[A-List] Fw: Iraq, 1991: Gallery Of Horrors Hidden From The Public

["Tariq Mahmood" <zaogir@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"RicK Rozoff" <rwrozoff@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
 Iraq, 1991: Gallery Of Horrors Hidden From The Public


1) Peter Arnett: How Pictures Changed Pentagon Policy
2) Maggie O'Kane: "The Most Pitiful Sight I Have Ever
 Seen"
3) Patrick J. Sloyan: How The Mass Slaughter Of Iraqis
 Went Unreported

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,894706,00.html
>
> 'You are the Goebbels of Saddam's regime'
> Former CNN reporter Peter Arnett reveals how pictures
> changed Pentagon policy
>
> Peter Arnett
> Friday February 14, 2003
> The Guardian
>
> It all started with the baby-milk plant story. Up to
> then, the Bush administration had been
> enthusiastically supportive of CNN's coverage of the
> 1991 bombing of Baghdad. Our live reports from the
> ninth floor of the al-Rashid Hotel suggested that the
> numerous cruise missiles and bombs daily hammering the
> Iraqi capital were finding their designated targets,
> namely command and control centres, military barracks
> and Saddam Hussein's palaces and bunkers. Our reports
> seemed to confirm Pentagon assessments that civilian
> casualties were nil.
>
> But on Day 4 bombs rained down on an industrial plant
> on the outskirts of Baghdad, and the honeymoon was
> over. I was driven to the location by my Iraqi
> "minder" along with a WTN film crew. We pulled off the
> highway past a large faded poster of Saddam Hussein
> comforting a distressed child. The entrance bore a
> crudely lettered sign reading "baby milk plant" in
> English and Arabic. The structure was barely
> recognisable as a building. The sheet aluminium walls
> and roof had been ripped off and scattered in the
> yard. The steel roof girders were twisted and
> blackened. The machinery underneath was a tangled
> molten pile. The plant had been empty of workers at
> the time.
>
> Iraqi officials said the factory produced 20 tons of
> milk powder per day for the children of the capital.
> They showed us plastic spoon-making machines with
> their output scattered. I was walking up to my ankles
> in white powder. Documents lying around described the
> product as a mixture of malt, sugar extract and milk.
> I picked up an armful of intact packets to distribute
> to kids back at our hotel. It looked like an innocent
> production plant to me.
>
> That night I reported to CNN on my satellite phone
> what the Iraqis told me: that the plant was the only
> source of infant formula in Baghdad and was not a
> legitimate target. And I went to bed. When I awakened
> in the morning I tuned in to BBC radio, and discovered
> that I had reported one of the most controversial
> stories of my career. White House spokesman Marlin
> Fitzwater called me a liar. President George Bush
> himself had watched the report, Fitzwater declared,
> "and was not pleased". The installation was not
> producing milk powder as the Iraqis claimed, but was
> "a production facility for biological weapons", said
> Fitzwater. And as for CNN reporter Peter Arnett, he
> was "a conduit for Iraqi disinformation".
>
> So began a war of words. The baby-milk plant was just
> the first of an avalanche of images from inside Iraq
> that seemed to give the lie to the Pentagon's repeated
> boasts that its new generation of weaponry was
> mistake-proof. Day 8, three houses and their
> inhabitants were destroyed in Baghdad. Day 9, several
> city blocks were bombed in a town north of Baghdad,
> with many dozens dead. Day 10, more bombings of homes
> in Najaf. CNN was bearing the brunt of official wrath
> because it was regularly scooping the competition and
> attracting large audiences with its coverage.
>
> Coalition military commander General Norman
> Schwarzkopf solved his moral dilemma by turning off
> CNN in his command bunker. The Bush administration,
> well aware that America's viewers were fixated by the
> war coverage, orchestrated an elaborate campaign of
> character assassination. I was denounced on the floor
> of Congress. Representative Laurence Coughlin of
> Pennslyvania said: "Arnett is the Joseph Goebbels of
> Saddam Hussein's Hitler-like regime." The CNN
> president received a letter from 34 congressmen who
> charged that my coverage "gives a demented dictator a
> propaganda mouthpiece to over 100 nations".
