November 18, 2005
Now that the Iraqi government has been
forced to investigate the US military's criminal use of phosphorus
incendiary bombs during the November 2004 assault on Fallujah,
it is important to note how slippery the Pentagon is being about
its claim not to have used this dreadful weapon against "civilians."
As I wrote in Counterpunch
on Nov. 13, 2004, during the assault by the US military on this
doomed city of 300,000:
In a grotesque and blatant
war crime, the U.S. began this assault by first encircling Fallujah,
and then declaring that it would allow women, children and old
people to leave, but not "men and boys of fighting age"
(whatever that may be). Several hundred people in a group of
families trying to flee the city over the weekend were actually
detained, and then, after allowing the women and children to
go, U.S. troops tested the men's hands for gunpowder traces.
Finding none, they nonetheless sent them back to the doomed city
to face their fate.
By trapping as many as 100,000
men and boys in the city before invading it, the U.S., acting
for all the world more like a group of Bosnian Serb thugs than
like the army of the Free World, has assured that it will be
killing many, many civilians, but we won't be hearing much about
that. As far as the Pentagon and Centcom in Iraq go, the dead
in Fallujah are and will be all rebels. If they die, they must
have died fighting.
Besides the fact that denying
civilians the right to flee a battlezone is in itself a war crime
under the Geneva conventions, US actions before and during the
assault and destruction of Fallujah mean that current assertions
that white phosphorus weapons were not used against civilians
are total lies. The Pentagon simply defined away all people left,
or stranded, or trapped in the city as insurgents.
This grim history, so reminiscent
of the way the Nazis herded jews into villages in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union before leveling them, gives the lie to the
latest effort to dodge a charge of war crimes in Iraq.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new
book of CounterPunch columns titled "This
Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage
Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff
can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
