Maybe presidents shouldn't be permitted to watch movies--at least not in times of military crisis.
During the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon's favorite film was Patton, a movie about the daring Army general who overcame all odds in World War II by rescuing American troops trapped in the Battle of the Bulge. Time and again Nixon made his top advisers sit through Patton--even during a four-hour cruise aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia--before invading Cambodia. Things got so bad former National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger later quipped, "If I have to see that movie once more, I'll shoot myself."
Last month George Bush asked Paramount Pictures to send him an advance copy of Flight of the Intruder, a film that reportedly inspired the president and was released only days after his declaration of war in the Persian Gulf. This latest example of revisionist history, Flight of the Intruder offers an easy explanation of why America lost the Vietnam War. In synch with current thinking at the Pentagon, the Intruder suggests we lost the war because our elected officials refused to unleash the full power of our aerial arsenal on the enemy. We also lost, so the theory goes, because of the antiwar protests--and the media's coverage of domestic dissent. Richard Nixon is the invisible, if not unlikely, hero of Intruder, the movie George Bush watched as he sent us to war. For Nixon was the president in 1972 who, after saturating himself in the lore of Patton, bombed Hanoi and mined Haiphong.
In his first week at war, Bush has surpassed many times over the bombing campaign launched by Nixon, his political benefactor, in Vietnam. But unlike Nixon in Vietnam, the Bush Administration has given us no comprehensive picture of the results. In the first 24 hours, it told us of our phenomenal successes. The next day, the president warned us--not surprisingly, blaming the press--against being "overly euphoric." Now the administration is withholding estimates of civilian casualties and bomb damage because of "inadequate information."
There is a reason we are riding a seesaw of elation and despair in this war--the government is hiding the ball, manipulating the news, as it tries to guard against "another Vietnam." If you're wondering why there's so much confusion and uncertainty, so many unconfirmed and speculative reports, you might ask the administration why it butchered the ground rules for the media's coverage of this war.
You might ask what it has to hide.
Earlier this month a coalition of newspapers, magazines and writers filed suit in New York against the president, Department of Defense and administration officials over their "policy, pattern and practice" of obstructing the news gathering and First Amendment rights of the press. The federal suit was lodged January 9 by such alternative journals as The Nation, Harper's magazine, L.A. Weekly, Mother Jones, and the Village Voice, as well as authors E.L. Doctorow and William Styron. Former New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg, who covered the war in Southeast Asia and now writes for Newsday (which is not a party to the suit), also joined the action. None of the major television networks or daily papers now covering the Gulf war has sued.
A look at the complaint reveals the administration's unprecedented attempt to hamstring and bamboozle the media in their coverage of the current conflict. Among other things, the Department of Defense has issued rules excluding U.S. journalists "from areas where American military forces are engaged in overt operations . . . ." Apart from access restrictions, the government also has given some reporters fewer rights than others by setting up "pool arrangements" for their coverage of the operation.
These pool arrangements are the principal weapon of the military press officers, who, according to the British Economist, "have had plenty of time to organise things so that too much bad news does not get out." Only those reporters who have enlisted for the mobile reporting team (MRT) will be allowed to accompany troops. They must pass basic training tests and wear uniforms. Significantly, they must allow their news articles to be censored for security purposes before being pooled for the use of all other journalists.
The power to decide when and where the MRTs will go rests with the military information machine. Military press officers retain the right to censor bad news, or even stories that suggest "military incompetence." As the Economist recently discovered, the United States has created only two eighteen-member MRTs for our entire ground forces. That's only four reporters per division (as compared with the customarily more secretive British, who will have more than three times as many reporters accompanying their one division).
So what's all the fuss, you ask?
As The Nation's lawsuit shows, these rules are unprecedented in the history of American combat. From our earliest military struggles until 1983, the American press retained wide access to our forces and battlefields. Even during World War II, when censorship was last formally invoked, correspondents "flew on bombing missions, rode destroyers, went on patrols [and] accompanied assault troops in the first stages of battle in numerous invasions," including North Africa, Sicily, Guadalcanal, the Philippines, Normandy beaches on D-day, and Iwo Jima.
During the Vietnam War, reporters traveled freely. According to testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966, the military underwrote the travel expenses of reporters to fly to Vietnam "to get a firsthand acquaintance with the facts." And did they.
But then things changed. As the Pentagon learned the "lesson" of Vietnam, it developed strategies to inhibit negative reporting. The Department of Defense implemented its new rules when we invaded Grenada in October 1983, and the Pentagon prohibited members of the press from accompanying the invasion force. Despite the government's ban on press access in Grenada, reporters for the New York Post and National Public Radio stole their way into the island nation. Their experience speaks volumes about the dangers of the Bush Administration's policy in the Gulf. For these journalists reported stories not available to the other media through military press officials--including the bombing by U.S. aircraft of a civilian psychiatric hospital.
