- CARLISLE, Pa. (Reuters) --
As U.S. troops approached Baghdad last spring, senior Army officers sought
to win the surrender of enemy forces by orchestrating news coverage by
journalists traveling with front-line fighting units, military officers
said this week.
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- At a three-day military-hosted conference on the media's
role in Operation Iraqi Freedom, officers said the Army arranged for an
embedded U.S. television crew to film airborne troops embarking in the
desert in hopes that Iraqi commanders would realize how far north U.S.
forces had advanced.
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- And when phony Iraqi government claims that American
troops were pinned down hundreds of miles from Baghdad appeared to stiffen
Iraqi resistance, an Army tank commander rounded up journalists for a televised
"thunder run" through the city to prove that the U.S. force --
and not Saddam Hussein -- was in charge.
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- "I just wanted them to report what happened. If
having the media report accurately is using them, then they were used,"
said Col. David Perkins, who as commander of the 3rd Infantry Division's
2nd Brigade had organized the tank foray into Baghdad specifically to garner
publicity for the U.S. advance.
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- "The main intent ... was to get the story out,"
he added. "I don't know why anyone would want anything other than
that."
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- This week's conference at the U.S. Army War College in
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, about 120 miles northwest of Washington, included
combat officers and some of the journalists who traveled with them in a
discussion of the Pentagon's embed program.
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- All told, 527 journalists traveled into Iraq with Army,
Marine and British ground forces during the six weeks of major combat operations
that ended on May 1.
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- DIVIDED VERDICT
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- The program drew a divided verdict from media critics
who welcomed the coverage but worried about possible self-censorship among
reporters dependent on the U.S. military for their safety.
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- Journalists, who agreed to abide by a set of military
ground rules, produced up to 6,000 articles a week, including many that
Army officers described as "positive" contributions to the military's
IO, or information operations, effort.
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- "If it was indeed an experiment, it was very successful
from the standpoint of the military," Army Lt. Gen. William Wallace,
who was V Corps commander during major combat operations, told an audience
of over 100 military officers and representatives from media outlets including
Reuters.
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- Reporters said the revelation that some military operations
were designed to help achieve publicity aims was disturbing but not entirely
unexpected.
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- "I was keenly aware that I was getting only one
side of the story," said Steve Komarow, a USAToday correspondent who
was embedded with Wallace.
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- Many officers lamented the loss of embedded reporters
since the news of the military campaign gave way to daily coverage of guerrilla
attacks, political turmoil and crime.
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- "What we're seeing now in Iraq is a loss of the
IO campaign because we've lost the embeds," complained Marine Col.
Glenn Starnes, who derided current reporting out of Iraq as fraught with
"sensationalized news."
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- "I FELT CHILLS ..."
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- But others said openly that the program had scored important
public relations victories before May 1, when President Bush said major
operations had ended. They pointed to publicity over early elections in
the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, which they said were calculated to drive
home America's interest in democratic reform.
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- "We've turned the media into a mechanism for communicating
information from the action to the consumer including the enemy,"
said Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "What
we don't engage in is deception or manipulation."
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- Major Gen. James Thurman, who was chief operations officer
for the land war command, said a crowning achievement of the embed program
was live television coverage of U.S. soldiers toppling a flag-draped statue
of President Saddam Hussein after the fall of Baghdad.
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- "I felt chills in my body," Thurman recalled.
"The signal that sent, it's powerful," he added. "We did
that as a team.
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- "As a war fighter, I am going to leverage information.
I'd be foolish not to," he said. "The power of information --
it is phenomenal."
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- Some media critics have said the scene gave the misleading
impression that U.S. soldiers were removing the statue at the behest of
crowds of cheering Iraqis.
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