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By Daniel Simpson

Why isn't it front-page news that the United States used chemical weapons in Iraq and then lied about it?

Until last week, evidence of what amounts to a war crime had languished for months in an obscure military journal. When an Internet search by bloggers brought it to light, the State Department conceded, in mealy-mouthed terms, that white phosphorus had in fact been fired in Falluja as a chemical weapon. Photographs and eyewitness accounts suggest the victims included civilians. But somehow it's still not a story.



"The mainstream American news media, whose reporters had witnessed the fighting and apparently seen no evidence of this, largely ignored the claim," The New York Times reported at the weekend, after Italian state television broke ranks and screened an investigative report entitled Falluja: The Hidden Massacre.

This documentary, which depicted a white phosphorus shower raining indiscriminately over a built-up area, featured images of corpses charred to the bone, apparently consistent with burns from phosphorus pentoxide. Many of these pictures, taken by the unembedded reporter Dahr Jamail, have been available online for the best part of a year, but ignored by newspapers and broadcasters.

Questioning the conduct of the U.S. military just isn't on the news agenda unless journalists have enough evidence to prove what's officially denied. Even then, the reluctance to stand up to power is palpable.

Within 30 minutes of publishing a report about the Italian documentary, BBC News Online had retracted its original headline ("US 'used chemical arms' in Iraq"), removed the word "indiscriminate" from its reference to the use of white phosphorus and recast the story to give prominence to an American denial that has since been discredited.

For daring to print the Italian allegations without caveats, The Independent drew the ire of the U.S. Ambassador to London, who wrote in a letter to the editor: "Had your correspondents acted responsibly by checking these assertions with either the US Embassy or with the Department of Defense, they would have learned the truth."

Hardly. The official story keeps changing as the truth leaks out. Having insisted for months that U.S. forces used white phosphorus bombs "very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes", the State Department was forced to admit last week that this was a lie: "We have learned that some of the information we were provided … is incorrect," it said. "White phosphorous shells, which produce smoke, were used in Fallujah not for illumination but for screening purposes, i.e., obscuring troop movements and, according to an article, 'The Fight for Fallujah,' in the March-April 2005 issue of Field Artillery magazine, 'as a potent psychological weapon'."

Unsurprisingly, this statement left out the most damning quote from the Field Artillery story, in which three American officers boasted about their exploits: "We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents," they wrote, "using [white phosphorus] to flush them out and [high explosive] to take them out."

Since the vast majority of those left in Falluja to face Operation Phantom Fury were civilians, it is almost unthinkable that innocent bystanders escaped the "shake and bake" treatment.

The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention exempts white phosphorus from its proscriptions for "military purposes … not dependent on the use of the toxic properties of chemicals as a method of warfare." As soon as it's fired at people, however, its classification changes.

If it can be proven that the quantities of white phosphorus fired in Falluja were inconsistent with the purposes of using its toxic smoke to hide troop movements, then the case against the U.S. military is unanswerable.

It's high time investigative reporters went to work on it.

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