AP has it right.

Combat is not over in Iraq.  The war is not won, nor is combat over.

And by the way, the U.S. military doe s not have NON-combat troops.  Even the combat support troops are fighting men and women.

As the AP accurately observes:
“50,000 American troops remain in country. Our own reporting on the ground confirms that some of these troops, especially some 4,500 special operations forces, continue to be directly engaged in military operations. These troops are accompanying Iraqi soldiers into battle with militant groups and may well fire and be fired on.”

What has happened in the Obama Administration has declared an official end to U.S.-led combat missions.   We are pushing the Iraqis to the front, and backing them up with combat forces.  I can well imagine U.S. troops engaging in some gallows humor, as the bullets fly and IEDs explode. “Good thing we’re not in combat anymore!”

Right.   The shift from U.S.-LED combat operations to U.S.-BACKED combat operations is an important evolution for more than symbolic reasons, but It’s not the end of the war. Maybe the beginning of the end, or the beginning of the beginning of the end.   So the AP and other news organizations are right to call what’s going on by its proper name: combat.

In contrast back in 2007 CNN, and some other new organizations briefly refrained from calling the reinforcements sent to Iraq a “surge,” thinking somehow that was putting a positive spin on the escalation of the war.  “Surge” sounded temporary like a “storm surge,” and many of my editors were skeptical that the strategy would increase troop levels only in the short term.

I, on the other hand, believed that “surge” was a perfectly good word, and described pretty much what the military had in mind.  In fact, anyone who was paying attention knew the Pentagon didn’t have enough troops for a permanent, or indeterminate increase in forces.   And eventually CNN got over its uneasiness, and used the term “surge” as everyone else did.

Words do matter, and journalists should not adopt official language that obfuscates the facts.  We talk about the war in Iraq, not Operation Iraqi Freedom.    And when advise and assist puts U.S. troops in combat, we should not hesitate to call it that.   We are not yet the the peacekeeping phase in Iraq.

Reading the cautionary tale in the Washington Post this week, about Mike Wise and his ill-conceived Twitter experiment [Post sportswriter Mike Wise suspended for Roethlisberger hoax on Twitter - Washington Post, Aug 31, 2010 ], I was reminded of similar “experiment” that occurred early in my time covering the Pentagon.

Wise, by the way, said he was just trying to show how quickly an unconfirmed report would spread in this age of social media, but was immediately sorry he did it.  “I’m not a journalism ombudsman,” he ruefully told Post media reporter Howard Kurtz.

Read Mike Wise’s mea culpa HERE.

Another Story Ruined by Too Much Reporting

So back 1992, shortly after I arrived on the Pentagon beat, I was having a friendly argument with a an Army colonel on the question of how thoroughly reporters actually check out “tips” before they blurt them out on the air.

This, he told me, was subject of hot debate in the Secretary of Army’s office during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991, as they monitored the live coverage on TV, (pre-Internet, and before I arrived.)

As members of the secretary’s staff watched, all sorts of misinformation was being broadcast in the heat of the invasion coverage.  One staffer postulated that none of the reporters were actually checking out anything, instead they were just going on the air with whatever the last person told them.

This couldn’t be true, another countered.  The network television reporters were among the most professional on the beat.   They would HAVE to check.

So, like Mike Wise, they devised a test.  They made up some phony information about the treads of M1A1 Abrams tanks having a problem with the sand in the Iraqi desert, and a Lt. Col was dispatched to pass the “tip” along to one of the reporters lurking in the 2nd floor “Correspondent’s Corridor,” outside the Pentagon briefing room, along with the proviso that the information was “unconfirmed” and would be need to be “checked out.”

There was a bet going (a case of beer, I think) as to whether the reporter would mention the ersatz problem in an upcoming report, or whether upon checking with the Army, he would find out there was nothing to confirm it.

The young colonel had not even made it up back the stairs to the 3rd floor office, when the disinformation was reported.  Point proved.  Bet won.   And for me, lesson learned.

In the 16 years I covered the Pentagon, I’m sad to say I saw many reporters go with stories that were “too good to check.”   And many was the time I got a hot tip in the morning, only to find after a day of digging, it was not as advertised.  At those times my producer and I would often turn to each other and say, in unison: “Another great story… ruined by too much reporting.”

