Reporting on the Iraq war

There remained firm limits on what could be reported out of Iraq. Especially taboo were frank accounts of the actions of US troops in the field —particularly when those actions resulted in the deaths of Iraqi civilians.

On the same day The Times ran its front-page story about the two thousand war dead, for instance, it ran another piece on page A12 about the rising toll of Iraqi civilians. Since the US military does not issue figures on this subject, Sabrina Tavernise relied on Iraq Body Count, a nonprofit Web site that keeps a record of casualty figures from news accounts. The site, she wrote, placed the number of dead civilians since the start of the US invasion at between 26,690 and 30,051. (Even the higher number was probably too low, the article noted, since many deaths do not find their way into news reports.) The Times deserves credit simply for running this story—for acknowledging that, as high a price as American soldiers have paid in the war, the one paid by Iraqi civilians has been much higher. Remarkably, though, in discussing the cause of those deaths, the article mentioned only insurgents. Not once did it raise the possibility that some of those deaths might have come at the hands of the "Coalition."

This is typical. A survey of the Times's coverage of Iraq in the month of October shows that, while regularly reporting civilian deaths caused by the insurgents, it rarely mentioned those inflicted by Americans; when it did, it was usually deep inside the paper, and heavily qualified. Thus, on October 18 the Times ran a brief article at the bottom of page A11 headlined "Scores Are Killed by American Airstrikes in Sunni Insurgent Stronghold West of Baghdad." Citing military sources, the article noted in its lead that the air strikes had been launched "against insurgents" in the embattled city of Ramadi, "killing as many as 70 people." A US Army colonel was cited as saying that a group of insurgents in four cars had been spotted "trying to roll artillery shells into a large crater in eastern Ramadi that had been caused when a roadside bomb exploded the day before, killing five US and two Iraqi soldiers." At that point, according to the Times, "an F-15 fighter plane dropped a guided bomb on the area, killing all 20 men on the ground." The Times went on to report the colonel's claim that "no civilians had been killed in the strikes." In one sentence, the article noted that Reuters, "citing hospital officials in Ramadi," had reported "that civilians had been killed." It did not elaborate. Instead, it went on to mention other incidents in Ramadi in which US helicopters and fighter planes had killed "insurgents."

The AP told a very different story. The "group of insurgents" that the military claimed had been hit by the F-15 was actually "a group of around two dozen Iraqis gathered around the wreckage of the US military vehicle" that had been attacked the previous day, the AP reported.

The military said in a statement that the crowd was setting another roadside bomb in the location of the blast that killed the Americans. F-15 warplanes hit them with a precision-guided bomb, killing 20 people, described by the statement as "terrorists."

But several witnesses and one local leader said the people were civilians who had gathered to gawk at the wreckage of the US vehicle or pick pieces off of it—as often occurs after an American vehicle is hit.
The airstrike hit the crowd, killing 25 people, said Chiad Saad, a tribal leader, and several witnesses who refused to give their names....

Readers of the Times learned none of these details.
This is not an isolated case. Regularly reading the paper's Iraq coverage during the last few months, I have found very little mention of civilians dying at the hands of US forces. No doubt the violence on Iraq's streets keeps reporters from going to these sites to interview witnesses, but Times stories seldom notify readers that its reporters were unable to question witnesses to civilian casualties because of the danger they would face in going to the site of the attack. Yet the paper regularly publishes official military claims about dead insurgents without any independent confirmation. After both General Tommy Franks and Donald Rumsfeld declared in 2003 that "we don't do body counts," the US military has quietly begun doing just that. And the Times generally relays those counts without questioning them.

In any discussion of civilian casualties, it is important to distinguish between the insurgents, who deliberately target civilians, and the US military, which does not—which, in fact, goes out of its way to avoid them. Nonetheless, all indications point to a very high toll at the hands of the US. As seems to have been the case in Ramadi, many of the deaths have resulted from aerial bombardment. Since the start of the invasion, the United States has dropped 50,000 bombs on Iraq. About 30,000 were dropped during the five weeks of the war proper. Though most of the 50,000 bombs have been aimed at military targets, they have undoubtedly caused much "collateral damage," and claimed an untold number of civilian lives.

But according to Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch, the toll from ground actions is probably much higher. Garlasco speaks with special authority; before he joined Human Rights Watch, in mid-April 2003, he worked for the Pentagon, helping to select targets for the air war in Iraq. During the ground war, he says, the military's use of cluster bombs was especially lethal. In just a few days of fighting in the city of Hilla, south of Baghdad, Human Rights Watch found that cluster bombs killed or injured more than five hundred civilians.

Since the end of the ground war, Garlasco says, many civilians have been killed in crossfire between US and insurgent forces. Others have been shot by US military convoys; soldiers in Humvees, seeking to avoid being hit by suicide bombers, not infrequently fire on cars that get too close, and many turn out to have civilians inside. According to Garlasco, private security contractors kill many civilians; they tend to be "loosey-goosey" in their approach, he says, "opening fire if people don't get out of the way quickly enough."


Probably the biggest source of civilian casualties, though, is Coalition checkpoints. These can go up anywhere at any time, and though they are supposed to be well marked, they are in practice often hard to detect, especially at night, and US soldiers—understandably wary of suicide bombers —often shoot first and ask questions later. Many innocent Iraqis have died in the process.

Such killings came into public view in March, when the car carrying Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, rushing to the Baghdad airport after her release from captivity, was fired on by US troops; she was badly wounded and the Italian intelligence officer accompanying her was killed. Three days after the incident, The New York Times ran a revealing front-page story headlined "US Checkpoints Raise Ire in Iraq." Next to the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, John Burns wrote,

no other aspect of the American military presence in Iraq has caused such widespread dismay and anger among Iraqis, judging by their frequent outbursts on the subject. Daily reports compiled by Western security companies chronicle many incidents in which Iraqis with no apparent connection to the insurgency are killed or wounded by American troops who have opened fire on suspicion that the Iraqis were engaged in a terrorist attack.

US and Iraqi officials said they had no figures on such casualties, Burns reported,

but any Westerner working in Iraq comes across numerous accounts of apparently innocent deaths and injuries among drivers and passengers who drew American fire, often in circumstances that have left the Iraqis puzzled, wondering what, if anything, they did wrong.

Many, he said, "tell of being fired on with little or no warning."

Burns's account showed that it was possible to write such stories despite the pervasive violence, and despite the lack of official figures Part of an article in New York Times Review of Books The Press: the Enemy Within, written by Michael Massing.