U.S. War Atrocities: Chemical Weapons, Human Rights Violations -- and our indifferent press

by Amee Chew
November 23, 2005

In recent weeks, the media finally picked up on the use of white phosphorus against Iraqi civilians in the U.S. military's 2004 offensives against Fallujah. White phosphorus is a chemical weapon with effects like napalm; it fills the air and indiscriminately kills every living creature it touches. It is not a precision weapon. Visit Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre to stream the widely viewed documentary online about U.S. chemical weapons use.

Bush planned the 2004 attack on Fallujah to coincide with the November presidential elections. Troops were already in position to bombard the city, and the attack started almost immediately after election results were in. Conveniently, the media widely failed to cover an attack on Fallujah at that time. Although the Pentagon continues to deny white phosphorus is a chemical weapon, a newly uncovered Pentagon intelligence document from 1995 reveals that is just how the military described it when used by Saddam Hussein.

Reports of war crimes in Iraq have abounded since the beginning of the occupation. Rapes perpetuated by U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police under Occupation Authorities have increased with growing civilian contact. "There are plenty of women in Fallujah who have testified they were raped by American soldiers," said Mohammed Abdulla of the Study Center for Human Rights and Democracy in Fallujah. "They are nearby the secondary school for girls inside Fallujah. When people came back to Fallujah the first time they found so many girls who were totally naked and they had been killed."

In a recent scandal, a website allowing soldiers to swap pictures of dead Iraqis for free access to pornography was discovered by European press. Journalist Chris Thompson observes,

Americans have thousands of media outlets to choose from. But they still have to visit a porn site to see what this war has done to the bodies of the dead and the souls of the living. One of the pictures on Wilson's site depicts a woman whose right leg has been torn off by a land mine, and a medical worker is holding the mangled stump up to the camera. The woman's vagina is visible under the hem of her skirt. The caption for this picture reads: “Nice puss — bad foot.”

Such happenings raise important questions about the link between militarism and the objectification (or commodification) of women -- which must be of concern to Asian American progressives.

Asian American sisters still face racist sexual objectification related to the history of U.S. imperialist intervention in South East Asia. These issues also have a material and concrete component; for instance, in the early 1990s, 1,200 South Korean women came to the U.S. as military wives annually, but 80% of these marriages between Korean women and U.S. troops end in divorce, often as a result of the husband's physical abuse.[1] Many of these women are forced to enter (or re-enter) the U.S. sex industry for survival. The presence of U.S. bases around the world is related to the proliferation of sex workers in their locale. Imperialism makes use of and reinforces racialized sexism against women of color, especially poor women.

Yesterday, the UK's Daily Mirror reported that a "Top Secret" Downing Street Memo reveals President Bush considered bombing the Arab TV station al-Jazeera -- located in Doha, Qatar. Al-Jazeera, which has millions of viewers, infuriated Washington and London by reporting from behind rebel lines and broadcasting pictures of dead soldiers, private contractors and Iraqi victims. Although Blair talked Bush out of his plan, the memo raises fresh doubts over whether previous actions against al-Jazeera were accidental. In 2001, two "smart" missiles destroyed the station's office in Kabul, supposedly by mistake, and in 2003, reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a U.S. missile strike on the station's Baghdad center.

The British government is threatening to sue any newspapers that publish contents of the leaked memo, and the Daily Mirror has now agreed to comply with this threat. Two British civil servants have been charged in connection with the leak.

1 Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives by Cynthia Enloe, 97-8.

 

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