Home >  Nation & World >  World News

Monday, March 24, 2003

By Robert H. Reid, The Associated Press

DOHA, Qatar -- Arab television yesterday aired Iraqi footage of purported dead Americans, some sprawled in a room, and interviews with five, seemingly tense U.S. prisoners.

U.S. officials confirmed that about 10 soldiers had been killed and up to 12 soldiers were missing after a double ambush near the southern Iraq city of An Nasiriyah.

The broadcast triggered a demand by President Bush for humane treatment of prisoners of war and observations that the interviews were violations of the Geneva Convention, of which both the U.S. and Iraq are signatories.

The broadcast of American war dead was also sharply criticized by U.S. coalition military leaders.

The broadcast
The casualties and the interviews with four men and a woman were broadcast by the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera with footage from state-controlled Iraqi television. Each was interviewed individually and gave their names and their home states. They spoke with American accents into a microphone labeled "Iraqi Television."

The clip pictured the five American prisoners being asked, one by one, to provide their names, their hometowns and their ages, and to explain why they had come to Iraq. The Pentagon has not officially released the names of any of the soldiers.

"I was told to come here. I just follow orders," said the first soldier to appear in the video, looking calm and uninjured.

"Why do you fight Iraqis?" he was asked.

"They shot at me first, so I shoot back," he said. "I don't want to shoot anybody."

The next solider to appear was Spc. Joseph Hudson of El Paso, Texas. His name was included in media reports after his mother, Anecita, spoke to reporters outside her home in New Mexico, holding his photograph. In the video, Hudson stared impassively into the camera. Asked why he had come from Texas to Iraq, he answered simply, "I follow orders."

One prisoner identified herself as from Texas. Her eyes darted back and forth as she was interviewed and she held her arms tightly in her lap as she was questioned.

At one point, the camera panned back, showing a massive white bandage wrapped around her ankle. Her voice was very shaky.

The footage said the American soldiers were captured during fighting around Nasiriyah, a major crossing point over the Euphrates River northwest of Basra.

The woman also said she was from the 507th Maintenance. There are 507th Maintenance companies both in the Air Force and Army.

The prisoners looked scared. One captive, who said he was from Kansas, answered all his questions in a shaky voice, his eyes darting back and forth between and interviewer and another person who couldn't be seen on camera.

Asked why he came to Iraq, he simply replied "I come to fix broke stuff."

Prodded again by the interviewer, he was asked if he came to shoot Iraqis.

"No I come to shoot only if I am shot at," he said. "They (Iraqis) don't bother me, I don't bother them."

Iraqi TV attempted to interview a wounded man lying down, at one point trying to cradle his head so it would hold steady for the camera.

Geneva Conventions
President Bush demanded yesterday that American troops held captive in Iraq be treated humanely, warning that Iraqis who do otherwise will be punished as war criminals.

Bush attended church at Camp David with his wife, Laura, where he prayed for those killed.

"I pray for God's comfort and God's healing powers, to anybody, coalition force, American, Brit, anybody who loses a life in this, in our efforts to make the world more peaceful and more free," Bush told reporters yesterday afternoon.

Even as American forces suffered casualties and Iraq took POWs, Bush said U.S.-led coalition forces continue to make good progress. "Saddam Hussein is losing control of his country," Bush said.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher appeared last night on Al-Jazeera to denounce the Iraqis for showing TV footage of the American prisoners and dead.

"They have showed gruesome pictures of prisoners of war in violation of the Geneva Convention," he said. "We have more than 2,000 Iraqi prisoners and we treat them according to the Geneva conventions."

Iraqi prisoners -- many of whom surrendered -- have been shown regularly on American television and in U.S. newspaper photos.

In Cairo, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said the casualties were proof the Iraqi military would fight. "What happened today showed that we're not surrendering easily. It is proof we're strong and it is not an easy invasion."

Showing the television footage may have been Iraq's way of testing America's resolve in the war. In Somalia in 1993, American audiences were outraged by images of Somali crowds dragging the bodies of American soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu: U.S. troops were pulled out of Somalia shortly after the incident.

U.S. television networks, however, hesitated to show the pictures.

Decisions about the broadcast
U.S. television networks spent hours yesterday weighing whether to air video footage, shown elsewhere in the world, of what appeared to be American prisoners of war in Iraq.

