weapons that the documentary asserts are chemical weapons
An assertion isn't evidence.
Example: Trump asserts he justwon the election by a landslide.
A subsequent documentary, Star Wars in Iraq (also by Sigfrido Ranucci and Maurizio Torrealta), accounts for human heads being burned, without their bodies, clothes and nearby equipment suffering damage by alleging the use of US experimental weapons. [6] These journalists have no technical explanation of how the weapons might have caused the unusual effects, and the quoted article did not reference comments from forensic pathologists or specialists in weapons effects.
Crucially, [the US] statement that white phosphorus had been used as an incendiary was not an admission that a chemical or otherwise illegal weapon had been deployed. Still less was it evidence that a massacre of civilians had taken place in Falluja.
—?Paul Wood (The BBC's defence correspondent) 17 November 2005 [7]
The media couldn't have made a bigger pig's ear of the white phosphorus story. So, before moving on to the new revelations from Falluja, I would like to try to clear up the old ones. There is no hard evidence that white phosphorus was used against civilians. The claim was made in a documentary broadcast on the Italian network RAI, called Falluja: the Hidden Massacre. It claimed that the corpses in the pictures it ran "showed strange injuries, some burnt to the bone, others with skin hanging from their flesh ... The faces have literally melted away, just like other parts of the body. The clothes are strangely intact." These assertions were supported by a human-rights advocate who, it said, possessed "a biology degree". I, too, possess a biology degree, and I am as well qualified to determine someone's cause of death as I am to perform open-heart surgery. So I asked Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield, to watch the film. He reported that "nothing indicates to me that the bodies have been burnt". They had turned black and lost their skin "through decomposition". We don't yet know how these people died. But there is hard evidence that white phosphorus was deployed as a weapon against combatants in Falluja. As this column revealed last Tuesday, US infantry officers confessed that they had used it to flush out insurgents.
—? George Monbiot in The Guardian November 22, 2005 [5]
From YOUR wikipedia story. |
