[NYTr] NY Times Responds to FAIR on Fallujah Weapons

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

FAIR 
http://www.fair.org

Activism Update

NY Times Responds on Fallujah Weapons
Public editor sides with reporter's dismissal

7/20/07

On July 18, New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt responded to FAIR's
June 11 Action Alert "Incendiary Weapons are No Allegation." FAIR's
action alert took issue with a New York Times review (5/29/07) of the
British play Fallujah, in which reviewer Jane Perlez called into
question the "objectivity" and "authenticity" of the playwright,
Jonathan Holmes, over "the scenes that deal with the use of napalm in
Falluja, an allegation made by left-wing critics of the war but never
substantiated."

In his response, Hoyt stood by Perlez's criticism that alleged that the
play erroneously referenced napalm attacks in Fallujah. He also
criticized FAIR for supporting its argument with documentation about
the use Mark 77 firebombs?a modern version of napalm--in another,
earlier, attack in Iraq, but not in Fallujah.

FAIR's point in taking issue with Perlez's criticism of the play is
that there had been a serious controversy about the use of incendiary
weapons in Fallujah: U.S. government officials denied that they were
being used, while some independent journalists said that they had been.
The New York Times took the government's side in this controversy with
reporter Scott Shane reporting (11/13/05):

    "A documentary on Italian television on Tuesday accuses American
forces of using white phosphorus shells in the assault on Fallujah last
year not just for nighttime illumination, their usual purpose, but to
burn to death Iraqi insurgents and civilians. The mainstream American
news media, whose reporters had witnessed the fighting and apparently
seen no evidence of this, largely ignored the claim."

Unfortunately for the U.S. government and for the Times, it turned out
that U.S. forces were on record as discussing the use of white
phosphorus (WP) as a weapon in Fallujah (Field Artillery, 3?4/05). (The
distinction between civilians and insurgents, which Hoyt stresses in
his response, does not seem to have been taken as seriously by the U.S.
military in Fallujah--see below.)

Moreover, the U.S. military has admitted to using Mark 77 in Iraq. Hoyt
points out that WP is not napalm at all, which FAIR did not argue.
Rather, the point was that a chemical agent with potentially lethal
effects was used in a battle in a major Iraqi city.

In the context of the New York Times's acceptance of the false denials,
a Times critic quibbling with a playwright about what particular form
of incendiary weapons were used on which Iraqi city--in a phrasing that
gives the reader no indication that any kind of incendiary weapons were
used anywhere--is more than a little grotesque. As FAIR said in the
original alert:

    "If Perlez meant to say that the U.S. military had only confirmed
the use of a napalm-like weapon elsewhere in Iraq, not in Fallujah,
while the only incendiary weapon admitted to have been used in Fallujah
was white phosphorus, then that's a very slender technicality with
which to call into question the "objectivity" and "authenticity" of a
playwright."

In his response to FAIR, Hoyt relied on the testimony of Dexter
Filkins, a New York Times reporter who was embedded with the Marines
during the siege of Fallujah. Filkins, Hoyt wrote,

    "said in an e-mail that he doesn?t buy the charges of large numbers
of civilian deaths, from whatever cause. 'The city was a ghost town by
the time the Marines went in, at least in the neighborhoods that I went
through, and we traveled from one end of the city to the other on
foot,' he said."

With all due respect to Filkins, Hoyt would have done better to consult
the reporters who were actually in Fallujah during the siege rather
than one who was with the forces bombarding it. Journalists like Rahul
Mahajan and Dahr Jamail described the roughly half of Fallujah's
300,000 residents who were still in the city being subject to
indiscriminate attacks by U.S. forces. Wrote Mahajan (CounterPunch,
11/6/04):

    "The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed
directly, blown up, burnt or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news
reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to 3/4 were
noncombatants."

Hoyt's response did reveal that Filkins witnessed the use of white
phosphorus in Fallujah--information that might have helped his
colleague Shane avoid his embarrassing dismissal of white phosphorus
reports, had Filkins bothered to report it at the time. It strains
credulity to imagine that an incendiary weapon that put fist-sized
holes in the gear of an embedded reporter didn't burn civilians to
death in the city where the weapon was directed.

