form of napalm, was used in the attack on Fallujah, in breach of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons of 1980, which only allows its use against military targets.

Meanwhile, five US soldiers from the elite 75th Ranger Regiment have been charged with kicking and punching detainees in Iraq.

The news came as a suicide car bomber killed four American soldiers at a checkpoint south of Baghdad yesterday.

Meanwhile, the madman who sits in the White House continues to deny that we torture, solely on the basis of his own delusion that anything he does is by definition the right thing to do; and his right-hand henchman continues to advocate that we do more of it.

Meanwhile, the evil men who claim to be our leaders continue to feed America's young people into the Heart of Darkness, where the lucky ones die quickly, and the not-so-lucky come home maimed and scarred forever by the physical wounds and the images seared into their brains of what they saw and what their commanders required them to do. And the "liberation" of the Iraqi people continues to be a liberation from this mortal coil, as our bloodthirsty leaders continue to tell us that we aren't killing them, we're making them free.

All of this is being done, in perpetuity, in the name of the 9/11 attacks, attacks in which NO Iraqis were involved. We have now killed ten times as many people as died on 9/11. How many corpses have to litter the Middle East before we're "even"? And how long are we going to put up with this?