The Sunday New York Times (12/18/11) featured a powerful investigation of civilian casualties resulting from the NATO war in Libya--casualties that, to hear NATO officials tell it, maybe don't even exist.

The Times' C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt report:

But an on-the-ground examination by The New York Times of airstrike sites across Libya--including interviews with survivors, doctors and witnesses, and the collection of munitions remnants, medical reports, death certificates and photographs--found credible accounts of dozens of civilians killed by NATO in many distinct attacks. The victims, including at least 29 women or children, often had been asleep in homes when the ordnance hit.

The Times even took its research--based on a small number of incidents--to NATO, which seemed to change its story immediately:

Two weeks after being provided a 27-page memorandum from the Times containing extensive details of nine separate attacks in which evidence indicated that allied planes had killed or wounded unintended victims, NATO modified its stance.

"From what you have gathered on the ground, it appears that innocent civilians may have been killed or injured, despite all the care and precision," said Oana Lungescu, a spokeswoman for NATO headquarters in Brussels. "We deeply regret any loss of life."

The Times reports that  it "found significant damage to civilian infrastructure from certain attacks for which a rationale was not evident or risks to civilians were clear." The paper also noted that many witnesses talked about "warplanes restriking targets minutes after a first attack, a practice that imperiled, and sometimes killed, civilians rushing to the wounded." That is a tactic often associated with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.

The Times also offers a sickening glimpse into the denial of NATO leaders after civilians were killed in an airstrike in Tripoli:

Initially, NATO almost acknowledged its mistake. "A military missile site was the intended target," an alliance statement said soon after. "There may have been a weapons system failure which may have caused a number of civilian casualties."

Then it backtracked. Kristele Younes, director of field operations for Civic, the victims' group, examined the site and delivered her findings to NATO. She met a cold response. "They said, 'We have no confirmed reports of civilian casualties,'"  Ms. Younes said.

The reason, she said, was that the alliance had created its own definition for "confirmed": Only a death that NATO itself investigated and corroborated could be called confirmed. But because the alliance declined to investigate allegations, its casualty tally by definition could not budge--from zero.

If you recall the corporate media coverage of the war while it was happening, Libyan leaders were churning out laughably clumsy propaganda about civilian deaths.  "Libya Stokes Its Machine Generating Propaganda" was the June 7 headline of a New York Times story by John Burns, who scoffed at the "nightly propaganda tour" of the Libyan capitol. It seemed obvious at the time that Burns and his ilk were offended by by the Libyan government's inability to lie as effectively as the NATO generals.

The Times also investigated August airstrikes that it termed "NATO's bloodiest known accidents in the war"--a series of strikes on buildings in the town of Majer:

The attack began with a series of 500-pound laser-guided bombs, called GBU-12s, ordnance remnants suggest. The first house, owned by Ali Hamid Gafez, 61, was crowded with Mr. Gafez's relatives, who had been dislocated by the war, he and his neighbors said.

The bomb destroyed the second floor and much of the first. Five women and seven children were killed; several more people were wounded, including Mr. Gafez's wife, whose her lower left leg had to be amputated, the doctor who performed the procedure said.

Minutes later, NATO aircraft attacked two buildings in a second compound, owned by brothers in the Jarud family. Four people were killed, the family said.

Several minutes after the first strikes, as neighbors rushed to dig for victims, another bomb struck. The blast killed 18 civilians, both families said.

The death toll has been a source of confusion. The Qaddafi government said 85 civilians died. That claim does not seem to be credible. With the Qaddafi propaganda machine now gone, an official list of dead, issued by the new government, includes 35 victims, among them the late-term fetus of a fatally wounded woman the Gafez family said went into labor as she died.

The Zlitan hospital confirmed 34 deaths. Five doctors there also told of treating dozens of wounded people, including many women and children.

The airstrikes in Majer were discussed by FAIR in an August 18 media advisory, where it was noted that several reports talked about a death toll of about 30. The deaths were barely covered at all. As we pointed out, the Paper of Record did not think much at the time:

The New York Times (8/10/11) ran a 170-word version of a Reuters dispatch which noted: "There was no evidence of weapons at the farmhouses, but there were no bodies there, either. Nor was there blood."

Corporate media were more offended by inflated Libyan claims about civilian casualties than they were about the false denials coming from the people doing the killing. What's worse, to kill people and then deny that you did so, or to overstate how many people your enemies were killing? Many reporters--too many--seemed to think the latter was the more serious crime.

According to a new poll from the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, which is partly funded by the State Department and has coordinated its work with the Coalition Provisional Authority, more than half of all Iraqis--including the Kurds--want an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, up from 17 percent last October.

