Bodies? What Bodies?
A Retrospective on Desert
Storm
By Patrick J. Sloyan,
AlterNet
November 25, 2002
Leon Daniel, as did others who reported from Vietnam during the
1960s, knew about war and death. So he was puzzled by the lack of
corpses at the tip of the Neutral Zone between Saudi Arabia and Iraq
on Feb. 25, 1991. Clearly there had been plenty of killing. The 1st
Infantry Division (Mechanized) had smashed through the defensive
front-line of Saddam Hussein's army the day before, Feb. 24, the
opening of the Desert Storm ground war to retake Kuwait. Daniel,
representing United Press International, was part of a press pool held
back from witnessing the assault on 8,000 Iraqi defenders. "They
wouldn't let us see anything," said Daniel, who had seen about
everything as a combat correspondent.
The artillery barrage alone was enough to cause a slaughter. A
30-minute bombardment by howitzers and multiple-launch rockets
scattering thousands of tiny bomblets preceded the attack by 8,400
American soldiers riding in 3,000 M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks,
Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees, armored personnel carriers and
other vehicles.
It wasn't until late in the afternoon of Feb. 25 that the press pool
was
permitted to see where the attack occurred. There were groups of Iraqi
prisoners. About 2,000 had surrendered. But there were no bodies, no
stench of feces that hovers on a battlefield, no blood stains, no bits
of
human beings. "You get a little firefight in Vietnam and the bodies
would
be stacked up like cordwood," Daniel said. Finally, Daniel found the
Division public affairs officer, an Army major.
"Where the hell are all the bodies?" Daniel
said.
"What bodies?" the officer replied.
Daniel and the rest of the world would not find out until months later
why the dead had vanished. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, some of them
alive and firing their weapons from World War I-style trenches, were
buried by plows mounted on Abrams main battle tanks. The Abrams
flanked the trench lines so that tons of sand from the plow spoil
funneled
into the trenches. Just behind the tanks, actually straddling the
trench
line, came M2 Bradleys pumping 7.62mm machine gun bullets into the
Iraqi troops.
"I came through right after the lead company," said Army Col. Anthony
Moreno, who commanded the lead brigade during the 1st Mech's
assault. "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."
A thinner line of trenches on Moreno's left flank was attacked by the
1st
Brigade commanded by Col. Lon Maggart. He estimated his troops
buried about 650 Iraqi soldiers. Darkness halted the attack on the
Iraqi
trench line. By the next day, the 3rd Brigade joined in the grisly
innovation. "A lot of people were killed,"' said Col. David Weisman,
the
unit commander.
One reason there was no trace of what happened in the Neutral Zone
on those two days were the ACEs. It stands for Armored Combat
Earth movers and they came behind the armored burial brigade leveling
the ground and smoothing away projecting Iraqi arms, legs and
equipment.
PFC Joe Queen of the 1st Engineers was impervious to small arms fire
inside the cockpit of the massive earth mover. He remained cool and
professional as he smoothed away all signs of the carnage. Queen won
the Bronze Star for his efforts. "A lot of guys were scared," Queen
said,
"but I enjoyed it." Col. Moreno estimated more than 70 miles of
trenches and earthen bunkers were attacked, filled in and smoothed
over on Feb. 24-25.
What happened at the Neutral Zone that day has become a metaphor
for the conduct of modern warfare. While political leaders bask in
voter
approval for destroying designated enemies, they are increasingly
determined to mask the reality of warfare that causes voters to recoil.
There was no more sophisticated practitioner of this art of bloodless
warfare than President George H. W. Bush. As a Navy pilot during
World War II, Bush knew the ugly side of war. He once recounted how
a sailor wandered into an aircraft propeller on their carrier in the
South
Pacific. The chief petty officer in charge of the flight deck called
for
brooms to sweep the man's guts overboard. "I can still hear him," Bush
said of the chief's orders. "I have seen the hideous face of war."
Bush was badly stung by the reality of warfare while president. After
the
1989 American invasion of Panama where reporters were also
blocked from witnessing a short-lived slaughter in Panama City Bush
held a White House news conference to boast about the dramatic
assault on the Central American leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega. Bush
was chipper and wisecracking with reporters when two major networks
shifted coverage to the arrival ceremony for American soldiers killed
in
Panama at the Air Force Base in Dover, Del.
