ACCORDING TO its charter, MRE was formed earlier this year "to advance public understanding of the military, national security, and homeland defense." The group’s acronym, of course, trades on the letters used as shorthand for "Meals-Ready-to-Eat" — the military’s prepackaged field chow. What Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has forced US reporters to eat is just as prepackaged and even less appetizing. And that raises an important question: when reporters in Afghanistan get more information about breaking developments in their area from a Pentagon briefing than from their own reporting, what’s the value of committing news resources to war zones — and risking the safety of journalists?

In fact, most of the major "scoops" on the war on terrorism have been offered up far from the battlefield — via sources and exclusive leaks gleaned from the same people in the corridors of power who are cutting off access elsewhere. Seymour Hersh’s ground-breaking reports of chaos and conflict in Afghanistan’s operations in the New Yorker were not obtained through battlefield observation. Bob Woodward’s glimpses of the CIA’s "cash in a suitcase" war in Afghanistan — excerpted from his forthcoming book, Bush at War (Simon & Schuster), in this week’s Washington Post — didn’t come from being embedded anywhere but in the District of Columbia and its environs.

Yet reporters’ complaints at the MRE conference add up to a dire picture of the US media’s effectiveness. In short, the media’s ability to cut through the fog of war to tell Americans what’s happening on the other side of the world in their name is being radically hindered by the Pentagon, which is busily working its own in-house fog machine.

Panelist after panelist at the MRE conference argued that the Pentagon’s murkiness is unnecessary. Reporters in the field have seldom — if ever — reported on the details of "operational security" that ensure the safety of US troops and the effectiveness of military attacks. And those who are embedded, in fact, are in the worst position to do so, constrained both by circumstance and censorship. Even the former military officers on the MRE’s media-analysis panel did not offer a single instance of a reporter breaking the parameters of "operational security."

So if the media do not have a poor track record with regard to "operational security," why close down press access in such a comprehensive fashion? The consensus that emerged at the MRE conference was that a good old-fashioned penchant for "secrecy" — among the most pronounced traits of President George W. Bush’s administration — was responsible.

Secrecy extends even to situations in which the Pentagon has an established, tried-and-true system for placing reporters on the field. Time’s Thompson noted that the "National Media Pool" system, organized by the Pentagon after the 1983 Grenada invasion to get reporters quickly into the battlefield, was completely abandoned in the Afghanistan campaign. "The pool was never called up," says Thompson. When pool access to a deployment of US troops to Uzbekistan was denied, Rumsfeld blamed what he termed "host-nation sensitivities." In short, the Uzbek government felt that the presence of US media on its soil would be unpopular, and asked the Pentagon to keep them out. The Pentagon acquiesced. A pool assignment to the USS Kitty Hawk — from which US Special Forces were waging war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban — was also nixed.

Beyond the Pentagon’s simple refusal to call up the pool created for just such an instance, however, is what can only be described as its condescension — bordering on arrogance — toward the press corps. In relating his story of the dead-on-arrival media pool, for instance, Thompson noted that he penned an obituary of sorts for the pool in the Columbia Journalism Review. An e-mailed response from the Pentagon to Thompson stated: "We guess you are dropping out of the pool."

Assistant Secretary of Defense Victoria Clarke — Rumsfeld’s point person for the press — didn’t attend the MRE conference, much of which was televised live by C-SPAN. In her stead Clarke sent an assistant, Air Force colonel Jay DeFrank, to sit on a panel called "Cutting Through the Fog of War." DeFrank gently and genially deflected much of the criticism leveled at the Pentagon by many of the panelists, noting that Department of Defense was doing its best to facilitate media access — down to offering "boot camps" for journalists to help prepare them for reporting from combat zones.

"There’s never going to be the access that you want, all the time," noted DeFrank. He said that despite glitches, the Pentagon was "moving the noodle forward" in terms of access. Journalists not only had to understand the dangers posed to troops by emissions from satellite phones and other media technology (which could conceivably be tracked and monitored by enemy forces), he observed, but they also needed to get the requisite training and credentialing to do the job.

DeFrank noted one case in which the Pentagon was willing to allow journalists to fly with C-17 military-cargo planes over Afghanistan, but that many of the media who wanted to do so lacked the proper altitude accreditation. The Department of Defense worked with the Dutch Air Force to get some journalists the necessary qualifications, said DeFrank, "but it would work to your favor to get an altitude-chamber card" for such stories in advance.

Most journalists are more interested in getting basic access than in getting to special missions that require possession of an altitude-chamber card. Yet when media representatives raise specific issues of access directly with Rumsfeld in a low-wattage setting, the answers are less than reassuring. For instance, Rumsfeld dropped in briefly on an October 30 meeting between Clarke and the bureau chiefs of major US media outlets. According to the transcript posted on the Department of Defense Web site (www.defenselink.mil), the first question posed to him by Associated Press bureau chief Sandy Johnson concerned delays in embedding reporters during the Afghanistan war. Johnson noted that it took six weeks from the start of the bombing for journalists to be embedded with US forces. "Can I get some assurance from you that the American media will go in earlier than that at the forefront of any activity?" she asked.

"Well, put yourself in my shoes for a minute," Rumsfeld replied. "I can’t give you that assurance because I don’t know what might happen." He then proceeded to sketch out the difficulties in deploying Special Forces in Afghanistan and the lack of time to provide "force protection for anyone from the press" in that period.

"Now, then, you say, can I give you assurance that in the event something happens that they’ll get in sooner than that?" Rumsfeld continued. "The answer is, of course I can’t give assurance. Can I give you assurance that we recognize the desirability of having people embedded? Yes, we do recognize that. Do we want to try to get them in as early as possible, that it’s not going to put at risk the US forces that are in there? Yes, we want to do that. But that’s the only assurance I can give you."

In other words, the answer is "no assurance at all" — despite the existence of a small media pool designed precisely to get reporters onto the battlefield as soon as things happen.

In his presentation to MRE, Thompson bemoaned the fact that the pool’s failure at the outset of the Afghanistan conflict left a "black hole in history." The tales of how Special Forces fought the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the earliest days of the Afghanistan conflict, and how the US military operated in the tense border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan have fallen into that black hole. According to Rumsfeld, there is every chance that such a black hole will open up at the outset of any military operation in Iraq as well.