> Conservative members of the British parliament
> compared me to turncoats of the second world war. And
> there was much more.
>
> My critics' rationale was that my observations were
> either direct lies or, if they were backed up by
> video, then the incidents themselves had been
> fabricated by Iraqi intelligence. The suggestion was
> that Saddam Hussein would raze his own cities for
> propaganda pictures. Maybe some people might even
> believe that if it was repeated enough, and certainly
> in these first weeks of the war the Bush
> administration was escaping serious criticism. But
> then came February 13, and the blame game was over.
>
> At 4:50 that morning an American jet dropped two
> precision-guided missiles on a civilian air-raid
> shelter in the Amariya district of Baghdad. Women,
> children and old men were packed inside; nearly 400
> died. Reporters descended and within hours the most
> gruesome pictures of the war shocked viewers around
> the world. The Pentagon tried to argue that the
> shelter was a legitimate target because it sprouted
> radio antennae and could have had a military use. Few
> were buying that. The Russian foreign minister who
> visited a few days later told me President Mikhail
> Gorbachev had sent him to Baghdad "because such
> carnage has to end".
>
> The debate over the Amariya bombing shifted attention
> from my credibility to the Pentagon's. The pictures
> had been so shocking that people did begin to question
> policy. Few argued that the consequences of a bombing
> raid that killed so many civilians should be ignored,
> particularly in a hi-tech war where such mistakes were
> not meant to happen. Long after the war, I learned
> that policy had indeed been changed by the shelter
> carnage, and that so-called "military-civilian
> targets" were struck off the bombing lists, at least
> for what remained of the Gulf war.
>
> The Pentagon fortunately resisted a more direct way of
> controlling the media in Baghdad by not bombing the
> al-Rashid Hotel or the Information Ministry. General
> Colin Powell, then joint chief of staff chairman,
> waxed indignant at the time at the very thought of
> such actions. But since then, the tolerance of
> unpleasant war images seems to be taxing the patience
> of American policymakers. The Clinton administration
> approved the bombing of the television centre in
> Belgrade during the Kosovo war just hours after
> several western TV reporters had completed their
> evening newscasts. The Kabul bureau of the
> controversial al-Jazeera, the "Arab CNN", was blown
> apart during the assault on Kabul in 2001.
>
> Eager journalists will no doubt again be manning the
> hotel roofs of Baghdad should another war break out.
> Let's hope that the "war of words and images" remains
> a verbal one.
> -------------------------------------------------------
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,894705,00.html
>
> 'The most pitiful sight I have ever seen'
> Maggie O'Kane, a rookie war reporter in 1991, explains
> the meaning of 'collateral damage'
>
> Maggie O'Kane
> Friday February 14, 2003
> The Guardian
>
> The 1991 Gulf war was my first experience as a war
> reporter. As a freelancer, I had knocked on the door
> of the Irish Times's D'Olier Street office with a
> piece of gold glittering in my palm: a valid Iraqi
> visa. I got to meet the editor, who bought me a ticket
> to Baghdad. Abu Tariq, my taxi driver in the capital,
> knew I wasn't quite sure how to be a war reporter. So
> he looked after me, taking me home at night to his
> wife. On one of those nights, all seven of his
> children were sitting around the dining room table,
> cutting up their white cotton table cloth into 10in
> squares. "They're making gas masks to cover their face
> with when the war comes," he said.
>
> The first days of that war had a curiously surreal
> air. Most of the press had left before the bombing
> started. The desperately ambitious, the thrill-seekers
> and the conscientious stayed on. Still, we were 1,000
> miles from the front.
>
> We rattled around at breakfast in the al-Rashid
> banqueting hall. The bread ran out. Our Iraqi censor,
> Sadoun, a large man who had gone to Aberdeen
> University and liked whisky, would bring his pen to
> check the reports before we filed them. Sometimes he
> censored, sometimes he didn't. It depended on the
> time, our numbers, his boredom threshold. John Simpson
> bossed the Iraqis around in his well-brought-up way.
> Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times kept a yellow canary
> in her room like a heroine from a Sebastian Faulks
> novel, but nobody worried too much about being gassed.
>
>
> Then, one night, Abu Tariq took me to the war. At a
> bus station south of Baghdad I came across a road
> filled with the wives, mothers and daughters of the
> cannon fodder you see in these pages. They were the
> women of the soldiers of the Basra Road. They were
> rushing at each battered minibus, taxi and truck
> arriving from the front at Basra. Like black bees at a
> honeycomb, they were hurling themselves at the
> survivors, pulling at the bloodied, wounded men in
> search of their sons, their fathers and those they
> loved. "Have you seen him?" "Where is he?" "Is he not
> with you?" Then, as each heard the news, she would
> fall to her knees to mourn for one of the 37,000 men
> who would not come home. It went on all night, a wail
> of pain and desperation. It was the most pitiful sight
> I have ever witnessed.
>
> Two days later, I flew home, my head still filled with
> the women's faces. I picked up a copy of Newsweek on
> the plane. On the cover was the jubilant General
> Norman Schwarzkopf. Inside was his description of
> their victory at the Basra Road. There was obscene
> detail of F16s and laser-guided missiles, and how they
> had trapped the fleeing Iraqi army from the air. He
> was reliving the highlights as if they were the final
> moments of a cup match.
>
> I cried on that plane. Partly still in shock at the
> women and the pain at that Baghdad station, and partly
> with shame, because I knew we had done such a lousy
> job of reporting the war. Few of the pictures you see
> on these pages were ever seen at the time. The body
> parts of these men being shovelled into the mouths of
> the bulldozers were men whose choice was to die at the
> front or be shot for deserting.
>
> This time they face the same choice. I've been back to
> Iraq many times. Mostly it has been to write about the
> sanctions that have destroyed the people of that
> pitiful nation. In between, I've been to other wars,
> but as this one builds, it becomes almost unbearable
> to follow. Except at moments of sanity such as last
> week's life-affirming stand by Joschka Fischer,
> Germany's foreign minister, when he told an astonished
> Donald Rumsfeld: "You have to make the case; I'm sorry
> but I am not convinced."
>
> After 10 years of reporting wars in Iraq, Bosnia,
> Chechnya, Kosovo and East Timor, I believe
> passionately that war can only ever be the absolutely
> final option for humanity. Unfortunately, we have been
> so protected from its pain and horror by the
> impenetrable wall of censorship and euphemism - as we
> will continue to be - that war is allowed to prevail
> as a legitimate means of conducting human affairs.
>
> Here is a bit of collateral damage: The first time I
> met Abu Ziad was in 1998. He had been the chief
> accountant with the British Iraqi Oil Company. Then,
> he had five children and lived in a big house by a
> bomb shelter. He recalled how during the Iran-Iraq
> war, when nearly 1 million young men died on each
> side, he would be at home in Baghdad, hearing the
> sounds of women wailing in the night for another lost
> son, husband or lover. He remembered thanking God that
> he had married late, and that his children were too
> young to be sent to fight. Then, three years after
> that war, President Saddam led them into another. At
> 2am on February 13 1991, two bombs hit the al-Amiriya
> bomb shelter near his home. The first was a drilling
> bomb that pierced the roof and cut open the central
> heating tank. Boiling water poured through the ceiling
> on to the women and children below, who were playing
> dominoes, watching Tom and Jerry videos dubbed into
> Arabic and eating kebabs.
>
> Only 15 minutes later, the second bomb exploded with
> such force that he never had the chance to identify
> the bodies of his wife and four of their five
> children: Zena, aged 14; Fuad, aged 12; Lena, aged
> seven; and Sadaad, aged six. "I saw a body being
> brought out, then I saw it was Zena's, but they were
> piling them on top of each other and I couldn't see if
> it was her. We weren't allowed to go close." Later
> that morning, Abu Ziad stood outside the shelter. He
> remembers noticing the ankles of the dead women and
> children. Their skin had been branded with the metal
> coils of red-hot mattress springs as they struggled to
> climb over the metal beds, and each other, to get out.
