AS IMAGES OF HURTLING missiles and fiery explosions try to crush us in the comfort of our drawing rooms, we must resist mistaking illusion for reality, message for medium, in the Anglo-American war against Iraq. Are we getting the full story? Can there be a war without the body bags of soldiers, without the mangled bodies of civilians? Or is truth always the first casualty?
Recently, one outspoken and graphic American website was shut down with the following notice: “We are sorry to notify you of suspending your account because of inappropriate graphic materia l… As ‘NO’ TV station in the US is allowing any dead US solders or POWs to be displayed, we will not either.”
Earlier, however, most networks had shown five scared US POWs as well as US Marine fatalities in Nasiriyah in Iraq. Then US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld indignantly claimed that “the Geneva convention doesn’t allow” this sort of thing, nudging the networks not to show captured or killed Coalition Forces soldiers. These were the same networks that continued to show blank and fatigued Iraqi POWs with their hands tied behind their backs, squatting or lying face down. Amazingly, when CNN recently grilled the Arab channel Al-Jazeera on why it continued to air such footage, the Al-Jazeera spokesman asked in turn why US stations were still broadcasting footage of Iraqi POWs. “Because their families wouldn’t be watching”, responded CNN’s Aaron Brown aggressively, as though the CNN broadcast is not available to Iraqis at home and abroad who may have relatives in the Iraqi armed forces.
Mr Rumsfeld’s attempt to clutch at the Geneva Convention is also pathetic. America is the principal accused not just in this illegal war against Iraq but also in the Bush administration’s refusal to abide by the international criminal court of justice and its attempt to undermine the United Nations and destroy every international treaty that impedes its attempts to run the world. In fact, as George Monbiot of The Guardian notes, the American prison camp in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba where 641 men are held breaches at least 15 articles of the third Geneva convention. American claims that these are “unlawful combatants” and not POWs are ridiculously self-serving. Indeed, the Iraqis can make the same claim more justly because the US invasion of their country is illegal.
Mr Monbiot notes that this redefinition breaches article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (al-Qaeda) must be regarded as prisoners of war. He refers to Jamie Doran’s film Afghan Massacre, which is the story of over 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pakhtuns who surrendered before General Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance at Kunduz on November 21, 2001. Most were dead upon arrival in the American guarded Sheberghan prison, 80 miles away. The US special forces instructed Dostum’s men to “get rid of them before satellite pictures can be taken”. Doran says a Northern Alliance soldier told him: “I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner’s neck. The Americans did whatever they wanted”. Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers with the corpses, then driven to a deserted place called Dasht-i-Leili and, in the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead were dumped into ditches. The German newspaper Die Zeit, the US group Physicians for Human Rights and our own Asma Jehangir have all investigated the claims and concluded that American soldiers in Afghanistan were culpable of war crimes.
Over 500 journalists from major networks are “embedded” with the Coalition forces. Thus it is not surprising that international media objectivity about the war is sorely lacking. During the fight for Basra, for example, one embedded journalist explained how the British shelling of the city was aimed at the Iraqi army “which was firing on the citizens of Basra in order to quell a popular uprising” – a great explanation for the civilian casualties resulting from the British bombardment.
But sometimes the media is an unwitting and welcome instrument in capturing the truth as well. As Doug Ireland, an independent American journalist points out, when General Tommy Franks was recently asked during a briefing in front of the cameras whether he was surprised by anything in the war, Franks said he wasn’t because the war had been in the planning for “at least a year.” This faux pas contradicted President Bush’s repeated assertions that “everything possible” had been done to avoid war. Yet not one reporter present was bold enough to point out the contradiction. Now Time magazine has just published more evidence that the decision for war was taken at least as early as March 2002. “F—k Saddam. We’re taking him out,” Times quotes Bush as telling three US senators at a White House meeting then. Much the same sort of craven media deference is evident during White House briefings to the media.
“In Iraq, the Bush administration has beaten the press at its own game. It has turned the media into a weapon of war”, admits the New York Times. Is it any wonder then that half the world is turning to Al-Jazeera?