[NYTr] Fallujah, the Information War, and US Propaganda

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

See Also: Oct 18, 2007

Assault on Fallujah: State Department Liars Critique NY Transfer News
http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20071015/070342.html


ZNet - Dec 27, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=14598&sectionID=15

Fallujah, the Information War, and US Propaganda

The US Army's Intelligence Analysis of the April 2004 Fallujah Attack

by Stephen Soldz

Now receded into distant memory for many, the battle for the Iraqi city
of Fallujah, accompanied by the al Sadr uprising in the south, was a
decisive turning point in the Iraq occupation. These battles
demonstrated to much of the world that the occupation was deeply
unpopular among many Iraqis, who were willing and able to fight the
occupation to a stalemate. These battles both ended in standoffs, as
the US forces felt constrained from unleashing their full military
capabilities to crush the resistance. New insights into the thinking of
the US military are available from a US army intelligence analysis – by
the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center [1] – of the first
Fallujah battle entitled Complex Environments: Battle of Fallujah I, 
April 2004 [2] that was leaked this week on the Wikileaks web site.

The first battle for Fallujah (the second, in November 2004, resulted
in the city's capture by occupation forces) began when images
circulated of four contractors being lynched from a bridge in the city.
This new document confirms that the attack on Fallujah was designed to
crush a symbol of resistance to the US occupation of Iraq:

"On 31 March 2004, four American Blackwater contractors were killed and
images of their bodies being burned and mutilated were broadcast on
television around the world. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, CENTCOM

Commander GEN Abizaid, and Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)
Ambassador Bremer decided a military response was needed immediately.
Fallujah had become a symbol of resistance that dominated international
headlines."

Media War

As befits a symbolic battle, the analysis makes clear that the
information war was primary. The failure of the Marines' attack to
retake Fallujah was caused, the authors claim, by resistance
("insurgents" in their lingo) forces' success in getting their message
out to the world.

"Insurgents demonstrated a keen understanding of the value of
information

operations. IO was one of the insurgents' most effective levers to
raise political pressure for a cease-fire. They fed disinformation
[sic] to television networks, posted propaganda on the Internet to
recruit volunteers and solicit financial donations, and spread rumors
through the street."

The report echo's the concern of American leaders about the influence
of Al Jazeera and other Arab media at conveying the rebel's side of the
story:

"Arab satellite news channels were crucial to building political
pressure to halt military operations. For example, CPA documented 34
stories on Al Jazeera that misreported or distorted battlefield events
between 6 and 13 April. Between 14 and 20 April, Al Jazeera used the
"excessive force" theme 11 times and allowed various anti-Coalition
factions to claim that US forces were using cluster bombs against urban
areas and kidnapping and torturing Iraqi children. Six negative reports
by al-Arabiyah focused almost exclusively on the excessive force theme.
Overall, the qualitative content of negative reports increasingly was
shrill in tone, and both TV stations appeared willing to take even the
most baseless claims as fact.

"During the first week of April, insurgents invited a reporter from Al
Jazeera, Ahmed Mansour, and his film crew into Fallujah where they
filmed scenes of dead babies from the hospital, presumably killed by
Coalition air strikes. Comparisons were made to the Palestinian
Intifada. Children were shown bespattered with blood; mothers were
shown screaming and mourning."

The report also makes clear that, in the military's opinion, the
Western press is part of the US's propaganda operation. This process
was facilitated by the embedding of Western reporters in US military
units. The US failure in this battle was largely attributable, the
authors claim, to the absence of embedded reporters to convey the
military's story.

"The absence of Western media in Fallujah allowed the insurgents
greater control of information coming out of Fallujah. Because Western
reporters were at risk of capture and beheading, they stayed out and
were forced to pool video shot by Arab cameramen and played on Al
Jazeera. This led to further reinforcement of anti-Coalition
propaganda. For example, false allegations of up to 600 dead and 1000
wounded civilians could not be countered by Western reporters because
they did not have access to the battlefield.

"Western reporters were also not embedded in Marine units fighting in
Fallujah. In the absence of countervailing visual evidence presented by
military authorities, Al Jazeera shaped the world's understanding of
Fallujah."

This account, however, is false. There were at least two "Western
reporters," as well as other Western civilians, inside Fallujah giving
detailed information on the effects of the fighting on civilians. While
briefly detained by rebels, they were quickly released, rather than
beheaded. The report ignores these reporters as they were independents,
neither embedded with the US military nor bound by the implicit rules
of the mainstream media to give special consideration to US military
claims and perspectives. Further, the accounts of these reporters and
observers contradicted American military claims.

