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A war story I wish I’d written

By Harvery Rice, March 13, 2004

The realization that the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion Iraq invasion was drawing near awakened memories I had buried since covering the war. They summoned a measure of resentment, frustration and even guilt.

Those feelings were sharpened by recent revelations raising the possibility that the rationale for the war was cynically manufactured by the Bush administration from selected, wildly inaccurate intelligence.

I was a witness to, and in a sense a participant in, the most concerted, successful attempt by our government to control war coverage in our history.

And it went off with barely a whimper from the men and women of the media.

The Chronicle had sent me to Doha, Qatar, where I was to cover the war from the headquarters of U.S. Central Command at Camp as Sayliyah.

Hundreds of reporters from all over the world flocked to the $1 million press center at the base, believing that this is where they would get a daily briefing{<>} on the progress of the war.

Reporters with combat units could only view a fragment of the story. The press briefers at Central Command would give the overview.

At least that’s what everyone thought.

Reality intruded the day the war began. I was among a mob of reporters watching the opening salvos of the war on a bank of television sets in the press center.

I turned to the press officer nearest me, who was surrounded by reporters peppering him with questions. “No comment,” he told incredulous reporters.”We don’t want to endanger the troops.”

Could he at least acknowledge that the war had begun?

“No comment.”

When it was pointed out that we were watching the invasion of Iraq on television, he was unmoved.

Gradually, it dawned on me that the military had herded us into the press center so that we could be kept away from information.

The press center was sealed off from the rest of the base, and access was controlled by armed guards. A reporter’s contact with military personnel of any rank was {<>}controlled by a press officer.

All military personnel, except the press officers, were restricted to the base, so there was no opportunity, as in past wars, for reporters to meet officers or enlisted men for candid appraisals of the fighting as it unfolded.{<>}

The entire anti-information campaign was run by a Texan named Jim Wilkinson, a Republican political operative who once worked for former U.S. Rep. Dick Armey.

Wilkinson, now communications deputy for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, was one of a score of Republican operatives who descended on Florida during the balloting recount in the 2000 presidential campaign. Wilkinson also helped sell the impression that Al Gore claimed to have “invented the Internet.”

Despite his penchant for desert camouflage uniforms and military jargon, Wilkinson, a civilian, was essentially a political commissar who controlled information about the war as if he were running{<>} an election campaign.

His assignment was to keep the operation “on message.”

Wilkinson once called a{<>} staff meeting to praise the 42 press officers for keeping reporters away from news of any sort, one of the press officers revealed.

Of the daily news briefing at the base, Kevin Diaz, a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, said, “It was a political briefing from beginning to end. They never intended to give us the X’s and the O’s.”

Michael Wolff, a columnist for New York magazine, drew hearty applause from reporters when he asked Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, one of the command’s chief spokesmen, during a briefing why we should attend when so little information was forthcoming.

Every reporter I knew concurred with the evaluation of the press center that appeared in Wolff’s next column: “It takes about 48 hours to understand that information is probably more freely available at any other place in the world than it is here.

“At the end of the 48 hours, you realize that you know significantly less than when you arrived, and that you’re losing more sense of the larger picture by the hour. Eventually, you’ll know nothing.”

The contrast with the British military spokesmen was profound. They readily gave me and other reporters as many details as they could verify about British clashes with Iraqi units. U.S. press officials steadfastly refused to give a shred of information about American units outside the briefings.

“In reality, we had two different styles of news media management,” Group Capt. Al Lockwood, the British army spokesman at Central Command, told the Guardian newspaper. “I feel fortunate to have been part of the U.K. one.”

The British gave me one of my few scoops, admitting that an uprising in Iraqi-held city of Basra had fizzled.

Wilkinson waited until three days after the war began before throwing out a few scraps of information.

On the afternoon of the third day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the man in charge of running the war, gave the first briefing to a press corps thirsting for news.

They were disappointed. Franks spoke in generalities and gave little information about the progress of the invasion.

“All in this room should remain convinced that what we say from this podium — myself or my staff — or what we say from the various press centers associated with this coalition, will be absolute truth as we know it,” Franks told us.

Yet he began the briefing with a half-truth.

The United States had entered its second war with Iraq without the support of the United Nations and with a much smaller coalition than the first war. In a clear attempt to hype the perception of support for the war, Franks told the briefing that 52 nations were represented at Central Command.

He neglected to say that many of those 52 nations were supporting U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, not Iraq. And many of them were stridently opposed to the invasion.

And that’s where my guilt comes in.

In retrospect, I realize now that I should have filed a story the first day of the war saying that no information was coming from Central Command.

Although most reporters individually treated the press operation with the disdain it so richly deserved, there were no stories revealing it for what it was.

There were no publishers making angry phone calls to the Pentagon or the White House — no letters, no outrage.

In this, we all failed the American public.

Rice is a reporter for the Houston Chronicle.