"Melts them until boneses?" What is this, the Smeagol translation site?

"We loves the tasty babelfishes, yes preciousss..."

Oh, and WP's been around since at least WWII. Nasty stuff, true, but not that controversial.

I imagine it's a babblefish translation.

Actually, WP is used as a marking round, not an illuminating round. It is against the Geneva Convention to use it against personnel. It can, however, be used against trucks, cars, backpacks, shoes, weapons, and hats.

"Illuminate... or immolate?"

Not sure if you were being sarcastic here (given the poor quality of the translation), so I checked it, and it's "illuminate."

But the story reminds me of one about some (Fallujan?) insurgents who wired a school or something with chemical weapons so that when U.S. troops came it, it would detonate and appear that Americans were usng chemicals against non-combatants.

So in addition to questioning whether the eye-witnesses were telling the truth at all about burned bodies, it is also worth noting that even if bodies were burned by chemicals, that says nothing about who burned them.

And for any doubters out there, do you really think the terrorists are above burning the bodies of Iraqi civillians to make American troops look bad? And does anyone here think Italian television is interested in the answer to that question?

This is pretty much the same thing as the Napalm claim a few years ago. If you knew anything about the military you knew they didn't use Napalm, just something similar. This is similar in that if you knew about the military, then you'd know that WP is still used.

I carried phosphorous grenades while in Iraq for the specific purpose of destroying classified hard drives and other military gear in case we were overrun. I was issued three of them, and turned all three back in, unused after seven months. Honest. Wasn't me! However, had an alternate use ever occured to me....

/kidding

This claim is ludacris on it's face, but will undoubtedly be trumpeted as "unassailable evidence" by the Blame America crowd.

Micheal Moore and Oliver Stone are in italy filming propeganda for the AL QEUDA

If we were going to get medieval on some of these guys, and I'm not necessarily opposed, I'd like to think we could do better than WWI ordinance.

I always thought that there is more than a way to burn a body; if you lack WP, petrol or diesel will do.

The upteenth anti-american crap story. Shame on the journalists who, for both ideology and ignorance, swallowed it.

Actually, WP is used as a marking round, not an illuminating round. It is against the Geneva Convention to use it against personnel.

As I understand it, the only weapons that are against the GC are WMD. Any other weapon is essentially free for use, so long as the target is legitimate. If you shoot an anti-tank rocket at a single enemy combatant standing in the middle of the field, you didn't violate the laws of war, just engaged in massive overkill.

(More likely you missed and wasted a rocket.)

What the Italian story is doing is playing the invent-a-war-crime game. They make up the laws of war, distort their meaning, or distort the context of US orders/regulations, and then make accusations against the US.

A famous example is John Kerry's claim that "free-fire zones" were war crimes -- a claim that glosses over the fact that the zones were "free-fire" only if you had a combatant target; US soldiers were still forbidden to fire on non-combatants.

In this case, the Italian paper is (correctly) citing the GC ban on chemical weapons, but then (incorrectly) claiming that any weapon that involves a chemical is a chemical weapon. WP and napalm *ARE* chemicals, but so are water, gasoline, and gunpowder. The GC ban is on contact and inhaled agents -- gases -- not incendiaries. They're counting on people not looking closer at either the GC.