But prominent media outlets didn't want to believe this. As John Burns of the New York Times explained:

Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

Turn to yesterday's Times (9/11/11), and you saw this headline:

Many Iraqis Have Second Thoughts as U.S. Exit Nears

The article, by Michael Schmidt, doesn't given any sense of a shift in the broad opposition to the U.S. occupation. Instead, it's mostly an attempt--like others before it, documented in this piece in Extra! by Dahr Jamail--by the Times to convince readers that a series of anecdotes and interviews give a better measure of Iraqi opinion:

Though Iraqis have called for Americans to leave from the start of the occupation in 2003, the prospect of such a drastic drawdown, from the 48,000 troops here now, has revealed another side of the Iraqi psyche. This is a nation that distrusts itself, with little faith in the government’s own security forces or political leaders. It is as if people here never actually believed that the United States would leave, so all along demands for a pullout were never carefully weighed against the potential fallout.

So the "Iraqi psyche" doesn't really trust Iraqis and never thought about what would happen in the event of a "drastic drawdown" of U.S. troops a mere eight years after the occupation began.

Television footage of the only man convicted in the Lockerbie bombing lying in bed, purportedly comatose with advanced prostate cancer at his Tripoli home, has provided a focal point for a question asked with new urgency in places far from Libya: With Col. Muammar el-Gadhafi's government in ruins, what reckoning is likely for the terrorist bombings that were once a signature of the former Libyan leader's war with the Western world?

So terrorism was Gadhafi's "signature," and many "nations" hope a full accounting will be forthcoming. What's the record that Burns has put together?

Obviously he talks about Pan Am 103, which is the most visible example. But there are serious questions about the link between Libya and the Lockerbie bombing. Burns mentions the 1986 Berlin nightclub bombing, which killed three people. The judge at the 2001 trial said the  Libyan government bore some responsibility, but a connection to Gadhafi could not be established. The Times account of the trial mentioned in passing that prosecutors alleged that the disco bombing was launched  "to retaliate against the sinking of two Libyan boats by the United States in the Gulf of Sirte." It's unlikely that many people remember these acts, which likely killed a fair number of Libyans.

The other examples Burns cites are support for the Irish Republican Army--similar schemes were undertaken around the world, including here in the United States--a shooting outside a British embassy that killed a police officer and the disappearance of a religious leader in Lebanon during a visit to Libya.

This is not to suggest that Gadhafi was innocent of any of these charges. His rule in Libya was marked by vicious attacks and repression inside the country.

But it's difficult to imagine someone at the Times writing about international hunger for accountability for terrorist acts supported, linked to or committed by George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. It's not as if it would be difficult to point to their "signature" acts--support for deadly, anti-democratic death squads in Latin America, the massive destruction and violence unleashed on Iraq, or the torture and prisoner deaths that occurred on Bush's watch. But something tells that if you were to to try to write about these "signature" acts of American terrorism in connection to either--or even to Henry Kissinger's record--someone at the New York Times might try to have you committed.

The incident is rehashed and examined in the New Yorker this week by Peter Maass, who was reporting from the scene that day. He states early on that both sides of the war debate got the event wrong:

The toppling of Saddam’s statue turned out to be emblematic of primarily one thing: the fact that American troops had taken the center of Baghdad. That was significant, but everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television--victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq--was a disservice to the truth. Yet the skeptics were wrong in some ways, too, because the event was not planned in advance by the military.

This struck me as an example of a sort of media "false balance," where blame must be assigned to both sides, even when one side is clearly more blameworthy. That's unfortunate, because Maass' report pretty clearly demonstrates that war propaganda need not be orchestrated by clever military censorship or clever public relations--corporate media are eager to misconstrue and distort events on their own.

So what did the "skeptics" get wrong? They believed an Army report that credited the statue operation--from the placement of an Iraqi flag on the statue's head to the pulling down of the statue itself--to an Army psychological operations unit.  Maass notes that this report

was picked up by the news media ("Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue," the headline in the Los Angeles Times [7/3/04] read) and circulated widely on the Web, fueling the conspiracy notion that a psyops team masterminded not only the Iraqi flag but the entire toppling.

The report got very little attention when it was released. (I actually remember a prominent journalist asking me to help him find it.) It's strange to call it a "conspiracy notion," unless you believe that a government report taking credit for a particular action qualifies as a conspiracy.

What Maass reports is that a handful of military personnel, some of whom had a keen understanding of the sort of imagery that would appeal to the press corps working from Baghdad, decided largely on their own to deliver a spectacle that would attract substantial media coverage. And they were right. If anything, they were slightly quicker than the psyops unit that was on the scene that day, broadcasting messages in Arabic. Maass wrote:

But problems with the coverage at Firdos soon emerged, including the duration, which was non-stop, the tone, which was celebratory, and the uncritical obsession with the toppling.

One of the first TV reporters to broadcast from Firdos was David Chater, a correspondent for Sky News, the British satellite channel whose feed from Baghdad was carried by Fox News. (Both channels are owned by News Corp.) Before the marines arrived, Chater had believed, as many journalists did, that his life was at risk from American shells, Iraqi thugs and looting mobs.

