Patrick Sloyan, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for Newsday, discussed last night his experiences with censorship imposed by the U.S. government on war reporting and warned audience members to not believe everything they see.
About 25 people attended the speech titled "War Reporting from Viet Nam to the Gulf War to Bosnia: What You Will Never Know" in 105 Dartmouth Hall. The speech was sponsored by College Course 1 "The War In and About Viet Nam."
Sloyan said the primary reason for his talk was to alert the audience not to take everything they see or hear in the media as the absolute truth.
Sloyan's reports of U.S. atrocities during the Gulf War won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
He said he wanted the audience "to question what you see as documentary evidence on TV."
Almost all the film footage of the Gulf War the American public saw on television was produced by the military and not by the press, he said.
"There was no eyewitness report, film or photo of that week of war" by any reporter, Sloyan said.
Americans never got the full story concerning the war or even most of it, contrary to the public's assumptions, Sloyan said.
"We [the American public] see things, but they are carefully orchestrated videos produced by the army and handled by the president to show a 'clean war,'" he said.
Sloyan said he was one of 1,000 journalists in the Gulf reporting on the week-long war.
The worst military maneuver Sloyan said he uncovered was where "the army took the plows on tanks for scooping up mines ... and buried thousands of Iraqi troops alive."
The colonel who Sloyan spoke with said this tactic was "a very cost-effective way to deal with fortified trenches," since not one American soldier was killed.
In addition, Sloyan learned that an unusually large percentage of American casualties in the war were caused by friendly fire and the U.S. military tried to hide this fact, even from some of the families of those killed.
Sloyan said from Viet Nam to the present, public approval of U.S. involvement in a war has been central to the success of American politicians.
"When you see war, people don't like that. That's what drives leaders out of office. If you are going to have a war, don't have any pictures," he said.
Sloyan said what he uncovered was not illegal or even inappropriate rather, they were acts of war, atrocities and tragic mistakes.
The Pentagon confirmed the story which Sloyan wrote with eyewitness accounts from both soldiers and higher ranking military officials.
The Pentagon said, "It's true, but there's no nice way of killing people," Sloyan said.
Sloyan said Viet Nam was the last war where reporters were allowed free access to fighting and it was those images and reports that changed the war in the public eye.He said coverage of Viet Nam caused all subsequent "political systems to hide the face of war."
"We were presenting the reality, mistakes, tragedy and grief of political decisions," Sloyan said, speaking of his coverage of the war in Viet Nam.
"It was images of the Viet Cong attacking the U.S. Embassy, still photos and videotape of dead marines lying on top of tanks that reinforced that our troops were dying and for what reason," Sloyan continued.
