February 2005 Archives

Bijal Trivedi - National Geographic Channel When 'Shock and Awe' launched the first stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom the phrase became synonymous with a massive military strike—terrifying and overwhelming. The onslaught of surgically precise attacks that began on March 21, 2003, was expected to vaporize the enemy's military and political will and bring them to their knees. It was a strategy designed to end the war in hours or days. That was the theory. The mission was to decapitate the government, destroy critical buildings and disrupt military communication with minimal civilian casualties—a tough order in Baghdad, a city of five and a half million. The tools for the attack represented a top of the line, high-tech arsenal: submarine and ship-launched tomahawk cruise missiles, B-2 stealth bombers and F-117 stealth fighters, and precision-guided bombs and bunker-busters. As a military tactic, shock and awe has been tried before during the last century—though it has rarely succeeded. In World War I the Germans used zeppelins to cross the English Channel and drop bombs on Britain, convinced the English would be stunned into submission. In World War II Hitler's air force inflicted a 57-day bombing campaign—the Blitz-on Londoners who once again refused to surrender. The Japanese also survived and resisted prolonged air attacks—until the atomic bombs were dropped. Hiroshima and Nagasaki created both shock and awe. In the Iraq war, 'Shock and Awe' hoped to generate a similar psychological blow—without the casualties or the use of nuclear weapons—via precision-guided bombs. Controlling where a bomb falls has always been a challenge. Early in WWI bombs were literally tossed, like a grenade, out of the plane. Things had improved by WWII with the development and use of relatively advanced aiming devices like the Norden bomb sight, which was mounted in the nose of many U.S. bombers. This device took into account altitude, wind speed and other variables to calculate the precise moment to drop a bomb—the accuracy swung between hundreds to thousands of yards if the weather or enemy resistance was bad. During Vietnam, when jungle guerilla warfare often made precision bombing moot, the first laser guided bombs were born. The bombing involved two planes—one directed a laser beam at a target and the other would drop a bomb with a seeker in the nose cone that would detect the laser light and hone in on it.

Attacks began on March 21, 2003

After Vietnam the sophistication of guided bombs grew steadily until the public witnessed the grand entrance of the "smart bomb" during the first Gulf War. In the early 1990s the American public watched spellbound as their network and cable news stations bombarded them with a bird's-eye view of precision guided bombs dropping down chimneys and slamming through the doors of various Iraq targets. These bombs gave the impression of clean, precise warfare. Some of these guided bombs allowed pilots to control them with a joystick and release the bombs a few miles from their targets. But of all the bombs and weapons launched in Iraq in the first Gulf War, only about seven percent were "smart." And even these bombs had shortcomings. Laser-guided precision weapons were accurate, but bad weather or clouds of smoke from burning oil fields often made it impossible to find targets. Worse, pilots needed to fly relatively low and within range of enemy fire. Just a decade later, 'Shock and Awe' used another advance in precision bombing—the Global Positioning System, or GPS. GPS guided bombs, such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition or JDAM, can be dropped from more than twice the altitude of earlier guided bombs and from farther away, helping pilots avoid antiaircraft fire. Tomahawk missiles guided by terrain recognition software and digitized maps, or the newest models directed by the Global Positioning System satellites, can find their targets regardless of weather conditions or smoke.

Soilders patrol the streets of Baghdad

On the evening of March 21, 2003, as the deadline passed for Saddam Hussein and his two sons to leave the country and avert war with the United States, the weapons of this hi-tech arsenal were launched. At 10:15 pm 'Shock and Awe' exploded onto television screens across the world. A National Geographic team witnessed the attack from the 10th floor balcony of the Palestine Hotel—one of three hotels the Iraqis had approved for journalists. The room provided a spectacular view of the Presidential Palace and some 20 other potential targets. What many television viewers did not know was that Saddam Hussein had forbidden broadcasting outside the Ministry of Information, and the hotels patrolled by Iraqi officials searching for banned equipment, such as video phones. "More than bombing, our tension comes from hearing that security people are sweeping the hotel for sat phones," National Geographic producer Charles Poe wrote in his journal. A bizarre testament to the precision of the weapons used during the first night of 'Shock and Awe' was that the streetlights still functioned. Electricity flowed to the city, including the Palestine Hotel where journalists frantically filed their reports. During the opening days of the war, even Iraqi government television was untouched and still broadcasting. Civilian casualties did occur, but the strikes, for the most part, were surgical. Some buildings were completely demolished, while neighboring structures were untouched. Some buildings remained standing while their innards were gutted. In others still, only individual floors were erased. On March 22, the producers saw what the military had advertised. They began filming anti-aircraft fire originating from the Republican Palace—Saddam's proudest residence. "Five minutes later," wrote Poe, "I got the best footage I will ever shoot as missiles thundered into the palace and blew it to bits. It was scary, for sure, but we were so far away and so well sheltered on our concrete balcony that we weren't worried about getting hit by pieces of wreckage." Even after several days of bombing the Iraqis showed remarkable resilience. Many continued with their daily lives, working and shopping, as bombs continued to fall around them. According to some analysts the military's attack was perhaps too precise. It did not trigger shock and awe in the Iraqis and, in the end, the city was only captured after close combat on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Evy Barry - Producer

When the mutilated remains of a young child were pulled from the River Thames on September 21, 2001, one of the most complex, bizarre and high profile murder investigations in criminal history began. All that remained of the tiny boy was a torso. His head, arms and legs had been removed with chilling precision and his body had been drained of blood.

