POWs to Be Shields, Iraq Says : Bush Expresses Anger; Geneva Code Violation Seen : Gulf War: Bombing of civilian targets justifies action, Baghdad says. More Scuds fired at Riyadh but no injuries reported. Decoy launchers hamper missile hunt.

Iraq announced Monday that it will use its captured American and allied airmen as human shields against the relentless air attack on Iraqi targets, prompting U.S. officials to accuse Saddam Hussein of committing war crimes.

“America is angry about this,” said President Bush, who vowed that the threat will not prompt him to relax the U.S. offensive.

The International Committee of the Red Cross declared that Iraq had violated the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war by televising the pilots and by threatening to place them at key military and civilian targets inside Iraq. It said it will seek to visit the allied prisoners of war in Iraq to check on their condition.

The world got its first glimpses Monday of Iraqi Television videotapes showing cut, bruised and dazed allied pilots condemning the allied assault on Iraq and Kuwait.

The Baghdad announcement that captives would be moved to strategic sites as protection against allied bombing made it clear that Iraq was resurrecting its nightmarish human shield policy from the early period of the Persian Gulf crisis. There was an immediate storm of international protest.

As the Persian Gulf War entered its sixth day, there were these other developments:

* Iraq launched at least two Scud missiles toward the Saudi capital of Riyadh this morning, according to Saudi officials. Preliminary reports indicated that one was downed by a Patriot interceptor missile and fell onto a Riyadh street, and one or two others fell in the desert. There were no reports of injuries.

* Iraq said allied aircraft raided Baghdad three times and bombarded other cities, including Tikrit, President Hussein’s hometown.

* The Pentagon said the number of sorties flown over Iraq and Kuwait by allied forces had climbed to 8,100.

* Allied commanders said the Iraqis have been setting up cardboard and plywood decoys of mobile Scud missile launchers, complicating the task of eliminating the Scud threat. “They do use decoys and they use them well,” said Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

In announcing that the captured pilots will be taking the places once occupied by hundreds of Western and Japanese civilian hostages at strategic sites throughout Iraq and Kuwait, the Iraqis said the move is justified because the United States and its allies were bombing civilian targets as well as military sites.

“Because the scientific and civilian centers are being targeted by the hostile air forces, it has been decided to deploy the captured enemy pilots, who number more than 20, around such centers,” an Iraqi spokesman said in a Baghdad Radio dispatch.

In Washington, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said that the Pentagon has picked “military targets,” but he added, “I’m sure there’s been collateral damage” to nearby sites.

The Baghdad broadcast, monitored in Amman, asserted that the decision to use the airmen as shields at “civilian, economic, educational and other targets” came after allied air strikes had targeted similar sites in Iraqi cities. It added, “such shelling resulted in the killing and injuring of Iraqis.”

There has been no confirmation of civilian dead or wounded as a result of the allied bombardment of Iraq and Kuwait, but a diplomat who toured eight hospitals in Baghdad after the first three days of bombing said he encountered only military casualties. The diplomat said most of them were injured when a U.S. “smart bomb” demolished the Iraqi Defense Ministry building.

The spokesman in the Baghdad Radio broadcast did not disclose the nationalities of the captured pilots. However, on Sunday the Hussein regime put on display seven uniformed men it identified as captured allied fliers. Three of the men identified themselves as Americans.

Audiotapes of the men’s voices, in which some of them made anti-war statements, were broadcast Sunday, and on Monday the video images of the prisoners were broadcast worldwide. Among those seen were Marine Lt. Col. Clifford M. Acree of Oceanside, Marine Chief Warrant Officer Guy L. Hunter Jr. of Camp Pendleton, Navy Lt. Jeffrey Norton Zaun of Cherry Hill, N.J., and British Flight Lt. John Peters.

One of the videotapes showed a cut and battered Zaun, 28, mouthing the words: “I think our leaders and our people have wrongly attacked the peaceful people of Iraq.” He spoke in the same stilted tone of the other prisoners who were pictured, and his face bore signs of what analysts said was an interrogation beating.

Speaking from his home in New Jersey, Zaun’s father, Calvin, said he was certain the Iraqis were “putting words in his mouth.”

The Outrage

President Bush, returning to the White House after spending the weekend at Camp David, Md., viewed the videotapes of the captured airmen and said that if Hussein “thought this brutal treatment of pilots is a way to muster world support, he is dead wrong.”

Will the Iraqi strongman be held accountable? Bush was asked.

“You can count on it.”

Hussein’s treatment of the prisoners would have no impact on “the prosecution of the war,” the President said.

Bush spent the afternoon at the White House, nursing a cold. During the morning, he spoke by telephone with Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez and Turkish President Turgut Ozal, White House spokesman Fitzwater said.

In addition to the outrage expressed in Washington, a storm of protest arose from officials in Britain and Italy.

“I think that we have the gravest suspicions of the means that may have been used to achieve those statements (by the captured airmen) for their own political purposes,” declared Defense Secretary Tom King of Britain.

