Truth As the First Casualty1
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Chapter One TRUTH AS THE FIRST CASUALTY1 The U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was not without precedent: there have been dozens of other U.S. invasions, dating back to the toppling of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893.2 The date was January 16, 1991. An event which one young U.S. pilot would soon describe as “the best light show I've seen since the Fourth of July,” had begun over Baghdad. As the bombs rained down on that city, forty infants were in incubators, mothers at their sides, at Baghdad's Saddam Central Children's Hospital. The hospital director described what happened next. First the electricity went out. With the thunder of war all around, the mothers were panic-stricken. In their desperation, they grabbed their children and rushed them into the basement. Six hours later, twenty of the babies were dead from lack of life support.1 Even if Saddam Hussein deserved being called “the most hated man in the world,” as The New York Times characterized him, what of these newborn infants? The story of the Saddam Central Hospital infants failed to make it into the media, although earlier, as we will see, the same media were quick to report erroneous accounts that the “Butcher of Baghdad” and his invading Iraqis killed 312 newborn infants in Kuwaiti hospitals, a charge later denied by Kuwaiti hospital workers following their “liberation.”2 While the media accepted the stories of Iraqi atrocities at face value and gave them wide play, American horror stories were ignored or treated as simply generic examples of the tragedies of war. No news organizations suggested the U.S. was an outlaw nation for violating the Geneva Conventions on chemical warfare by using napalm. And six months after the war ended, when, as part of a campaign to “terrorize 2 Common Cents the Iraqis into surrendering,” the Pentagon admitted using tank-bulldozers to bury Iraqi troops alive in mass graves, The Globe and Mail found a Washington spokesperson to comment that, “There's no nice way to kill somebody in a war.”3 In a speech marking the first anniversary of the war, U.S. President George Bush called on Iraqis to overthrow their leader.4 What remained unreported by the mass media were the efforts by Bush and others to deliberately target and destroy the Iraqi civilian infrastructure, contrary to international humanitarian law. It is becoming increasingly apparent that much of what the public was told about the reasons for the Gulf War and what happened during and after the war was not true or selectively presented. There are two reasons for this: military censorship which prevented the press from knowing what was going on, and self-censorship -- the process of ideological blinkering that prevents the press from telling the public much of what it knows. We will first look briefly at the former before concentrating on the latter. Military Censorship Of approximately 1,400 journalists in the Persian Gulf, only 192 of them, including technicians and photographers, were placed in press pools covering combat forces, of whom perhaps 30 were at the front at any one time. The military selectively chose these people to report on the activities of over 800,000 “coalition” troops, and the pool members relayed information to the vast majority of reporters who were excluded. Newsweek reporter Tony Clifton commented, Now I know why I haven't had children. It's because later in my life, I don't want some innocent child saying, `Daddy, what did you do in the gulf war?' Because I would have to reply, `Child, I watched it on CNN, from an armchair in a big hotel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.'5 To put the above figures into perspective, more than 1,500 accredited journalists reported on the 1990 Super Bowl, not including technicians. Mainstream news executives filed a complaint with U.S. Defence Secretary Richard Cheney in the early summer, 1991, about various forms of censorship in the Gulf war. “By controlling what journalists saw and when they saw it, the military exercised great power to shape and manage the news,” the complaint read.6 The military used three major forms of media censorship, not including their selective control over who was granted a visa to enter Saudi Arabia.7 First, only pool reporters were permitted to cover hostilities; second, reporters had to stay with their military affairs escort at all times; third, all stories were subject to “security review” (censorship) by military officials. The official justification for censorship is that it prevents the enemy from 3 Truth as the First Casualty getting any military secrets. In fact, the major purpose appeared to be impression management aimed at those on the home front: manipulating public opinion. The pool requirement, for example, makes it easier to exclude media coverage altogether on some occasions. Generally it not only favours mainstream media, but only those currently in the military's good graces. For example, France's main news agency, Agence France-Presse, was excluded from the photography pool, and launched a lawsuit in protest. Pool reporter Douglas Jehl of The Los Angeles Times reported that 50 U.S. military vehicles were missing, and censors cleared his story. Later, the military decided the story was contrary to their “best interests” and ordered Jehl out of the press pool.8 New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was interviewing shopkeepers in Saudi Arabia on February 10, 1991, when he was picked up by the U.S. military and detained for five hours before being sent back to his hotel in Dhahran without his press credentials. When he went to the press centre later to retrieve them, officials at first refused to admit him, telling him he had an “attitude problem.”9 When James LeMoyne of The New York Times quoted enlisted personnel who criticized President Bush and questioned the purpose of the war, officials cancelled a scheduled interview with General Norman Schwarzkopf, and didn't re-schedule it. For the next six weeks, LeMoyne said almost all print news reporters were denied access to Army units.10 LeMoyne's news organization, The New York Times, had one correspondent in the news pool, while the U.S. military organ, The Stars and Stripes, had several. Use of press pools constitutes news management at its most effective, on a comparable basis with a Ronald Reagan press conference, complete with screened questions and video teleprompter. Only the favoured are admitted, and one `mistake' and you are out. Partly as a result, journalists identify with the military spirit and goals. In the Gulf, they were “eager” to take part in the training and fitness tests provided by the army. They started to “wear uniforms and adopted army slang.”11 As a result, says New York Times reporter Malcolm Browne, “in effect each pool member is an unpaid employee of the Department of Defence.”12 “With limited exceptions, such as on D-Day in WW2 (when 27 pool reporters went ashore with the first wave of forces), press pools were not used in any U.S. war until the 1983 invasion of Grenada.13 In WW2, reporters were “allowed easy access to the battlefield.” Limitations were due to the relatively small number of reporters, rather than military controls.14 [During World War II] correspondents flew on bombing missions, rode destroyers, went on patrols, and accompanied assault troops in the first stages of battle in numerous invasions...Pool correspondents accompanied the first waves of forces landing on the Normandy beaches on 4 Common Cents D-Day.15 According to CBS news president Eric Ober, who was in the infantry in the Vietnam War, “reporters could go anywhere -- anytime.” There were two basic restrictions in Vietnam. First, that no troop movements be reported prior to engagement. Second, that no faces of dead or wounded soldiers be shown before their families had been properly identified.16 Ron Nessen, who covered Vietnam for NBC news and later served as press secretary to Gerald Ford, said “there were no censors” in Vietnam.17 Reporters were given guidelines, asked to cooperate, and to a very great extent they did so.” The tight censorship of the Gulf War had its beginnings in the Falkland Islands. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher kept the British press under tight restrictions and banned television crews from the Falkland Islands during her brief and successful war to recapture that colony from Argentina.18 Following Thatcher's cue, the Reagan Administration established the precedent for virtually total media censorship in the U.S. invasion of Grenada in October, 1983. The press was not allowed to accompany the invasion force, and was kept from the island for two days. This provoked an uproar resulting in a small number of journalists being granted access, but only with military escorts.19 When the U.S. invaded Panama in December, 1989, the official press pool was denied access until the second day, after the fighting ended at Rio Hato and Patila, and was barred from getting close to fighting still going on at Commandancia. Their main source of information turned out to be CNN broadcasts of Pentagon briefings from Washington. Hundreds of other journalists who arrived to cover the events were restricted to a military base.20 According to Patrick Sloyan, writing in The Washington Post, the “muzzling” of the press in Panama created the “illusion of bloodless battlefields”21 which later became so evident in the Gulf. This formal censorship, with its beginnings in the Falklands, is responsible for much of the uninformed and misleading coverage of the Gulf war.