edia coverage of war is one of the most important things you'll ever see in a magazine or on TV.  The constant stream of images of dead G.I.s and mangled Vietnamese was one of the main things that finally turned popular opinion so against the war there that even the nuts running the country had to call it off.

Of course there was a lesson learned from this, and it wasn't one about humanitarian morals and motives.  It was that the US public has no stomach for casualties, and that's doubly true if we have to see them on the actual evening news.  Clinton learned this when the infamous Blackhawk Down incident occurred in Mogadishu, and many marines were killed, and several of their dead bodies were dragged through the streets.  The US public demanded to have someone to blame, and with the commanders on the scene ducking and dodging the blame for their foolish orders that sent troops out on a poorly-planned and very dangerous mission, Clinton and other higher ups got much of the blame.

The Republicans learned far more from Vietnam than the Democrats did, and rather than just trying to limit any US casualties, they realized that the actual body count was of less importance than the perception of it.  If no film of the Marines being dragged through the streets in Mogadishu had ever made it onto US TV, the reaction to the events there would have been negligible.  Out of sight, out of mind.

To this end, media controls in Gulf War I were extremely tight, and unprecedented in the modern world.  And they were spectacularly successful, as the article discussed on this page details.  This lesson slipped away during the Clinton years, with that administration's fatal flaw of actually allowing the ugly truth of things to occasionally be presented.  Bush II's handlers learned very well from daddy Bush's success and from Clinton's mistakes, and the media was under very tight control during the Afghanistan invasion, and then even more locked up and embedded during the Iraq Attack.

Read on to find out more about that subject.  More similar news items will be added to this page over time, with the newest additions on top.

November 13, 2003

I've not been posting about the ongoing Iraq SNAFU lately, since it just depresses me.  But this article about the bald-faced lies by the soon-to-be-fired (?) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was just too funny to pass up.

WASHINGTON - In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would be welcomed by the Iraqi citizenry and that Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

Now, after both statements have been shown to be either incorrect or vastly exaggerated, Rumsfeld - with the same trademark confidence that he exuded before the war - is denying that he ever made such assertions.

 

For example, on Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.

"Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?" Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS' "The News Hour."

"There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces. "Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do."

The Americans-as-liberators theme was repeated by other senior administration officials in the weeks preceding the war, including Rumsfeld's No. 2 - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - and Vice President Cheney.

But on Sept. 25, - a particularly bloody day in which one U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush, eight Iraqi civilians died in a mortar strike and a member of the U.S-appointed governing council died after an assassination attempt five days earlier - Rumsfeld was asked about the surging resistance.

"Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said . . . they would welcome us with open arms," Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.

The defense chief quickly cut him off. "Never said that," he said. "Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said."

November 21, 2002

Just in time for Iraq Attack II™ comes a story about massive deaths during the first one, ten years ago.

The article is quite thorough, and one of the first things that sprang to my eye was the innovative attack method US troops used against the entrenched (literally) Iraqi army.

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."

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.

The article has a lot of other interesting things about the war, including how the media was kept from knowing anything, whenever possible, and how much of a desire there was to limit casualties, or at least the appearance of casualties.  This included attacks and beatings of the media by US troops, as well as total censorship of the images and reporting.  Since after all, if people saw that war was actually icky and full of dead people, it wouldn't be so glibly approved by the voters back home.

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.

A lot of the US high tech bombing and missile stuff was spectacularly unsuccessful as well, facts that weren't exactly admitted to at the time.

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 six per cent were smart bombs.

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.

There was news recently about the Israelis and their new anti-missile defense program and its high success rate against incoming sub-orbital missiles, like SCUDs.  You can see why they didn't bother continuing to use Patriot Missiles, eh?

The same style of coverage was used in Afghanistan, though the press black out wasn't as complete, mostly because the US didn't have a full invasion going on so they couldn't control all of the media so totally. The US' official reports on Afghan casualties were always a fraction of what reporters on the ground saw, and the reports of Taliban deaths and captures were just as exaggerated. And since all of the alleged Taliban prisoners from Afghanistan have been whisked away to the Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, keeping them safely away from lawyers or reporters, it may be years before we hear any more from them.

Keep this sort of thing in mind come Iraq Attack II, which will have media coverage just as censored as the first time, if not more so.  There's no reason the US people should have the truth about our military's actions, after all.  We just sign the checks and let them do what they think is best. To question that would be traitorous, and make Baby Ashcroft cry.

November 19, 2002

Here's an interesting review/discussion of a new Bob Woodward book.  The book describes actions and personalities inside the Bush administration during the Afghanistan operation and the planning for the Iraq Attack, and is based on hundreds of interviews with virtually all the principles, including several long interviews with the President.  It's about what we heard publicly; Cheney and Rumsfeld were totally gung ho, Powell was the voice of reason/moderation, and Bush was very unsure which course of action to take and wavered depending on his advisors for instruction, but the level of specific detail in the book makes it quite interesting.

One interesting tidbit is that the head of the FOX "news" division was sending over memos full of advice on how to keep the American people supportive of the war effort.

Roger E. Ailes, a media coach for Bush's father and now chairman of the Fox News Channel, sent a confidential communication to the White House in the weeks after the terrorist attacks. Rove took the Ailes communication to the president. "His back-channel message: The American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible," Woodward wrote. He added that Ailes, who has angrily challenged reports that his news channel has a conservative bias, added a warning: "Support would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly."

I'm actually surprised to hear that Ailes bothers to deny that FOX has a right wing bias; I thought that was their whole raison d'étre, to present a right wing/pro-republican perspective on the news to counter what they and most conservatives like to say is the liberal bias of the mainstream news.  And the apparent fact that Ailes is sending Bush memos on how to craft the news coverage of things to keep support up is pretty instructive.  Perhaps he was absent the day his journalism class professor explained the essential journalistic principles of objectivity and impartiality?

There are also three book excerpts, all of which are damn interesting.  This one discusses the CIA money men who were dropped into Afghanistan with literally millions of dollars in US cash money, up to $3million in a single briefcase, in one example.  They spent around $70m total in bribes and payoffs to get Taliban to defect, to get local warlords to fight on the US side, or at least to not shoot at US troops.  The mission was actually quite a success, ethical squishiness about paying off the supposedly terrorism-sponsoring enemies aside.  It was much cheaper to buy people off than what it would have cost to import tens of thousands of US troops, fly thousands more bombing missions, etc.  Not to mention the lesser loss of life.

Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in 10 stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say: We're here, we're serious, here's money, we know you need it.

"What we want you to do is use it," he said. "Buy food, weapons, whatever you need to build your forces up." It was also for intelligence operations and to pay sources and agents. There was more money available -- much more. Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.

The problem is that we've now abandoned Afghanistan and with the CIA no longer there throwing money around, the warlords are no longer keeping people off the US' troops, and there are daily attacks and bombs set on the roads.  The Russians poured everything they had into Afghanistan, occupying the entire country for over a decade, and finally had to give up and withdraw in failure.  That would seem to be a pretty simple lesson to learn from, but it seems that the US policy-makers didn't.

Tom Tomorrow has good coverage of this unfortunate turn of events, with links to supporting articles about it in USA Today, Time, and the LA Times.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.