FAIR activists who wish to comment on Hoyt's response can do so at the
Times's website (at the link below). What follows is Hoyt's response in
full:

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/was-there-napalm-in-fallujah/

July 18, 2007, 3:03 pm
Was There Napalm in Fallujah?
By Clark Hoyt

On May 28, Jane Perlez reported from London on a play
called ?Fallujah,? which purported to tell the story of the November,
2004 assault by U.S. forces on the Iraqi city where four American
contract workers had been killed the previous spring and hung from a
bridge.

The Perlez story set off a mini-storm of e-mails because of this
paragraph:

?The denunciations of the United States are severe, particularly in the
scenes that deal with the use of napalm in Falluja, an allegation made
by left-wing critics of the war but never substantiated.? (Times style
is to spell the city?s name without the ?h.?)

A media watchdog group called Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR),
which describes itself as progressive, took Perlez to task in
an ?Action Alert,? declaring that ?Incendiary Weapons Are
No ?Allegation.?? FAIR urged its readers to contact me to get The Times
to set the record straight.

I?ve spent quite a bit of time looking into this. Here?s what I found:

Perlez was correct. There are no substantiated reports of the use of
napalm ? or a ?napalm derivative,? as the play?s author and director
said ? in the battle of Fallujah.

FAIR?s complaint started with the assertion that U.S. forces ?did use
the modern equivalent of napalm in Iraq.? Notice, that FAIR
said ?Iraq,? not ?Fallujah.? That?s because the source for FAIR?s
statement was an August, 2003 article in the San Diego Union-Tribune
quoting a Marine colonel as saying that the successor weapon to napalm
was used during the invasion of Iraq, as Marines battled toward
Baghdad. The article was written more than a year before the battle of
Fallujah.

After discussing napalm, FAIR slid over to a discussion of white
phosphorus (WP), a different incendiary weapon that the U.S. military
first denied ? and then admitted ? using directly against insurgents in
Fallujah.

FAIR quoted accurately but selectively from an article in ?Field
Artillery,? the journal of the Army?s Field Artillery: WP was such ?an
effective and versatile munition? that U.S. forces ?saved our WP for
lethal missions.? Those quotes suggest the WP was dropped directly on
Iraqis to kill them.

But a close reading of the article indicates a different story: WP was
used for screening missions and later ?as a potent psychological weapon
against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could
not get effects on them with HE (high explosives). We fired ?shake and
bake? missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to
take them out.?

Michael Stebbins, the director of biology policy at the Federation of
American Scientists, a non-partisan, non-profit group that deals with
national security issues, told me that napalm and white phosphorus
are ?very different.? He said, ?No experienced military person would
mistake one for the other.?

Napalm and its successor use jellied petroleum products, require an
ignition and often kill by suffocating their victims because the fire
they create is so intense it uses up all the nearby oxygen. WP ignites
on contact with the air and can inflict deep wounds because it burns as
long as it has a supply of oxygen.

These are weapons with horrible potential effects, and you might
say, ?What?s the difference, they both kill.? But, so do 500-pound
bombs dropping on Iraq and all the other weaponry employed in a war
that inspires strong passions.

Calling what was used in Fallujah ?napalm? may have greater emotional
impact than calling it WP. Napalm raises images of Vietnam and,
especially, that tragic 1972 photograph of a naked little girl, running
down a street, screaming in agony from napalm burns.

A playwright may take such license to achieve a dramatic effect. A
journalist needs to deal precisely with facts, such as which weapons
were actually used in a particular battle.

The sub-text here comes from a 2005 documentary shown on Italian
television. It charged that WP was used against civilians in Fallujah
in November 2004, something that has also not been substantiated.

Dexter Filkins of The Times, who accompanied the Marines who assaulted
Fallujah, said in an e-mail that he doesn?t buy the charges of large
numbers of civilian deaths, from whatever cause. ?The city was a ghost
town by the time the Marines went in, at least in the neighborhoods
that I went through, and we traveled from one end of the city to the
other on foot,? he said.

Filkins did experience WP first hand. He said the unit with which he
was traveling took friendly fire, and chunks of WP burned holes the
size of fists through his backpack and sleeping bag.

?But, honestly, I don?t know what that phosphorus was being used for. A
flare? A weapon? I don?t know. We were under heavy fire, and it didn?t
seem significant enough at the time to ask.?