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In the lead-up to war, U.S. media organizations, with rare exceptions, had begun to back away from investigative reporting and journalistic scrutiny. Once
the war began, government censorship combined with this self-censorship produced a media blackout.
The restrictions on the press were tighter than during any earlier American war. Journalists could not travel except in pools with military escorts, and even then most sites were off-limits. Department of Defense guidelines stated that stories would not
be judged for “potential to express criticism or cause embarrassment,” but journalists weren’t taking any chances. When news anchors weren’t hosting retired generals and pundits, or screening eerie green images of the coordinates of the day’s
targets, they were praising the military on a job well done.

Pentagon censors had to clear all war dispatches, photos and footage before they could be released. Two months after the war ended, the editors of 15 news outlets protested to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney about the Pentagon’s control. But the
damage had been done.

6. Bush 41’s Gulf War accelerated Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s jihad

Al Qaeda was founded in 1988, but the 1991 Gulf War fueled sprung it into action. Bin laden, whose billionaire construction family was closely tied to the royal family, was furious that the the royal family welcomed U.S. troops into the country, sullying
the holiest Muslim sites with their presence. Once the war started, his outrage
grew that the royal family was allowing the US to stage its brutal attacks on Iraqi soldiers and civilians. His public criticism of the royal family led to his expulsion in
1991. In his exile in Sudan, with the hundreds of millions of dollars he brought with him, he built his organization, and planned jihad.

Al Qaeda’s first bomb attack occurred in December 1992 at the Gold Mihor hotel in Aden, where two people were killed. Two months later they made their first attack on the World Trade Center, detonating a 500kg bomb that killed six
and injured thousands.

Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa, often quoted in the media, declares that “killing Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” Less
quoted is the part of the sentence that references the 1991 Iraq War–” in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to
threaten any Muslim.”

7.Bush 41’s Gulf War violated international military law

Seymour Hersh’s 2000 New Yorker article “Overwhelming Force” exposed the Highway of Death, the corral and massacre of retreating Iraqi soldiers Two days
after the UN and Soviet brokered ceasefire and the day before peace talks were to begin, Hersh
tells us, two-star General Barry McCaffrey overrode his division commander and ordered his 24th Division to engage in an all-out attack on a retreating Republican Guard tank division on their way back to Baghdad. As Hersh describes
it: “Apache attack
helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, and artillery units from the 24th Division pummeled the five-mile-long Iraqi column for hours, destroying some seven hundred Iraqi tanks, armored cars, and trucks, and killing not only Iraqi
soldiers but civilians
and children as well.” There were no U.S. casualties on what came to be called the Highway of Death. Lieutenant General Ronald Griffith, commander of 1st Armored Division of VII Corps, told Hersh that the Iraqi tanks were facing backwards, atop a
trailer truck taking them to Baghdad. “It was just a bunch of tanks in a train, and he made it a battle,” Hersh reports Griffith saying, but McCaffrey
“made it a battle when it was never one. That’s the thing that bothered me the most.”

8. Bush 41’s Gulf War sickened approximately a third of US veterans

In 2008, a congressionally mandated Research Advisory Committee (RAC) made up of prestigious scientists confirmed what veterans and their families have long asserted: That “without a doubt,” Gulf War illness, as it’s come to be called, is a
profound, multi-system physical illness “caused” by brain-damaging chemicals to which troops were exposed by the Department of Defense. The RAC report identified three specific neurotoxins as certain culprits: anti-nerve gas pills that troops were
forced to take (or risk court martial), insecticides and repellents that drenched troops’ tents, clothing, and gear, and nerve gases including sarin (the killer chemical in the Tokyo subway attack) emitted into the air when U.S.
forces dismantled and
demolished a vast munitions storage facility in Khamisiyah. The skin, stomach, minds, hearts, lungs and every other organ of hundreds of thousands of American
veterans of Desert Storm (and Desert Shield, the operation preparing for war) were not
psychological, as the government had insisted for almost 20 years. ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease, multiple sclerosis, disabling neuropathies, heart attacks, difficulty breathing, walking standing—all these, we now know, were caused by
neurotoxins
including experimental anti nerve gas pills soldiers had to take or risk court martial, insecticides and pesticides that the military administered recklessly,
sarin and other gases released into the air when we bombed an Iraq military storage facility
at Khamysia, with a growing body of evidence regarding the role of depleted uranium.

