Bush Administration: Declared War On Journalists

By Scott Horton (Harper's)


Is it hyperbole to say that the Bush Administration has gone to war against journalists?

Increasingly, this claim is a literal truth.

Those who would dismiss the claim should contemplate some hard facts from the real battlefields of the “war on terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, over a hundred journalists have been killed – a multiple of the number who died in World War II – and a large part of that number fell to American arms. I don’t suggest that the U.S. soldiers intentionally targeted them; but it does appear that historical rules that shielded journalists on the battlefield have disappeared, and that this has led to deaths. And with respect to certain foreign press organizations, like al-Jazeera, intentional targeting is now documented.

Thousands of journalists have been arrested by U.S. forces, and a few hundred held for significant periods. Reports of beatings and abuse are fairly routine. Journalists who take pictures or shoot film that the Pentagon and White House don’t want seen on U.S. televisions suffer the worst – consider CBS cameraman Abdul Amir, held in prison for a year, or AP Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Bilal Hussein, now held for over a year – without charges.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, journalists have had their photographs and film seized and destroyed by U.S. forces, acting on formal orders to interdict the transmission of film footage which would undermine the White House’s message.

This is not the way it once was. America’s historical attitude has been tolerant, reflecting the values of the First Amendment. Reporters may be irksome and inconvenient – they may get in the way of the message the Pentagon and the White House want to get out. But historically the United States has respected that they play a legitimate role – a role that takes them out on to the field of battle to perform a difficult and dangerous job.

Under the Bush Administration, and particularly under the Neocon idealists who have seized the machinery of war, the historical view has been warped and subverted and something quite sinister is emerging in its place.

The notion of “communications” plays a crucial role in the Department of Defense’s last Quadrennial Review. The focus of the discussion of communications is not signals or dealing with allies, but management of the media – and particularly of the media message concerning the conduct of the war beamed back home to the United States. In the view of Neocon theorists like Stephen Cambone and Douglas Feith, the media affords access by the “enemy” to the “soft underbelly of the democratic state.” The war effort can be undermined and the will of the people to fight can be eroded. To most Americans, this would be called “democratic process,” namely the right of the people to be freely informed and to decide to authorize or reject the conduct of war as a part of their essential franchise. But the Neocon theorist has been ever mindful of the “weaknesses” and “vulnerabilities” of democracy, and frankly never so enamored of democracy.
While working in Iraq last year, I was warned repeatedly that journalists were targeted and that documents existed establishing this. I was also warned that by defending journalists, I would myself become a target.

Even more chilling: in a series of speeches given across the country, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has assailed journalists and suggested that Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations are successfully infiltrating media organizations and controlling their message.

Today some further documents have emerged which establish the official administration viewpoint: journalists are the enemy.

Paul McLeary at Columbia Journalism Review:

It looks like it's official: the United States Army thinks that American reporters are a threat to national security. Thanks to some great sleuthing by Wired's "Danger Room" blogger Noah Shachtman, the Army's new operational security guidelines (OPSEC) hit the Web in a big way yesterday, and the implications they have for reporters -- who are grouped in with drug cartels and Al Qaeda as security threats to be beaten back -- are staggering.

Make no mistake, this is a very big deal, and every American citizen, not just reporters and soldiers, needs to understand the implications of the Army's strict new policy, because it directly affects how citizens receive information about their armed forces: information that it has every right to get.

Shachtman reproduces a slide from the new "OPSEC in the Blogosphere," document, which lists and ranks "Categories of Threat." Under "traditional domestic threats" we find hackers and militia groups, while "non-traditional" threats include drug cartels, and -- yes -- the media. Just to put that into some perspective, the foreign "non-traditional threats" are listed as warlords, and Al Qaeda. In other words, the Army has figuratively and literally put the media in the same box as Al Qaeda, warlords, and drug cartels.

The attitude that appears in these frames reflects the theory of total war. It’s a mindset I have come across many times in my career, in the former Soviet Union and in Communist China, for instance. And now: in training slides for the U.S. Army.

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.