Most bum tips are not deliberate attempts at snookering sloppy, scoop-happy reporters.  Most are honest misunderstandings, based on incomplete or inaccurate information.  But the rise of the Internet has lead to a lowering of standards when it comes to reporting whatever someone else is reporting.   Shoot first, ask questions later.

A notable recent example was another “experiment” conducted by Georgetown Law Professor Peter Tague, who told his criminal law class a rumor he made up about Chief Justice John Roberts.  It was all over the blogosphere within minutes after he told the class NOT to tell anyone, although most mainstream media avoided falling for the hoax.

[Anatomy of a Rumor: The Story Behind Chief Justice John Roberts’s ‘Retirement’- March 4, 2010]

First Report, Then Check

By the time I left CNN, it had changed its policy about repeating what other news organizations were reporting, without independent confirmation.  For most of my tenure at CNN, the policy was if a competing news organization had a scoop, we would wait, check it out, confirm it if it was true, knock it down if it was not, and not go to air until we had a reasonable basis to judge the accuracy of the report, and the ability to provide some context.

By the time I left CNN in 2008, it had adopted a hair-trigger policy in an effort to be more competitive in the internet age.  If any “reputable” news organization reported a news development of significance, then CNN would immediately parrot the report, — with attribution to the original source, of course.  Then, if CNN confirmed it after the fact, we would stop attributing it.  And if we were to find out the reports were inaccurate, or misleading, we would correct it and blame any misreporting on the original source.  Again, after the fact.

It guaranteed that CNN was never very far behind its competitors.  It would always be first, or almost as good, a close second to report (repeat) a story someone else had broken.  But it also meant bad reporting would be much more widely reported, until the facts could catch up.

Can any one say, “Shirley Sherrod?”

Mike Wise didn’t need to conduct an experiment to see how low the Internet and social media have lowered standards.

We pretty much already know.

FOOTNOTE: Before anyone accuses me of not checking out the above story about the colonel and the network reporter, I did check it out with others who told me similar versions.  Could they all be making it up? Could it be apocryphal?  Yes.  Does it ring true based on my firsthand observations over 16 years?  I’m afraid the answer to that is “yes,” too.

Back in 2003, a friend of mine, an unabashed liberal was grilling me about the wisdom of the impending invasion of Iraq. He was highly skeptical, and in fact believed the worst about the motives of the Bush Administration. He argued the coming war was ginned up on flimsy intelligence and would be a complete disaster. He wanted to know what I thought, as someone who covered the Pentagon and the debate about the war on a daily basis.

As a journalist, I avoided giving my opinion. In fact I wasn’t sure I had an opinion. One of the luxuries of being a reporter, who strives for objectivity, is that you don’t have to have an opinion. My job was to examine all sides of the issue, try to bring facts to bear on the debate, hold people accountable, and let the chips falls where they may. I didn’t need to decide if the invasion was the right thing to do. And honestly, I didn’t know.

My friend pressed me. I must have some opinions, he insisted. What did I think? When he would make his impassioned argument against the invasion, I would simply tell him what the senior leaders would offer as counterarguments, but I wouldn’t volunteer what I thought. That just frustrated him
Finally the week before the invasion, I allowed that if I had to get off the fence, I would come down on the side of believing the war was probably justified. I thought most Iraqis would welcome liberation but just couldn’t say it, and that Iraq, and the world, would be likely better off in the end.

But I did say I was wary about the intelligence, which I knew from long reporting experience is always imperfect. And I was also acutely aware of the unforeseen, unpredictable, and unintended consequences that can be set into motion once a war begins. I was just glad I wasn’t the president and I didn’t have to make such a weighty decision.

As for the weapons of mass destruction, I knew that many smart people in the Pentagon were honestly convinced they were there. I knew commanders who had access to intelligence I did not, and who were certain they would face, at the very least, poison gas on the battlefield.

And while I was wary about all the things that could go wrong, I also knew that sometimes — despite all the uncertainties of war — it’s not always mission impossible.  I remembered well all the dire predictions before NATO went to war over Kosovo in 1999. The standard military line was that the strategy was deeply flawed. You can’t bomb an enemy into submission. It would take substantial ground troops. And there would be heavy casualties. And afterward NATO forces would be subject to constant guerilla attacks, from snipers and rebel holdouts.