Civilian Casualties

Dahr Jamail, at that time a reporter for the now defunct New Standard,
felt obligated to go into the besieged city.[3]

"As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who'd been
sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the
cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members
carried them in.

"One woman and small child had been shot through the neck – the woman
was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on
her amongst her muffled moaning.

"The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually
vomited as the doctors raced to save his life.

After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive."

Contrary to the army report's claim that no cluster bombs were used in
the attack, Jamail saw wounds suspiciously like those from that weapon:

"There had been reports of this, as two of the last victims that
arrived at the clinic were reported by the locals to have been hit by
cluster bombs – they were horribly burned and their bodies shredded."

Another of these nonexistent Western reporters was Rahul Mahajan, who
wrote for various alternative news sites, as well as his Empire Notes
blog.[4] He reported from Fallujah on April 11, 2003.[5] Since Mahajan
was in the same group with Jamail, it is perhaps not surprising that he
also reported extensive civilian casualties:

"During the course of the roughly four hours we were at that small
clinic, we saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a
young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was having a seizure
and foaming at the mouth when they brought here in; doctors did not
expect her to survive the night. Another likely terminal case was a
young boy with massive internal bleeding. I also saw a man with
extensive burns on his upper body and wounds in his thighs that might
have been from a cluster bomb; there was no way to verify in the
madhouse scene of wailing relatives, shouts of 'Allahu Akbar' (God is
great), and anger at the Americans."

The intelligence report claims that "Red Crescent ambulances
transported fighters" yet does not discus how this alleged situation
was dealt with by the US troops. Mahajan, like other Westerners in the
city, provides elucidation of this gap by reporting that the Americans
were firing on ambulances, including ones containing civilians:

"I had heard these claims at third-hand before coming into Fallujah,
but was skeptical. It's very difficult to find the real story here. But
this I saw for myself. An ambulance with two neat, precise bullet-holes
in the windshield on the driver's side, pointing down at an angle that
indicated they would have hit the driver's chest (the snipers were on
rooftops, and are trained to aim for the chest). Another ambulance
again with a single, neat bullet-hole in the windshield. There's no way
this was due to panicked spraying of fire. These were deliberate shots
to kill people driving the ambulances.

"The ambulances go around with red, blue, or green lights flashing and
sirens blaring; in the pitch-dark of a blacked-out city there is no way
they can be missed or mistaken for something else). An ambulance that
some of our compatriots were going around in, trading on their
whiteness to get the snipers to let them through to pick up the wounded
was also shot at while we were there."

Jo Wilding, a British observer also among the Westerners in Fallujah,
was in one of the ambulances fired upon, on a trip to pick up a
pregnant woman and transport her to the hospital. She and the ambulance
staff hoped that the presence of Westerners would help protect from
American attack. They were wrong:

"Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him and me by the
window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across
my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the
ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window.

"We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes
on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the
buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I
can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some,
it's hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance I start singing. What else
do you do when someone's shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an
enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.

"I'm outraged. We're trying to get to a woman who's giving birth
without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under
siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you're shooting at us. How
dare you?"

Even back in Baghdad, Mahajan and Jamail were the only Western
reporters who attended a press conference of the Iraqi Minister of
Health, who confirmed that the Americans had fired upon ambulances in
Fallujah (and also in Sadr City in Baghdad):

"During the questions, when asked about shooting at ambulances, Abbas
confirmed that US forces shot at ambulances, not only in Fallujah and
the approaches to Fallujah, but also in Sadr City. He agreed that the
acts were criminal and said he has asked the IGC ([Interim] Governing
Council) and Bremer [US governor of occupied Iraq] for an
explanation."[6]

While in Fallujah, Jo Wilding also saw civilians fired upon by US
troops, illustrating the "Coalition's concern for collateral damage"
that the intelligence analysis refers to:

"There's a man, face down, in a white dishdasha, a small round red
stain on his back. We run to him. Again the flies [h]ave got there
first. Dave is at his shoulders, I'm by his knees and as we reach to
roll him onto the stretcher Dave's hand goes through his chest, through
the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back
and blew his heart out.

"There's no weapon in his hand. Only when we arrive, his sons come out,
crying, shouting. He was unarmed, they scream. He was unarmed. He just
went out the gate and they shot him. None of them have dared come out
since. No one had dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified,
forced to violate the traditions of treating the body immediately. They
couldn't have known we were coming so it's inconceivable tat anyone
came out and retrieved a weapon but left the body.

"He was unarmed, 55 years old, shot in the back."