> The doors had been locked for security. Four hundred
> and six people, mostly women and children, died
> inside.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,894708,00.html
>
> 'What I saw was a bunch of filled-in trenches with
> people's arms and legs sticking out of them. For all I
> know, we could have killed thousands'
> Patrick J Sloyan on how the mass slaughter of a group
> of Iraqis went unreported
>
> Patrick J Sloyan
> Friday February 14, 2003
> The Guardian
>
> On February 25 1991 the war correspondent Leon Daniel
> arrived at a battlefield at the tip of the neutral
> zone between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Daniel was one of
> a pool of journalists who had been held back from
> witnessing action the previous day, when Desert
> Storm's ground war had been launched. There, right
> where he was standing, 8,400 soldiers of the US First
> Infantry Division - known as the Big Red One - had
> attacked an estimated 8,000 Iraqis with 3,000 Abrams
> main battle tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees
> and armoured personnel carriers.
>
> Daniel had seen the aftermath of modest firefights in
> Vietnam. "The bodies would be stacked up like
> cordwood," he recalled. Yet this ferocious attack had
> not produced a single visible body. It was a
> battlefield without the stench of urine, faeces, blood
> and bits of flesh. Daniel wondered what happened to
> the estimated 6,000 Iraqi defenders who had vanished.
> "Where are the bodies?" he finally asked the First
> Division's public affairs officer, an army major.
> "What bodies?" the major replied.
>
> Months later, Daniel and the world would learn why the
> dead had eluded eyewitnesses, cameras and video
> footage. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them
> firing their weapons from first world war-style
> trenches, had been buried by ploughs mounted on Abrams
> tanks. The tanks had flanked the lines so that tons of
> sand from the plough spoil had funnelled into the
> trenches. Just behind the tanks, straddling the trench
> line, came Bradleys pumping machine-gun bullets into
> Iraqi troops.
>
> "I came through right after the lead company," said
> Colonel Anthony Moreno. "What you saw was a bunch of
> buried trenches with people's arms and legs sticking
> out of them. For all I know, we could have killed
> thousands."
>
> Two other brigades used the same tank-mounted ploughs
> and Bradleys to obliterate an estimated 70 miles of
> defensive trenches. They moved swiftly. The operation
> had been rehearsed repeatedly, weeks before, on a
> mile-long trench line built according to satellite
> photographs. The finishing touches were made by
> armoured combat earth-movers (ACEs). These massive
> bulldozers, with armoured cockpits impervious to
> small-arms fire, smoothed away any hint of the
> carnage. "A lot of guys were scared, but I enjoyed
> it," said PFC Joe Queen, an ACE driver awarded a
> Bronze Star for his performance in the battle.
>
> What happened in the neutral zone that day is a
> metaphor for the art of war in an era when domestic
> politics is often more important than the predictable
> outcome on the field of battle. In 1991 American
> voters rallied behind President George Bush Sr for the
> seemingly bloodless confrontation with Saddam Hussein.
> Neatly hidden from a small army of journalists was the
> reality of war - a reality that can make these very
> same voters recoil in disapproval.
>
> His son is likely to use the same sort of tactics to
> blind one of the world's freest and most influential
> media establishments. Running the show for President
> George Bush is the man who manipulated global
> perceptions of the first Gulf war for Bush Sr: Dick
> Cheney. Then defence secretary and now vice-president,
> Cheney is likely to buffalo the New York Times, the
> Associated Press, CNN and others ready to bend to US
> government censorship.
>
> According to White House officials, no final decisions
> have been made by Bush, Cheney and current defence
> secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "We're still negotiating
> with the media," said one administration official. But
> Bush has already implemented ground rules that require
> journalists to give up their mobile and satellite
> phones to military commanders who would control the
> movements of these so-called pool reporters during
> Desert Storm II. If the final rules, organised by the
> Pentagon, are anything like the pool system designed
> by Bush Sr and Cheney in 1991, the world will be given
> a cloudy mixture of video footage and misinformation
> that will fog the reality of war.