The images were picked up from Iraqi television by the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said the Geneva Conventions make it illegal for prisoners to be pictured and humiliated, adding that "television networks that carry such pictures are, I would say, doing something that's unfortunate."

Article 13 of the current Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949, states that prisoners of war "must at all times be humanely treated."

"Likewise," it continues, "prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity."

That left network executives with agonizing decisions involving both matters of taste and the question of whether they were letting the Pentagon influence their independent newsgathering decisions.

All of the networks said they would not show video of what was said to be an Iraqi morgue containing American bodies, saying the material was neither newsworthy nor appropriate for airing. However, both CNN and NBC have aired a still image of bodies that could not be identified.

A snippet of the POW footage was shown on CBS, shortly after it was received from Al-Jazeera, while Rumsfeld was being interviewed on "Face the Nation." The network held off from showing it again after the Pentagon asked for time to contact the families of the soldiers involved.

"I consider that a legitimate request and I don't have any qualms about agreeing to it. The issue of sensitivity to the families is valid," CBS News President Andrew Heyward said.

ABC News President David Westin said the network was giving the Pentagon "a reasonable period of time" to contact the families of the POWs before airing the tape.

"I always appreciate hearing Secretary Rumsfeld's viewpoint or that of any government official that we take into account," Westin said. "But we'd make our own judgment as to whether it was newsworthy."

Last night ABC ran a still picture of one of the captured Americans after Peter Jennings interviewed his mother.

NBC, meanwhile, aired a short clip of one of the captured soldiers in its nightly news after the network became aware that the soldier's family had been contacted, a spokeswoman said.

A representative of Fox News Channel said at one point yesterday that the issue of airing the footage was being discussed and that no decision had been made. CNN said it also was still considering whether to air the video footage.

Associated Press Television News, which distributes video to broadcasters all over the world, initially withheld transmission of the images of the POWs as the Defense Department notified families, but later went ahead with it, said Nigel Baker, APTN's director of content.

Remarking on the fact that some of the U.S.-based networks have aired video of captured or surrendering Iraqi soldiers, CBS said that in the pictures it has used, the captured soldiers could not be identified.

ABC doesn't want to risk an American family learning a relative is a POW by watching it on TV, but the chances of that happening with a family in Iraq are almost nil, spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said.

Former POWs remember, offer comfort
Yesterday's reports sparked fears from prisoners of war captured during 1991's Desert Storm, Vietnam and World War II that U.S. troops could face torture, beatings, rape and forced confessions during captivity.

Air Force Lt. Col. Jeffrey D. Fox was shot down on his 26th mission and captured in Kuwait by Iraqi soldiers on Feb. 19, 1991. During his two weeks as a POW, Fox said, he was beaten and strip searched twice, as he was accused of being Jewish.

Blindfolded and handcuffed, Fox was asked by his captors who had bombed a Baghdad air-raid shelter that killed more than 300 people. He answered he had no idea.

"We're going to ask you one more time," Fox quoted his captors telling him. "Then we will kill you."

A pistol was held near his head and he heard the weapon being cocked, and then the gun fired, but he was not struck.

"I was literally on the chair going back and forth and yelling," said Fox, 51, now retired and living in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

He advised the American POWs to "hang in there" and know that "the U.S. military and the coalition military are going to get you out."

At an afternoon briefing yesterday at U.S. Central Command in Qatar, Abizaid said that "a young officer, leading his convoy, made a wrong turn and went where he wasn't supposed to. There weren't combat forces around when it happened. It's an unfortunate incident."

Paul Galanti, a retired Navy commander who spent seven years in the North Vietnam POW camp called the "Hanoi Hilton," said he fully expects the Iraqis to use the captured American soldiers for propaganda.

"It's going to be rotten treatment," said Galanti of Richmond, Va. Frank Kravetz, a crew member on an Air Force bomber in World War II, spent time in solitary confinement on a stretcher in a German interrogation center after he was captured. Kravetz not only had to contend with constant pain from bullet wounds to both legs, but with the mental anguish that came with solitary.

"It's a terrible experience because you're facing someone down the barrel of a gun and you don't know what's going to happen to you," said Kravetz, 79, of Chalfant. "It's the unknown and when you're by yourself, separated from your crew, it's just bad with the anxiety."

The imprisonment, first in a hospital and then in two POW camps, gave Kravetz time to think. Too much time.

"You think about your loved ones back home," he said. "I was [missing in action] for six months and my parents didn't know I was a POW."