The story was hardly different when we invaded Panama little more than a year ago with "Operation Just Cause." Although plans for a press pool were in place, the Pentagon excluded the pool from accompanying the invasion force during the most active hours of military operation. Consequently, the government eliminated any chance of discovering how many civilians were killed during the intense fighting in a downtown Panama City shantytown called El Chorrillo. The military's meager casualty count and the subsequent discovery of mass graves by CBS News' 60 Minutes suggested an inordinate discrepancy between wishful thinking and truth.
Worse still, as chronicled by Miami New Times last November, the government won't talk about what really happened on December 20, 1989, when Navy commandos led the way in the Panama invasion. The Miami weekly discovered that the lives of four Navy SEALs were lost during the military's ill-crafted attack on Paitilla Airfield. Of course, the government's dry-run use of the restrictive press regulations proved that it could keep the lid on negative reporting--at least until the wounded, if not the dead, began to talk.
So what do D-day, Vietnam, and Panama have to do with Operation Desert Storm? What's so wrong with dressing reporters like soldiers and subjecting their copy to military review? And why should reporters be allowed to accompany troops into combat anyway?
No one's arguing that Saddam Hussein isn't a barbarian, what with nearly a decade of fighting Iran--and gassing even his own people--seared onto his soul. Nor does anyone claim the press has any right to report on troop movements and the like in time of war. Since Andrew Jackson began suppressing front-line dispatches during the War of 1812, reporters' combat copy has been screened for legitimate security reasons.
At the same time, the public's right to know the details of its government's conduct is never greater than in times of war. Sure, we must trust our president, and according to the latest opinion polls, 85 percent of the American public thinks he's doing just fine. But does the war's coverage by the networks working hand-in-glove with the administration leave us much room to think otherwise? Does it leave us much time to think about anything other than the drama of war correspondents, operating in the dark and clumsily donning their gas masks?
Under the Bush Administration guidelines, we aren't really getting the news. We're getting the pool reports from an elite group of publicists who have no choice but to package the news in the military's wrapper. Hopefully, most of the information is accurate. But plainly there is a widening gap between reliable coverage and the speculation that mottles the morning news.
In its January 18 issue, the Arizona Republic reported that "Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's best troops, the elite Republican Guard, may have been virtually wiped out by allied bombing on the first night of the Persian Gulf war." Quoting a freely circulated Bush Administration intelligence report, the Republic told us "as many as 150,000 members of the Republican Guard were killed or wounded" when caught in a single staging area. In contrast, the newspaper noted that no allied ground casualties had been reported.
We now know the intelligence report was only so much hokum, or maybe unbridled optimism, but the result is still the same: a confused, if not duped, public.
In the first hours of battle, we also learned of our success in ridding the Gulf of the sixty "Scud" missiles sold by the Soviets to Saddam Hussein. Only several days later did we discover from CNN that Moscow sold more than 500 Scuds to the Iraqis during its protracted war with Iran, and Scud attacks into Israel and Saudi Arabia were far from over.
Like any overzealous censor, the Pentagon is needlessly alarming the press and public with its ever-tightening grip on the news. So much so that on January 22 Department of Defense spokesperson Pete Williams said, "There's some feeling that we know a lot more about battle damage than we're saying, and we're trying to convey to you that that is not the case."
Whatever is the case, Williams will have an opportunity to explain the Pentagon's position at length--and under oath--in a deposition during the week of February 4 in The Nation's lawsuit. Last week the coterie of alternative publications won the right to expedite discovery in the case before Federal District Judge Leonard Sand.
Franklin Siegel, the magazine's lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, admits the case is one of "first impression" and fighting the administration will not be easy. The government will be filing a motion to dismiss the case, which Judge Sand will hear on February 21.
Whether the law can compel the administration to return to the rules of wartime coverage that existed throughout our nation's history is almost beside the point. At issue really is whether we care enough about the consequences of our actions to compel our elected policymakers to return to their senses.
Fact: Last December the Marines banned two reporters (they happened to be women) from covering Operation Desert Shield for "asking rude questions."
Fact: "No century in human history can match the twentieth in the sheer number of human beings slaughtered as a direct consequence of the political activity of the great states. One [1972] estimate of the humanly inflicted deaths of the twentieth century places the total at about one hundred million" (from The Cunning of History by Richard L. Rubenstein).
One can only guess what "rude" questions were asked by the reporters last month. Maybe they did speak with uncivil tongues. But one wonders these days whether the Marines would consider an inquiry into body counts--here at the slaughter bench of history--another "rude" inquiry.
The Pentagon's restrictions are reducing the flow of information and distorting the picture from the Gulf. They leave us not an informed citizenry but instead, in the words of Senator John F. Kerry, a Vietnam veteran and a Democrat from Massachusetts, "a democracy [in] need of more information than has been forthcoming."
Still, we seek our counsel from the movies, where the lessons of history are less complicated, contrasts and consequences are not so stark, and our heroes live forever.
Please use the first pullquote.
thanks, cj
There's a reason we are riding a seesaw of elation and despair in this war--the government is manipulating the news, trying to guard against "another Vietnam."
No one's arguing that Saddam isn't a barbarian--
what with the gassing of his own people seared onto his soul.
Like any overzealous censor, the Pentagon is needlessly alarming the press and public with its ever-tightening grip on the news.