>
> Daniel, the wire service veteran, was part of the 1991
> pool system. About 150 American journalists,
> photographers and film crews were scattered among
> attacking units. Their reports were supposed to be fed
> to a rear headquarters and then shared by hundreds of
> journalists from around the world. "They wouldn't let
> us see anything," said Daniel, who has seen just about
> everything there is to see in war. Not a single
> eyewitness account, photograph or strip of video of
> combat between 400,000 soldiers in the desert was
> produced by this battalion of professional observers.
>
> Most of the grisly photos from Desert Storm seen today
> were the work of independent journalists who raced to
> the "Highway of Death" north of Kuwait, where war
> planes had destroyed thousands of vehicles in which
> Iraqi soldiers had fled after the start of the ground
> war. The area was free of the military handlers who
> routinely interrupted interviews to chastise soldiers
> into changing their statements while reporters stood
> back, or forcibly removed film from cameras that
> captured images deemed offensive by an Army public
> affairs officer.
>
> Cheney, brimming with contempt and hostility for the
> press, saw journalists as critics of the military who
> must be contained. "Frankly, I looked on it as a
> problem to be managed," he said after the war. "The
> information function was extraordinarily important. I
> did not have a lot of confidence that I could leave
> that to the press."
>
> Since being brought into government as an intern by
> Donald Rumsfeld, then a congressman, Cheney has spent
> most of his adult life fencing with the media and
> learning its strengths and weaknesses. A stunning
> victory in 1991 was the media's agreement to permit
> the Pentagon to censor journalists' reports before
> they were printed or broadcast. In the past the
> Pentagon had left censorship up to individual
> reporters. During 10 years of war in Vietnam, not one
> journalist violated self-imposed rules against
> reporting, for example, specific locations of attacks.
>
>
> As a result, the conventional wisdom was that the
> government was not violating the First Amendment to
> the Constitution: that Congress "will make no law to
> abridge [. . .] freedom of the press". Only a handful
> of journalists went to federal court to challenge the
> government censorship imposed by Bush, Cheney and
> Colin Powell, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
> The court ruled the suit moot - the war was over - but
> invited the press to try again so that the issue might
> be settled. It never was.
>
> The media was more duped than cowed. Cheney won over
> some people with the promise that places in the pool
> would give them an advantage over competitors. For
> instance, a Washington Post pool reporter kept to
> himself all details of a US Marine operation for
> exclusive use by the Post and, later, a book.
>
> For independent journalists, life was much more
> difficult. More than 70 operating outside the pool
> system were arrested, detained, threatened at gunpoint
> or chased from the front line. Army public affairs
> officers made nightly visits to hotels and restaurants
> in Hafir al Batin, a Saudi town on the Iraqi border.
> Reporters and photographers would bolt from the table.
> The slower ones were arrested.
>
> But when the ground war started, the mighty were
> hamstrung along with the mediocre. The Associated
> Press, which benefited most from a system that turned
> all journalists into wire service reporters, sent
> photographer Scott Applewhite to cover victims of a
> Scud missile attack near Dahran. The warhead had hit
> an American tent, killing 25 army reservists and
> wounding 70. It was the single biggest loss to Saddam
> Hussein during Desert Storm. Applewhite, an accredited
> pool member, was stopped by US Army military police.
> When he objected, they punched and handcuffed him
> while ripping the film from his cameras.
>
> Cheney made sure it was just as bad for the rest of
> the pool. When the ground war started, the defence
> secretary declared a "media blackout", blocking all
> reports. After the war, General Norman Schwarzkopf and
> his aides revealed that the blackout was ordered
> because of fears that Saddam would use chemical
> weapons on allied forces. Potential news reports of
> soldiers writhing in agony from a cloud of sarin nerve
> gas had spooked the president and his commanders. "No
> pictures of that," said General Richard Neal, who
> directed ground operations during the war.
