AFGHANISTAN AND BEYOND
Access Denied
The Pentagon's War Reporting Rules are the Toughest Ever
Journalists have been denied access to American troops in the field in Afghanistan to a greater degree than in any previous war involving U.S. military forces. Bush administration policy has kept reporters from combat units in a fashion unimagined in Vietnam, and one that's more restrictive even than the burdensome constraints on media in the Persian Gulf.
And at the Pentagon in Washington, where massive quantities of battle reports arrived hourly, Defense Department spokespersons spoonfed correspondents a calibrated daily ration of news about the military operations that has left those journalists frustrated and mutinous.
Those conclusions arise from interviews with more than a score of foreign editors, Pentagon correspondents, Washington bureau chiefs, top news executives, media critics, and others conducted from early October through mid-December. Their grievances have two strands. First, journalists in the Afghanistan theater did not have reasonable access to land and sea bases from which air attacks were launched on Taliban positions. Thus: no press presence on long-range bombing runs, and little or no opportunity to interview pilots upon their return from their missions. Correspondents have had no expectation of accompanying commando units into Afghanistan — an acceptable restraint, since journalists are not parachute- or combat-trained. But neither have they been permitted to interview those Special Operations forces after the fact to confirm, independently, the success or failure of missions and the extent of casualties. The aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk — the launch base for many of those commando raids — was off limits. Journalists had no independent contact with such units as the 10th Mountain Division while it was poised in Uzbekistan awaiting action, nor with the Marine Expeditionary Units just before they entered Afghanistan from ships in the Arabian Sea in late November, nor with other American forces in Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Oman. Also out of bounds to the press: the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, from which long-range bombing missions originated. In the whole region, there has been no central, allied-operated information facility — comparable to the Joint Information Bureau (JIB) in Saudi Arabia during the gulf war — to which journalists could appeal for facts, guidance, and confirmation. It wasn't until November 25 that, for the first time during the war, the Pentagon organized a press pool to accompany, under restrictions, more than 1,000 marines landing in southern Afghanistan near Kandahar; in mid-December it assigned public affairs officers to aid the press at other sites.
"Imagine this," said Sandy Johnson, the Associated Press bureau chief in Washington, speaking in November. "There is a war being fought by Americans and we're not there to chronicle it. We have access to the Northern Alliance, we have access to the Taliban, we have practically zero access to American forces in the theater." Journalists, she is sure, got shorter shrift in Afghanistan than they ever did in the Persian Gulf.
Controlling the Flow
The second strand of press grievance centers on the Pentagon, where information is funneled to journalists in briefings by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a pair of upper-echelon military officers: the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard B. Myers, and Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem. General Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces, has been relatively invisible, in sharp contrast to General Norman Schwarzkopf, who became a television star and folk hero for his detailed press briefings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, during the gulf war. Victoria Clarke, the Defense Department chief spokesperson, gets mostly good marks from Pentagon reporters for accessibility and for her efforts to find answers to their questions. But — as the correspondents point out — the stingy flow of information derives from policy makers higher than she in the administration. Clarke is the only Pentagon spokesperson in memory who has had no serious experience as a working journalist. Says Clark Hoyt, Washington editor for the thirty-two Knight Ridder newspapers: "I think she's trying hard to do a professional job. She sometimes feels we're not grateful enough for the bit of access we've gotten, but I don't think you can expect gratitude for feeling as shut out as the press feels right now."
In the aftermath of September 11, the Pentagon briefly increased its press conferences from two a week to five, then in early October told reporters it was returning to its "normal" twice-weekly schedule. The press corps protested vigorously, demanding to know what was normal about bombing Afghanistan. The Pentagon relented. ("Let's hear it for the essential daily briefing," Rumsfeld jibed, "however hollow and empty it might be.")
The Pentagon press is, in fact, pleased to have regular session with Rumsfeld, who — although he is masterly at parrying unwelcome questions — at least gives reporters steady access to a cabinet official. Rumsfeld is the Pentagon's most expert briefer, says Charles Lewis, Washington bureau chief for the Hearst newspapers, "not necessarily in terms of imparting information, but in giving us a chance to see the song and dance in public. That's valuable." At one recent briefing, a reporter asked Rumsfeld if he would describe how Taliban leaders were being flushed from their hideouts. "I certainly can, and I'm not inclined to," Rumsfeld answered.
An unstated reason for the Pentagon's determination to control the flow of news from the front is a concern that images and descriptions of civilian bomb casualties — people already the victims of famine, poverty, drought, oppression, and brutality — would erode public support in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.
On October 19, a Washington Post article by Pentagon correspondents Tom Ricks and Vernon Loeb reported that U.S. Special Forces already were operating in Afghanistan, and that the ground phase of the war was thus under way. The next day, a Pentagon briefer conducted a show-and-tell with video images — shot by the military's own combat film teams — of Army paratroopers boarding a plane at an undisclosed location; and night-vision footage of commandos parachuting into Afghanistan. Days later, Rumsfeld began a briefing with a dour warning — triggered, it appeared, by the Post article — that any officials in the Pentagon who leaked tactical military information about ongoing operations were breaking the law. His admonition clearly was intended to tighten his office's chokehold on how the war is reported, and to discourage any backchannel contact with officials in the know.
Abusing Ground Rules
That same week, in an article headlined "Military Is Putting Heavier Limits on Reporters' Access," The New York Times wrote that the media were being frozen out of military operations far more than in any recent conflict — NATO's war against Yugoslavia, the American invasion of Haiti, the U.S. intervention in Somalia.
Restrictions imposed on the press in Grenada in 1983 soured many journalists on the military, leading to the creation of press pools for the Panama incursion of 1989, and the more onerous pooling in the Persian Gulf. After those experiences, the Pentagon and Washington bureau chiefs of TV and print news organizations put their heads together and thrashed out a set of principles for wartime news coverage that were promulgated in 1992. In Afghanistan, the guidelines are very much on the back burner, a victim of the unique aspects — military, logistical, geographical — of the war.
The most egregious single offense against the press's capacity to report the war happened near Kandahar on December 5. When a stray B-52 bomb killed three soldiers and wounded nineteen others, commanders in the field confined the press pool reporters and photographers to a warehouse, thus preventing them from approaching the victims, the rescuers, and the medics. "Outrageous," declared the AP's Johnson. "A gross abuse of the ground rules for the press pool," said Jill Abramson, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times. A Pentagon spokesman acknowledged that "in the heat of battle," the Marine commanders on the ground had erred in restraining journalists from covering a major story — Americans killed and wounded by friendly fire.
That incident finally brought the promise of a thaw in the Pentagon-versus-press cold war. "We owe you an apology," Victoria Clarke wrote in a letter to Washington bureau chiefs. "The last several days have revealed severe shortcomings in our preparedness to support news organizations in their efforts to cover U.S. military operations in Afghanistan." The Pentagon was establishing several public information facilities inside Afghanistan, she said, that would help provide "maximum media coverage with minimal delay and hassle." Whether those mea culpas and good intentions would translate into significant improvements remained to be seen. But on December 20, three photojournalists working for U.S. news outlets near Tora Bora were detained by Afghan forces, apparently at the request of U.S. forces. Their images of American troops were seized, although the presence of U.S. troops in the area had been openly discussed by the Pentagon, according to The New York Times.
The mood among Defense Department correspondents, according to National Public Radio's man at the Pentagon, Tom Gjelten, is "unquestionably one of great dissatisfaction." He objects to the way Rumsfeld and his staff have "put a lid" on reporters' customary easy access to the generals and admirals who populate the building. "There's been a kind of chilling atmosphere here," he says. "Senior military officers have got the idea they're not supposed to talk to reporters." One recent day, while walking the Pentagon corridors, he encountered a general who'd been a source for him in the past. As they strolled, chatting, the general glanced over his shoulder and said: "I just hope nobody sees me talking to you." Says Gjelten: "That's the atmosphere now." CNN's man at the Pentagon, Jamie McIntyre, on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, said that Rumsfeld "issued an edict essentially telling everybody not to talk about anything. So even the flow of routine information has been shut down." ABC's Washington bureau chief, Robin Sproul, concurs that the Pentagon is "very much controlling access" to military experts lower on the chain of command who traditionally have been fruitful sources. But, she hastens to append, as regards the topmost echelon: "This has been the most accessible Pentagon I've ever experienced, and I've been a bureau chief in Washington for almost twenty years."
The Pentagon has invoked so-called "host country sensitivity" as the reason for denying journalists access to U.S. troops in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and Tajikstan, for example — countries which may have political, diplomatic, and cultural reasons for playing down their cooperation with western forces. AP's Johnson scoffs: "The most isolated and closed society in the world is Saudi Arabia, and during the gulf war our politicians persuaded that country to allow literally hundreds of American and other western journalists to report from there. That has not happened in this theater."
Media executives aren't really sure who's responsible for keeping the press at arm's length from U.S. forces in Islamic countries. CNN's top executive for news, Eason Jordan, says that in Uzbekistan, U.S. officials blame it on the Uzbekis. "You go to the Uzbekis," says Jordan, "and they say, 'Gee, we're all for it, but the U.S. is blocking it.'" Whom does he believe? "I don't know. It doesn't matter. There's nothing I can do to change it."
In mid-September, President Bush declared that his administration "will not talk about any plans we may or may not have. We will not jeopardize in any way, shape, or form, anybody who wears the uniform of the United States." But journalists covering the Afghanistan story, both at the front and in Washington, are unanimous that any reporting that might endanger U.S. troops during an ongoing operation ought not be published or aired. They fully understand that commando activity, by its nature, must be clandestine. But a few Pentagon reporters I talked to felt that legitimate concerns about operational security were being used as an excuse for not being more forthcoming, and for keeping journalists and the troops apart.
At one level, it's foolishly counterproductive to keep the press from the troops in wartime, says George Wilson, the defense columnist for National Journal, and for twenty-three years the military affairs correspondent for The Washington Post. Whenever a military unit is hospitable to a reporter, Wilson says, "you create another Ernie Pyle because reporters always fall in love with the troops when they see how hard they work." Young officers in the field love to have their soldiers get some ink for their exploits.
In some zones, even if access were permitted, the result wouldn't be worth the effort. Diego Garcia, where B-52 missions originate, is 2,500 miles from Afghanistan. "It's a hell of a trip just to shoot tape of landings and take-offs," says John Stack, Fox News Channel's vice-president of newsgathering, "because that's all you're going to get."
Leonard Downie, executive editor of The Washington Post, has pointed out to Victoria Clarke that any bad news from the front that isn't reported in a timely fashion can create unnecessary suspicions of a cover-up. In Grenada in 1983, for example, reports of a massacre by American troops gained currency in the period before reporters were allowed on the island. The story was false, but, Downie remembers, "it has haunted the reputation of the U.S. military ever since." Clarke insisted to Downie that the Pentagon takes pains to convey bad news as quickly as possible.
That may not have been the case in the Pentagon briefers' handling of an October 20 raid by more than a hundred Army Rangers who parachuted into a Taliban stronghold sixty miles southwest of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. A second Special Operations unit assaulted a housing complex thought to be used by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader. General Myers told Pentagon reporters that the attack went off "without significant interference" from the enemy, and that the mission, "over all," was successful.
But in a controversial November 12 article in The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh wrote that, after leaving the complex, the Americans came under fierce counterattack and retreated hastily under heavy fire, and that twelve U.S. soldiers were wounded, three of them seriously. The mission was a "total goat fuck" — military idiom for an operation gone terribly wrong — according to Hersh's sources. Pentagon officials denied the letter and spirit of Hersh's account, without offering an alternative scenario, except to say that some soldiers suffered cuts and bruises but that no one was hit by enemy fire.
Meanwhile, the columnist Robert Novak was reporting details of the same mission, which partly mirrored Hersh's; so was retired General Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander, in an interview in the St. Petersburg Times. British newspapers, including the Guardian, published reports similar to Hersh's.
Asked if he stands by his New Yorker story, Hersh answers, "I guess it's down to a question of what a serious injury is." Before publication, he turned over to David Remnick, the magazine's editor, the names of his sources. He accepts that the military never discusses casualties in so-called "black," or secret, operations. Thus, in the absence of eyewitness accounts, what really happened on that October 20 mission will remain, for now at least, a matter for dispute between journalists and the Pentagon braintrust.
If news from the Pentagon has been carefully orchestrated, news of the actual shooting war between Northern Alliance and Taliban forces has been gathered without let or hindrance by any journalists willing to risk the terrible dangers. Vietnam is the model for that brand of free-wheeling, unfettered newsgathering; correspondents roamed the country at will, took their chances in battle, and interviewed whomever they chose.
My own experience of wartime press-military relations extends to Vietnam in the 1960s and to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1991. A correspondent in Saigon could taxi out to Ton Son Nhut airport, hop aboard a helicopter or cargo plane heading for Pleiku or Danang or Hue, or wherever the action was that day, then accompany the troops on search-and-destroy missions into the deepest rain forest, all the while interviewing commanders and foot soldiers who, routinely, were happy to have press notice. That all ended in the Persian Gulf, where the military virtually closed down journalistic enterprise in favor of guided tours of the front by public affairs officers who led pools of obedient, unhappy journalists on brief visits to fighting units, and then reviewed their dispatches for possible mischief.
By late September in the current conflict, well before the October 7 start of bombing, journalists were crowding Tajikistan hoping to buy a $300 helicopter ride into the rebel-held sectors of northern Afghanistan. Some went in by donkey, others in truck convoys navigating treacherous mountain terrain. Several sneaked into Taliban territory garbed from head to toe like women in traditional burkhas. "Some reporters moved on horseback, or took hair-raising car journeys over bad roads," says Anthony Williams, a Reuters news editor in London. "A rented car can cost $3,000," according to Mark Miller, chief of correspondents for Newsweek.
The local food brought bouts of salmonella, dysentery, fever, giardiasis. Free-lance bandits preyed on journalists, knowing they carried large amounts of American dollars (credit cards are useless there) and expensive electronic equipment. Says CNN's Jordan: "The biggest challenge we face is just keeping our people alive." Photographer Tyler Hicks captured, close-up, some of the most brutal images of the war for The New York Times: Northern Alliance troops hauling a wounded Taliban soldier from a ditch, shooting him in the chest, then beating him with a grenade launcher and leaving him half-naked in the road to die. By mid-December, more journalists than U.S. troops had been killed by hostile fire.
"Tell Them Who Won"
No matter the hazards that journalists have suffered to get the Afghanistan story — and the superb reporting that has marked much of their work — the public blames the press and supports the military in contretemps between the two. A mid-November Gallup poll showed an 80 percent approval rating for Secretary Rumsfeld's handling of the war on terrorism (89 percent for President Bush) and a dismal 43 percent for the news media. The reasons, according to Gallup: journalists' role as the bearers of bad news puts them at odds with administration officials, who at this moment are seen as doing a commendable job. A November Pew Research Center poll showed the public solidly behind the military: half of the respondents say the military should exert more control over news about the war; only 40 percent think the media should decide how to report it. More than half (53 percent) favor censorship of war news when the national interest is involved.
Fully 82 percent believe the Pentagon is disclosing as much as it can about operations in Afghanistan.
That jibes with the experience of the Los Angeles Times, which receives "a torrent of abuse" — according to foreign editor Simon Li — whenever it publishes detailed reports on troop activity in the battle zone. "As if the Taliban had to read the Los Angeles Times to know where the action is." Even before the bombing began, USA Today was condemned, in a widely circulated chain letter, for a page-one scoop in which it revealed that American soldiers already were operating inside Afghanistan. The chain letter called for a boycott of the newspaper.
In wartime, the press and the military are rarely on cozy, familial terms, which hasn't happened since World War II. Even in that conflict, a government censor in 1943 had a cranky answer to the question: How much should the American public, through the press, be told about the war. "I'd tell them nothing till it's over," he said, "and then I'd tell them who won."
The two cultures are essentially irreconcilable, each with its valid agenda. The press expects candor and cooperation from the government so the public may be informed about a war conducted in its name; it expects officials not to impede independent, enterprising news coverage except where operational or national security unambiguously might be compromised. From the media, governments want fair, consistent, non-exploitive treatment that appreciates the complexity of prosecuting a modern war. Ideally, the good-faith tension between those two sets of aspirations serves the public best.
Rumsfeld told reporters recently that he understands "the
need to provide the press — and through you, the American
people" — the fullest possible menu of information.
Defending the American way is what the war in Afghanistan is all
about, he said, "and that certainly includes freedom of the
press."
It depends on what the meaning of the word "freedom"
is.
Sidebar: Q&A with Victoria Clarke
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
