FOX NEWS NETWORK
FOX SPECIAL REPORT WITH BRIT HUME
(18:00 ET) February 22, 2001, Thursday
How effective were last week's air strikes against Iraq?
HUME: Coming up next: How effective were last week's air strikes against Iraq? That story next.
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HUME: The U.S.-European command says the U.S. attacked targets this day in the northern no-fly zone over Iraq. The U.S. warplanes fired in self-defense, it was said, after Iraqi forces targeted allied planes on radar and with anti-aircraft fire. These were the first strikes toward Iraqi targets on the ground since last week's attacks. As FOX NEWS's Steve Centanni tells us, new information shows many targets were missed during last week's air strikes.
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STEVE CENTANNI, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Even as Pentagon officials confirmed U.S. planes fired back at Iraqi air defenses Thursday, they were admitting that last week's much more extensive raid was not as successful as it could have been.
RADM. CRAIG QUIGLEY, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: We know that every weapon used in the raid did not perform 100 percent.
last week were seriously damaged and that most of the targeted radar installations were left standing because of a glitch in a new high-tech precision guided weapon. It's called the JSOW or Joint Stand-Off Weapon. It's fired from the wing of a carrier-launched FA-18, finds its way to a spray of bomblets to blanket the target. The Pentagon isn't saying what went wrong, but one observer points to this possibility.
JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: These precision weapons require precision targeting, and very simple mistakes like using the wrong map projections can lead to the sort of results that we've seen in this strike.
CENTANNI: President Bush was asked about the malfunctioning bombs and said last Friday's air raid was successful, in spite of that weapons problem.
and the other was to degrade the capacity of Saddam to injure our pilots. I believe we succeeded in both those missions.
CENTANNI: The Pentagon says the evidence of success may be that Iraq has only turned on two of the targeted radars since the attack.
QUIGLEY: Is that because we damaged them as part of the strike or because they're reluctant to bring them up to know that we would engage them again?
CENTANNI: Either way, he says, the goal of disrupting Iraqi air defense was achieved. Saddam's accuracy against U.S. planes had increased in recent weeks after the U.S. says China helped Iraq install a fiberoptic system to better link their radar with their weapons. As the new Chinese ambassador arrived in Washington Wednesday, U.S. officials expressed their displeasure over the Chinese aid to Iraq.
(on camera): The Pentagon continues to assess the damage from the attack, while at the same time trying to figure out why many of their quarter-million-dollar bombs failed to find their targets.
At the Pentagon, Steve Centanni, FOX NEWS.
HUME: And coming up next: Are artists getting away with too much in the name free speech? We'll ask Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president
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Copyright 2001 Fox News Network, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
