by Robert Fisk
This was painfully illustrated for me when the Iraqis took Khafji. The “pool” reporters were at first kept up to 25 kilometres from the fighting and—misled by their U.S. military “minders”—filed stories incorrectly stating that the town had been recaptured. But when I travelled independently to the town to investigate, an American NBC reporter who was a member of the “pool” confronted me. “You asshole,” he shouted at me. “You’ll prevent us from working. You’re not allowed here. Get out. Go back to fucking Dhahran.” He then betrayed me to an American marine “public affairs” officer who announced to me: “You’re not allowed to talk to U.S. marines and they’re not allowed to talk to you.”
It was a very disturbing moment. By travelling to Khafji, The Independent discovered that the Iraqis were still fighting in the town when the British prime minister was claiming outside Downing Street that it had been liberated. For the American reporter, however, the privileges of the “pool” and the military rules attached to it were more important than the right of a journalist to do his job. I named the NBC journalist in The Independent—and in an interview with The New York Times—and he was withdrawn from the Middle East. But the American authorities had been able to set reporters against reporters, to divide journalists on the grounds that those who tried to work outside the “pool”—“freelancers,” as the U.S. military misleadingly called them—would destroy the opportunities of those who were working—under heavy censorship restrictions—within it. That is why, when an enterprising reporter from the Sunday Times of London managed to find the Staffordshire Regiment in the desert in late January 1991, he was met by an angry British officer who said that if he didn’t leave, “you’ll ruin it for the others.”
The “others,” however, already had problems. When American correspondents on the carrier Saratoga quoted the exact words of air force pilots, they found that the captain and other senior officers deleted all swearwords and changed some of the quotations before sending on their dispatches after a delay of twelve hours. On the Kennedy, news agency “pool” reporters recorded how U.S. pilots watched pornographic videos in order to relax—or to become aroused—before their bombing missions. This was struck from their reports.
At one of the two American airbases in Bahrain, a vast banner was suspended inside an aircraft hangar. It depicted an American “Superman” holding in his arms a limp, terrified Arab with a hooked nose. The existence of this banner, with its racist overtones, went unreported by the “pool” journalists on the base. A “pool” television crew did record Marine Lieutenant Colonel Dick White when he described what it was like to see Iraqi troops in Kuwait running for their lives. His words are worth repeating. “It was like turning on the kitchen light late at night and the cockroaches started scurrying,” he said. “We finally got them out where we could find them and kill them.” These astonishing remarks did not elicit a single question from the “pool” reporter, although there was certainly one that was worth putting to the colonel: What was the “New World Order” worth when an American officer, after only three weeks of bombing, compared his Arab enemies to insects?
Journalists even felt the Iraqis had not been punished enough and sought to falsify the record of the war to prove it, suggesting that the land liberation of Kuwait, which took just over four days, constituted the entire conflict. In The Washington Post, Jim Hoagland was to write that “except for the 100 hours of Desert Storm in 1991, the United States and its allies have treated Saddam’s regime as an acceptable evil.” In the same paper, Richard Cohen joined Hoagland in the amelioration of history by telling readers that “the war lasted, you will recall, just one hundred hours.” As Arab-American activist Sam Husseini would point out, “forgotten were the nearly 40 days and 40 nights that the U.S. rained down 80,000 tons of explosives on Iraq—more than all the conventional bombing of Europe in World War II.”
But long before this war had concluded with the wholesale slaughter of fleeing Iraqi troops—and in the disgrace of our betrayal of the hundreds of thousands of brave Iraqis who rose against Saddam at our request—journalists had become mere cyphers, mouthpieces of the generals, discreetly avoiding any moral questions, switching off their cameras—as we would later witness—when the horrors of war became too obvious. Journalists connived in the war, supported it, became part of it. Immaturity, inexperience, upbringing: you can choose any excuse you want. But they created war without death. They lied.
