TV AND THE GULF WAR : Raging, Well-Spoken Woman Was More Than She Seemed

The mystery woman . . .

She was small, middle-aged, brunette and stylishly dressed in what appeared to be a white athletic suit.

She was also outraged.

While walking in Baghdad, amid what looked like extensive bomb damage, she vented her fury at Americans and the media with a raw eloquence, screaming at the camera--”We are human beings!”--as if George Bush himself were watching.

The sight of this distraught, tortured Iraqi woman on Cable News Network on Feb. 1 was something--along with earlier television pictures of a bloodied Israeli woman carried off on a stretcher after a Scud attack on Tel Aviv civilians--that vividly lingered, as few other scenes from the Persian Gulf War have. Here, achingly, was the war’s human wreckage.

The Iraqi-supplied Baghdad footage that CNN ran was edited to first focus on the twisted remains of a U. S. Tomahawk missile, before cutting to the woman standing on what appeared to be a hill of rubble. As she walked, frequently turning back to the camera, seemingly on impulse, her rage over Iraqi civilian casualties just exploded.

Realizing how dramatic this was, CNN reran the piece repeatedly for two days and, as it does with all its Baghdad stories, clearly labeled this one as being Iraqi-approved.

In other words, viewer beware.

Nonetheless, it was a shock Friday to hear CNN report on the air that its Pentagon correspondent, Gene Randall, had learned from “intelligence sources” that the anguished woman--seemingly an ordinary citizen captured by a roving Iraqi TV camera--was instead “a senior Iraqi diplomat.”

CNN later identified the woman as Suha Turaihi, assistant to Deputy Foreign Minister Nizar Hamdoon, a former Iraqi ambassador to the United States.

She was no ordinary citizen.

The disclosure does not necessarily mean she was performing for TV, or that the hatred she expressed was not genuine. On the contrary, if she was acting, then her performance has to go down as the best yet in a crisis where working the camera is routine on both sides of the conflict.

Nor does it mean that CNN should stop running Iraqi-censored reports from Baghdad, whether from its own correspondent, Peter Arnett, or from Brent Sadler, the reporter from England’s ITN whose Baghdad pieces have been appearing on CNN.

What this incident does teach us, though, is to be extremely wary of TV pictures, especially those filling the screen during a war where propaganda is the currency of both sides.

In Iraq, the pictures are tightly controlled by a government determined to exploit CNN.

Even the allies concede that their bombardment of Iraq has killed civilians. Yet, for all we know, the woman in the Iraqi video was a set-up, staring in a staged event on rubble, caused not by allied bombs or missiles, but by fallout from Iraq’s own antiaircraft fire.

Why was she there? “We don’t know,” CNN spokesman Steve Haworth said Friday.

It was Ed Turner, CNN executive vice president for news gathering, who first raised a question about the Iraqi woman, Haworth said: “Ed noticed that she was speaking in very good English, and he thought he saw a U. N. emblem on her clothing. He asked Peter (Arnett) to find out who the woman was.”

Arnett complied, and in a story on Sunday, Haworth said, identified the woman as a former U. N. official.

The original, taped footage of the woman was delivered to CNN in Baghdad, then beamed to CNN’s Atlanta headquarters, where it was shaped into a news package.

When did Turner first see it?

“I would presume when it was in the building, or more likely, when it aired,” Haworth said.

If so, then that raises questions about why CNN continued to show the footage even after Turner had a question about the woman. It should have yanked the story until her identity was cleared up.

In a Friday story from Baghdad aired on CNN, ITN’s Sadler reported that “newspapers here are mouthpieces for the state.”

In this case, perhaps CNN was, too.