Chapter 4
The Persian Gulf

"Something is definitely underway here. Something is definitely going on... obviously an attack is under way of some sort." With those words ABC correspondent Gary Shephard, on Wednesday January 16, 1991 at 6:34 P.M. (EST) became the first journalist to break the story of Operation Desert Storm. Never before had a war begun or been waged on live television viewed by an international audience of millions, and from the beginning, the journalists were as much a part of the story of the Gulf War as were the politicians and the soldiers.

On August 2, 1990 Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. An emergency session of the United Nations Security Council immediately passed resolution 660 condemning the invasion and demanding total Iraqi withdrawal. President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker began building a coalition of twenty-eight nations opposed to the invasion and annexation of Kuwait, Bush declaring on August 5 that Iraq's action "will not stand." The U.S. and other coalition forces quickly launched the ostensibly defensive Operation Desert Shield to protect Saudi Arabia, but by November, when plans were announced to double the number of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to 400,000, it was apparent that coalition forces had taken on an offensive posture. On January 9 Baker met in Geneva with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz who refused to deliver a letter from President Bush to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the two failed to agree on terms of settlement. Three days later both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate agreed to back Bush if he were to use military force to uphold the UN resolutions against Iraq, and on January 15, the deadline for total Iraqi withdrawal, Bush signed the National Security Directive formally authorizing military action. By the end of the next day war had begun as the allied coalition's aircraft quickly gained air superiority and pounded Iraq into submission.

Millions world-wide sat glued to their televisions as CNN's John Holliman described the opening moments of the bombing from the Al-Rashid Hotel in the middle of Baghdad:

George Bush himself learned about the beginning of the war at the same moment as an estimated 160 million other U.S. viewers. According to a source quoted in a British newspaper, Bush "was fiddling with the TV remote control when the bombing was due to start, and showed almost childish delight when the raid on Baghdad came through on live television at the time he had ordered it." President Bush's televised address on Wednesday night, the first night of the Gulf War, replaced John F. Kennedy's funeral as the highest rated television event in American history.

Like the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf was one of those historic events that will always be remembered by the way television depicted it. Yet, what appeared on television, particularly in the opening moments of Desert Storm, was something completely new and unprecedented. For all of the network news time devoted to the Gulf War, for the most part it was a non-event. Viewers saw little action -- the only combat footage being Iraqi anti-aircraft tracers and Patriot - Scud collisions, and received solid, factual information only at very long intervals. Rather than news, the first nights of the Gulf War were drama. Speculation became fact.

Television screens were filled with the talking heads of retired military officers and academic experts discussing weapons systems and speculating on military strategies. Never before had network news devoted more of its expensive time and resources to less real information. Even the correspondents in Riyadh and Dhahran often had to ask their news bureaus in New York and Washington for the latest developments just before they went on the air.

This lack of tantalizing visuals and hard information did nothing to limit coverage. In the five months before the outbreak of Desert Storm, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait generated 2334 television news stories -- the most ever for a single news event. From December of 1990 to February 1991 the three networks devoted approximately 47 times more of their programming to the Gulf Crisis than any of the next three top stories: Soviet politics, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the U.S. recession. At the beginning of the war, the networks even took the highly unprecedented step of suspending all commercials. CBS held out the longest with non-stop news broadcasting until 10:30 the next morning. As numerous polls indicated during and after Desert Storm, the American public was overwhelmingly satisfied with the quantity and quality of media coverage of the war. Yet, as a University of Massachusetts, Amherst study concluded, those who watched television more heavily during the Gulf crisis were less likely to be well informed of its causes and consequences, and more likely to support it. Despite the quantity of the coverage and the incredible number of people who watched it, the live broadcasts of the first days of war were as much the world's longest news flash as they were "news."

