MAURIZIO TORREALTA: Well, first of all, I want to say that any time any institution corrects itself, I think, is a great event. And I would like to see many more institutions that are able to admit their mistakes. Then, the correction is not complete, because the Pentagon said that they used white phosphorus as a weapon, but not on civilians. And unfortunately we got really hundreds of pictures of people that seemed to be killed by white phosphorus. And I think an investigation, a United Nation investigation, on that could really finally say the last word about how much has been used against civilian people.

And then there is another couple of questions that I have in my mind. First of all, since the news are something that wasn't unknown -- The Independent, The Guardian wrote about the use of white phosphorus, and a lot of Arabian website was -- they published information about that. And what make that became news right now? It is a question that I really can't answer. And I think we should discuss a little bit about this second question.

JUAN GONZALEZ: George Monbiot, I'd like to ask you, the Pentagon is trying to split hairs in terms of how it defines chemical weapons; your perspective on their attempt to get through their own contradictions on this?

GEORGE MONBIOT: The Chemical Weapons Convention could not be clearer. There are two kinds of chemicals listed under it: One is the scheduled chemicals, such as phosgene and mustard gas and VX gas which cannot be used under any circumstances; then there is all other toxic chemicals which may be used for purposes which do not depend on the use of their toxic properties. However, the moment you use one of those other chemicals for its toxic properties against human beings, you are in breach of the convention. And what we saw very clearly from that extract in Field Artillery magazine was that they were firing these munitions directly at the combatants in Fallujah in order to exert the toxic effects of those munitions upon those combatants to flush them out so they could then be killed. In doing so, the U.S. Army was acting in direct contravention of the Chemical Weapons Convention. It committed a war crime.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play an excerpt from the RAI TV documentary, Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre. This part features an interview with Mohamad Tareq Al Deraji, a biologist from Fallujah who heads the Fallujah Center for Human Rights.

NARRATOR: Mohamad opens his PC and shows us images of a victim in Fallujah, a woman lying on the side, clothes intact, hiding a scorched body, a veil covering like a shroud a face melted by the heat.

MOHAMAD TAREQ AL DERAJI: In al-Askeri, I hear some witnesses say, ‘Here’s some bodies – here’s killing by the -- a man died from the [inaudible] burns.’

REPORTER: In what state did you find the dead?

MOHAMAD TAREQ AL DERAJI: Different type. Children, women, younger youth, older men. All different form of people. But many from them has killing and the dead, inside the chicken room or cooking room, some from them when he [inaudible]. There is some witnesses. He say when American attack some places, the big [in Arabic] – shower?

WOMAN: A shower of fire?

MOHAMAD TAREQ AL DERAJI: Yeah, shower, but different color [inaudible]. And after this, all the people in this place is dead.

REPORTER: Why was the bombing so severe?

MOHAMAD TAREQ AL DERAJI: In the April battle, American say we want to cut the people killing the foreign counters, American counters. After the battle in April, American -- he cannot enter the city, but he search about another reason. He found maybe a terrorist is a suitable reason. He continues to attack Fallujah between April and November. More than one hundred houses destroyed to kill Zarqawi and the assistant of Zarqawi.

AMY GOODMAN: That is Mohamad Tareq Al Deraji, a biologist from Fallujah, quoted in the documentary, Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre. We'll get response when we come back. And I should also say we did call the Pentagon. We called the Lieutenant Colonel Venable and asked him to join us, who had stated the reversal of the military position on whether they used white phosphorus as a weapon against people in Fallujah. He was extremely angry, and he refused to come on the broadcast.  

We're on the line with George Monbiot, author and columnist for The Guardian of London, wrote the piece, “U.S. Lied About Chemical Weapons in Iraq”; and Maurizio Torrealta, News Editor for the Italian television, RAI, co-producer of the film Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre. We just saw this biologist from Fallujah speaking. Maurizio Torrealta, could you amplify on who he was and what he saw?

MAURIZIO TORREALTA: Yes. He is a member of a human rights organization in Fallujah. He tried a couple of times to be brought to the attention of the Western people what's happening in Fallujah. He visited Rome. And then he went to Strasbourg in the European Parliament, invited by organizations, some political organization and some European deputies. And we met in there, and he told us some information.

But what strikes me is the fact that it's been a year that he was speaking about such things, and just the recent days, I got a lot of letters that have been sent by organizations in Fallujah to the U.N., to Kofi Annan, denouncing the same thing, and nothing happened. And we had to put on video those horrible pictures, in order to have some kind of reaction. And the reaction came before from the society. The politicians didn’t really care less. So finally it break through. I mean, it became news. And after a year people knows what happened, knows, at least has some idea, of what happened in Fallujah. And really, as a journalist, I'm really scared by the impossibility that the people in Fallujah had, for years, to brought to the attention of all the media what really happened over there.

JUAN GONZALEZ: George Monbiot, your column also mentions that the Field Artillery article was not the first mention of the use of white phosphorus, that there was actually some reporting by an embedded reporter at the North County Times in Southern California as early as April 2004. Could you talk about that?

GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes. I'll coach you from what he said. He was an embedded reporter with the Marines during the siege of Fallujah, which, as you say, took place in April 2004. And his article goes as follows: “’Gun up,’ Millikin yelled, grabbing a white phosphorus round from a nearby ammo can and holding it over the tube. ‘Fire!’ Bogert yelled, as Millikin dropped it. The boom kicked dust around the pit as they ran through the drill again and again, sending a mixture of burning white phosphorus and high explosives they call ‘shake and bake’ into a cluster of buildings where insurgents have been spotted all week.” Now, the key term there is into a cluster of buildings. In other words, again they were not using this white phosphorus for the purposes of illumination or for the purposes of smoke screening, both of which are legal uses of white phosphorus in war. They were using it as a weapon in order to flush the insurgents out of those buildings. Doing so is in breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And in both that article and in the Field Artillery, they keep referring to this mixture called “shake and bake,” which is obviously a mixture of white phosphorus and explosives at the same time, so it's clearly meant to be used as an offensive weapon, no?

GEORGE MONBIOT: I believe it's a pun on some seasoning which you have in the United States which you put on a chicken before you put it in the oven. And the idea is that you shake them out of their hiding place and then you can bake them or kill them with high explosives, having shaken them out with your white phosphorus. The use of white phosphorus to do that is not legal.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to the documentary, Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre, which is the documentary that RAI Television, the Italian state broadcaster, did last week that Democracy Now! also broadcast. BBC then got this reversal from the military on whether they used white phosphorus as a weapon against people in Fallujah. And this goes to the testimony of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena who worked as a reporter in Iraq before she was kidnapped. She spoke to RAI TV after she was released.