WbVf wouliln'tplay
witlatbePentagon,bV
theg"If war reporter
tlaebra^tdlove?to ha,te.
WENTY-FOUR-HOUR-A-DAY
COV-
erage and no news: this was the
story of Operauon Desert Storm.
An honorable exception was the
work of severaljournalists from
the London IndEendmt, among
them Patrick Cockburn, Karl
'Waldron,
and RobertFisk. Fisk, a
Beirut-basedcorrespondentwith
long experience in the Middle
East, was virnrally alone among the thousand-plus journalistscovering the war-he actedlike a rePoner.
Fisk found a U.S. officer who told him the real reason
why the Baghdad bunker was bombed. (According to Fisk's
article, which was never widely reprinted, U.S. intelligence
knew that senior members of Saddam'sBa'th parry were
inside,along with hundreds of civilians.)He took off on his
own and found U.S. troops, who asked for the loan of a
tourist map to help them find their way through th. desert.
And he earned the enmiry of U.S. military supervisors,one
of whom, in Kuwaig announced to him, as Fisk tried to
stop the kidnapping of a Palestinian:"This is martial law,
boy. Fuck off!"
By
5 5 u o r H r n J o N E s / M A Y / J U N Er 9 9 r
Robert
OFTHE
Rather than waidng obediently in a hotel to be told what
was happening by official spokesmen,Fisk decided to find
out for himself. He poked around and weng unchaperoned,
to the heart of the story.He talked with as many peopleas he
could, in their own languages;he investigated,asked questions and double-checkedthe answers,thought for himself,
and wrote. He did this job, the ordinary work of a reporter,
and it becameextraordinary in the surrounding absenceof
professionalbehavior by almost all of his colleagues.
Robert Fisk's reflections on the Press and the war are
reprinted here from dispatcheshe frled with the London
lndependmf, under the following advisory: Robert Fisk is a
ueteran Middle East carrespondent who is not reporting
under the auspicesof the miliary in Saudi Arabia. This
report was not subiea tu military censorship.
[ONE: The Briefing]
Tsrnr Is No BLooD oN THE FLooR oF THE RrcENcv
Room at the Hyan Regency in Riyadh. And although the
talk is all of war, there is no hint of pain or fear benveenthe
television arc lights and the wood-paneled walls. The ashtrays are regularly emptied.The wall-to-wall carpet is spotless.The flagsclusteredat one end of the room-American,
Fidk
Saudi, and a curious banner labeled Jon'rr Foncr,s with a
map of the Arabian peninsula in yellow protected by palm
leaves-might be stageproPs in a televiseddrama. Which is,
in one sense,what they are.
The sryle is informal, sanitized, occasionally infused with
laughter, as, under the eyesof the world, the allied briefers
tell reporters how the war is going. If you watch television at
your fueside,you will know the faceswell; but anending this
extraordinary ritual is probably essentialto understand its
meaning.Old hands say that Saigon's"Five O'clock Follies"
had nothing on this.
It is February almost a month after the war began.Brigadier General Richard Neal, U.S. depury director of operations, givesthe first performance,and makes us feel the war
is a world away. He is a short man with a chunky facewho
talks warspeak. "Battlefield preparation" is still going on' as
well as "restrikesof strategictargets." There have beensixtyfive thousand sorties "to date," and the allies continue "to
source." Off the record, a sourceremarks that "the weather
in this part of the world is very difficult to predict. Clouds
come one dag rain the next day, the sun will rise the next
day. It's very difficult to predict."
[TWO: The Press Surenders]
A coI-oNEL coMMANDINGe U.S. ArR BASEIN THE PERsian gulf decidedit was time to "honor" the pool rePorters
who had been anached to his fighter-bomber squadrons
sincethe day the war broke out. He produced for each of
them a small American flag that had been carried in the
cockpit of one of the very fust U.S. iets to bomb Baghdad.
"You are warriors, toor" he told the journalists as he
handedthem their flags.