>
> As a result, reports and film were delayed or "lost"
> by military commanders so that most of it arrived too
> late for most deadlines. Neal and Schwarzkopf provided
> the bulk of briefings and videos in Saudi Arabia, and
> these were the first reports to filter through; many
> became the basis of the most lasting perceptions of
> Desert Storm. Gun camera footage always showed empty
> bridges or aircraft hangars being destroyed by "smart
> bombs" - laser-guided munitions that never struck a
> single human. But only 6% of the munitions used
> against Iraq could be guided to a target. Over 94%
> were far less surgical during the 30-day air war,
> which often saw 400 sorties a day. Those bombs
> depended on gravity and variable winds, and were
> capable of causing "collateral damage" to nearby
> unarmed civilians.
>
> The global television audience was awed by Tomahawk
> cruise missiles roaring from the decks of US Navy
> warships at sea. But less than 10% hit their targets.
> The missile's accuracy depends on landmarks that can
> be spotted by an on-board camera that can shift the
> weapon's direction. But the featureless desert led
> many Tomahawks to wander away like so many lost
> patrols, according to Pentagon studies.
>
> Schwarzkopf conducted televised briefings about the
> allied counterattack on Saddam's Scud missiles that
> had terrorised Saudi Arabia as well as Israel. Yet an
> air force study after the war showed that Iraq had
> ended up with as many Scud launchers as it had
> possessed before the war started. A murky Schwarzkopf
> video showed the destruction of what seemed to be a
> Scud launcher, but later turned out to be a bombed oil
> truck.
>
> Controlling the briefings, the videos and the press
> during Desert Storm was an extension of US policy
> started by President Ronald Reagan and his defence
> chief, Caspar Weinberger. It was Weinberger, an
> anglophile, who admired Margaret Thatcher's
> manipulation of the media during the Falklands war,
> which led directly to her political revival in 1982. A
> year later, Weinberger took control of the US media
> when Reagan found himself in a deepening hole in
> Lebanon.
>
> On October 23 1983, 241 US Marines died after a truck
> laden with explosives destroyed a makeshift barracks
> at Beirut airport. The massacre suddenly focused
> attention on the ageing actor's foreign policy
> decisions as the reports and pictures showed the
> removal of American bodies. Within 48 hours of the
> bombing, the president dispatched the first wave of
> 5,000 American troops to Grenada in the Caribbean.
>
> But the invasion angered Thatcher. Grenada was linked
> to the UK as a member of the Commonwealth. Only the
> previous week, Washington had informed London that
> there was no need for outside intervention, as local
> political turmoil was likely to play itself out
> without further bloodshed. Geoffrey Howe, Britain's
> foreign minister, was explicit. "The invasion of
 Grenada was clearly designed to divert attention,"
 Howe said in an interview. "You had disaster in
 Beirut; now triumph in Grenada. 'Don't look there,' "
 he said, gesturing with his forefinger, " 'look over
 here.' "

 Reporters were banned from Grenada. Those who tried to
 land on the island, such as Morris Thompson of
 Newsday, were arrested and imprisoned on US ships
 offshore. All details and videos were supplied by
 military reporters and photographers at Pentagon
 briefings.

 The media barons howled, but little changed. When Bush
 Sr invaded Panama in 1989, journalists were once again
 banned. Democratic congressman Charles Rangle of New
 York still insists that as many as 5,000 civilians in
 Panama City were killed by US invaders. But there are
 no pictures, no eyewitness accounts.

 The invasion of Panama and the arrest of Manuel
 Noriega were, like Desert Storm later, something of a
 political triumph for Bush. But the reality of that
 particular war asserted itself during a televised
 briefing by the president. It was just at the end of
 the session, when Bush was wisecracking with
 reporters, that most networks split their screens to
 show the arrival of dead US soldiers from Panama.

 Bush was caught bantering as flag-draped coffins
 arrived at an air force base in Dover, Delaware - a
 military mortuary. Later that week, Bush ordered the
 press banned from covering the arrival ceremonies for the fallen. President
Clinton continued the ban. And
 his successor, President George Bush, also wants to
 keep the dead out of the national limelight.

 · Patrick J Sloyan's reporting on the war after the
 end of Desert Storm won the Pulitzer prize for
 international reporting in 1992.