Media coverage of the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War mostly portrayed the war as a blunder. There were systematic war crimes that have largely vanished into the memory hole, but permitting government officials to vaporize their victims paves the way to new atrocities.
It is folly to pay more attention to Pentagon denials than to piles of corpses and flattened villages.
On the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, former First Lady Barbara Bush announced: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen? It’s not relevant, so why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
The Pentagon quickly institutionalized the Barbara Bush rule. Early in the Iraq war, Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks, asked about tracking civilian casualties, replied, “It just is not worth trying to characterize by numbers. And, frankly, if we are going to be honorable about our warfare, we are not out there trying to count up bodies.”
Congress, in 2003 legislation funding the Iraq War, required the Pentagon to “seek to identify families of non-combatant Iraqis who were killed or injured or whose homes were damaged during recent military operations, and to provide appropriate assistance.” The Pentagon ignored the provision. The Washington Post reported: “One Air Force general, asked why the military has not done such postwar accounting in the past, said it has been more cost-effective to pour resources into increasingly sophisticated weaponry and intelligence-gathering equipment.” Acquiring more lethal weapons trumped tallying the victims.
The media blackout on the death count begins After the invasion progressed, Bush perennially proclaimed that the United States had given freedom to 25 million Iraqis. Thus, any Iraqi civilians killed by U.S. forces were both statistically and morally inconsequential. And the vast majority of the news coverage left out the asterisks.
A 2005 American University survey of hundreds of journalists who covered Iraq concluded:
Many media outlets have self-censored their reporting on the conflict in Iraq because of concern about public reaction to graphic images and details about the war.
Individual journalists commented:
“In general, coverage downplayed civilian casualties and promoted a pro- U.S. viewpoint. No U.S. media show abuses by U.S. military carried out on regular basis.” “Friendly fire incidents were to show only injured Americans, and no reference made to possible mistakes involving civilians.” “The real damage of the war on the civilian population was uniformly omitted.” The media almost always refused to publish photos incriminating the U.S. military. The Washington Post received a leak of thousands of pages of confidential records on the 2005 massacre by U.S. Marines at Haditha, including stunning photos taken immediately after the killings of 24 civilians (mostly women and children). Though the Post headlined its exclusive story, “Marines’ Photos Provide Graphic Evidence in Haditha Probe,” the reporter noted halfway through the article that “Post editors decided that most of the images are too graphic to publish.” The Post suppressed the evidence at the same time it continued deferentially reporting official denials that U.S. troops committed atrocities.
In 2006, the U.S. military imposed new restrictions on the media, decreeing that “Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without service member’s prior written consent.” This effectively guaranteed that Americans would never see photos or film footage of the vast majority of American casualties. (Dead men sign no consent forms.) The news media did not publicly disclose or challenge the restrictions.
In 2007, two Apache helicopters targeted a group of men in Baghdad with 30 mm. cannons and killed up to 18 people. Video from the helicopter revealed one helicopter crew “laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians, including two Reuters journalists.” “Light ‘em all up. Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards,” one guy on the recording declared. Army Corporal Chelsea Manning leaked the video to Wikileaks, which disclosed it in 2010.
Wikileaks declared on Twitter: “Washington Post had Collateral Murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT to the public.” Wikileaks also disclosed thousands of official documents exposing U.S. war crimes and abuses, tacitly damning American media outlets that chose to ignore or shroud atrocities.
A mid-2008 New York Times article noted that “After five years and more than 4,000 U.S. combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half-dozen graphic photographs of dead U.S. soldiers.” Veteran photographers who posted shots of wounded or dead U.S. soldiers were quickly booted out of Iraq.
The Times noted that Iraqi “detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the U.S. Defense Department, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.” Privacy was the only “right” the Pentagon pretended to respect — since the vast majority of detainees received little or no due process.
The collateral damage of innocent dead civilians
Click for Full Text!