The Great War for Civilisation (222 page)

199
And all the while, the American media continued their servile support for the Bush administration. As I reported in my own paper on 26 January, we were now being deluged with yet more threats from Washington about “states that sponsor terror.” “Take Eric Schmitt in
The New York
Times
a week ago. He wrote a story about America's decision to ‘confront countries that sponsor terrorism.' And his sources? ‘Senior defence officials,' ‘administration officials,' ‘some American intelligence officials,' ‘the officials,' ‘officials,' ‘military officials,' ‘terrorist experts' and ‘defence officials.'” Why not, I asked, “just let the Pentagon write its own reports in
The New York Times
?”

200
A 27 January 2003 CNN instruction—
Reminder of Script Approval Policy—
fairly took the breath away. “All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval,” it said. “Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved . . . All packages originating outside Washington, LA [Los Angeles] or NY [New York], including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW in Atlanta for approval.” The “ROW” was the row of script editors in Atlanta who could insist on changes or “balances” in the reporter's dispatch. “A script is not approved for air unless it is properly marked approved by an authorised manager and duped [duplicated] to burcopy [bureau copy] . . . When a script is updated it must be re-approved, preferably by the originating approving authority.” I noted the key words: “approved” and “authorised.” CNN's man or woman in Kuwait or Baghdad—or Jerusalem or Ramallah—may know the background to his or her story; indeed, they would know far more about it than the “authorised manager” in Atlanta. But CNN's chiefs would decide the spin of the story. The results of this system were evident from an intriguing exchange in 2002 between CNN's reporter in the occupied Palestinian West Bank town of Ramallah, and Eason Jordan, one of CNN's top men in Atlanta, who resigned in 2005 over a remark about the American military shooting of journalists in Iraq. The correspondent's first complaint was about a story by reporter Michael Holmes on the Red Crescent ambulance-drivers who were repeatedly shot at by Israeli troops. “We risked our lives and went out with ambulance drivers . . . for a whole day,” Holmes complained. “We have also witnessed ambulances from our window being shot at by Israeli soldiers . . . The story received approval from Mike Shoulder. The story ran twice and then Rick Davis [a CNN executive] killed it. The reason was we did not have an Israeli army response, even though we stated in our story that Israel believes that Palestinians are smuggling weapons and wanted people in the ambulances.” The Israelis refused to give CNN an interview, only a written statement. This statement was then written into the CNN script. But again it was rejected by Davis in Atlanta. Only when, after three days, the Israeli army gave CNN an interview did Holmes's story run—but then with the dishonest inclusion of a line that said the ambulances were shot in “crossfire” (i.e., that Palestinians also shot at their own ambulances). The reporter's complaint was all too obvious. “Since when do we hold a story hostage to the whims of governments and armies? We were told by Rick that if we do not get an Israeli on-camera we would not air the package. This means that governments and armies are indirectly censoring us and we are playing directly into their own hands.” All this was relevant to the coming war in Iraq. Clearly a U.S. Army officer would have to be ready to deny anything contentious stated by the Iraqis if Baghdad reports were going to get on air. In fact, a 31 January 2003 memo ensured that CNN's system of “script approval” became stricter. CNN staff were now told that a new computerised system of script approval would allow “authorised script approvers to mark scripts [i.e., reports] in a clear and standard manner. Script EPs [executive producers] will click on the coloured APPROVED button to turn it from red (unapproved) to green (approved). When someone makes a change in the script after approval, the button will turn yellow.” Yellow indeed.

201
You could observe this cockiness when Mohamed Saeed al-Sahaf, the jovial but far from funny information minister, spoke of Tony Blair. “I think the British nation has never been faced with a tragedy like this fellow.” Fellow. Ah yes, Sahaf knew how to mock the Brits. He would read out daily casualty reports which—given the years of controversy to come about the number of Iraqi civilian dead—now have an archival importance they did not possess at the time. On this, the third day of the invasion, he gave the following figures for dead and wounded: in Baghdad, 194 wounded; in Nineveh, 8 wounded; in Karbala 10 killed and 32 wounded; in Salahuddin, 2 killed and 22 wounded. In Najaf, the figures were 2 and 36; in Qadisiya, 4 and 13; in Basra, 14 and 122. In Babylon, the Iraqi government claimed 30 killed and 63 wounded. In all, 62 civilians had been killed so far.