But the reality was, after 78 days, NATO DID win, without a single allied casualty. It was messy, and many civilians were killed. And the Chinese embassy was bombed by mistake. (Many n the region are still convinced that was deliberate.) But the alliance prevailed. It wasn’t “mission impossible” after all.
So flash forward to Iraq. It certainly seemed plausible back in 2002, that an invasion to topple Saddam Hussein might work. It certainly seemed Saddam was intent on acquiring WMDs even if he didn’t have them yet, he certainly acted as if he were hiding them. So when my friend pressed me, I conceded that I thought the war was justified, albeit with the same reservations many people had. I hoped for the best.
Now as the U.S. tries to tentatively declare victory and head home, I believe what I came to believe later in 2003, namely that Iraq will be better off in the end, will remain a mess for the foreseeable future. And the price the U.S. paid, in lives, in money, in national prestige is one we would not have paid had we known the cost going in.

So over the years I have seen smart people who were “wrong for the right reasons,” that is, they made reasonable decisions based on the best information available at the time, but were wrong in the end. And I’ve seen others who were “right for the wrong reasons,” meaning they jumped to conclusions based on incomplete, or even erroneous, information, but turned out to have jumped to the right conclusion.

And after all this, I have come to believe two things about the Iraq war right now: Iraq is not ready for U.S. troops to leave. And it is time for us to go.

The fact is the Pentagon draws up contingency plans for almost every conceivable scenario. If fact, it would be irresponsible if military planners didn’t prepare for the possible of military action against Iran. When the President says, “What are our options?” there better be some. But there is a big difference between “having plans” (as in on the shelf) and “plans to” (as in a strike is likely, sooner than later.)

The AP’s got the story right, once you get past the sexy headline. But this kind of thing is an easy way to grab some attention. The essential element of tabloid journalism is to state the ordinary in extraordinary terms, to write a story that while technically true is totally, and often deliberately, misleading.

One master of this disingenuous technique is none other than Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Sy Hersh, whose 2006 report in the The New Yorker was a classic example portraying this kind of routine planning as evidence of impending war. The report, quoting questionable secondhand sources such as “government consultants” and “former defense officials” was cleverly written and carefully nuanced so that when no attack materialized, Hersh could say he only suggested an attack was possible, not inevitable.

It’s a tabloid trick as old as the profession. You would think people would stop falling for it. So I’m thinking probably AP felt it HAD to write something about Mullen’s statement, just to provide context, lest it become tabloid fodder again.

As a professional journalist I have been on the receiving end of hundreds of leaks, and they have been invaluable in helping me  sort out unvarnished fact from official fiction, which after all is at the core of my job.

As an amateur historian also I know that when it comes to understanding past events, documents are the key.  Memories are unreliable, people have agendas, memoirs can be self-serving, but contemporaneous records can offer the clearest picture of what truly transpired.

And despite some of the snarky dismissals of the admittedly awkward official explanations offered by everyone from Robert Gibbs to Robert Gates, I also know from experience that what they say it true.  Namely that, while the leak is stunning in its scope, so far there has been little in the way of surprises, at least for anyone who has been paying attention to the Afghan war for the past eight years.

A “blinding flash of the obvious.“
The major “revelations” are what we used to call a BFOTO “a blinding flash of the obvious.”

Among them:

– Many civilians are killed by accident by U.S. troops, and sometimes those accidents could or should have been avoidable.  Many more civilians are killed deliberately by the Taliban and al Qaeda.

– The U.S. has long suspected collusion between Pakistan’s secret services, and the Taliban, and has complained bitterly in private, while being more circumspect in public.

– The enemy sometimes employs weapons and tactics the U.S. doesn’t want to publicize, i.e. heat-seeking, shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles.

–Many fighting the war, including many of our NATO allies, have deep misgivings about the prospects for success.  And that’s especially true for some of our front line troops.

– The U.S. is battling a growing insurgency, with not enough troops, and unreliable Afghan partners.

– In internal reports, the U.S. military tends to be more critical in evaluating the performance of its allies, than of itself.  And it rarely gives the enemy the benefit of any doubt.

So why is the WikiLeaks leak troubling?

