MacArthur Warns Press About Pentagon Control

By: Barbara Bedway If the Pentagon does indeed execute the Iraqi war plan it calls "Shock and Awe" this month, the very brevity of the intensive bombing campaign presents a challenge all too familiar to John R. MacArthur. A former reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and foreign desk editor for United Press International, MacArthur is now publisher of Harper's Magazine. He is also the author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, a penetrating investigation into how the Pentagon promoted unprecedented curbs on the press in the opening days of the Gulf War.

With the Defense Department warning journalists to get out of Baghdad, the stage is set for a repeat of the kind of information-control that kept the American public uninformed about the true dimensions of the earlier war, he said. "The Pentagon is expecting a kind of Panama-style war, over in three days," he said. "Nobody has time to see or ask any questions. I think if embedded reporters see anything important -- or bloody -- the Pentagon will interfere. Same result, different tactic: the truth gets distorted."

He expects Al Jazeera, the Arab TV network which some in the military refer to as the "enemy station," to be "knocked out in the first 48 hours, like what happened in Kabul."

For MacArthur, the $200,000 stage set built for military briefers in Qatar to deliver news of the war to reporters and a worldwide TV audience is emblematic. "The key for the Pentagon in the Gulf War was letting the generals announce the news directly to the American people, not relayed through reporters," he pointed out.

In the planned invasion's first days, he urged reporters to press for answers on the number of troops and civilians killed, though they "won't get a straight answer." When they hear claims of little collateral damage, reporters should keep in mind that the Air Force, after the Gulf War,
admitted that 75% of its "dumb" bombs sailed off target, and even 10% of "smart" bombs missed the mark, according to Second Front.

MacArthur, who writes a monthly column for The Providence (R.I.) Journal, emphasized that "conveying the heart of the story" does not depend on being present at the front. As he documented in his book, reporters have broken some of the most significant war stories -- including the secret bombing of Cambodia and the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War -- by digging in the bureaucratic alleyways of Washington. The untold story of the first Gulf War -- that 93% of the bombs dropped were not those "smart" bombs the Pentagon focused on -- was information available on the home front.

The lesson? "Reporters in the States should make friends with Pentagon contacts, who can help you figure out what kind of bombs we're dropping and how many. Think-tanks connected with the Pentagon also have this kind of information."

MacArthur does not expect post-invasion stories as crude as the first Gulf War's widely reported (yet false) account of Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators: "More likely, the CIA will feed stories that they've found poisonous gases, and so here's evidence the invasion was justified. Reporters will find victims of Saddam's torture -- it won't be hard -- rather than victims of American bombing mistakes. A live victim is always more interesting than a dead victim."

He added: "If I were willing to risk my life as a reporter, I'd go to Basra. The Shiites will take advantage of the chaos in the South. Last time, they exacted a horrible revenge on Saddam's people. A civil war could start there, and you might see the U.S. in the position of suppressing a Shiite uprising."

Though he believes "you can't expect much of embedded reporters," MacArthur said he does not blame them for the limitations the Pentagon has been able to impose. "The ones who agreed to the embedding are the owners of media," he pointed out. "If the owners would show some solidarity and say, 'We'll agree to a lottery or some other system, but we won't go along with this embedding anymore,' we'd stand a chance of changing those limitations."
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