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Necessary bedfellows
US media covering the Afghan war from the Pentagon got better scoops than those working in Kandahar. Will access to Gulf War: The Sequel be another repeat of a muzzled and misled American press?
BY RICHARD BYRNE

FORMER WASHINGTON Post reporter Don Oberdorfer’s 1971 book Tet! (Doubleday) is among the best books about American warfare ever penned — a richly colored blend of reportage and analysis about the 1968 Communist offensive that proved the tipping point of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency.

Dipping into Tet! more than 30 years later, the level of access given its author seems amazing. In reconstructing the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong’s brief reign of terror in the city of Hue, for instance, Oberdorfer interviewed survivors of the Communist takeover, South Vietnamese and US military commanders, and even a captured Viet Cong leader. Many of Oberdorfer’s interviews were conducted months after the battle. Yet his account — published some three years after the events — is stamped with an authenticity gained only through immediate and substantial access to the battleground. Oberdorfer’s brilliant "first draft" of history, in other words, is journalism at its finest, and it could not have been written without a high level of access to critical sources.

The stories told by today’s reporters at a conference organized last weekend in Washington, DC, by a new journalism organization — Military Reporters and Editors (MRE) — relegated Tet!, along with the access once afforded US reporters, to the sepia tones of daguerreotypes. As Americans are asked to undertake yet another war in Iraq, military-beat reporters agree that their having already been shut out of meaningful access to the US war on terrorism does not bode well for their coverage of the upcoming battle with Saddam Hussein.

Fittingly enough, the conference’s location — a Holiday Inn near Capitol Hill that was undergoing renovations — looked a bit like a war zone. At a conference panel on Friday morning titled "Been There, Done That," veteran correspondents from USA Today, Time, Army Times, and the San Diego Union-Tribune unloaded salvo after salvo on the Pentagon and its handling of media access in the Afghan conflict.

Moderator Jim Michaels — who serves as USA Today’s deputy world editor — kicked off the panel by noting that continuing mistrust on both sides of the military/media divide in the post-9/11 world has ensured that "we’ve actually taken some steps backward" in terms of reporters’ access to military operations. In other words, if you thought that the severe restrictions on access to military operations in every post-Vietnam US conflict from Grenada to Kosovo were bad, the current war on terrorism has an even worse record in the secrecy department.

Consider the process by which the Pentagon traditionally "embeds" reporters in the field. In the past, journalists were assigned to field units and housed with the troops. In general, "embedded" reporters give up certain freedoms related to filing at will in exchange for close access to operations. They can also be subject to military censorship through the use of an actual "blue pencil" that strikes sensitive operational details from copy or by the simple delay of reports from the battlefield.

Panelists who reported the Afghan war described a disturbing breakdown even in this straightforward arrangement. Army Times writer Sean Naylor explained that in the first few months he was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Afghanistan, Pentagon control of media access was so intense that "the Pentagon released information from Kandahar [in daily Pentagon briefings] before the actual PAOs [public-affairs officers] on the ground in Kandahar released it." Thus, being "embedded" at the Pentagon would have been more informative and useful than being in Kandahar at that particular time.

USA Today military reporter Andrea Stone noted that the media were often restricted in their access to military bases in both Afghanistan and Guant‡namo Bay. She also noted that reporters were housed together, far away from military personnel in Afghanistan, and restricted to one road between their quarters and a media center. She noted dryly that bunking with colleagues from CNN was "interesting, [but] not as useful" as sleeping with those doing the actual fighting.

But Time’s Mark Thompson offered the most scathing criticism. The systematic subversion of journalistic access in the latest conflict, he argued, amounted to "lack of information warfare against the press" by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his public-affairs operation. One Pentagon tactic has been to engage in sheer silence; reporters have seen reliable sources inside the Pentagon systematically clam up as a result of Rumsfeld’s public pronouncements against leaks and his investigations of them when they happen. "Long-time sources in the building don’t want to be called upon," says Thompson.

Another tactic in this battle against the press has been to create a single "choke point" for information. In both the Gulf War and the NATO action in Kosovo, Thompson observed, the press had access to dual briefings — one from the region of conflict and another back in Washington. The dual approach allowed reporters to probe operational details from two perspectives — and often to find the truth through comparison. The effectiveness of NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, for instance, was often gleaned from a complex interplay of briefings from NATO officials in Europe, half-truths broadcast by Serbian television, and later "clarifications" from US officials in Washington, DC.

The war on terrorism, on the other hand, has been strictly managed in Washington with a single daily Pentagon briefing. "It’s the Donald Rumsfeld Show," quipped Thompson. "And he does it well. But there is little light coming from the theater." Thus, a crucial check on the Pentagon’s version of events — already virtually unchallenged in the war on terrorism — has been removed.

Thompson — and many other panelists at the two-day MRE conference — also lashed out at a recent Pentagon decision that portends an even more political military. James Wilkinson, a member of the Bush White House communications team, was made the new spokesperson for the US Central Command — the nerve center of US military operations in an area stretching from the Horn of Africa to deep Central Asia — including Iraq and Afghanistan. Wilkinson’s new job involves sensitive work rarely given to a civilian in any US military command. That a "White House flack," as Thompson dubbed Wilkinson, will be in a position to filter information about the war on terrorism and a possible war with Iraq has raised eyebrows not only among reporters such as Thompson, but also among ex-officers such as retired Army major general John G. Meyer. In a panel of former officers who analyzed media coverage of the military, Meyer brought up Wilkinson’s appointment in the Q&A session, noting how unusual it was for a "political appointee" to be named to the post.

As a signal of how the Pentagon will likely handle a war with Iraq, the Wilkinson appointment — coupled with the Bush administration’s already sketchy track record on access to basic military operations in the war on terrorism — seems not just unusual, but ominous. It is, in essence, a tossing down of the gauntlet to both the media and the military — a signal that the "no leaks/single disciplined message" policy will be extended to any military actions in Iraq.

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Issue Date: November 21 - 28, 2002
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