WikiLeaks is no Whistleblower.
I bristled a bit Sunday night when the story first broke and I heard several news organizations shorthand WikiLeaks as a “whistleblower” group.  A whistleblower is someone who exposes wrongdoing.  To apply the label to WikiLeaks is not only imprecise but unfair, in that it creates a preconceived perception that the released material “blows the whistle” on illicit activity.  Let’s be clear: WikiLeaks is an anti-privacy, anti-secrecy group, whose primary tenet is that nothing should be kept from the world, not military secrets, not sources or methods of intelligence gathering, not even the secret rituals of fraternities and sororities.  Governments, Corporations, Private citizens all have some right, even responsibility to keep some secrets.  WikiLeaks only allegiance seems to be to the source of its leaks.  By remaining agnostic on the consequences of its actions, WikiLeaks seems to me to to be functioning less in the tradition of good old-fashioned muckrakers, and more like anti-privacy terrorists.   If I were the New York Times, I would not be happy about being described as one of WikiLeaks “media partners” on the organizations website.

Can we handle the truth?
One reason the government and the military keep details of military operations confidential is they have little confidence  the public — and news organizations in particular — can appreciate the nuances and context of complicated information.  We can see this result already in some of the superheated coverage of what has by necessity to be only a cursory review of the documents.  No doubt over time, many people will mine these files, and produce nuggets of interesting, even helpful contextual insights.  But for now I don’t envy the government spokespeople who have to argue for perspective in the face of skeptical media and politicians more interested in inflaming than informing the public.  As I have observed from my 30 years in journalism, providing context is a thankless job.  Rarely is anyone ever congratulated in the newsroom for keeping a headline-grabbing story it in perspective.

Increased Understanding, Undermining Support?
It’s undeniable that these documents — if studied carefully — can greatly increase our understanding the complexities of the war, and by illuminating the enormity of the task, will like undermine support, for what increasing looks like a short-term strategy that can only be won in the long term, and great continued sacrifice.

So if the end result is much more textured look at the gritty realities of war, including a lot of the stuff the Pentagon would prefer we didn’t know what’s the harm?  Shouldn’t we all have a more clear-eyed view of how things are going?

Well it certainly more difficult to live in a world where there are no secrets, where nothing can stay private.  How do get sources to help the U.S. fight terrorism, when there’s no guarantee that they can be protected?  How can governments quietly cooperate on diplomatically sensitive matters if everything has to be done in public, where posturing and political gain have to be part of the calculus?

The Naked bottom line
It’s not any one particular disclosure that bothers me. It’s the idea that nothing can be private. There are no state secrets, no matter how important, or how vital to our collective security and well-being.

In a way, it’s like those full body scanners at the airport.  They produce grainy, indistinct, black-and-white images, but with basic image-enhancement software they can easily be converted to full-color pictures that leave nothing to the imagination. And you know somebody, somewhere will store them, and somehow, despite the best efforts of those in charge, someone with no respect for privacy will obtain them.  There are only two things you can do: rail against the loss of privacy, or just get used to walking around naked. Increasingly for governments and private citizens alike, the only option is the latter, metaphorically speaking.

CNN could have gone one of two ways after Octavia Nasr’s offensive tweet on the death of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah earlier this month.

The network could have reprimanded her, thus giving her the benefit of the doubt based on her two decades of loyal service. Or it could have done what it did: summarily fire her, ending both its PR problem and her 20-year career with one swift, clean kill.

Nasr, you may recall, infamously tweeted, “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah … One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”

That was a huge mistake, given, as the New York Times points out, “Ayatollah Fadlallah routinely denounced Israel and the United States, and supported suicide bombings against Israeli civilians,” and his “writings and preachings inspired the Dawa Party of Iraq and a generation of militants, including the founders of Hezbollah.”

So if CNN had not fired her, it would have come under intense criticism for harboring a “Hezbollah sympathizer”. It would have faced a losing battle defending her against critics who would never accept her ex post facto explanation, that her “sadness” and “respect” for the departed Shiite cleric was based — not on his advocacy of terrorism — but his enlightened views on women’s rights. For CNN, this probably looked like mission impossible.

The news media in general, and big news organizations in particular, don’t do nuance very well. And if ever there was an antithesis of nuance it is Twitter, as Octavia Nasr ruefully admitted in a mea culpa blogpost, her last on CNN.com, “Revered across borders yet designated a terrorist. Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet. It’s something I deeply regret,” were Nasr’s last words.

