Christian Science Monitor: Phosphorus shells kill all within 150 meters.
The Christian Science Monitor has picked up the reports of chemical weapons being used and gives more details of the video. The US may deny that they targeted civilians all they want. But in fact, these shells are deadly from 150 meters in. That is larger than a football field.
"I heard the order being issued to be careful because white phosphorus was being used on Fallujah. In military slang this is known as Willy Pete. Phosphorus burns bodies, melting the flesh right down to the bone," says one former US solider, interviewed by the documentary's director, Sigfrido Ranucci.
"I saw the burned bodies of women and children. The phosophorous explodes and forms a plume. Who ever is within a 150 metre radius has no hope," the former soldier adds.
So, even if the US did try to keep all shells away from civilian targets, it didn't matter. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, you were dead on the spot, with no chance of survival.
I go back in time to the Roman conquest of Gaul. Julius Caesar had to kill one million Gauls and sell a million more into slavery. That is almost the whole Gallic population. So, in order for us to subjugate Iraq, we would have to kill tens of millions of Iraqis, more even than the Holocaust or Stalin's purges. The Bush administration is faced with a no-win situation. They can institute a policy where they use phosphorus shells to exterminate entire towns, kill millions of people in the process, and subjugate Iraq. But then, we would be reviled even more than the Nazis were. Or, we can try to "stay the course," make the same old broken-record arguments, and drain hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.
An Al-Jazeera reporter who covered the Fallujah offensive had this to say:
"The amount of people who used to confirm to us that the
US army had been using non-conventional weapons against Falluja city was enormous, but it was impossible to confirm," he said.
"The city was sealed off and families left; so basically only the resisting fighters were inside the city. They were mostly denied admission into hospitals, so we could not verify the information from the medical fraternity, but yes everybody was saying that burnt bodies were scattered on Falluja's streets."
So, not only did the US indiscriminately bomb Fallujah with chemical weapons, they covered it up by refusing any kind of access. This is the sort of thing that the sordid veil of secrecy by the Bush administration covers up. Given their continual secrecy, what else do they have to hide?