In 2012 the VA shredded the blue-ribbon RAC team and continues to drag its feet on research and treatments.

9. Several notorious massacres since Bush 41’s Gulf War have been committed by Gulf War Veterans, some whose brains have been severely damaged from exposure to toxic chemicals and/or trauma

Consider the case of John Allen Muhammad, (formerly John Allen Williams) –who
came to be known as the Beltway Sniper, who murdered In her 2009 memoir, Scared Silent, Mildred Muhammad, the later of his two ex-wives, writes that her
husband went to the
1991 Gulf War a “happy,” “focused, and “intelligent” man, who returned home “depressed,” “totally confused,” and “violent,” making her fear for her life. In their briefs, Muhammad’s appeals lawyers stressed that his “severe
mental illness” never came up at trial, where he was allowed to represent himself despite obvious mental incompetence. (Till the end, he maintained his innocence, claiming that at the time of the killing spree he was in Germany for
dental work.) In
seeking clemency and a stay of execution, Muhammad’s lawyers presented psychiatric reports diagnosing schizophrenia and brain scans documenting profound malformations consistent with psychotic disease. Neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor Virginia
Governor Tim Kaine were impressed. According to Governor Kaine, “crimes that are this horrible, you just can’t understand….”

But mental disorders from depression to mood swings, thought disorders, violent
outbursts, and delusions are not uncommon among Gulf War veterans in addition to physical symptoms such as rashes, vertigo, respiratory and gastrointestinal problem, and
neurological diseases like Parkinson’s, ALS, and brain tumors. According to Dr. William E. Baumzweiger, a California psychiatrist with expertise in psychiatric ailments of Gulf War veterans, “a small but significant number of
Gulf War veterans become
homicidal” seemingly “out of nowhere.” Indeed, as early as 1994, University of Texas epidemiologist Dr. Robert Haley, the preeminent researcher of Gulf War disease, had demonstrated that the brain scans of veterans with Gulf War illness were
distinctly abnormal.

Muhammad’s lawyers pointed to childhood beatings as a cause of his psychiatric disease and brain malformation, claiming that Gulf War syndrome exacerbated these conditions. But they didn’t mention that Mohammad had no history of mental illness before
the war–and that during the war he was stationed in Khamisiyah.

It probably wouldn’t have helped. In 2002, another Gulf War veteran, Louis Jones Jr. was executed for the 1995 rape and murder of a young female soldier, Pvt. Tracie Joy McBride. Like Sergeant Muhammad, Sergeant Jones was an exemplary soldier decorated
in the war; but also like Muhammad, he returned from Desert Storm depressed, disoriented, and increasingly anti-social and bizarre. Like Muhammad, his defense was inadequate–but his appeals lawyer displayed MRIs and other scans of his abnormal brain,
arguing that it was evidence of the brain damage from toxins he and other veterans with Gulf War disease were exposed to in-country. Supporting the petition for clemency was the written testimony of Dr. Haley that “there is now a compelling involuntary
link between Mr. Jones’ neurotoxic war injury and his inexplicable crime.” Like Muhammad, Jones was stationed in Khamisiyah during the demolition, which poisoned thousands of troops and then thousands more as sarin plumes traveled far and wide, a
fact the government hid for close to a decade.

And then there’s the case of Timothy McVeigh. We have no scans of his brain, but we have ample reports of his mental state before and after Desert Storm, and evidence that the war changed him profoundly. In their biography, American Terrorist, Lou
Michel and Dan Herbeck paint a vivid picture of McVeigh’s days in the ground war. The enthusiastic young marksman, at first, happily followed orders and shot an Iraqi soldier manning a machine gun over a mile away. When a bloody mist replaced the
soldier’s head in his viewfinder, McVeigh was disturbed and discharged the rest of his round into empty desert sand. Later, after Saddam had agreed to a UN and Soviet brokered ceasefire, McVeigh was further shocked and shaken by orders to kill defeated
Iraqi soldiers traveling home on the highway from Kuwait to Iraq (come to be known as the “Highway of Death” for the thousands that U.S. Forces corralled and massacred on the night of Feb 26, 1991). He watched the road in horror as dogs chewed on
human limbs, and as human bodies without arms or legs tried to crawl away.

