Originally Posted by
PhPWiki, Highway to Hell
U.S. television tended to sanitize the pictures of the Highway of Death by removing troubling images of burned and mutilated bodies. Moreover, photographs of the episode were pulled from distribution to try to erase the memory of the unsavory episode. An image of an Iraqi soldier burnt to a crisp in the Desert Slaughter was published by the British Guardian on March 3 and created a great uproar...
At the afternoon Pentagon briefing on March 1, Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly said bluntly that the United States was not in the game of counting casualties and when pushed said that they had "killed an entire army." Details of the magnitude of the systematic annihilation of the Iraqis emerged, however, when reporters journeyed up the highway leading from Kuwait City to Iraq, and about twenty miles from the city found evidence of a tremendous slaughter of Iraqis who were fleeing from Kuwait. The first report on what became known as "the Highway of Death" was broadcast on CNN during the morning of March 1, which showed pictures of the road from Kuwait City to the Iraqi border. According to CNN correspondent Tom Mintier, video had just surfaced of a scene outside of Kuwait City depicting "vehicles who were going nowhere." The fleeing Iraqis took any vehicles that they could find to drive to Iraq and when they got outside of the city the allies put a pincer movement on them. They were hit by allied aircraft and artillery in place along the highway, producing a massive traffic jam and subsequent slaughter. The vehicles included civilian cars, buses, trucks, tanks, fire engines, and armored vehicles, some of which burned together as they caught fire and then exploded, producing a conflagration from which few, if any, escaped. There were hundreds of victims, Mintier reported, and charred bodies, burned beyond recognition, were evident inside and around the vehicles.
The video showed pictures of a highway littered with civilian and military vehicles that had been destroyed in one of the most massive slaughters by air power in history. There were images of one vehicle after another, mile after mile, piled upon each other, evoking a picture of a giant traffic jam in which planes bombed and destroyed anything below themselves. Mintier stated that there may have been heavy civilian casualties, and it was not certain if the victims were Iraqis, their Kuwaiti hostages, or fleeing Palestinians.
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Mainstream newspapers tended to downplay the story. The March 2 New York Times inserted a couple of brief paragraphs concerning what was arguably one of the major stories of the war in the middle of an article by R. A. Apple, who tersely described the basic facts and, like the TV reporters, stressed the "looters" angle (p. 6A). The mainstream media in Britain, however, were more critical of the desert slaughter. A BBC report mentioned that the vehicles taken out of Kuwait City were mostly civilian vehicles and that there were very few tanks or artillery on the Highway of Death, raising the question whether the fleeing Iraqis with their hostages were a legitimate military target. The BBC's Stephen Sackur also discerned evidence of cluster bombs, antipersonnel weapons that are designed to break up into hundreds of little bomblets to maximize damage to both humans and machines. Sackur wrote: "It was the scale of the American attack that took my breath away. Was it necessary to bomb the entire convoy? What threat could these pathetic remnants of Saddam Hussein's beaten army have posed? Wasn't it obvious that the people of the convoy would have given themselves up willingly without the application of such ferocious weaponry?"
The Highway of Death
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