Also relevant to the issue of "collateral damage" is the way in which
the US forces divided civilians into potential "insurgents" – all males
considered to be of "military age" – and all others. The others were
allowed to leave the city or areas of active combat ("Throughout the
fight Coalition forces allowed nonmilitary-age men, women, and children
to exit through the cordon"), but males considered to be of fighting
age – many tens of thousands in a city of perhaps 250,000 population –
were not allowed to leave and were thus subject to being shot, as was
the man described above by Wilding, upon the least suspicion. Wilding
describes the implementation of this policy as a group of volunteers
attempted to evacuate civilians before a planned American attack:

"'We're going to be going through soon clearing the houses,' the senior
one says.

"'What does that mean, clearing the houses?'

"'Going into every one searching for weapons.' He's checking his watch,
can't tell me what will start when, of course, but there's going to be
air strikes in support. 'If you're going to do t[h]is [evacuate] you
gotta do it soon….'

"The people seem to pour out of the houses now in the hope we can
escort them safely out of the line of fire, kids, women, men, anxiously
asking us whether they can all go, or only the women and children. We
go to ask. The young marine tells us that men of fighting age can't
leave. What's fighting age, I want to know. He contemplates. Anything
under forty five. No lower limit."

Any military forcing tens of thousands of mostly noncombatant civilians
to stay in a war zone under siege is obviously not putting the
reduction of civilian casualties (reduction of "collateral damage")
high on its list of priorities. Not surprisingly, an analysis by Iraq
Body Count concluded that almost 600 ("between 572 and 616 of the
approximately 800 reported deaths") civilians were among the dead in
Fallujah.

The intelligence report also contains chilling phrases that, while
subject to multiple interpretations, suggest both the difficulties of
fighting a guerilla resistance in a city and the possibility of
horrifying actions. Thus, in describing the structure of homes in
Fallujah , the report calmly states:

"The houses also are all made of brick with a thick covering of mortar
overtop. In almost every house a fragmentation grenade can be used
without fragments coming through the walls. Each room can be fragged
individually."

Absences in Report

It is striking that, for all its emphasis on claims that US troops
followed the "Laws of War" in the battle, avoiding, they claim,
extensive "collateral damage" (i.e., civilian casualties) there is no
discussion of any strategies designed to accomplish this in the
"complex environment" of a city with tens to hundreds of thousands of
residents in place. Of course, the accounts of Jamail, Mahajan, and
Wilding suggest that the claim that collateral damage was largely
avoided is exaggerated at best.

While providing useful analyses of the nature of the Fallujah fighting,
and of the information war, this intelligence report demonstrates yet
again the difficulties that US occupation forces, including
intelligence analysts, have in coming to terms with the nature of
nationalist opposition to occupation. While it contains interesting
discussions of the organization of the Fallujah resistance, including
their decentralized command and control structures which were hard to
destroy, the authors cannot resist repeating the Marine attackers
description of the resistance fighters as " an "evil Rotary club"
rather than a military organization."

The report also illustrates American blinders in analyzing the
political context of the Fallujah battle. The report does refer to the
growing opposition to the assault among the Iraqi Governing Council, a
group of Iraqi officials hand-picked by the United States:

"The Iraqi Governing Council began to unravel. Three members quit and 5
others threatened to quit…. The Sunni politicians considered the
operation 'collective punishment.'"

The intelligence analysis, however, doesn't mention the extreme
unpopularity, at the time of the Fallujah battle, of the occupation
among many Iraqis as part of the context that hampered the US in its
assault. For example, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll of Iraqis taken in
late March and early April 2004 found

"Only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led
occupation of their country is doing more good than harm, and a solid
majority support an immediate military pullout even though they fear
that could put them in greater danger…

"Asked whether they view the US-led coalition as 'liberators' or
'occupiers,' 71% of all respondents say 'occupiers.'

"That figure reaches 81% if the separatist, pro-US Kurdish minority in
northern Iraq is not included….

"53% say they would feel less secure without the coalition in Iraq, but
57% say the foreign troops should leave anyway. Those answers were
given before the current showdowns in Fallujah and Najaf between US
troops and guerrilla fighters."

In failing to come to terms with the unpopularity of the occupation,
the report continues the American blindness to the difficulties of
sustaining an occupation as opposition mounts. The report thus pays
insufficient attention to the extent to which the Fallujah population
supported the resistance fighters. Perhaps, however, the absence of any
discussion of "winning hearts and minds" is an implicit recognition
that this was an impossible goal, and one irrelevant to the US desire
to crush Fallujah as a symbol of organized opposition to occupation.