The incident says a lot about the new, cozy, damaging
relationship berweenreporters and the military in the gulf
war. The military preparation for handling this war has been
so thorough, and journalists have becomeso dependenton
interdia . . . roads, rail, and bridge systems."He divulges infortnation dispensedby western military authorities in
SaudiArabia, that reportershavefound themselvestrapped.
that "three TELs were anacked in Scud-relatedareas"-a
TEL, it transpires,is a transport erector launcher for a misJournalists are now talking of Iraq as "the enemy," as
sile-and there is much snickering when he suggeststhat if they themselveshave gone to war-which, in a sense,
there was an Iraqi technician "trying to check his fuel" mo- they have.
When ten U.S. Navy jets took off from the aircraft carrier
ments before an allied bomb exploded besidehim.
Six lraqis have surrenderedto U.S. forces.Iraq "continues USS Kaznedy at the start of the war, a reporter for the
to disregard the Geneva Convention and also the lnterna- Philadelphia Inquirer filed a pool dispatch from the ship,
tional Committee of the Red Cross." He places a "high describinghow"Thursdaymorningwas one of the moments
confidencevalue" on reports that execution squadsage suspendedin time . . . paving the way for a dawn of hope."
roaming behind Iraqi lines to shoot deserters.But what the As Royal Air Forcefighter pilots took off from a gulf airstrip
generalreally wants to talk about is his pride in the young severalweeks later, a young British rePorter told her television audiencethat "their braveryknows no bounds."
men bombing Iraq.
Such languageis of the early 1940s,when Hitler's armies
"We've got such kids doing the iob. . . . These young
kids. . . . Super equipment.. . . Unbeatablecombination." were poisedto invadeEngland.Journalistsin uniforms and
He speaks of a "combined arms attack" that is "well or- helmetsare trying to adopt thegrauitasof Edward R. Murchestrated" in a "target-rich environment." He regretsnot row. We are being prepared for "the biggesttank battle
beingable to give us "a good BDA" ( bomb-damageassess- sinceWorld \Var II" and "the largestamphibious operation
ment).Is the Baghdadairport being used?"l wouldn't buy a
ticket on a local airline to go to Baghdad." Much laughter.
The general tells us about "a lucrative target" that was
"hunkereddown."
The speechis packaged,a word that itself appealsto the
generals.The Americans now speak, for example, of a
"package" when they mean a collection of aircraft participating in a raid. There is, of course,no mention of the
sufferingof war, leastof all referenceto civilian casualties(in
warspeak,"collateral damage")in Iraq. There is, in fact, no
war at all, but rather a husk of words from which all realiry
has beensucked.
Others talk. Then the floodlights and camerasand tape
recordersare switched off for an "off-the-record" briefing at
which, in semidarkness,exactly the sameperformers go on
talking, on condition they are referredto as a "U.S. military
sinceD-Day."
This is as dangerousas it is misleading.'Whenthe largest
western armieslaunch their anack from the Muslim nation
containingIslam'srwo holiestshrines,this is no time to draw
parallelswith the SecondWorld'SUar.Nor is this the "dawn
of hope." It may well be the start of renewed decadesof
hatred bet'weenthe West and the fuab world. Yet our reporting doesnot reflectthis.
Ir rs Nor EASvFoR JouRNALIsrsro cASTDoUBToN THE
U.S. military claimsin the gulf. To do so is to invite almost
immediate condemnation and the accusationthat we have
taken SaddamHussein'sside. In fact, there cannot be a reporter in Saudi fuabia who does not realizethat Saddam
Husseinis a brutal, wicked dictator who rules through terror. There canbe no doubt about the savageryof his army in
MAY/JUNE tggr IMOTHER JONES 57
i
L
d Firk attempte? to atop tlaeki?nappirg of a Paleatinian
in Kus,ait, a (Jnite? Stated offtcer dlaoute?at bim:
'Tbil fu martial [ow, boy.Furk off."
occupied Kuwait. Reporters who wander off to investigate
military affairs in Saudi fuabia risk, at worst, deportation.