Television's impact on the Gulf War was profound, yet so was the impact of Gulf war on television. Desert Storm illustrated how recent technological advances in telecommunications have irrevocably altered the media-military relationship. Electronic mail, digital transmission of still photos, facsimiles, portable satellite phones, lap top computers, and instantaneous audio-visual transmission via satellite were just a few of the relatively new technologies brought by reporters to the Persian Gulf region. Though it made information gathering faster and easier, this new technology did not necessarily improve media coverage. To a large extent, the Gulf War showed that the satellite has made immediacy rather than accuracy the defining standard of media quality. If, as the saying goes, news is the first rough draft of history, then the news of the high-tech Gulf War came in "so fast that watching TV [was] a little like looking over a journalists shoulder at his notebook while he scribbles away. We have the facts before we actually have the story." Usually the news the American public watches every evening is the end result of a long process of selection, editing, and digestion which occurs in news rooms. During the Gulf War, particularly in the first few days and during the televised press briefings throughout, viewers were able to see "reporters in the messy business of doing this job: asking difficult, often contentious, sometimes impolite, questions." As Brookings Institution media expert Stephen Hess commented, the television news of the Gulf War was "like showing just the raw data in an experiment or one's notes." Analysis and thoughtfulness naturally were diminished by such coverage.

Reporters in the Persian Gulf, were incredibly powerful sources of information for a global audience. As Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) noted, "For the first time in history, an individual journalist at the front lines is technologically capable of reporting what he or she sees to a world audience in real time." Despite this capability, the same technology also gave the military the ability to make journalists obsolete. Often, reporters were "by-passed as conduits for official information since the military could now speak directly via television cameras to the publics in whose name they were operating." The technology that made journalists so powerful also provided the military the opportunity to bypass news organizations and journalists. The military itself was able to use television to speak directly to the public and put its own "spin" on events.

In many ways, the biggest story of the Gulf War was the media itself, particularly Ted Turner's 24 hour-a-day Cable News Network. Before January 16, 1991 CNN had rarely drawn more than a million viewers in the United States for any sort of sustained coverage. At the height of the Baghdad bombing CNN reached a global audience, was watched by 10 million people in the U.S. alone, and was an intelligence source for George Bush, Saddam Hussein and their generals. During the first wave of missile and air attacks, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, said that "one way his officials had been able to gauge the effectiveness of the raids was by listening to CNN reporters 'who were watching it unfold.'" Unlike the other television networks, CNN was able to sustain coverage in Baghdad for most of the Gulf War because of an exclusive rental of a "four wire" communication system negotiated with the Iraqi government in November of 1990 for $15,000 a week. The overseas phone line consisted of two dedicated channels in each direction occupying a band twice the size of conventional bands. The line required no operators or switches and allowed reporters stationed on the roof of the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad to scoop the world. The other three American networks were themselves at times dependent on CNN for information. NBC anchor Tom Brokaw at one point interviewed CNN's Bernard Shaw in Baghdad.

The ability of viewers to be in so many distant, disparate places at once via satellite television produced truly bizarre events. On January 17, during the second day of air attacks against Iraq, while CNN talked to its reporters in Iraq the network was

As the CNN anchor pointed out, the audio-visual montage was "surreal." By being in Saddam Hussein's mosque, George Bush's church, and Atlanta, Georgia simultaneously -- in other words, by being everywhere at once -- viewers of Gulf War television were ironically often left without any useful, understandable information. Though this small slice of a CNN broadcast was in a sense news in its rawest, most pure form, it was also scattered, incoherent, and virtually meaningless. This was the paradox of the modern telecommunications technology used in the Gulf War. Media-military expert, Peter Braestrupp pointed out that "Television news, as it has evolved, favors a clear story line, smoke, flame, emotion, spectacle. The complexities of the Persian Gulf build-up did not lend themselves to nine second sound-bites or the pontifications of anchormen." The wide-ranging events of the Gulf War were simply too complex to fit into the tidy formats of traditional television news. Incoherence and over-simplification were the frequent results.

The print media did a somewhat better job of in-depth coverage of the Gulf War. To be certain that their product was not dated by the time it hit the news stand in the morning, newspapers were forced to consider seriously what their readers already knew from watching television the evening before. Despite the early "death of print" predictions, newspaper and magazine sales rose during the Gulf War. On the one hand, the print media spiced up its coverage with colorful charts and maps that looked quite similar to what appeared on television. Yet, newspapers and magazines also tended to offer a wider range of perspectives and more thoughtful and creative analysis of events than TV. The main role of print during the Gulf War was to synthesize the raw, incoherent and often incorrect data provided by television. "There's a lot of confusion, particularly with numbers," said one New York Times editor. "It's in the very ad hoc nature of reporting things as they happen. Newspapers can sit back and wait, lay the story out a bit more [than television]."

