Embed Who Ran Afoul of Military in Iraq Reflects on His Experience

By: David Axe In early February, I was embedded at a remote Iraqi Army training base, and interviewing a U.S. officer about the development of Iraqi security forces when a sour-faced U.S. Army sergeant pulled up in a Humvee. He ordered me to put away my cameras and get in.

"You're in violation of regulations," he said. I thought it was a joke. So did the officer. But the sergeant persisted. So I apologized to my interviewee, stowed my gear and climbed into the Humvee.

Over the next 36 hours, I was shuttled from base to base and finally to
Kuwait -- under armed guard for all but the final leg. I never got an
official explanation for what was happening. From my guards and others, I gleaned that I had published supposedly sensitive information on my blog at www.defensetech.org, thus allegedly endangering U.S. forces and disqualifying me for a military embed.

As a freelance Iraq correspondent for C-SPAN, The Village Voice, Salon, The Washington Times and others, I've been to Iraq six times, five times embedded with U.S. or British forces. Never had anything like this happened.

I've been bombed, shot at and mortared many times, but in the protective embrace of Western armies, I never feared. But this ... this was plain scary.

It turns out that the "classified information" in question concerned radio jammers that the U.S. Army uses to defeat Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), the biggest killers in Iraq. Understandably, my editors were interested in the military's efforts to counter IEDs. I got the info in an on-the-record interview with Army 1st Lt. Derek Austin, who apparently didn't know it was supposed to be secret. Also, I had checked the info against public websites like www.globalsecurity.org, leading me to believe that there was nothing sensitive about it.

The Army's claim that I was endangering U.S. troops by betraying their secret weapons didn't hold up too well. But then, it didn't have to. On the ground in Iraq, the Army is the highest authority, simply by
virtue of its near monopoly on security and safe transport.

With the murder of freelancer Steve Vincent in Basra in August, the
kidnapping of freelancer Jill Carroll in Baghdad in January and the severe injury suffered by ABC anchor Bob Woodruff in a roadside bombing of an Iraqi convoy in north-central Iraq the same month -- not to mention the murder of three Iraqi journalists in Samarra this week -- the climate for journalists in this troubled country has never been worse.

European media have all but abandoned the country in the wake of several abductions. U.S. media are largely confined to fortified Baghdad hotels and rarely leave the city without military escort. "There are levels of risk that often seem beyond reason," John Burns, New York Times Baghdad bureau chief, told me in January.

Increasingly, the only way to cover Iraq is to embed with Western forces ... or to stick to the relative safety of autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan.

Embedding means serious limitations. Routinely, you only see what U.S. forces see: the insides of armored vehicles, the passing faces of frightened and angry Iraqi, and the muddy landscapes of walled bases, mostly. And embedding means working within the rubric of the military public affairs operation -- hardly the most sophisticated or democratic undertaking, and one that encourages self-censorship in addition to coming down hard on journalists who offend its sensibilities.

This past week, CBS correspondent David Martin had to admit to self-censorship, also surrounding the IED issue. He had finished a network news segment on the counter-IED tactics but pulled it an hour before airing last week after a senior military officer told him it contained information that might be helpful to the enemy. Here's how he described it on the CBS News blog:

"I didn?t find his argument about how it would help the enemy very persuasive, but because there?s a war on I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I?ve done that a number of times over the years, and each time it?s turned out that going with the story wouldn?t have caused any harm.

"So how do you decide that a story contains sensitive information that shouldn?t see the light of day? In war, you can make an extreme case that almost any accurate information about the U.S. military is news the enemy can use. ...So how do you decide that a story contains legitimate secrets? It?s like the famous definition of pornography ? you know it when you see it."

Former L.A. Times reporter Monte Morin, now an Iraq correspondent for the government-funded Stars and Stripes newspaper, told me he has run afoul of Army public affairs on several occasions, at times being threatened with eviction from the country. One notable incident in the days before one of Iraq's contested elections saw him hauled through the rain to a confrontation with an angry officer. Morin had quoted a soldier talking about stockpiling body bags for the inevitable bloodshed -- an unforgivable offense in the Army's eyes.

Morin might have irritated host officers hoping for good news from the front, but never did he violate the code of conduct that matters most for any reporter, whether embedded or not. That is, our shared journalistic ethics. Morin announced his intentions as a reporter, quoted his sources accurately and told the truth as he saw it.

The military has consistently demonstrated that it doesn't understand modern media or its audiences -- and that it is overly sensitive to stories about technology and tactics and to any story depicting the occupation's human cost.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in February that his department is behind the times. "Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but ... our country has not adapted. ... For the most part, the U.S. government still functions as a ?five and dime? store in an eBay world," Rumsfeld said.

The implications for our democracy are grave. With more than 2,200 Americans dead in the so-called War on Terror and costs running into the hundreds of billions of dollars, good reporting from the war zone is more important than ever. But with embedding increasingly the only realistic way to cover the conflict, and with the U.S. military lagging in its understanding of the modern media environment, good reporting in Iraq is also harder than ever.