"That's an amazing sight, isn't it?" Chater said as the tanks rolled in. "A great relief, a great sight for all the journalists here.... The Americans waving to us now--fantastic, fantastic to see they're here at last." Moments later, outside the Palestine, Chater smiled broadly and told one Marine, "Bloody good to see you." Noticing an American flag in another marine's hands, Chater cheerily said, "Get that flag going!"

Another correspondent, John Burns of the Times, had similar feelings. Representing the most prominent American publication, Burns had a particularly hard time with the security thugs who had menaced many journalists at the Palestine. His gratitude toward the marines was explicit. "They were my liberators, too," he later wrote. "They seemed like ministering angels to me."

Maass writes that reporters and executives watching back at home "were ready to latch onto a symbol of what they believed would be a joyous finale to the war":

Wilson Surratt was the senior executive producer in charge of CNN’s control room in Atlanta that morning. The room, dominated by almost 50 screens that showed incoming feeds from CNN crews and affiliated networks, was filled with not just the usual complement of producers but also with executives who wanted to be at the nerve center of the network during one of the biggest stories of their lives. Surratt had been told by the newsroom that Marines were expected to arrive at Firdos any moment, so he kept his eyes on two monitors that showed the still empty square.

"The climax, at the time, was going to be the troops coming into Firdos Square," Surratt told me. "We didn't really anticipate that Hussein was going to be captured. There wasn't going to be a surrender. So what we were looking for was some sort of culminating event."

On that day, Baghdad was violent and chaotic. The city was already being looted by swarms of people using trucks, taxis, horses and wheelbarrows to cart away whatever they could from government buildings and banks, museums and even hospitals. There continued to be armed opposition to the American advance. One of CNN's embedded correspondents, Martin Savidge, was reporting from a Marine unit that was taking fire in the city. Savidge was ready to go on the air, under fire, at the exact moment that Surratt noticed the tanks entering Firdos Square. Surratt vividly recalls that moment, because he shouted out in the control room, "There they are!"

He immediately switched the network's coverage to Firdos, and it stayed there almost non-stop until the statue came down, more than two hours later. I asked Surratt whether, by focusing on Firdos rather than on Savidge and the chaos of Baghdad, he had made the right call.

"What were we supposed to do?" Surratt replied. "Not show what was going on in the square? We did the responsible thing. We were careful to say it was not the end. At some point, you’ve got to trust the viewer to understand what they’re seeing."

That problem of reporters being told to go find the news that was on TV, as opposed to the things they were actually seeing firsthand, was apparently common:

A visual echo chamber developed: Rather than encouraging reporters to find the news, editors urged them to report what was on TV. CNN, which did not have a reporter at the Palestine, because its team had been expelled when the invasion began, was desperate to get one of its embedded correspondents there. Walter Rodgers, whose Army unit was on the other side of the Tigris, was ordered by his editors to disembed and drive across town to the Palestine. Rodgers reminded his editors that combat continued and that his vehicle, moving on its own, would likely be hit by American or Iraqi forces. This said much about the coverage that day: Rodgers could not provide reports of the war's end because the war had not ended.

And:

Anne Garrels, NPR's reporter in Baghdad at the time, has said that her editors requested, after her first dispatch about Marines rolling into Firdos, that she emphasize the celebratory angle, because the television coverage was more upbeat. In an oral history that was published by the Columbia Journalism Review, Garrels recalled telling her editors that they were getting the story wrong: "There are so few people trying to pull down the statue that they can't do it themselves.... Many people were just sort of standing, hoping for the best, but they weren't joyous."

[Newsweek photographer] Gary Knight...had a similar problem as he talked with one of his editors on his satellite phone. The editor, watching the event on TV, asked why Knight wasn’t taking pictures. Knight replied that few Iraqis were involved and the ones who were seemed to be doing so for the benefit of the legions of photographers; it was a show. The editor told him to get off the phone and start taking pictures.

And Maass reports the same happened to at least one newspaper reporter:

Robert Collier, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, filed a dispatch that noted a small number of Iraqis at Firdos, many of whom were not enthusiastic. When he woke up the next day, he found that his editors had recast the story. The published version said that "a jubilant crowd roared its approval" as onlookers shouted, 'We are free! Thank you, President Bush!" According to Collier, the original version was considerably more tempered. "That was the one case in my time in Iraq when I can clearly say there was editorial interference in my work," he said recently. "They threw in a lot of triumphalism. I was told by my editor that I had screwed up and had not seen the importance of the historical event. They took out quite a few of my qualifiers."

Given all the evidence he collects, it's odd for Maass to spend any time at all on how "skeptics" believed in a conspiracy that the statue toppling was a manufactured event. It most clearly was; as he documents, it was manufactured primarily by major U.S. media outlets. In a way, that's far worse than blaming it on official military propaganda efforts.