Rules of engagement
By Seymour Topping Posted Jul 1 2003
The Iraq War produced a historical change in how journalists cover wars and how the media relate to the American military.
From the Korean War to Desert Storm, the press has had to cope not infrequently with the manipulation of information, censorship and denial of access to combat areas. The trust that was characteristic in much of World War II between journalists and the military began to erode with General Douglas MacArthur’s inflated communiqués during the Korean War and then declined precipitously in the Vietnam War. Military briefings in Saigon came to be derided by correspondents as the “Five O’Clock Follies.” Press and public were repeatedly misled by propaganda ploys such as the Tonkin incident in which a phantom attack on an American warship was employed to justify bombing of North Vietnam.
Reality was brought home not by the briefings of generals and politicians, but by aggressive reporting of journalists and television images of American casualties and Vietnamese villages being laid waste. Although journalists hastened the close of the Vietnam War, many in the military simply viewed them as responsible for undermining the war effort.
The American military did not fully let down the bars to open journalism during the Gulf War of 1991. Reporters were often refused access to combat zones. Dispatches filed through government-controlled transmitters were sometimes censored. At briefings, exaggerated claims were made of the effectiveness of the smart bombs. There was little public questioning of the strategy adopted by the first Bush administration in calling a halt to the march on Baghdad, which could have decisively toppled the Saddam Hussein regime.
Some extraordinary changes were evidenced in the war just ended. Some 600 journalists were given access to the battlefields, most of them embedded in frontline American and British combat units. Reporters carrying portable satellite transmitters communicated at will and freely in real time with their newsrooms, providing print and images. There was no censorship apart from the reasonable admonition that filing of some information could endanger the security of troops in combat field operations and result in expulsion from the theater of operations. Some reporters were given security briefings and survival training at military installations before the war.
Nevertheless, there was the inevitable toll for frontline reporting. Fourteen journalists died in accidents and crossfire during the brief Iraq War, compared to more than 70 accredited journalists killed during the 15-year American phase of the Vietnam War.
The most grievous loss was suffered on April 8 during the assault on Baghdad when three journalists were killed and three others wounded by American fire. Jose Couso, a Spanish cameraman for the channel Telecinco and Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian working for Reuters, died of wounds when a tank shell struck the Palestine Hotel, where journalists took shelter during the bombing of Baghdad. Another journalist, Tariq Ayoub, a producer and reporter for Al-Jazeera, was killed as he stood filming on the roof of the two-story villa housing his office. The American military reacted at first to press outcries by claiming that the two buildings had been shelled in response to sniper fire, something denied by witnesses. In Madrid, hundreds of journalists demonstrated before the American Embassy to protest the killing of Couso and to mourn Julio Anguita Parrado, a newspaper correspondent who died when an Iraqi missile struck an American position outside of Baghdad.
Vice President Dick Cheney, citing the great lengths to which the American military had gone to provide American and foreign journalists with facilities to cover the war, dismissed as patently false assertions that the attacks in Baghdad had been deliberate. Military spokespeople were particularly at pains to reassure Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arab television channel that gained their respect for even-handed reporting, that destruction of its Baghdad office had not been intended. But Omar Al-Issawi, a producer for Al-Jazeera, faulted the American military, as did an editorial in The New York Times, for failing to concede promptly that the shelling of the station’s well-marked villa and the Palestine Hotel had been grave mistakes outside rules of engagement.
For American media analysts, patriotism was not a deterrent in questioning the field strategy of the Iraq invasion. In the first days, when American and British troops met unexpected resistance, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his generals were compelled to fend off contentions by reporters and television commentators that the Pentagon had erred in not committing more ground troops. The debate was no-holds barred, notwithstanding Vice President Cheney’s observation that hasty criticism by “retired military officers embedded in TV studios” tended to confuse the public.
Several factors contributed to the change of Pentagon policy governing news coverage. The press and, to some extent, the American public are more insistent on unfettered access rights. The portable satellite phones carried by correspondents rendered the old forms of censorship difficult if not impossible to enforce. Television camera operators received open access rather than being forced to surrender to using images of state-controlled Iraqi television or the Al-Jazeera channel, with its 45 million Arabic viewers. More than anything else, American officers seem to have shed distrust and resentment of the media stemming from critical coverage of the Vietnam War and accept that close collaboration with the press serves their interests best. The change in attitude is also generational and likely to remain the norm.
The media welcomed the new policy of the military, but, at the same time, demands that this openness be extended to the domestic arena. Citing the need to guard against Al Qaeda terrorism, the Bush administration drastically curtailed access to information bearing on the workings of the federal government in the past year. Arbitrary bars to freedom of information have been invoked, such as the withholding of the identities of detainees and closure of court proceedings previously public. Attorney General John Ashcroft expanded information restrictions to cover agencies where security has never been a major concern. Since September 11, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services were empowered to stamp documents “secret.” The President is authorized to deny access to any public records that he deems sensitive without being required to elaborate on the criteria for such action.
Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, among other legislators, cited these actions, sanctioned by the Homeland Security Act of 2002, as the most severe weakening of the Freedom of Information Act in its 36-year history. The Freedom of Information statute served to open millions of pages of government records to examination by scholars, journalists and the general public. Private companies in key public sectors have also been brought under the Attorney General’s no-disclosure canopy in return for supplying data to the government. In these civil areas, it is now a crime for a federal official to disclose information labeled “secret.”
The Justice Department is contemplating a further tightening of curbs in a draft legislation known as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. This would enlarge the Patriot Act, which currently permits electronic surveillance of Web sites and the content of data banks without court approval or evidence of criminal intent.
A bipartisan coalition of legislators, journalists and various public-interest groups are seeking amendments and instituting court challenges to the Homeland Security Act. They hold that the restrictions on information will impair national security by weakening independent oversight on services relating to safety and health.
Americans may rationalize that this shrinking of access to information about the performance of government is only a temporary expedient and once the terrorist threat is contained, restrictions will be lifted. Mary Graham, a scholar in these matters at the Brookings Institution, warns against such assumptions. She says, “What are often being couched as temporary emergency orders are, in fact, what we are going to live with for 20 years. We make policy by crisis, and we particularly make secrecy policy by crisis.”
Terrorism, whether by Al Qaeda or by other international or domestic conspirators, constitutes a long-term threat made increasingly dangerous by new technologies. Editors acknowledge that effective means of dealing with that threat must be put in place, but they hold that this can be done without excessive secrecy and surveillance that impinge on civil liberties. With the end of the Iraq War, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and other press groups hope to bring wider public attention to the cost for democratic institutions of the erosion of freedom of information.