March 19, 2005 -- Anniversary of a lie
There's a number of moments that, as a journalist, we will never forget. Some of them we shared with most of the rest of you, like the horror of watching a plane strike the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Others were unique -- running into an emptying newsroom at 3:30 a.m. as the final raw votes for Al Gore trickled in from Florida, literally (and successfully) yelling, "Stop the presses."
One of the most memorable moments will mark its two-year anniversary around 10:15 p.m. tomorrow night. It happened on March 19, 2003 (Philadelphia time), the bloody opening salvo of the war in Iraq. Our newsroom at the Daily News was already on proverbial pins and needles, since President Bush had been making it pretty clear since early 2002 that there would be a war in Iraq, come hell or high water.
But the question was when, and how. On March 19, 2003, we were ready to head home for the night when the first bulletins leaked out. Bush had authorized a strike on Baghdad -- not the massive "shock and awe" we were all expecting, though that would come later, but a supposed pinpoint strike on a "target of opportunity." That undoubtedly meant Saddam Hussein, and maybe his two sons.
The "kill shot" was the kind of thing that electrified those of us who were still in the newsroom, since it wasn't at all the conventional move we were expecting. Odd as it sounds when viewed through the haze of everything that's happened in the 731 days since then, but we also felt a strange kind of hope that night -- hope that an undeniably repulsive dictator might be killed, and that a ground and air war that would kill many Americans and innocent Iraqi civilians could be avoided.
Here's what we wrote that night:
THE UNITED STATES last night launched a daring opener to its war on Iraq by going for all the marbles in just one shot.
U.S. cruise missiles and F-117A Stealth bombers directly targeted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in what officials called a "decapitation attempt" to kill him and his top aides in Baghdad in one surgical strike.
Military officials said there had been a "target of opportunity."
In the next few hours and over the next few days, there were all kind of reports and rumors. The target was a heavily fortified bunker called Dora Farm where Saddam often slept. Some said that Saddam was badly wounded, and maybe taken away in an ambulance. Some reports suggested that one or both of the dictator's sons had been killed.
Here's a BBC article that captures the essence of the reports, many peddled by "senior administartion officials":
Senator Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate intelligence committee, said on Thursday he had been told that intelligence officials do think some of the Iraqi military leadership were killed in the bombing.
Officials told the Washington Post they believe the Iraqi leader, and possibly one or both of his sons, Qusay and Uday, were inside a compound in southern Baghdad when it was bombed.
"The preponderance of the evidence is he was there when the building blew up," the newspaper quoted one official as saying.
....Several reports describe the target as a residential site where the Iraqi president and his sons may have been sleeping.
But the Washington Post quoted "a knowledgeable official" as saying the location was an underground bunker, which was part of a secure compound guarded by the Special Security Organisation, which protects the president and is commanded by his younger son Qusay.
Yes, it was an "exciting" moment -- but with two years of hindsight, we now know that the start of war in Iraq was exactly like so much of what came both before and after March 19, 2003. It was wrong, at best, and an out-and-out baldfaced lie, at worst...100 percent, unadulterated Grade A baloney, and one of the worst batches at that.
If Saddam was even at Dora Farms -- and there's no evidence he was -- he obviously was not seriously wounded. We now know that the dictator's odious sons, Uday and Qusay, lived to fight another day, as did the regime's military leadership.
A bunker was not destroyed.
There was no bunker at Dora Farm.
From Bob Woodward:
On March 24, 2003, five days after the start of the war, Tim made his way down to Dora Farm. It looked like the remnants of a flea market, people were still carting stuff away. There were craters and clearly the place had been attacked. He searched everywhere. There was no bunker or any hint of one. He found a subterranean pantry for food storage attached to the main house. Perhaps that was what his ROCKSTAR agents [CIA informants inside Iraq] had been referring to. It was baffling and mysterious. Was it possible that manzul was neither a place of refuge nor a bunker, but a pantry?
Tim eventually tracked down some of the ROCKSTAR agents who had reported that night. Two said their wives had been captured by Hussein's agents and had their fingernails pulled out. Another maintained that his house had been bulldozed. There was some evidence to support these claims, but Tim was unsure.
Soon Tim was reassigned to CIA headquarters to work undercover on other issues. Saul and other superiors asked him and the team members to put down the sequence of events of the day and night of March 19 to 20, 2003. They wanted a very briefable, immaculate package. The more Tim searched his memory and the few documents, he realized that much was cloudy. Everyone had been stressed. The ROCKSTARS on the ground had not wanted to disappoint, and had obviously been worried about being captured or killed.
Tim made a series of efforts to write down in a meaningful way what had happened. He tried a version. Did he have 40 percent? Or 62 percent? Or 83 percent? he wondered. What percentage of the truth was available? What had slipped away? What had been untrue? He tried several more times. It wasn't black or white, and it certainly wasn't a straight line. Was he getting closer or further from the truth?
He never produced a definitive version. The biggest unanswered question was whether Saddam Hussein and his entourage had really been there that night.
Also in 2004, the widely respected Human Rights Watch reported that no military or political leaders died in the strike, but a civilian was killed and 14 others, including a child, were wounded.
And the attack on Dora Farm was not unique. In fact, the New York Times eventually reported, with little fanfare, that the American military went 0-for-50 (that's right, zero) in attempted targeted bombing of high-profile Iraqi leaders. Those strikes did, however, killed "a significant number of civilians."
The Dora Farm myth was just one of the biggest and boldest of a string of falsehoods that were sold to the American people just in the 21 days of "combat operations" in Iraq in March and April of 2003. For example:
-- On April 8, 2003, a U.S. B1-B bomber dropped four 2,000 bombs on a house in the affluent al-Mansur neighborhood of Baghdad because of a tip that Saddam and his underlings were there. At least this time, the Daily News was skeptical (Our headline -- "Saddam Killed, Again" -- was a classic), and rightfully so. There was in fact, no evidence that Saddam had ever been there. But 18 civilians were killed.
-- On March 21, 2003, the U.S. military reported that it believed that Saddam's cousin, the notorious "Chemical Ali," had been killed along with two other top leaders in a Baghdad air strike. This time, they were forced to admit that he survived -- only because they reported yet again he'd been killed in an attack, on April 7, 2003: Capt. Al Lockwood, a spokesman for the British military at U.S. Central Command, said the body of Gen. Ali Hassan al-Majeed had been found.
In fact, 17 civilians were later reported killed in the airstrike, including four children under the age of 12. We knpw that "Chemical Ali" was not among them, since he was captured that Aug. 21, very much alive. He is currently awaiting trial.
-- After Army Pvt. Jessica Lynch was captured on March 23, 2003, the Pentagon told the Washington Post that she was captured with "guns blazing," when in fact she never fired a shot -- one of many inconsistencies in Lynch's capture and rescue that even she herself acknowledged.
Yet the myth of Lynch's capture and rescue, just like the mythology around our "precision" strikes against Saddam, his sons, or Chemical Ali, helped to create an image of a war that in the end, wasn't. Indeed, the success of the U.S. propaganda machine in March and April 2003 may help explain why so many were caught off-guard by the insurgency that followed.
Misinformation is a part of war, and has been used for very good causes -- such as the deception surrounding D-Day in 1944. In this case, though, the tall tales are bundled up in a non-stop stream of falsehoods, bad information and outright lies, about "mushroom clouds," uranium in Niger, WMD, links to al-Qaeda, and God knows what else.
In hindsight, March 19, 2003, was an important turning point -- not just for Iraq, but for our own state of mind. Before that day, we were still, at times, too trusting of the official pronoucements.
Now, they've made it impossible to know what to believe. |
