BY LAURIE GARRETT
Garrett, medical writer for Newsday, was part of the paper's Persian Gulf war reporting team.

THE DEAD

When Jordan TV news anchor Rabah Rousan showed up for work on February 13, she had not yet heard the news of the bombing of the Baghdad air-raid shelter. A seemingly endless series of minor calamities, including the breakdown of her car, had left her out of touch with events until, at 6 p.m., she strolled into JTV headquarters on the outskirts of Amman.

"I walked into the newsroom and everyone was standing. There were tears in their eyes, people were shaking, some sobbing, and I said, 'What's wrong?'" Rousan recalls.

What had upset the JTV news staff was their viewing of more than half an hour of videotape, most of which the world's public -- including Jorandian viewers -- has never seen. (JTV did air far more graphic clips of the bombing's impact, obtained from both unedited CNN feeds and Baghdad's WTN, than those shown in the U.S.)

This reporter viewed the unedited Baghdad feeds the following day; they showed scenes of incredible carnage. Nearly all the bodies were charred into blackness; in some cases the heat had been so great that entire limbs were burned off. Among the corpses were those of at least six babies and ten children, most of them so severly burned that their gender could not be determined. Rescue workers collapsed in grief, dropping corpses; some rescuers vomited from the stench of the still-smouldering bodies. JTV news director Mohammed Amin was so overwhelmed by the video images that he ordered the worst of the footage withheld from broadcast.

"We felt it deeply," he says. "We were -- we are now -- all overwhelmed. But, of course, we must remain objective. And we don't want to show the ugliest images of the war." Rousan adds that her colleagues felt that broadcasting the grisliest images would fly in the face of Islamic teachings, which dictate that "the humanity of the individual, the dignity, cannot be defiled."

Shortly before she went on the air at 10:00 P.M., Rousan, who anchors the English-language new broadcast, viewed the unedited videotapes from Baghdad. "I'm not an emotional person," she says, "but I was there crying like a baby. I saw a young child's body, completely charred, clothes and hair all burned off, and there was still smoke coming off him. I've never seen anything like that in my life! I went into the makeup room and cried uncontrollably."

News director Amin recalls cursing the American bombers in a rage that night while his staff wept. "We all felt it," he says, "as if it were Jordanians under those bombs, our people. Because we are one people, we are all Arabs, we could see those children as our children, and it hurt our hearts like I cannot tell you." On the air, Rousan visibly struggled to keep her emotions under control. She could not keep from sounding sarcastic, however, when she introduced a clip of U.S. Brigadier General Richard Neal's explanation of why U.S.-led forces bombed the site. "I didn't intend to do that, of course," Rousan says. "It was very unprofessional. I just couldn't help it, though." Another of Rousan's colleagues, while delivering a news update earlier in the evening, had cracked on the air, tears welling in her eyes and her voice breaking.

Even though Jordanians did not see the worst of the images from Baghdad that night, the effect on the population was profound. An elderly sheik went berserk minutes after the broadcast. Setting out in search of a target for his rage, he stabbed a German student whom he mistook for an American. For two days, hundreds of enraged Jordanians surrounded the Egyptian and American embassies and the United Nations building in Amman, shouting pro-Saddam slogans, throwing stones, and attacking Western journalists.

"You know what would cool us off?" shouted Saher Hadi, a twenty-four-year-old banker, as he demonstrated in front of the U.S. embassy. "American babies killed like the Iraqis we saw on TV tonight. We would have pleasure in that. I have many American friends, but this is something beyond friendship. Americans must accept responsibility. You," he said, punching his finger sharply into my chest, "must accept responsibility." If JTV had aired, unedited, all the video it received, the reaction of Jordanians and Palestinians would no doubt have been far more violent. One can only wonder how U.S. viewers would have reacted if they had seen the unedited video, or at least more than the sanitized few moments that were aired.

"All my life I will remember these things in vivid detail," Rousan says. "I was educated in the States -- I lived there seven years when my father was ambassador, in the sixties -- and I was expecting the American people to say, 'We made a mistake, we're so sorry.' But they didn't. and it's terribly hard for me. I feel so American. It's half of who I am. But now I feel it's morally wrong to be pro-American, and it's like having to hate half of myself."

Rousan, who is forty years old, has a clear "American" memory of where she was the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Now, she says, she will always carry an equally vivid "Iraqi" memory of her whereabouts the day bombs fell on a Baghdad air-raid shelter.

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