Millions of viewers watched as the network television screens were
split:
Bush bantering with the press while flag-draped coffers were carried
off
Air Force planes by honor guards. Dover was the military mortuary for
troops killed while serving abroad. On Bush's orders, the Pentagon
banned future news coverage of honor guard ceremonies for the dead.
The ban was continued by President Bill Clinton.
Shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush summoned
battlefield commanders to Camp David, Md., for a council of war.
Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, chief of Central Command with
military responsibility for the Persian Gulf region, flew from Tampa,
Fla.
He and Central Command's air boss, Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles
Horner, were flown from Andrews Air Force Base, Md., by helicopter
to the retreat in the Catoctin Mountains near Thurmont, Md. Horner
said golf carts took them to the president's cabin. Bush was wearing a
windbreaker.
"The president was very concerned about casualties," Horner recalled.
"Not just our casualties but Iraqi casualties. He was very emphatic. He
wanted casualties minimized on both sides. He went around the room
and asked each military commander if his orders were understood. We
all said we would do our best."
According to Horner, he took a number of steps to limit the use of
anti-personnel bombs used during more than 30 days of air attacks on
Iraqi army positions. Schwarzkopf's psychological warfare experts
littered Iraqi troops with leaflets that warned of imminent attacks by
B52
Strategic Bombers. Arabic warnings told troops to avoid sleeping in
tanks or near artillery positions which were prime targets for 400
sorties
by allied aircraft attacking day and night.
"We could have killed many more with cluster munitions," Horner said
of bomblets that create lethal minefields around troop emplacements
once they are dropped by aircraft.
But Bush's Camp David orders were also translated into minimizing the
perception if not the reality of Desert Storm casualties. The
president's point man for controlling these perceptions was Dick
Cheney, Secretary of Defense. To Cheney, that meant controlling the
press, which he saw as a collective voice that portrayed the Pentagon
as
a can't do agency that wasted too much money and routinely failed in
its
mission.
"I did not look on the press as an asset," Cheney said in an interview
after Desert Storm. He was interviewed by authors of a Freedom
Forum book, "America's Team The Odd Couple," which explored the
relationship between the media and the Defense Department. To
Cheney, containing the military was his way of protecting the
Pentagon's
credibility. "Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed,"
Cheney said of the media.
This management had two key ingredients: Control the flow of
information through high level briefings while impeding reporters such
as
Leon Daniel. According to Cheney, he and Army Gen. Colin Powell,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, orchestrated the briefings
because
"the information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have
a
lot of confidence that I could leave that to the press."
The relentless appetite of broadcasting networks made Pentagon control
a simple matter. Virtually every U.S. weapon system is monitored by
television cameras either on board warplanes and helicopters or
hand-held by military cameramen or individual soldiers. This "gun
camera" footage may be released or withheld depending on the
decisions of political bosses of the military. So when the air war
began in
January 1991, the media was fed carefully selected footage by
Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and Powell in Washington, DC. Most of it
was downright misleading.
Briefings by Schwarzkopf and other military officers mostly featured
laser guided or television guided missiles and bombs. But of all the
tons
of high explosives dropped during more than a month of night and day
air attacks, only 6 percent were smart bombs. The vast majority were
controlled by gravity, usually dropped from above 15,000 feet 35,000
feet for U.S. heavy bombers where winds can dramatically affect
accuracy. And there never was any footage of B-52 bomber strikes that
carpeted Iraqi troop positions.
Films of Tomahawk cruise missiles being launched by U.S. Navy ships
in the Persian Gulf were almost daily fare from the military. Years
later,
the Navy would concede these subsonic jets with 2,000 pound
warheads had limited success. These missiles are guided by on-board
computers that match pre-recorded terrain maps, shifting left or right
as
landmarks are spotted. But the faceless desert offered few waypoints
and most Tomahawks wandered off, just as the French Legion's lost
platoon did in the Sahara. The only reliable landmark turned out to be
the Tigris River and Tomahawks were programmed to use it as a road
to Baghdad and other targets. But Iraqi antiaircraft gunners quickly
blanketed the riverside. The slow moving Tomahawks were easy
targets. Pentagon claims of 98 per cent success for Tomahawks during
the war later dwindled to less than 10 per cent effectiveness by the
Navy in 1999.