In the end, the most surprising aspect of this leaked report is the
absence of any information or analysis in the classified document that
was not readily available in the public domain. Its failure to deal
with the real situation the US faced in Iraq during the Fallujah
assault raises the question as to why, even in a classified
intelligence analysis, the military, and perhaps the entire US
government, did not analyze reality, rather than relay propaganda. Many
possible explanations can be contemplated: a fear of the document being
leaked, military leaders and even intelligence analysts being infected
with the same propaganda being fed to the press and the public, or
systems for relaying information that reward those who support the
prevailing ideology. Most likely is some combination of these factors.
But the result, this report illustrates, is that, as with prewar
intelligence, the intelligence during the Iraq occupation has in many
cases reinforced existing beliefs rather than provide new insights
designed to allow the US forces to adapt to the real conditions they
faced.

Preparing for November Attack

The report provides several glimpses into the tactics used to prepare
for the later November 2004 attack in which Fallujah was captured by
the Americans at the cost of thousands of damaged buildings, many tens
of thousands of refugees, and an unknown number of both rebel and
civilian casualties. In preparing for the November attack, US forces
had more time for pre-attack "shaping operations":

"Shaping operations that clear civilians from the battlefield offers
[sic] many positive second-order effects. In Fallujah in April 2004,
IMEF [I Marine Expeditionary Force][7] only had a few days to shape the
environment before engaging in decisive combat operations. The
remaining noncombatants provided cover for insurgents, restrained
CJTF-7's[Coalition Joint Task Force 7] employment of combat power, and
provided emotional fodder for Arab media to exploit."[8]

In preparing for the November attack, the US engaged in months of
massive bombing and artillery strikes, perhaps in order to terrorize
into leaving many of the population who were not of military age and
hence allowed to leave. As the Guardian reported October 31, 2004:

"US warplanes and artillery pounded targets in the city amid prolonged
clashes with insurgents. A marine at a nearby US base described the
strikes as the heaviest artillery bombardment he had heard in two
months. At least a dozen airstrikes hit a southeastern district of the
Sunni Muslim city during the afternoon, witnesses said."[9]

These "shaping operations" largely worked, as Reuters reported on
October 26, 2004:

"'Three-quarters of the people have fled to other towns to avoid the
American air strikes, especially the women and children,' said Abdel
Aziz Ibrahim, a teacher.

"Bank employee Mohammed al-Alwani said: 'Whoever looks around Fallujah
now can only feel sadness. The damage is so heavy the suburbs look like
they were hit by an earthquake.'"[10]

Having failed to destroy Fallujah as a symbol of resistance to
occupation in April, the US designed the November attack to accomplish
this goal once and for all, as the Christian Science Monitor explained
on the eve of the attack[11]:

"'One thought going around now is: "Why doesn't Iraq look like
[post-World War II] Germany or Japan, which knew they had been
defeated?"' says John Pike, a military analyst who heads
Globalsecurity.org in Alexandria, Va. 'One of the challenges we are
facing now is these people don't know they have been defeated,' he
says. 'Fallujah will be an opportunity for them to be crushed
decisively and for them to taste defeat.'"

Or, as explained by another Western analyst in the same article:

"'The logic is: You flatten Fallujah, hold up the head of Fallujah, and
say "Do our bidding, or you're next,"' says Toby Dodge, an Iraq analyst
at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London."

The US also learned from its perceived failure in the information war
during the April attack, which led, in the view of the intelligence
report, to calling off the attack before victory. In November they got
many reporters, including even Iraqi reporters, to embed with US
troops, so that they could act, in the words of the intelligence
report, as the propaganda arm of US forces.[12]

The greater success in manipulating the information war in November was
offset, however, by the US's inability to hide from reporters and thus,
from the world the country's descent into full-scale civil war. It
remains to be seen if the relative lull in civil war currently
occurring as the various factions reevaluate the situation will allow
the US greater success in the information war, if not in the real war
of occupation.

End Notes

[1] http://avenue.org/ngic/

[2]http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Complex_Environments:_Battle_of_Fallujah_I%2C_April_2004

[3]http://blog.newstandardnews.net/iraqdispatches/archives/000162.html

[4]http://www.empirenotes.org/

[5]http://www.empirenotes.org/april04.html#11apr043

[6]http://www.empirenotes.org/april04.html#11apr043

[7]http://www.i-mef.usmc.mil/

[8]http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/cjtf-7.htm

[9]http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1340365,00.html

[10]http://greenethoughts.blogspot.com/2004/10/falluja-emptied-of-women-and-children.html

[11]http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1029/p01s02-woiq.html

[12]http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23534-2004Nov3?language=printer


[Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health
researcher, and faculty member at the Boston Graduate School of
Psychoanalysis. See: http://www.bgsp.edu/

He maintains the Psychoanalysts for Peace and Justice web site at
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/ORR.htm and the Psyche, Science, and
Society blog at http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/ ]