How the Mass Slaughter of a Group of Iraqis Went Unreported
By Patrick J Sloyan
The Guardian UK
Friday 14 February 2003
'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'
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.
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