The questions that the Saudis asked were in many ways more relevant than those put by the tamed reporters. “What is the New World Order?” a Saudi preacher asked me. Order is something the Saudis like the sound of. The world is an entity from which many Saudis are isolated. But “new” is a word which for Gulf Arabs had a dangerous ring about it. I tried to explain what President Bush might have meant by the phrase, referring to the context in which it first appeared. The Cold War was over, Eastern Europe was free. The Americans thought that these winds should blow through the Middle East as well. Dictators were no longer going to be tolerated—certainly not dictators who opposed the wishes of the United States. In retrospect, I realise now, I was explaining the official ideology of Bush Junior; I was just a decade too soon.
Given their concerns about any “new” world order, let alone the “American way of life,” it was a natural step for King Fahd to demand that Saddam Hussein should “return to God’s order”—a distinctly theological version of the Bush vision—and add that “we invoke God that He might register victory for His army.” In Baghdad, Saddam had himself sought God’s inspiration against the forces of “Satan and his hirelings.” Having adopted the persona of the twelfth-century Kurdish warrior Saladin, he tried to speak with the same voice. “Satan will be vanquished,” he said three days after the start of the bombardment of Iraq. The quotation was almost word-perfect. Faced by the French crusaders at the battle of Hittin on 4 July 1187, al-Malik al-Afdal, Saladin’s own son, records how his father rallied his Muslim troops with the battle cry: “Satan must not win.” Bush in turn asked God to protect America’s soldiers in the Gulf. But he had already placed the conflict on quasi-theological, moral grounds when he addressed a meeting of Christian religious leaders in the United States, declaring that the Gulf conflict was “between good and evil, right and wrong.” The ideological foundation of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was thus laid down before the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.
THE SIX O’CLOCK FOLLIES on 13 February 1991 had never started so late, but no one was surprised. There was a problem to contend with, as every journalist in Riyadh knew. How would Brigadier General Richard Neal, the U.S. deputy director of operations, respond to the killing of more than four hundred innocent Iraqi civilians in the Amariya air-raid shelter in Baghdad?
Would he begin by announcing an investigation into what appeared to be a devastating tragedy, the accidental bombing of a shelter packed with civilians, an expression of regret if the Baghdad reports turned out to be true? Or would he claim that the deaths occurred in a hardened military bunker, that the target was “legitimate,” and that he had no idea how civilians came to be there?
The latter reply was precisely what Neal gave, proving to millions of Arabs that the Americans were heartless as well as all-powerful. He even boasted of his pilots’ prowess in firing missiles down the bunker’s air shaft. The Arabs must have drawn in their breath. Indeed, the general chose to spend more than ten minutes recording the day’s military activity—the number of air sorties, of Iraqi aircraft claimed to have been destroyed on the ground and of oil wells set alight—before mentioning the hundreds of deaths in Baghdad as a coda, as if it was the last thing anyone was likely to be interested in. A “bunker strike” was what he called it. “I’m here to tell you it was a military bunker—it was a command-and-control facility . . . it was a hardened shelter . . . there is no explanation at this time why there were civilians in this bunker.”
Once he had finished, the general found himself—to borrow his own war-speak—in a questi
on-rich environment. What happened? General Neal’s replies were calculated to reassure the Allies that their military tactics remained as ethical as ever—and were bound to inspire indignation in much of the Arab world. Neal talked about America’s “active bunker-busting campaign.” The shelter/bunker was a military target—it had been on the Allies” target list for some days. Military signals had come from it. He said it had been painted with camouflage, although under later questioning he admitted that “I was only told this when I came in.” The Americans had meant to hit it, he said. “These young pilots don’t go out by the seat of their pants . . . this air campaign was scrupulously targeted. The folks spent a lot of time on it.”
Hitherto, the general had uttered not one expression of regret. Only when asked if there might be some such gesture of sorrow did he reply: “You’re damn right . . . but I would add that this was a legitimate target. But if four hundred civilians, as reported, were killed, logic would tell you that of course the American public and the coalition forces are saddened by the fact . . . if in fact . . . there were civilians, if in fact it did occur, it is a tragedy.” If, if, if. It was a military target. It was “legitimate.” They were great pilots. It was a “command-and-control facility.” But it wasn’t.