In his famous 60 Minutes interview ten years later, McVeigh would tell Ed Bradley that the killing changed him. He found himself thinking, “I’m in this person`s country. What right did I have to come over to his country and kill him? …How did he
ever transgress against me?” He went over thinking, “Not only is Saddam evil, all Iraqis are evil.” But quickly it was “an entirely different ballgame… face to face…you realize they`re just people like you.” He told
Bradley that the
government modeled brutal violence. In a 1998 prison essay he objected to the United States’ continuing campaign against Iraq: It was the U.S. that had “set the standard” for “stockpiling and use of weapons of mass destruction.”

McVeigh’s experience in the Gulf War surely altered his thinking. But did it also alter his brain? What toxins might have entered his body on the highway where U.S. forces had just dropped cluster bombs and 500-ton bombs of napalm and depleted uranium,
incinerating thousands vehicles and the people inside. He told Ed Bradley that when he came back “something didn`t feel right in me, but. I couldn`t say what it was.” Psychological trauma alone, neuroscientists now tell us, affects not only psyches
but brains. Sophisticated neuroimaging shows the brains of those who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to be abnormal in areas regulating memory retrieval and inhibition (hippocampus), fearfulness and focus (pre-frontal cortex), and emotionality
and lability (amygdala). The hippocampus of Alzheimer’s sufferers is also shrunken and the amygdala of bipolar sufferers have enhanced activation similar
to those with PTSD.

_____________________________________

The current trend in international war crimes and crimes against humanity is to
consign crimes committed by individuals to national courts, and to apply international justice to those at the highest levels of government who make the
decisions implemented
on the ground. George HW Bush is now beyond the reach of international law to be tried for the crimes of Desert Storm and its sequels. But the evidence is ample and mounting for history to judge

The Rev Kev
December 6, 2018 at 5:31 am

Oh yeah – the Highway of Death. The first images showed that it had already been “sanitized” as in there were no bodies to be seen but only cars and trucks. There were pictures taken before the cleanup but Ameriacns were not allowed to see them.
I am thinking of the infamous foto (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/the-war-photo-no-one-would-publish/375762/) which American media refused to publish at the time (In fact, I have seen a video clip in a French documentary that
exists only in a shortened version as seen in the west). During the Vietnam War
such an image would probably have been published but back then there was a very
rich ecology of tens of thousands of TV stations, newspapers and radio stations
covering that
war. By the time of the First Gulf War much of them had already been consolidated into more pliable media empires.
Personally I would be loath to write off Timothy McVeigh’s troubles to toxins as suggested by that article as that could be just a way to write off the reasons for his murderous attack without going into his motivations. Remember, this was a guy
with an IQ rated at 126. It was no coincidence that the Oklahoma bombing was on
the anniversary of the burning to death of 76 men, women and children at the Waco siege. Without putting on a tin-foil hat or attempting to go into the rabbit warren of
McVeigh’s thoughts, it may be that he saw how his government was slaughtering
ordinary Iraqis and using him as an instrument in doing so. Seeing that very same government massacring fellow Americans without consequence was just too much and he decided
to strike back, hence using the anniversary date to underline his statement. An
explanation like that does not need toxins to account for it. Not that I am pardoning the sob but I think that such people should be understood than just being written off as
somehow damaged by toxins or biochemical effects of PTSD.

JTMcPhee
December 6, 2018 at 11:58 am

Oh, and I forgot about the “not one brick atop another” bombing of the entire Korean Peninsula in that “police action” or whatever it was, 1950-53, one of several demonstrations that maybe short of using nuclear weapons, “air
power” does not “win wars,” whatever one chooses those words to mean. Here’s a nice recitatif on the subject: https://theintercept.com/2017/05/03/why-do-north-koreans-hate-us-one-reason-they-remember-the-korean-war/


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