In denial: the media and chemical weapons

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.