Criticism is not something big media organizations take well.  The quick, easy, expedient solution was to cut her loose. It’s too bad. Let me be clear. I agree with CNN and Octavia Nasr that her tweet was a serious error in judgment. However, I also accept both her apology and explanation, which is a measure of forgiveness CNN could not manage, because of its sensitivity to external condemnation.

You don’t have to be much of a cynic to conclude that if you are a celebrity who brings ratings and revenue to the network, you have a much greater chance of forgiveness and redemption. Think Lou Dobbs at his most controversial, or Richard Quest’s embarrassing peccadilloes, or Eliot Spitzer’s personal baggage.

But the truth is I did have enormous respect for Octavia, and the global perspective she added to CNN’s international coverage. Her insights reminded all of us that things often look different to people in other parts of the world, and that our reporting should recognize that and help explain that. She was all about nuanced perspective, not superficial caricatures.

So to paraphrase her career-ending tweet, I admit I was “sad to hear of the firing of Octavia Nasr, one of CNN’s editors I respected a lot.” Now just don’t tweet that, because all the nuance will be lost, and I could be out of a job.

CNN Drops Editor After Hezbollah Comments- New York Times, July 7, 2010

As predicted the other combat boot has dropped as the Defense Secretary Gates has issued new rules of engagement with the news media, according to my colleague Thom Shanker reporting this morning in The New York Times.

[“Gates Tightens Rules for Military and the Media,” New York Times, July 2, 2010]

The Pentagon says it’s not related to the Rolling Stone article that brought down Gen. McChrystal.  Nevertheless it requires all on the record interviews to be cleared by the Pentagon.  Which means if reporters want get any quotes or insights that go beyond the official Pentagon-sanctioned message, they will have to talk to anonymous sources on background, or heaven forbid, off the record.

It was Gates who famously declared, “the press is not the enemy” shortly six months after he took over back in 2007.

“The same is true with the press, in my view a critically important guarantor of our freedom. When it identifies a problem, as at Walter Reed, the response of senior leaders should be to find out if the allegations are true – as they were at Walter Reed – and if so, say so, and then act to remedy the problem. If untrue, then be able to document that fact. The press is not the enemy, and to treat it as such is self-defeating.“
– Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense, Annapolis, Maryland, May 25, 2007

The now infamous Rolling Stone article so clearly shows, treating the press as your friend can be self-defeating, too.  Or at least career-limiting.

By the way: There is a lot of grumbling among career military PAOs [Public Affairs Officers] that this massive screw-up with McChrystal was a the fault of a politically-appointed civilian who was “too clever by half” in pursuing the trendy goal of “strategic communications.”  No one quite knows what “strategic communications” is, but the general idea is to do a better job winning people over to your way of thinking, and so the idea of getting a story in Rolling Stone was perhaps aimed at reaching a different audience, which up to now has not been all that supportive of the war effort.  Not only did the effort backfire in spectacular fashion, it has also helped to discredit the whole notion of “strategic communications,” which many see as a gussied-up euphemism for plain old media manipulation and propaganda.

There will be a lot of handwringing inside and outside media circles about how all this is going to make the missions of both the military and the media more difficult.  But the truth is it will change very little.  Commanders will be more wary. There will be a short term cutback on embed opportunities with senior officers, but in the end experienced reporters with a track record of integrity and independence, will use their hard-earned trust to get the access they need.  That’s never easy.

Meanwhile the whole episode serves as reminder to both sides of the military/media divide just where their loyalties should lie.

One footnote:

Traveling with Secretary Gates to Singapore shortly after his 2007 speech, I made up a bunch of buttons with his “not the enemy” quote, and passed them out to the traveling press, as a joke to gently chide the secretary to live by his words.

I wore one on my lapel to one of those off the record after-hours social events that have now come under renewed scrutiny.

(You can see it in this picture I have posted here, if you click on it to see the image full size.)

It was a typical off the record affair, just a chance for the traveling party to mix share some lighthearted banter, and yes there was drinking going on.  I can’t tell you what was in the secretary’s glass but I think it was club soda.  As you can see I was drinking what appears to be lemonade in a wine glass.  What did we discuss that night?  In all honesty I have no idea.  I didn’t take notes, and I don’t remember.   But I can assure you no one was dissing the President.  And there were no hijinks that the press corps was covering up.