The Pentagon’s Dangerous Views on the Wartime Press - New York Times editorial
The Defense Department earlier this summer released a comprehensive manual outlining its interpretation of the law of war. The 1,176-page document, the first of its kind, includes guidelines on the treatment of journalists covering armed conflicts that would make their work more dangerous, cumbersome and subject to censorship. Those should be repealed immediately.
Journalists, the manual says, are generally regarded as civilians, but may in some instances be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” a legal term that applies to fighters that are afforded fewer protections than the declared combatants in a war. In some instances, the document says, “the relaying of information (such as providing information of immediate use in combat operations) could constitute taking a direct part in hostilities.”…
Comments
Following the US defeat in Vietnam, the DoD went to war with the fourth estate. Never again would journalists roam free over the battlefield, reporting at will on what they saw, heard, and in some cases did. Desert Storm was the first real opportunity for the Pentagon to implement its new information control methodology, establishing reporting pools from which journalists were dispatched to units and locations chosen by military leaders. During OIF, the "embed" system took information control to new levels, as the Pentagon tried to engineer sympathetic reporting by relying on the kinship which naturally develops among human beings exposed to shards of flying metal traveling at extreme velocity. The content and spirit of the document in question should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Pentagon's struggle to conceal the truth about the wars it fights on behalf of the Republic.