202
A Pentagon investigation showed that U.S. soldiers on the Jumhuriya Bridge thought they had identified an “enemy hunter/killer team on the balcony of a room on the upper floors of a large tan-colored building.” Reporters Without Borders carried out its own investigation into the Palestine Hotel deaths on 8 April 2003, interviewing both journalists and U.S. forces involved in the incident. It concluded that while the killings were not deliberate, the failure of U.S. commanders to inform their forces that the Palestine Hotel was a base of hundreds of journalists was “criminal” and that the U.S. Army had lied when it continued to insist that “direct firing” had come from the hotel when this was clearly untrue. The headquarters of Major General Blount “bore a heavy responsibility” for not providing information “that would have prevented the death of the journalists.” The question, the report said, “is whether this information was withheld deliberately, because of misunderstanding or by criminal negligence.” Regrettably, Reporters Without Borders did not investigate the attack on the Al-Jazeera office the same day.

203
This appalling incident is recalled in David Zucchino's
Thunder Run: Three Days in the
Battle for Baghdad (Atlantic Books, London, 2004), which covers the journey of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade from southern Iraq to Baghdad during the invasion. In this account of the motorway killings (pp. 231–46), Hubbard and his comrades are confronted by “suicide vehicles” on Highway 8 that were “relentless” and “kept speeding north.” Hubbard, the book says, “couldn't comprehend the repeated, futile forays—each one ending in an eruption of flames and flying metal as one vehicle after another was destroyed by high-explosive rounds.” Zucchino quotes a young army private complaining that “Damn, we're killing a lot of people here.” Another private “saw one of the first vehicles get hammered . . . He saw the car explode, and he saw human beings explode, too.” A few hours later, according to Zucchino, “from the west and north came suicide cars, nearly twenty of them by mid-afternoon.” Yet the book makes no reference to the large number of civilians who died under U.S. tank fire, many of whose bodies I had seen with my own eyes. If so large a number of suicide bombers were really deployed against the Americans on Highway 8, then this was a major turning point in the war—and a key to the forthcoming insurgency. But my own evidence as an eyewitness to the aftermath suggests that, while there clearly was a military ambush, most of the dead were civilians and that American fear of suicide bombers led them to fire at any vehicle which did not clear the road. As Hubbard told me, “a lot of people sped up . . . I had to protect my men.” Zucchino's book, incidentally, gives a fairly convincing account of the military confusion surrounding the killing of the journalists at the Palestine Hotel (pp. 296–307), although it repeats the canard that gunmen were firing from the building. It is worth adding that if it is true, as Zucchino's book says, that the 3rd Infantry Division endured “one of the most brutal and decisive battles in combat history” in Baghdad, then the Pentagon's contention that Iraqi forces simply declined to fight and “melted away” in the capital is untrue.

204
A report on the military assessment of “the lessons of the war with Iraq” in
The New York
Times
on 20 July 2003 stated that the approval of Donald Rumsfeld was required if “any planned airstrike was thought likely to result in deaths of more than 30 civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed and all of them were approved.” So the Christian families of Mansour stood no chance.

205
This one file of letters and court documents is now deposited—appropriately enough and courtesy of
The Independent
—in the royal Hashemite archives in Amman.

206
In all, 15,000 objects were looted from the Baghdad Museum. Despite much fanfare by the Western authorities when some treasures were later recovered, 11,000 were still missing in June 2005, including the famous 3,500-year-old “Mona Lisa” ivory depicting the head of an Assyrian woman. Of the 4,000 artifacts discovered, 1,000 were found in the United States, 1,067 in Jordan, 600 in Italy and the remainder in countries neighbouring Iraq.