Just as distorted were Schwarzkopf's claims of destruction of Iraqi
Scud
missiles. After the war, studies by Army and Pentagon think tanks could
not identify a single successful interception of a Scud warhead by the
U.S. Army's Patriot antimissile system. U.S. Air Force attacks on Scud
launch sites were portrayed as successful by Schwarzkopf. The Air
Force had filled the night sky with F-15E bombers with radars and
infrared systems that could turn night into day. Targets were attacked
with laser guided warheads.
In one briefing in Riyadh, Schwarzkopf showed F15E footage of what
he said was a Scud missile launcher being destroyed. Later, it turned
out
that the suspected Scud system was in fact an oil truck. A year after
Desert Storm, the official Air Force study concluded that not a single
Scud launcher was destroyed during the war. The study said Iraq ended
the conflict with as many Scud launchers as it had when the conflict
began.
In manipulating the first and often most lasting perception of Desert
Storm, the Bush administration produced not a single picture or video
of
anyone being killed. This sanitized, bloodless presentation by military
briefers left the world presuming Desert Storm was a war without death.
That image was reinforced by limitations imposed on reporters on the
battlefield. Under rules developed by Cheney and Powell, journalists
were not allowed to move without military escorts. All interviews had
to
be monitored by military public affairs escorts. Every line of copy,
every
still photograph, every strip of film had to be approved censored
before being filed. And these rules were ruthlessly enforced.
When a Scud missile eventually hit American troops during the ground
war, reporters raced to the scene. The 1,000 pound warhead landed on
a makeshift barracks for Pennsylvania national guard troops near the
Saudi seaport of Dahran. Scott Applewhite, a photographer for the
Associated Press, was one of the first on the scene. There were more
than 25 dead bodies and 70 badly wounded.
As Applewhite photographed the carnage, he was approached by U.S.
Military Police who ordered him to leave. He produced credentials that
entitled him to be there. But the soldiers punched Applewhite,
handcuffed him and ripped the film from his cameras. More than 70
reporters were arrested, detained, threatened at gunpoint and literally
chased from the frontlines when they attempted to defy Pentagon rules.
Army public affairs officers made nightly visits to hotels and
restaurants
in Hafir al Batin, a Saudi town on the Iraq border. Reporters and
photographers usually bolted from the dinner table. Slower ones were
arrested.
Journalists such as Applewhite, who played by the rules, fared no
better. More than 150 reporters who participated in the Pentagon pool
system failed to produce a single eyewitness account of the clash
between 300,000 allied troops and an estimated 300,000 Iraqi troops.
There was not one photograph, not a strip of film by pool members of a
dead body American or Iraqi. Even if they had recorded the reality of
the battlefield, it was unlikely it would have been filed by the
military-controlled distribution system.
As the ground war began, Cheney declared a press blackout, effectively
blocking distribution of battlefield press reports. While Cheney's
action
was challenged by Marlin Fitzwater, the White House press secretary,
the ban remained in effect. Most news accounts were delayed for days,
long enough to make them worthless to their editors.
Accounts of Iraqi troops escaping from Kuwait the carnage on the
Highway of Death were recorded by journalists operating outside the
pool system.
Schwarzkopf repeatedly brushed off questions about the Iraqi death toll
when the ground war ended in early March. Not until 2000, during a
television broadcast, would he estimate Iraq losses in the "tens of
thousands." The only precise estimate came from Cheney. In a formal
report to Congress, Cheney said U.S. soldiers found only 457 Iraqi
bodies on the battlefield.
To Cheney, who helped Bush's approval rating soar off the charts
during Desert Storm, the press coverage had been flawless. "The
best-covered war ever," Cheney said. "The American people saw up
close with their own eyes through the magic of television what the U.S.
military was capable of doing."
-----------
Patrick J. Sloyan won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Desert
Storm while working as a senior correspondent for Newsday. He
wrote this article as a Fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation.
This article has been republished with permission from the Alicia
Patterson Foundation.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14633
