Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 15, 1991 TAG: 9102150137
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Cox News Service
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
\ PRISONERS OF WAR: Puffy-faced and battered-looking American and allied flyers appeared on videotape after their planes were downed in bombardments of Iraq. Almost nothing has been heard from the Americans or their comrades since.
U.S. officials have sternly demanded that the Iraqis comply with the Geneva Convention in the treatment of POWs. But so far the Baghdad government has refused to allow the International Red Cross to monitor conditions.
Unsubstantiated reports from Iraqi prisoners of war said that at least two American POWs captured on the ground, a woman and a man, have been installed at Basra, a military headquarters and site of massive allied bombardment.
A diplomatic official in Washington said that the United States knows the location of two of the total of eight American POWs.
\ OIL DISASTER: When U.S. officials announced that Saddam Hussein had opened the spigots and dumped crude oil into the Persian Gulf, they predicted the spill would be 12 times the size of the Exxon Valdez leak off the shore of Alaska. Estimates of the size of the oil spills vary greatly.
Johns Hopkins University environmental engineer Edward Bouwer believes there are 7 million barrels of oil floating in the gulf.
The Saudi Meteorology and Environmental Protection Agency says slicks range from a total of 500,000 barrels to 3 million barrels. By comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill was 254,762 barrels.
"We're concerned that the Persian Gulf is on the way to becoming a dead sea," said Brent Blackwelder, an official with Friends of the Earth.
Saudi Arabia has imported booms to protect desalinization plants and brought in bird experts from California to help save wildlife. But Blackwelder said that cleanup equipment arrived too late to be effective in saving the gulf. Most of the giant ooze is still at sea, heading steadily toward Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
\ ARAB-AMERICANS: The FBI stirred a controversy soon after the war began by announcing an "outreach program" that called in prominent Arab Americans for voluntary questioning. The program has been ended after slightly more than 100 interviews, "most of them cordial," said an FBI spokesman. But federal investigators continue to question Arab Americans about possible terrorism.
The American Civil Liberties Union is considering filing a lawsuit, charging U.S. investigators with harassing citizens for their Arab background or their pro-Palestinian views.
The ACLU also is expected to file a suit next week alleging that Pan American Airlines discriminates against Arabic passengers.
\ THE BATTLE FOR KHAFJI: Khafji is quiet once again, but it took allied troops a week to root out the last of the Iraqi forces that had seized the coastal Saudi city for 36 hours late last month. In the end, Saudi forces had to conduct house-to-house searches to capture Iraqi snipers that had hidden in the bombed out community about six miles from the Kuwait border. Allied defense forces have now been beefed up in the area to prevent a repeat Iraqi assault.
The final allied count suggested a solid Iraqi defeat. At least 40 Iraqi soldiers were reported killed and more than 400 were said to have been taken prisoner. But damage to the modern buildings there was extensive.
The U.S. military lavished praise on Saudi and Qatari troops for reclaiming Khafji from Iraqi forces. In fact, there is strong evidence that their mission was seriously flawed. American journalists who traveled to the city without U.S. military escorts were able to establish that in the confusion of battle, the Qatari troops ended up firing upon their own allied Saudi forces. And contrary to U.S. military claims, journalists on the scene established that the Marines had been actively involved.
by CNB