The footage you won’t see from Saddam’s trial

London, July 3, 2004 - A team of United States military officers acted as censors over all coverage of the hearings of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, destroying videotape of Saddam in chains and deleting the entire recorded legal submissions of 11 senior members of his former regime.

An American network cameraman who demanded the return of his tapes said he was told by a US officer: "No. They belong to us now. And anyway, we don’t trust you guys."

According to American journalists, a US admiral in civilian clothes told camera crews the judge had said there should be no sound recording of Saddam’s initial hearing. He ordered crews to unplug their sound wires during the hearing.

Several of the six crews present pretended to obey the US admiral’s instruction. "We learned later," one of them said, "that the judge didn’t order us to turn off our sound. The Americans lied - it was they who wanted no sound. The judge wanted sound and pictures."

TV crews found that three US officers ordered the censorship of tape which showed Saddam being led into the courtroom with a chain round his waist which was connected to handcuffs round his wrists. The Americans gave no reason for this censorship. But some of the crews managed to hoodwink the American "censors".

"I had pretended to unplug the sound from the camera but the man who claimed he was a US admiral didn’t understand cameras and we were able to record sound. The US censors at the embassy were inattentive - that’s how we got the sound out. The only thing they managed to censor from most of the tapes was Saddam’s comment: ’This is theatre - Bush is the real criminal’."

Television stations throughout the world were astonished on Friday when the first tapes of Saddam’s trial arrived without sound - and have still not been informed that the Americans censored the material. - Independent Foreign Service

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