U.S. Forces Battle Into Heart of Fallujah

(Further evidence, an article from the Washington Post dated--Wednesday, November 10, 2004--verifying the use of White Phosphorous Munitions by US troops on the Residents of Fallujah).

On Tuesday night, Fallujah's eerily empty streets were littered with shattered concrete and dead bodies, said a resident shaken by a missile strike on the second story of his family home. Insurgents cloaked in checkered head scarves carried wounded fighters to Mosques.

Civilians caught in the crossfire were gathered in a Hospital donated by the United Arab Emirates and flying a blue and white UNICEF banner. There, medical workers low on bandages and antiseptic bound wounds in ripped sheets and cleaned torn skin with hot water.

The Jolan and Askali neighborhoods seemed particularly hard hit, with more than half of the houses destroyed Dead bodies were scattered on the streets and narrow alleys of Jolan, one of Fallujah's oldest neighborhoods. Blood and flesh were splattered on the walls of some of the houses, witnesses said, and the streets were full of holes.

Some of the heaviest damage apparently was incurred Monday night from Air and Artillery attacks that coincided with the entry of ground troops into the City. US Warplanes dropped eight 2,000-pond bombs on the City overnight, and Artillery boomed throughout the night and into the morning.

"Usually We Keep the Gloves On," said Army Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, the senior officer in charge of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force 2-2 Tactical Operations Command Center. "For this Operation We Took the Gloves Off."

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.

Kamal Hadeethi, a Physician at a Regional Hospital said, "the Corpses of the Mujaheddin which we received were burned, and some Corpses were Melted."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35979-2004Nov9_2.html


The following is an entry from 'Hunter's Diary: http://hunter.dailykos.com
The United States does not have a policy of Melting the Skin off of Children. It also, apparently, does not have a policy sufficiently precluding it, as the repeated insistence on asserting legality of Child Melting has clearly shown.

(Ha ha ha, the righty bloggers shout! "Water" is a Chemical too, therefore them kids ain't dead!). I think the preferred defenses in this discussion tell us everything we need to know about the priorities of the various parties, and I feel quite comfortable with mine.

Yesterday, the main point of contention on the right was the United States would never do such a thing as to use WP as an Antipersonnel Weapon, or use it in a City, despite it's apparent harmlessness. Now it's quite clear we do and did, and so everybody's dropping that point and merely talking about how harmless the substance is, other than (according to right-wing sites) being able to burn through steel, causing severe "chemical burns"--protein wisdom's quote, not mine--on both clothes and flesh, and persistently reigniting upon exposure to Oxygen. Yeah, except for that, it's peachy. And we don't fire it at targets, except for the documented cases we do.

We on both sides of the Iraq debate have every right to be mad about this stuff. It's a powerful and charged situation. And we can argue about the Justifications for Civilian deaths, and at what point they are "worth it," and how many dead Children equal "freedom."

But we DON'T get to pretend it's not happening, we DON'T get to pick our noses and pretend that these Civilians just happened to die of natural causes at the exact moment they were hit with Munitions, and the right frankly DOESN'T get to be incensed when people bring it up as a valid and powerful measure of the costs,implications, and possible outcomes of this war. You think talking about Civilian Casualties sucks?
Well, yeah, that's sort of the point. How do we think the people in Fallujah feel right now, you think they need any of us to tell them?

I wrote a post which I felt every human being on the planet could agree with--that these Civilian deaths are morally repugnant, were entirely predictable given the nature of the conflict, and that it is a fiasco beyond words that we're putting our troops in the situation where such Urban Conflict is forced upon them.

Apparently we can't even get that far, these days, because through word games and blanket condemnations of those that raise any evidence of the issue, we're not even willing to engage the most basic point: that we're fighting in Civilian neighborhoods, and that significant numbers of those Civilians are well and truly dead.