The 'Fog of War'

A non-military dimension has been sorely lacking in mainstream coverage of the attack on Iraq. General Tommy Franks set the tone for embedded reporters saying: “We don’t do body counts”. Few journalists caught images of Iraqi casualties, and some who did were killed. In this rarely seen image, the father of a 10-year-old girl weeps over her body after after a bomb exploded in a crowded market in Baghdad killing more than 50 people, including 15 children, and wounding many more. © Kael Alford/Panos Pictures

 Before the attack, Kate Adie, a BBC reporter in the first Gulf War, explained in a radio RTE1 interview in Ireland: “The Americans... and I've been talking to the Pentagon ...take the attitude which is entirely hostile to the free spread of information…I was told by a senior officer in the Pentagon, that if uplinks - that is the television signals out of... Baghdad, for example - were detected ... they'd be fired down on. Even if they were journalists”. Her source added: “They know this, they’ve been warned”.

 Then, in the first days of the attack, the international press watch group Reporters Without Borders protested that journalists had been arrested and beaten by US soldiers in Iraq. The officer in charge of the arresting unit issued a clear warning to journalists: “Don’t mess with my soldiers. Don’t mess with them because they are trained like dogs to kill. And they will kill you...”

 Despite this message being a clear disincentive, many journalists took the risks to report from Iraq.

 José Couso, TeleCinco cameraman and Taras Protsyuk, a Reuters cameraman were killed by a US tank shell at the Palestine hotel where most non-embedded journalists were staying. Three others were injured. A french cameraman filmed the attack. The footage shows the US tank carefully take aim and wait two minutes before firing. In contrast to military claims that the tank was responding to fire from the hotel, the footage of the event recorded quiet in the area before the tank opened fire on the journalists. At the same time, Tareq Ayyoub, an Al Jazeera correspondent was killed and a colleague of his was injured when the Baghdad office of Al Jazeera was hit by a US missile. The Basra Sheraton, whose only guests were al-Jazeera journalists, received four direct hits during a heavy artillery bombardment. (And, don’t forget, the Al Jazeera office in Kabul was destroyed by US bombardment last year). Then, nearly simultaneously, the Abu Dhabi TV office in Iraq was also attacked.

 Terry Lloyd, an ITN correspondent, was killed by coalition forces. Julio Anguita Parrado, reporter for the Spanish newspaper El Mundo was killed by friendly fire (another El Mundo reporter was killed recently in Afghanistan). Parrado was killed with Christian Liebig, a journalist for German Focus magazine. Also two journalists went missing when Terry Lloyd was killed by coalition fire: Fred Nerac, a French ITN cameraman and Hussein Osman, a Lebanese translator. Not even the embedded journalists have been safe. And the list goes on.

 Iraqi TV and radio transmitters have been systematically targetted and are now completely blacked-out. This has been widely criticised by Human Rights organisations such as Amnesty International because by targeting civilian installations it breaks Geneva conventions. In the UK and the US media and politicians called for, and applauded, the destruction of Iraqi TV.

 As a replacement, courtesy of the Office of Global Communications, the US administration is transmitting ‘Towards Freedom’ TV and radio from its own broadcasting station in a specially equipped Hercules aircraft flying above Iraq. The transmissions include dubbed speeches by Bush and Blair as well as US network news bulletins. US radio has been transmitting in Arabic since before the attack started and has been accompanied with the dropping of millions of leaflets designed by US psychological operations.

 Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on PR work selling the official US line on the war, and that worked to an extent, but censorship also had a role to play.
 Independent media organisations were closed by US authorities. YellowTimes.org for instance was suspended by authorities in the United States for showing pictures of Iraqi civilian casualties and US POWs.

 The Association for Progressive Communications, APC, issued a statement highlighting censorship of the Al-Jazeera website noting that it “has been the target of hacker attacks, domain name hijacking and the withdrawal of hosting services all within the first few weeks of the war on Iraq led by the United States”.

 TV networks, and the search engine Google, banned advertisements for peace.
 As well as censorhip there have been claims of self-censorship by media empires such as Rupert Murdoch’s, suspecting that an engratiating pro-war stance might win favour in media legislation.

But, Perhaps the most innovative form of censorship in this conflict has been the embedding of journalists with the military, what Uri Avnery of CounterPunch calls ‘Presstitution’.. Turning journalists into soldiers and invaders has given military control over the ‘embeds’ and their work preventing a non-military perspective from emerging. “Never before have so many journalists betrayed their duty as in this war. Their original sin was their agreement to be ‘embedded’ in army units. This American term sounds like being put to bed, and that is what it amounts to in practice” argues Avnery. “A journalist who lies down in the bed of an army unit becomes a voluntary slave. He is attached to the commander's staff, led to the places the commander is interested in, sees what the commander wants him or her to see, is turned away from the places the commanders does not want him to see, hears what the army wants him to hear and does not hear what the army does not want him to hear. He is worse than an official army spokesman, because he pretends to be an independent reporter”.

 So what is the US army line? When General Tommy Franks said “We don’t do body counts” he laid bare the attitude of the military, and the attitude to be adopted by the embedded media. Iraqi dead have mainly been referred to as rough numerical estimates, often not even that. Coalition dead have been treated as war heros, parents and children, their stories have been dealt with in human depth, looking at what the loss means to their families and friends. But many people aren’t buying this line.

An increasingly sceptical public has been searching for a truer picture of events. There has been a massive surge in interest in alternative news sources: Al Jazeera saw an increase of 4 million viewers to its European subscriptions but caused an outcry among western politicians and media for showing what was happening on the ground, for telling the truth. Millions flocked to the internet to find what wasn’t being shown on television.
 The ‘fog of war’, a term alluding to the difficulty in determining facts amid chaotic events, has become a close brother of misinformation and propaganda and is being manufactured. Mass media has given great exposure to unsubstantiated claims. Widespread reports of Saddam’s Torture Morgue (see inset image), the discovery of chemical weapons, the surrender of 8,000 Iraqi troops, the capture of an Iraqi General, the killing of ‘Chemical Ali’, claims that cluster bombs were not used, the destruction of a Terror Camp in northern Iraq, the 120-strong column of tanks from Basra, the uprising in Basra – have all been fictitious. Counterclaims, retractions and admissions of error are sometimes seen days afterwards, and sometimes not at all, but they never make the headlines. The first casualty of war prevents us from seeing the other casualties of war, the human ones.