Iraq’s senior diplomat in Washington, Khalid Shewayish, was called to a meeting at the State Department with Undersecretary for Political Affairs Robert M. Kimmitt, who gave him a message strongly protesting Baghdad’s actions.

Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said Iraq has not officially informed the United States--as the Geneva Conventions require--that it is holding American prisoners. The conventions, to which the United States and Iraq are parties, require humane treatment of prisoners, prohibit parading or humiliating them and require them to be evacuated from combat zones.

Appearing on network television news programs Monday morning, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney said Iraq has a “solemn legal obligation to abide by the Geneva Conventions in terms of treatment of prisoners. To do anything else would in fact constitute a war crime.”

But, he said, “This is a man (Hussein) who previously has used chemical weapons; he’s made a practice in connection with his own military efforts to launch weapons at civilian targets in Riyadh and Tel Aviv. I suppose the fact that he’d violate the Geneva Convention where prisoners are concerned shouldn’t be surprising to us.”

As of Monday, according to the Pentagon, 11 Americans, six Britons, two Italians and one Kuwaiti were listed as missing in action. One American was listed as killed in action.

The Military

Meanwhile, Pentagon officials offered a less optimistic assessment than in recent days of the Gulf War’s progress, acknowledging that bad weather was hampering bombing raids.

Senior military officers refused to spell out specific damage reports and acknowledged that some of the mobile and fixed-position launchers Iraq has used to dispatch its troublesome Scud missiles remain intact despite a concerted campaign to destroy them.

In addition, Rear Adm. John (Mike) McConnell, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the failure to destroy the Iraqi communications network by which troops receive orders from headquarters: “The command element is still in control of the military activity in this country.”

But Lt. Gen. Kelly said, “the (Iraqi) troops in the field are not doing very much.” And according to Fitzwater, Bush feels that the war is “going very well.”

After a private intelligence briefing for members of the House of Representatives, Rep. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) said, “We are moving from the euphoria of the early days of the war to the reality phase, exemplified by the torture of POWs, weather problems and the difficulty of rooting out an entrenched army.”

“So far Saddam has been more resilient than you would have thought. Who could take all this air war and still be standing?” said Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), after another briefing. “You’d think he would yell ‘uncle’ and give up. But no, that is not in the Arab psyche.”

Iraq’s Strategy

By holding the captured American, British and Italian pilots at undisclosed future targets, analysts said, Hussein hopes to break the resolve of the allies’ pilots, who now will not know whether their fellow airmen are being held at the targets they’re assigned to destroy.

Domestically, Hussein also hopes that the announcement will create an additional incentive for civilians to capture and turn over downed allied pilots. Already, he has offered rewards of up to $32,000 for anyone who turns over live enemy airmen. Hussein clearly meant to horrify his enemies by displaying the beaten pilots. Even before he invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, the Iraqi leader often boasted that America and its allies could not stomach a prolonged war that would send thousands of Americans home in body bags.

But analysts who have been in Baghdad recently said the POW broadcast was also clearly meant as a morale booster for Iraq’s beleaguered 17 million people, who have been totally cut off from one another since the allied assault began last week.

In Baghdad, most residents have been without electricity, running water and flushing toilets for five days. The display of captured enemy pilots whose planes set off Iraqi’s daily nightmare of sirens, missiles, and bombs was Hussein’s way of trying to show that his armed forces are fighting back effectively.

The regime’s propaganda machine has taken pains to load the nation’s television and radio news with proud claims of its victories every day and night since the war began. But the POW display was the first concrete evidence that the regime could present to a people long suspicious of its claims. And such successes already appear to be having a powerful impact on the besieged Iraqi nation.

One Western journalist who left Baghdad for Jordan on Sunday said the unending allied bombing, combined with the continuing but limited ability of their iron-fisted leader to strike back, has served as a unifying force for many one-time dissidents in Iraq.

“One Iraqi businessman who has always been anti-Saddam had nothing but praise for him the day I left,” said the reporter, who asked not to be identified because he hopes to return to Iraq when the government permits it.

Indeed, most of the journalists who were among the last ordered out of the country by Iraq’s security agencies on Sunday said that the aerial onslaught has now given the Iraqis a common enemy for the first time since their war with Iran, and that Hussein is the only force that they believe can protect them.

Fineman reported from Amman and Gerstenzang from Washington. Times staff writers William J. Eaton and Paul Houston, in Washington, and John Goldman, at the United Nations, contributed to this story.

NEXT STEP

Iraq is among 164 signatories to the Geneva Convention, which forbids parading POWs or intimidating them. Violations are handled by several means, according to Anne Stingle, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. The Red Cross first works with the government involved, pointing out the legal requirements. If that does not work, the group calls world attention to the violation and asks other signatory nations “to bring pressure to bear.” There can eventually be trials for violations of the accords, “if the world community so decides,” Stingle said. Under the convention, the Red Cross must be allowed to visit prisoners in a private setting without guards, video monitors or other witnesses.