[Media-watch] US military [tried to] censor coverage of Saddam hearing

[Tim Gopsill]

US military [tried to] censor coverage of Saddam hearing

By Robert Fisk in Baghdad - 03 July 2004

http://www.k1m.com/antiwarblog/archives/000110.html
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=537630

A team of US military officers acted as censors over all coverage of the 
hearings of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen on Thursday, destroying 
videotape of Saddam in chains and deleting the entire recorded legal 
submissions of 11 senior members of his former regime.

An American network cameraman who demanded the return of his tapes, which 
contained audios of the hearings, said he was told by a US officer: "No. 
They belong to us now. And anyway, we don't trust you guys."

According to American journalists present at the 30-minute hearing of 
Saddam and 11 former ministers at Baghdad airport, an American admiral in 
civilian clothes told camera crews that the judge had demanded that there 
should be no sound recording of the initial hearing. He ordered crews to 
unplug their sound wires. Several of the six crews present pretended to 
obey the instruction. "We learnt later," one of them said, "that the judge 
didn't order us to turn off our sound. The Americans lied - it was they who 
wanted no sound. The judge wanted sound and pictures."

Initially, crews were told that a US Department of Defence camera crew 
would provide the sound for their silent tapes. But when CNN and CBS crews 
went to the former occupation authority headquarters - now the US embassy - 
they found that three US officers ordered the censorship of tape which 
showed Saddam being led into the courtroom with a chain round his waist 
which was connected to handcuffs round his wrists. The Americans gave no 
reason for this censorship.

"They were rude and they didn't care," another American television crew 
member said. "They were running the show. The Americans decided what the 
world could and could not see of this trial - and it was meant to be an 
Iraqi trial. There was a British official in the courtroom whom we were not 
allowed to take pictures of. The other men were US troops who had been 
ordered to wear ordinary clothes so that they were civilians' in the court."

Three US officers viewed the tapes taken by two CNN cameras, Al-Djezaira' 
(a local, American-funded Iraqi channel), and the US government. 
"Fortunately, they were lazy and they didn't check all the tapes properly 
so we got our audio' through in the satellite to London," one of the crew 
members told The Independent yesterday. "I had pretended to unplug the 
sound from the camera but the man who claimed he was a US admiral didn't 
understand cameras and we were able to record sound. The American censors 
at the embassy were inattentive - that's how we got the sound out."

The only thing the Americans managed to censor from most of the tapes was 
Saddam's comment that "this is theatre - Bush is the real criminal."

Television stations throughout the world were astonished yesterday when the 
first tapes of Saddam's trial arrived without sound and have still not been 
informed that the Americans censored the material. "What can we do when an 
American official tells us the judge doesn't want sound - and then we find 
out that they lied and the judge does want the sound?" an American camera 
operator asked.

Video showed the face - and audiotape revealed the voice - of Judge Raid 
Juhi, whose name was widely reported in the Arab press yesterday. According 
to the camera crews, Judge Juhi wanted the world to hear Saddam's voice. 
Nevertheless the Americans erased the entire audiotape of the hearings of 
the 11 former Saddam ministers, including that of Tariq Aziz, the former 
deputy prime minister, and "Chemical" Ali, Saddam's cousin accused of 
gassing the Kurds at Halabja. The US Department of Defence tape of their 
hearings has been taken by the US authorities so there is now no technical 
record of the words of these 11 men, save for the notebooks of "pool" 
reporters - four Americans and two Iraqis - who were present.

Judge Juhi said not long ago that "I have no secrets - a judge must not be 
ashamed of the decisions he takes."

The Americans apparently think differently.




http://www.robert-fisk.com



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