This is not "old news" - it was only last Thursday that the US State Department, faced with new evidence, announced "We have learned that some of the information we were provided ... is incorrect."

As George Monbiot sums it up in today's "old news", "The US government, in other words, appears to admit that white phosphorus was used in Falluja as a chemical weapon."

Under the Chemical Weapons Convention a chemical weapon can be "any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm". And that's what the US State Department has now put its hands up to.