Iraq, the air war may be increasing
in pace and ferocity. For example, on January 9,
the US unleashed its air power on Baghdad's Haifa
Street, a "mostly Sunni Arab enclave of
residential buildings and shops". According to the
Washington Post, "F-15 fighter jets strafed
rooftops with cannons, while the Apaches
[helicopters] fired Hellfire missiles." Elsewhere
in Iraq that day, according to USAF reports, F-16s
strafed targets near Baiji with cannon fire, while
others dropped GBU-38s on targets
near
Turki Village; and F-15Es provided "close air
support" to troops near Basra.
That same
evening, back in the US, a broadcast of Fox News
Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume
offered a brief glimpse of the air war in a story
by reporter David Macdougall, who was, said Hume,
"embedded with the air force in a location we
cannot identify, where not only fighter jets but
bombers roared into the air headed for other
targets in Iraq". Macdougall reported that the
B-1B Lancer, the long-range bomber that carries
the largest payload of weapons in the USAF, was,
for the first time in more than a year, again
being employed in combat in Iraq.
"These
B-1 bombers were central to the raid. We're told
they flew a 10-hour mission, and by the looks of
their empty bomb bays, these planes dropped
thousands of pounds of munitions. They bombed 25
targets deep inside Iraq," he said. At one of
these sites, he reported, US Army troops sent in
after the air strike reportedly found a "command
and control center, insurgent hospital, and a
closet-sized room covered in blood".
We
may never know whether that "room covered in
blood" was a torture center or part of the
hospital, or if it became "covered" in the same
manner that caused the 280 Iraqi civilian
casualties from air strikes reported in the media,
and the many more that undoubtedly went unreported
and ignored, last year. This is yet another facet
of the air war that will remain a mystery.
The secret air war While
reporting on the air war has often been barely
evident, except as the odd paragraph in daily
round-up battle pieces from Iraq (which rely
mainly on military handouts or press briefings),
the gaps in our knowledge about the air war have
been facilitated by the US military's failure to
be honest and forthcoming with both data and
doctrine. In this respect, the military has been
the media's enabler.
Given CENTAF's
knowledge that no matter how "smart" their
munitions or how precise their targeting,
non-combatants, especially in urban neighborhoods,
are sure to die in air strikes, I had a question
for Lieutenant-Colonel Kennedy: Could he explain
how CENTAF decided what was an acceptable level of
civilian casualties it was willing to sacrifice
for military aims? His answer: "Not in a
sufficient manner that you would be happy with."
Kennedy's response echoed a running theme
in his replies to my questions. At one point in
our exchanges, he actually suggested that an
article on the air war in Iraq was not "a viable
story" and told me not to contact him again until
I was under contract to produce an article that
met his standards. He later claimed that his
"viability" comment was due to my "apparent
freelance status" and the fact I had not provided
"a copy of any contract, nor contacts with a
publisher".
"When you provide such
information I'll be happy to entertain your
questions," he wrote. After providing proof that I
was indeed a journalist, he deigned to answer me
again, concluding, "This is the last e-mail I will
respond to from you."
Kennedy was just one
of a number of US military officials who thwarted
attempts to uncover the barest outline of the real
extent and nature of the US air war and its toll
on Iraqis. Aside from the USAF's daily release of
air-power summaries of dubious worth, the
military's efforts have kept almost all
substantive aspects of the air war in essence a
secret from Americans at home.
During the
Vietnam War, the United States conducted a
clandestine air war in Cambodia, lied about it to
the press, and hid it from the American public. In
Iraq, the US military has, these past years,
engaged in a different kind of secretive air
campaign, but the methods of keeping it a mystery
appear to have certain similarities.
A few
years ago, at a meeting at a Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace event, Les Roberts, a
co-author of The Lancet study and now on faculty
at Columbia University's program on forced
migration and health, recalls a Pentagon
spokesman's declaration that aside from some sites
in Najaf and al-Anbar province, the US military
had refrained from any attacks on mosques in Iraq.
Roberts said the spokesman's rhetoric differed
markedly from the facts on the ground, recalling
that "just weeks before, I had seen helicopter
gunships destroy a beautiful mosque about an hour
south of Baghdad".
When I asked
Lieutenant-Colonel Kennedy why CENTAF did not
track figures on civilian casualties of the air
war, he laid the blame on higher headquarters,
namely the Office of the Secretary of Defense: "Go
ask OSD, as we do not set policy here," he wrote.
"I think that it's a red herring," Sewall,
the former Pentagon official, told Tomdispatch.
"They spend a tremendous amount of energy using
computer models to predict where the glass shards
are going to go, and then they don't actually care
about whether or not that effort to control the
direction of the glass shards results in killing
fewer people, because they've never bothered to
find out whether it in fact succeeded in killing
fewer people." As she pointed out in a telephone
interview, it is "a rather absurd position".
"If they wanted to, they could certainly,
as a matter of their own internal procedures, do
it," Sewall said of tracking civilian casualties.
"I think it's inexcusable that they don't do a
better job." Nick Turse is the
associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com.
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