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killed entirely by accident in an intensive bombing campaign.” Yet later Miklaszewski
(3-21-03) would use the military phrase “surgical strike” saying, “every weapon is
precision-guided –deadly accurate designed to kill only the targets, not innocent
civilians.” As Coen and Hart (2003, 17) point out, “The view that all the U.S.’s weapons
are “precise” would seem to be at odds with the notion that all civilian deaths caused by
U.S. attacks area “accidents” but both claims were equally popular with the US press.”
The refusal to admit the logical consequences of the modern weapons of war reveals once
again, the presence of war persuasions.
Over 60 people were killed when a missile crashed into a heavily populated open-
air market in the Shuala section of Baghdad. It was one of 2 market bombings that killed
civilians during the invasion of Iraq. The Shuala attack was reported in the US media,
complete with rare images of civilian casualties, but the stories avoided assigning blame
or responsibility for the deaths. The New York Times (3-29-03) reporting was typical “it
was impossible to determine the cause.” The U.S. press carried no subsequent
investigations of the incident, but British war correspondent Robert Fiske found a serial
number on a missile fragment at the scene of the explosion. The story was reported in the
London newspaper, the Independent, with a follow-up article by another journalist who
traced the number to the Raytheon Corporation. The number corresponded to the HARM
anti-radar missile or a Paveway laser-guided bomb. The military told the paper that a
U.S. Navy EA-6B Prowler jet “was in action over the Iraqi capital on Friday and fired at
least one HARM missile to protect two American fighters from a surface-to-air missile
battery” (4-2-03). The Independent also found that damage to the market was consistent
with a HARM missile, and its tendency to go off-target.
Convention