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Coverage of Terrorism
to take along any newspapermen, who
always make mischief.” The headstrong
general ignored Sherman’s advice. His
name was George Armstrong Custer.
The battle was the Little Big Horn. The
lone civilian casualty of that slaughter
was the newspaperman who accompanied
him.
The current war against terrorism
brings old conflicts into high relief. In
an age of advanced technology, when
Predator drones prowl remote landscapes,
when satellites gather reconnaissance,
and cruise missiles and smart
bombs lead the attack, the journalist
often finds himself or herself profoundly
marginalized, remote from the
action—and ever more at the mercy of
Pentagon briefers. Emboldened by its
successes in the Gulf War, the Pentagon
now holds an even tighter leash on
the news. Much video footage comes
not from independent camera crews,
but from the eyes of weapons handpicked
for theatricality. In such a war
there are few if any Ernie Pyles sending
back dispatches from the front. Indeed,
there is scarcely a front at all. Not only
are our enemies’ whereabouts unknown,
but also sometimes even their
identities. There are no flags to be
raised over Suribachi—just one Pork
Chop Hill after another. Neither Kabul
nor Osama bin Laden are the prize in
any final sense.
The more amorphous and murky
the military goals, the more government
can control information and propaganda
to define victory. In the absence
of clear objectives, it is easy,
operating behind the curtain of secrecy,
to conceal setbacks and pronounce
progress. In the early going,
the government discretely let it be
known that numbers of Taliban warriors
were defecting to the Northern
Alliance or deserting from lack of spirit.
The reality is otherwise. There were no
material defections at the times of those
reports. Later there were government
leaks suggesting that Pashtun leaders
in the south of Afghanistan were fomenting
counterinsurgencies against
the Taliban. These too appear to be
just wistful notes sounded in an otherwise
bleak landscape, hopes floated
out there by those practiced in the art
of psychological warfare and deception.
Here we were on familiar ground.
The only leaks that offend the generals
are those that contradict them.
Today, it is not only distance and
technology that conspire to put journalists
at a disadvantage. It is also the
smothering use of secrecy that obstructs
the gathering of news. Just how far the
government is willing to go to keep
unsettling truths from the public was
illustrated at the outset of the current
campaign. Not long after CIA briefers
met with a select audience of Congressional
members, news leaked that they
had been told there was a 100 percent
chance terrorists would again strike
the United States. Now if this is not
information to which the American
public is entitled, what is?
But the response to that leak was
President Bush’s threat to limit the
members of Congress given access to
classified information. Such obsessive
restrictions on information may help
explain why Americans were blindsided
by the September 11 events. Threat
assessments of the intelligence community
have long been deemed too
unsettling to share with the public.
The issue is often not one of secrecy
but of control. It is no coincidence that
in World War I the same office that
oversaw press censorship also oversaw
propaganda efforts. The British journalist
Phillip Knightly records that in
World War II, a government censor
was asked what he would tell the American
people. His response: “I’d tell them
nothing till it was over and then I’d tell
them who won.”
In World War II, censorship often
took ludicrous twists. Announcers covering
baseball games were not even to
report that the game was halted because
of rain. There are of course legitimate
occasions for secrecy. In times
like these of heightened vulnerability,
real-time troop deployments, pending
operations, and “sources and methods”
of intelligence gathering are all
widely accepted by reporters as legitimately
sensitive areas. The generals
always argue for more secrets, the reporters
for fewer. In World War I, the
military came up with a list of more
than 100 kinds of secrets the press was
to stay away from. The list was whittled
down to a scant 18 and printed on a sixby-12-inch
card that was handed out to
every editor and city desk in the nation.
Compliance was voluntary. Then as
now, secrets seeped out on their own.
Shipping news was a no-no, though
arrivals and departures were posted in
every hotel lobby. Construction of new
defense factories was to be ignored,
though they occasioned banquets by
the local Chamber of Commerce.
“Was there any other answer than
secrecy at the source?” asked George
Creel, the journalist who served in
World War I as a kind of national censor
as chairman of the Committee on
Public Information. “If such information
came to the ears of a reporter,
most certainly it could be learned by
any spy worth his pay.” Reflecting years
later, Creel noted “In 1917, fortunately
for us, the radio was not a problem.” In
the age of the Internet, there is no
delay upon which the reporter can
draw comfort or defense for reporting
genuinely security-sensitive materials.
All reporting today is real time.
But many of the most sensitive secrets
are themselves rarely newsworthy.
It is the outcomes of troop deployments
and the fruits of that
intelligence-gathering that interest the
public. The wider threat to national
security comes not from reporters ignoring
appeals to discretion or breaching
formal censorship codes like those
faced by Scotty Reston. Rather it comes
from the government’s wholesale and
wanton overclassification of information.
Ironically, it is that which undermines
the government’s capacity to
conceal those bone fide secrets whose
disclosure might actually damage national
security.
Today, no one has lower regard for
secrecy than those in government who
actually wield the stamp of classification.
They know from experience that
it is used more often than not to lend a
certain cachet to documents and that,
without that stamp, memos and correspondence
would be lost or ignored in
the tsunami of paperwork that engulfs
all bureaucracies, particularly that of
the defense and intelligence communities.
It is why former CIA Director
12 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001