The truth—hidden at Neal’s press conference—was revealed to me within twenty-four hours in a suburban villa on the outskirts of Riyadh. The Americans believed that the bunker was used by senior members of the Iraqi Baath party and their families and friends. They regularly bombed bunkers where they assumed civilians associated with the regime were sleeping. The bombing of targets where women and children were staying was routine. My source was impeccable—a former American air force general who was now the senior targeting officer for the Royal Saudi Air Force. He examined the USAF photo-reconnaissance and satellite imagery each day. He knew the Amariya bunker.
When I visited him for morning coffee, he was in a state of great distress. One of the two American laser-guided missiles had travelled down the Baghdad bunker’s air-ventilation shaft, he said. The other had hit a dirt patch outside, causing damage to surrounding buildings. “All the Saudis are furious about this,” he said. “The Arabs in the Coalition are saying that Iraq will be effectively destroyed if these bombings continue. The infrastructure is being deliberately degraded— infrastructure for civilians as well as military—but this bombing was a serious error.”
Sipping my coffee, taking notes, watching the pain on this man’s face, I could only ponder the chasm between the deliberate, brutal nature of the American bombing campaign and the soft-focus, equally deliberate perversion of the truth imbibed and swallowed and duly regurgitated by the media. Far from the “target-rich environment” that Neal and his fellow generals claimed, the Americans and British were now flying between 150 and 200 sorties every day over Baghdad alone, and pilots were reporting that they were bombing the same targets five or six times, even after the structures had been virtually destroyed. The general spoke slowly, deprecating the activities of the air force he once served—though never, of course, the pilots—and had witnessed the arguments between Lieutenant General Charles Horner, commander of allied air forces in the Gulf, and Lieutenant General Ahmed el-Baheri, commander of the Saudi air force:
There is a great deal of feeling among Saudis in the MODA [the Saudi Ministry of Defence and Aviation] because of the Baghdad bombing. They are distraught over the continued bombing. They are very concerned that Iraq should not be destroyed—they are thinking about the postwar era— and the Saudis didn’t want to go along with the Washington statement that the bunker was a “legitimate military target.” “Chuck” Horner is in favour of the continuing bombing of Baghdad. He’s a technology guy. He’s a nice guy. General Baheri feels we should get on with the ground war. Neal talked about camouflage on the roof of the bunker. But I am not of the belief that any of the bunkers around Baghdad have camouflage on them. There is said to have been barbed wire there but that’s normal in Baghdad. We’ve been told that wire is sometimes put up to control crowds, that there is barbed wire near bakers” shops to prevent riots. There’s not a single soul in the American military who believes that this was a command-and-control bunker. Senior commanders in the field do not report to command-and-control bunkers in Baghdad. The military did believe it contained soldiers. We thought it was a military personnel bunker. Any military bunker is assumed to have some civilians in it. We have attacked bunkers where we assume there are women and children who are members of the families of military personnel who are allowed in the military bunkers. The shelters are totally worthless against LGBs [laser-guided bombs]— just think of the kinetic energy of a bomb dropped at mach speed.
I could think of that energy very easily. I would visit that bunker in the Amariya suburb of Baghdad many times in the years to come. It would become a shrine, its blackened walls smothered with photographs of the 400 and more women and children and babies who died there. It had been used as a shelter each night for local families—there were no Baath party officials among them—and the two missiles fired at the structure burned them all alive. On some parts of the walls, flesh adhered for years afterwards. Other concrete surfaces were found to be imprinted with the shapes of the human beings who were liquefied in a millisecond at the moment the American missiles exploded. Hiroshima-like, they would leave their memory as a shadow on the walls.