The last journalist who did that in Iraq,FarzadBazoftof the
London Obseruer,was hanged.
Yet almost three weeks after the start of the war, ioutnalistshave in effect surrenderedto western authorities.
Th.y are being forced either to participate in pool reporting
under military restrictions-having their reports read and
often amendedby censors-or to work independentlyat the
exact words of air-force pilots, they found that the captain
and other senior officers had deleted all swear words and
changed some of the quotations before sending on their
dispatchesafter a delay of rwelve hours. On the USS Kennedy, pool reporters recorded how fighter-bomber pilots
watched pornographic videotapesto help them relax before
their mission.This was struck from their report.
But more often, it's the reporters' own omissionsthat are
blatant. At one U.S. air base, a vast banner is suspended
inside an aircraft hangar.It depictsSupermanholding in his
arms a limp, terrified fuab with a hooked nose. The existence of this banner, with its racist overtones, went unre-
risk of having their accreditationtaken away.
It should also be said that there are journalists in the pool
who are valiantly and successfullyfiling dispatchesthat describethe unhappinessas well as the modvation of soldiers ported by the pool iournalists at the base.
A pool televisioncrew did record Marine Lieutenant
at war, the boredom as well as the excitement,the mistakes
Dick white when he describedwhat it was like to
colonel
as well as the efficienry.
"lt was like rurnBut many of their colleaguescan claim no such record' seelraqi troops in Kuwait from his plane.
the cockroaches
and
Most of the iournalists with the military now wear uni- ing on the kitchen light late at night
forms. Th.y rely on the soldiersaround them for adviceand started scurrying."
This astonishingremark went unquestioned,although
protection.Th.y are dependenton the troops and their ofWhat is the
ficers for communications, perhaps for their lives. And there was certainly one question worth asking:
after
there is thus the profound desire to fit in and a frequent New World Order worth when an American officer,
only three weeks of war, comPares his Arab enemies to
absenceof critical fasulties.
This was painfully illustrated when Iraqi troops captured insects?
the abandonedSaudi border town of Khafii. Pool reporters
were first kept up to fifteen miles from the sighting andmisledby their u.S. military minders-filed storiesreporting
the allied recapnre of the town.
But when the Independent traveled to the sceneto investigate the story an NBC television rePorter-a member of
th e m ilit ar y pool-re s p o n d e d w i th a n o b s c e ni ty and
shouted: "You'll prevent us from working. You're not allowed here. Get out. Go back to Dhahran." He then called
over a marine public-affairs officer, who announced,
"You're not allowed to talk to U.S. Marines, and they're
not allowed to talk to you."
It was a disturbing moment. By traveling to Khafii, the
lndependent discovered that the Iraqis were still fighting in
the town long after allied military spokesmenhad claimed
that it had been liberated. For the NBC reporter, however,
the privileges of the pool and the military rules attached to
it were more important than the right of. iournalists to do
their job.
Eventhose who are playing by the rules are having difficulties.When reporrerson the carrier USSSaratoS4quoted the
5 8 u o r u n n J o N E S / M A Y / J U NrE9 9 r
Tttts IS supposEDTo BE A wAR FoR FREEDoM'BUT THE
westernarmiesin SaudiArabia-under the guiseof preserving "securiry"-want to control the flow of information.
There could be no bener proof of this than the predicament of the Frenchtelevision-crewmemberswho filmed the
Khafyi fighting at great risk to their lives, breaking no securiry guidelines-and then had their tape confisiated becausethey were not membersof the pool.
In realiry the Frenchwere merely doing their job. If reporters were trusted to travel independently to the front, as they
have done in so many orher wars-obeying local military
commanders,betraying no secrets,but taking responsibiliry
for their own lives-the whole charade of pools and restrictionscould be abandoned.
Generalswill always blame the media for their failures,
however much we bow to their rules.But the public, whose
support for this conflict is partly shaped by what it reads
and seeson television, may not forgive the media for its
weaknessin so humbly accePtingthose linle flags handed
out by the colonel.