Identification seemed almost impossible. The lack of teeth and fingers rendered standard forensic techniques like dental and fingerprint analysis useless. Detective Inspector Will O'Reilly, of Scotland Yard, was charged with leading the investigation and turned to science to advance his inquiry.

Forensic scientists are not normally called on to lead or solve investigations single-handedly; their job is to verify the hypotheses given to them by detectives. This time, however, it was the other way around. To identify the boy—dubbed Adam by the police—and catch his killers, scientists would have to provide the essential evidence. The short life history of this little boy would have to be reconstructed entirely from clues hidden in his tiny torso.

While Ray Fysh, a specialist adviser with the UK's Forensic Science Service, was assembling a team of experts to perform this difficult task, O'Reilly was searching for a motive. The only other case that bore any similarity to this one occurred in 1969 in London when police discovered the torso of a baby girl, dismembered in a comparable way to Adam's. Though no one was ever arrested for the crime, many suspected the murder was part of an African ritual killing. To explore this possibility O'Reilly consulted Richard Hoskins, an expert on African religions at Kings College London.

Hoskins told the police that Adam's murder had, in fact, involved a ritual; draining a child's body of blood was a practice he recognized from Africa. "Blood is often poured on the ground as an offering to the spirits involved," said Hoskins.

One ancient African belief states that spirits of the dead are invoked through sacrifice. Killing animals and birds is a common act for appeasing the gods or for making traditional medicine—the greater the sacrifice the stronger the prayer or potion.

Ritual killing was unfamiliar turf for O'Reilly so he visited a special police unit in Pretoria, South Africa—the only one in the world dedicated to investigating ritual murders. Here police have investigated hundreds of what they call muti murders since the unit opened a little over twenty years ago.

Muti is the Zulu word for medicine. A muti murder occurs when an individual dies as a result of their body parts being harvested for use in traditional medicine. The body parts are then mixed with other ingredients such as herbs or plant roots to make the muti.

Colonel Kobus Jonker, the retired head of the ritual murder unit, possesses a range of gruesome photographs that reveal the shocking nature of a muti murder. A photograph of a young girl with half of her face cut away was his first ritual murder case in 1981. "This is done when the girl is still alive. They will hold her down [and] the more she screams, the more the ancestors will hear the pain and the muti will be more powerful," said Jonker.

Although the witchdoctor will prepare the medicine, he is not typically involved in harvesting the body parts. A client triggers a muti murder by requesting luck, money, power or health from a witchdoctor. The majority of healers abhor the use of human body parts, but an unscrupulous sangoma, whose ways have deviated from others in his profession, may decide that traditional ingredients—herbs, roots, animal parts—are not powerful enough to achieve the desired result. He then hires a hit man to collect fresh body parts. When the client returns for his muti the witchdoctor tells him what to do with it.

The body part used to create a particular potion is specific to the desired result. A brain bestows knowledge, breasts and genitals of either sex endows virility, a nose or eyelid poisons an enemy and a penis brings luck in horse racing.

O'Reilly hired Credo Mutwa, a well-known and powerful sangoma who abhorred the use of dark practices by some of his peers, to provide insights on Adam's murder. Mutwa insisted that Adam's was not a muti murder but a human sacrifice committed by the worst black magicians in West Africa. "In such a sacrifice they bathe in his blood or drink it and the skull would be used as a cup," he explained.

A human sacrifice differs from a muti murder because its intent is to offer the individual's life to appease a deity. The death of the individual is therefore paramount, which is not the case in a muti murder.

O'Reilly returned to London having established that Adam's murder bore all the hallmarks of a west African ritual killing. But where Adam came from, where he lived and where he was murdered were all unknowns. A forensics specialist believed Adam's country of origin was literally spelled out in his DNA.

The DNA analysis, though tenuous, suggested that Adam might be West African (a fact previously suggested by Credo Mutwa). But the technique could not prove that Adam had lived there.

Nick Branch a pollen expert from Royal Holloway, University of London, was also on the case. He thought pollen preserved in the lungs and digestive tract might reveal where the boy had been living; a variety of pollen grains can provide a botanical fingerprint of a specific region. He found none in the lungs but did discover some in the intestines.

These spores—from plants such as alder—were native to Britain and northwestern Europe. The pollen appeared to have been breathed in and swallowed with food, which takes about 72 hours to pass through the body. Food in the large intestine was a clear sign Adam had been fed less than 72 hours before death. This data only proved that Adam had been in Britain at least three days before he died.

While working on the contents of the intestine Branch had also found some unidentifiable plant matter and a large mineral component that he found unusual and passed on to a colleague for further analysis.

While the scientists were doing their best to further the inquiry detectives had a breakthrough of their own. Immigration services alerted the team to a woman called Joyce who had claimed political asylum from Sierra Leone, citing her husband's ritual murder of their son as her reason for wanting to stay in Britain. She had two daughters in care due to neglect and she had asked social services if she could have them back to perform a ceremony on them.