In two separate incidents in late March, dozens of civilians in Iraq were killed by what eyewitness survivors say were US airstrikes. US officials, however, offered a range of denials and evasions about what may have caused the explosions. Despite evidence uncovered by one British newspaper about the second (and more deadly) of the attacks, most US corporate media outlets allowed the stories to end with the official US denials.
On March 28, in an open-air market in the Shuala section of Baghdad, more than 60 people were killed in a missile attack. As with an earlier missile explosion on March 26, the New York Times' John Burns reported on March 29 that "it was impossible to determine the cause", adding that "a [US] Central Command spokesman in Qatar said Friday night that the United States could not tell what caused the bombing on Friday". Burns suggested that these incidents "threaten to become yet another major problem for the Bush administration".
This PR angle, rather than outrage at such outrages, was also highlighted on the March 26 CBS Evening News after the earlier explosion, with anchor Dan Rather noting that "scenes of civilian carnage in Baghdad, however they happened and whoever caused them, today quickly became part of a propaganda war, the very thing US military planners have tried to avoid". (Of course, the extensive preparations the Pentagon made for communicating to the press before the war indicate that it was not hoping to "avoid" a propaganda war — but to win one.)
While it might be hoped that reporters would be interested in uncovering the cause of more than 60 civilian deaths, the US corporate media made little effort to investigate the Shuala massacre. One British reporter on the scene, however, found evidence that appears to shed light on the origin of the devastation.
On March 30, Robert Fisk reported in the London Independent that what appeared to be a missile fragment was found on the scene of the explosion. It bore a visible serial number, which Fisk published. In a follow-up report on April 2, the Independent's Cahal Milmo reported that the number could be traced back to the US Raytheon Corporation, and that the weapon was "thought to be either a HARM anti-radar missile or a Paveway laser-guided bomb". The Independent continued: "The American military has confirmed that a navy EA-6B 'Prowler' jet, based on the USS Kitty Hawk, was in action over the Iraqi capital on Friday and fired at least one HARM missile to protect two American fighters from a surface-to-air missile battery."
Some media accounts have pointed to the relatively small crater created by the explosion at Shuala as an indication that a US cruise missile was not responsible. But cruise missiles are not the only weapons being launched from US planes in Iraq. The Independent reported that, according to experts, "the damage caused at Shuala was consistent with that of a Paveway or, more probably, a HARM weapon", which are smaller than cruise missiles.
As of April 4, according to a search of the Nexis database, no major US news outlet has picked up this new information. Instead, reporters have continued to relay US officials' denials of any knowledge about the Shuala blast. The New York Times' Burns on April 4 questioned why the Iraqis have not been able to explain the incident: "Often, as in Shuala, officials have delayed taking reporters to the site for hours, and have met with evasions the inquiries about the unusually small crater at the marketplace, and the fact that most victims appeared to have died from shrapnel wounds and not from the kind of blast associated with high-energy bombs and missiles."
On US National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation on April 2, the question of civilian casualties was discussed by host Neal Conan with guests Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and retired marine Colonel Gary Anderson. In response to a caller's question, Conan explained that US military officials still could not find any evidence that the March 26 bombing was caused by a US weapon.
O'Hanlon then explained that a military investigation into these cases would involve answering three questions: verifying where you were shooting, and tracking "how many of the bombs or cruise missiles that you fired reached their proper targets"; looking for bomb fragments; and, finally, by judging from size of the crater left by the explosion, "whether it's consistent with the size of the explosive charge that was on the warhead in question, possibly even the shape of the crater and things like that".
Interestingly, the report in the Independent provides answers to all of those questions. But Conan summed up the matter this way: "There were other attacks, though, and as so far, the investigations by the US military... are not complete, and again, as Michael O'Hanlon knows, it may be some time, if ever, before we actually know what happened there."
NPR's listeners might have been interested to know that more information was available — even though it wasn't part of an investigation by the US military.
An April 1 Washington Post article describing the killing of civilians by US soldiers at a checkpoint outside the Iraqi town of Najaf proved that "embedded" journalists do have the ability to report on war in all its horror. But the rejection by some US outlets of Post correspondent William Branigin's eyewitness account in favour of the Pentagon's sanitised version suggests that much of the corporate media prefer not to report the harsh reality of war.
The Pentagon version was the one first reported in US media — sometimes in terms that assumed that the official account was factual. "What happened there, the van with a number of individuals in it ... approached the checkpoint", reported MSNBC's Carl Rochelle on March 31. "They were told to stop by the members of the 3rd Infantry Division. They did not stop, warning shots were fired. Still they came on. They fired into the engine of the van. Still it came on, so they began opening fire on the van itself."
Rupert Murdoch's Fox network's John Gibson on March 31 presented the story in similar terms: "We warn these cars to stop. If they don't stop, fire warning shots. If they don't stop then, fire into the engine. If they don't stop then, fire into the cab. And today some guys killed some civilians after going through all those steps."
But later on the night of March 31, the Post released its story on the shooting that would appear in the April 1 edition of the paper. Branigin's report described US Army captain Ronny Johnson's attempts to avoid the incident: "'Fire a warning shot', he ordered as the vehicle kept coming. Then, with increasing urgency, he told the platoon to shoot a 7.62mm machine-gun round into its radiator. 'Stop [messing] around!', Johnson yelled into the company radio network when he still saw no action being taken. Finally, he shouted at the top of his voice, 'Stop him, Red 1, stop him!'
"That order was immediately followed by the loud reports of 25mm cannon fire from one or more of the platoon's Bradleys. About half a dozen shots were heard in all.
"'Cease fire!', Johnson yelled over the radio. Then, as he peered into his binoculars from the intersection on Highway 9, he roared at the platoon leader, 'You just [expletive] killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough!'."
The Post's account is significant because it suggests that, in fact, military procedures may not have been properly followed at the checkpoint. Several US papers, including the New York Daily News, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, LA Times and San Francisco Chronicle, managed to include the discrepancy between the official Pentagon account and the Post's eyewitness description in their reports on the Najaf killings in their April 1 editions. The New York Times, however, did not, instead running a story that only presented the official version, under a headline that stated as a definite fact that adequate warning had been given before soldiers opened fire: "Failing to heed warning, 7 Iraqi Women and children die."
The NYT ran a follow-up article on April 2 — "US military chiefs express regret over civilian deaths" — that still omitted any mention of the description of the incident in the Washington Post. The piece, by Christopher Marquis, described the victims as being "killed when their van apparently failed to stop after orders by American guards". It rehearsed the official version of events ("that soldiers fired warning shots to stop the van, then fired into the engine, but that the van continued forward, forcing troops to fire into the passenger compartment").
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution summarised the story thus on April 2: "Seven Iraqi women and children are killed at an Army checkpoint ... after they failed to heed warning shots." The Houston Chronicle reported on April 1, without qualification, that "US troops ... opened fire on a civilian vehicle that refused their order to halt and ignored warning shots." Although the story cited the Washington Post on the number of people killed in the incident, it ignored the parts of the Post account that contradicted the official account.
According to the Iraq Body Count web site (<http://www.iraqbodycount.net/bodycount.htm>), as of April 11, up to 1413 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the invasion.
[Abridged from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Visit <http://www.fair.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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