The general drank more coffee than I—he had seen the satellite pictures and he must have understood the degree of superhuman pain that the victims underwent—but he remained locked into the tactical issues of the air bombardment. The best military sources, even when they unmask military lies, do not always say what we want to hear. If the bombs were killing the innocent in Baghdad, the general also lamented the wastefulness of the munitions:
We are committed to a 40 per cent reduction in Iraqi troops in the KTO [Kuwaiti Theatre of Operations]. We should maximise our weaponry to better effect. We’re past the point of diminishing returns in the Baghdad bombings. The lucrative targets are in Kuwait. We can assume we are killing a lot of their frontline troops. It’s a crap shoot. But we shouldn’t be bombing in Baghdad. A bombing campaign like that tends to run itself out. After the bunker hit, we’re going to get nervous about continuing the Baghdad bombing campaign. President Bush had a free hand until yesterday’s hit. He doesn’t have that any more. Now he’s in a box. I think this accelerates a ground war . . . The pilot of the aircraft who did this will know it was him. But it wasn’t his fault. Saddam Hussein does put children in military bunkers and he is to blame for this irresponsibility. But we were wrong too. Kelly [Lieutenant General Thomas Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff] is a personable guy, he’s a nice person, I know him, but he’s so intoxicated with this damned air war technology that he went on television and said he was “comfortable” about the targeting. We could, by genuinely expressing our sorrow, do something to repair this.
The Amariya bunker was only the bloodiest of civilian bombings. On 3 February, jets—believed to be British—killed 47 civilians and wounded a further 102 when they destroyed a river bridge crowded with pedestrians in Nasiriyah. Most of the victims fell into the Euphrates. On 14 February, British bombers attacked a motorway bridge in the western city of Fallujah—twelve years later it would be the centre of resistance to the American occupation of Iraq—but missed the bridge and hit an apartment block and a crowded market, killing dozens of civilians.
Reporters often justify their own unique form of self-censorship—their uncritical repetition of the statements of generals and major generals—on the grounds that their “access” to senior military officials must be kept open, that this access gives them information that might otherwise be denied their readers. In Northern Ireland and in the Middle East—both among Arab or Iranian military officers and American and British forces—I have found the opposite to be the case. The more journalists challenge authority, the more the military whistleblowers want to talk to them. M
y files contain hundreds of messages or letters from officers of almost every army operating in the Middle East. One set came from a linguist serving with a U.S. AWACS crew monitoring intelligence over the Gulf before and during the 1991 conflict. His own recollections created for me an intriguing new dimension to the American military presence in Saudi Arabia. He wrote that at an official “Commander’s Call” in October 1990:
. . . it thoroughly sickened me that, apart from our immediate reason for being in Saudi Arabia (dubious though it was), a lot of high-ranking people had a completely separate agenda, and far reaching plans for after the war . . . certain elements within the military had in mind from the very beginning the intention to keep our presence there long after the war was over.
The AWACS officer was far more sickened by the testing of a massive new bomb against Iraqi troops:
One of the most exciting times for the briefers was when, in an absolutely textbook case of overkill, the U.S. Air Force decided to drop the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb right on the Republican Guard. They actually dropped four of them over two nights. It was a psychological (PSYOPS) operation, conducted by the Special Ops guys. The bomb in question is the BLU-82, commonly referred to as the “Daisy Cutter.” It is a 15,000-lb. bomb that is dropped on a pallet out of a C-130 like a cargo bundle. In this case two MC-130s dropped two of them in two locations simultaneously. This was followed by another MC-130 dropping leaflets telling the Iraqis that they would get the same thing the next night and that they should all surrender. The next night they dropped two more along with more leaflets saying we told you so. Since they were dropped in twos, the briefers wasted no time in coining the term “Blues brothers” for these bombs. Touching, isn’t it?138
Crews on the AWACS reconnaissance planes during the 1991 Gulf War would fly in complete darkness, the one window at the back of the aircraft covered to prevent glare on their computer screens. Each crewman or -woman sat at a “rack” that included a large graphics screen with a map of the Gulf area; the plane was equipped with data links over which crew members received radar tracks from other AWACS, E2Cs and ground radar. Crews could watch the strike “packages”—another of the military’s hygienic phrases—as they entered Iraq and Kuwait, hit their targets and returned as little arrow-shaped symbols on the screen. My source was tasked “to make sure the Iraqi Air Force never had a chance” and his description of this ruthless operation shows just how sophisticated American surveillance technology had become: