Pentagon's Recipe For Propaganda

By Carol Brightman, AlterNet. Posted February 20, 2003.

It’s time to take a close look at the Defense Department’s plan for managing the press during the impending invasion of Iraq. Called "embedding," it will position chosen reporters and photographers inside military units -- not for a week but for the duration of the war. "Embedding for life," is how deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Bryan Whitman, sees the program -- which appears to be viewed a bit differently by the military than by the media.

At a recent orientation meeting with Washington bureau chiefs, Whitman described the ideal "embed" as one who follows a unit (ground, air or sea) from load-out to deployment through combat (subject to field approval) to the "march on whatever capital we happen to march on" to the return trip home and the "victory parade." This could take "two weeks, two months, two years." If reporters leave a unit there is no guarantee they can return or even join another unit. Probably they will be "pooled" in mobile media clusters that form and dissolve as the action dictates. "Itinerants" (reporters working independently) are not encouraged.

Nearly 300 reporters have already been inducted into the program at a half-dozen media boot camps along the East Coast, and more one-week sessions are foreseen. Participants are prepped on U.S. military policy and weapons capabilities, and taught rudimentary survival skills, including how to suit up in the event of chemical or biological weapons exposure. Lt. Col. Gary Keck, who wrote the training program, stresses that enrollment doesn’t guarantee an "embed opportunity." Nor must embeds take the course, although commanders are reassured when they have.

The media boot camps are overtures to a larger strategy in which the Pentagon, for the first time, has actively integrated reporters and photographers into its war machine. The significance of this audacious decision, whose sponsors are Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, General Tommy Franks, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers, becomes clearer when it’s set beside the media policy that governed Gulf War I.

Under then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Army Gen. Colin Powell, the press was confined to the National Media Pool, and ordered to submit all copy, photographs, and film to military censors. Most TV footage, usually bombers streaking across desert skies, was supplied by military crews. High-level briefings were orchestrated by Cheney and Powell themselves because, as Cheney later told an interviewer from Freedom Forum, "the information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have a lot of confidence I could leave that to the press."

As a result, according to Patrick J. Sloyan, who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of Desert Storm in Newsday, not a single pool reporter produced an eyewitness account of the clash between allied and Iraqi troops. Nor did a single image of dead bodies find its way into the American media. By the time the press was taken to the scene of a battle, the Iraqi bodies were gone; buried, on one occasion, by giant plows mounted on Abrams battle tanks, followed by Armored Combat Earth movers that leveled the ground.

"The best covered war ever," Cheney told the Forum interviewer. "The American people saw up close with their own eyes through the magic of television what the U.S. military was capable of doing." But in the months to come, writes John R. MacArthur in Second Front, "it was difficult to find anyone [in the media] who didn’t … count Desert Storm as a devastating and immoral victory for military censorship and a crushing defeat for the press and the First Amendment."

In Afghanistan, the reliance on special operations units and air power tipped the balance even further toward military control, until even the pools were abandoned. In one instance, journalists stationed at a Marine base were locked in a warehouse after U.S. forces were hit by "friendly" fire a hundred yards away. Later briefing officers distributed press releases from Central Command in Tampa.

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