207
By far the most damning document on U.S. treatment of prisoners—including their “rendition” to countries where they would also be tortured—is Amnesty International's 200-page report published on 27 October 2004,
United States of America: Human Dignity Denied; Torture
and Accountability in the “War on Terror”
(AMR51/145/2004).

208
In a 21 May 2005 email to
The Independent
, Karpinski wrote that she had visited Guantánamo for “less than an entire day and I was there to resolve some issues between two officers, nothing related to the detention operations at all. I had access to all cellblocks at Abu Ghraib. When the prison compound was transferred to the Military Intelligence Commander in November 2003, my access remained unimpeded. The limitation was in the hours I was allowed to visit Abu Ghraib. I was not allowed to go out to Abu Ghraib during the hours of darkness . . . due to the increased danger of travelling at night . . .” Most of the mistreatment and torture at Abu Ghraib appears to occur at night.

209
By midsummer 2005, disclosures of torture by U.S. armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were being made almost weekly. In
The New York Times
on 23 May, Bob Herbert described the military torturers as “sadists, perverts and criminals,” quoting the
Times
's own report of 20 May of a U.S. Army document on torture in Afghanistan: “In sworn testimony to army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning.” This original report, by Tim Golden, described how an innocent man was kicked a hundred times on the leg by guards and later died in his cell, handcuffed to the ceiling.

210
For years, Americans—not least Tom Friedman—had been lecturing the Palestinians on the principles of non-violence, suggesting that a Gandhi-like approach to occupation might yield benefits. Arab pleading at The Hague proved, of course, that such peaceful protest did not amount to the proverbial hill of beans.

211
This terrible period of Muslim–Christian history brought an end to a miniature caliphate during which scholars—Christians as well as Arabs and Jews—translated from Arabic some of the greatest works of classical literature which had been stored in Baghdad. The Edict of Expulsion was signed on 31 March 1492, and marked, for the Jews, their greatest disaster since the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. It also gave rise to a long tradition of near-pornographic anti-Islamic tracts which presented the Prophet as the Antichrist.

212
Bin Laden's self-righteousness was such that he clearly could not grasp the response of Americans to his long address; the nation that was the victim of the 11 September 2001 crimes against humanity was not going to open a discussion on the al-Qaeda leader's theories of bankrupting the United States by forcing them into wars. Bin Laden also named reporters on CNN and
Time
magazine who had quoted him as saying that if “defending oneself and punishing the aggressor” is terrorism, “then it is unavoidable for us.” He added—and this is the kind of advertising a foreign correspondent doesn't need—that “you can read it in . . . my interviews with Robert Fisk. The latter is one of your compatriots and co-religionists and I consider him to be neutral. So are the pretenders of freedom at the White House . . . able to run an interview with him so that he may relay to the American people what he has understood from us to be the reasons for our fight against you?” Quite apart from bin Laden's erroneous belief that I was a “compatriot” American—and I'm not sure I want to be a “co-religionist” of anyone—I could have done without bin Laden's imprimatur on my work. And I certainly wasn't going to play patsy by agreeing to act as al-Qaeda's new
interlocuteur valable
.

213
The flourishing new democracy that President George W. Bush identified in Afghanistan began to fragment as the old drug barons also took power in the government while the Taliban and al-Qaeda gradually returned to the country from which they had been ejected, attacking U.S. troops and pro-government Afghan soldiers. The elected president, Hamid Karzai, had been a paid consultant of Unocal, the Calfornian oil company which once negotiated with the Taliban for a trans-Afghan oil pipeline to Pakistan. America's special envoy to Afghanistan was Zalmay Khalilzad, a former employee of Unocal. Once in power, Karzai and President Musharraf of Pakistan agreed to restart the pipeline project. It was the Israeli newspaper
Ma'ariv
which shrewdly noted that “if one looks at the map of the big American bases created [in Afghanistan], one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected pipeline to the Indian Ocean.” By 2005, Afghanistan was exporting more opium than it had ever produced before. Even Karzai was forced to complain bitterly after revelations in 2005 that the Americans had treated their Afghan prisoners just as cruelly as their Iraqi victims.