The political implications of this new telecommunications technology were enormous. The availability of CNN in 105 countries spawned what has been coined "tele-diplomacy." World leaders whose nations were at war were able to send messages to each other on CNN. George Bush and Saddam Hussein knew that any speech made to their own people would also be heard by their foreign allies and enemies. Nowhere was this power of the media as a policy-making force better illustrated than at the end of the war. By the end of March, as American troops quickly withdrew from Iraq, the remains of Iraq's army drove rebellious Kurds and Shi'ites into Iran and Turkey. Criticism of Bush's hasty withdrawal had been confined to the editorial pages of newspapers for about two weeks before the world's television cameras finally captured images of starving Kurds struggling in the rugged mountains of Turkey and Northern Iraq. The Bush administration had been able to ignore the newspaper editorials, but the same was not true for television pictures. "Coverage of the massacre and exodus of the Kurds generated public pressures that were instrumental in slowing the hasty American withdrawal from Iraq and forcing a return to help guard and care for the victims of Saddam Hussein's vengeance." The power of new media technology was evident.

Though it certainly was not stated as such, the primary purpose of Desert Storm press pools and news briefings was to curb and channel the power of this media technology. The press pooling system that had been developed by the Sidle Panel after Grenada and used in Panama was tested once again in the Persian Gulf. As was the case in Panama, controversy swirled around the pool and members of the media complained about the stringency of the military's restrictions. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney initially refused to allow reporters to accompany the first wave of troops to Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Faced with mounting criticism, on August 13, the Defense Department finally permitted a seventeen member pool to go to Dhahran accompanied by six press officers. In Dhahran journalists were handed the official news media ground rules for Desert Shield, which among other things, stated that journalists needed to be physically fit, could not carry a weapon, had to remain with a military escort at all times, and that their datelines could not name specific places. Included in the page long list of categories of information not releasable were types and numbers of troops, aircraft, equipment and supplies, and information on operations underway, future operations, security precautions, and rules of engagement.

In October of 1990, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Defense, Pete Williams met with media representatives to discuss proposals for new ground rules and guidelines in case of a shooting war in the Persian Gulf. Williams said the restrictions were necessary to mollify the Saudi government as well as for U.S. security reasons. Unable to reach a consensus at that meeting, the Public Affairs staff at the Pentagon eventually produced four drafts of rules to be used in the coming Desert Storm. In keeping with the Sidle Panel, Williams originally proposed doing away with the pools once independent reporting in the war zone became feasible, though this idea was eventually eliminated by Williams' superiors. The reason for this Williams explained, was that the Pentagon was "not technically using the Sidle Panel's point-by-point blueprint for a National Media Pool because there are 1,400 reporters already there." The final guidelines warned reporters that because of "host-nation requirements, you must stay with your public affairs escort while on Saudi bases," that news media personnel "who are not members of the official CENTCOM media pools will not be permitted into forward areas," and that "pool products will be the subject to review [sic] before release to determine if they contain sensitive information." The guidelines also claimed that the material would be examined "solely for its conformance to the attached ground rules, not for its potential to express criticism or cause embarrassment."

As was supposed to happen in Panama, the press pool consisted of a handful of journalists representing different types of media who were assigned to front line units and whose work was to be shared among all news organizations. The pool's members were under constant military escort while reporters in Saudi Arabia who were not pool members were permitted only to attend the daily press briefings and forage on their own for rear echelon stories. The way the system was supposed to work for print journalists, stories were reviewed first by public affairs officers in the field, then sent to the Joint Information Bureau press center in Dhahran. If the press center officers found fault with the story they would send it to the Pentagon where public affairs officials would either approve it or would call the reporter's editor or bureau chief to discuss the problem. According to Pete Williams, this system thus left "the final decision to publish or broadcast in the hands of journalists, not the military." In the high-speed competitive news business, however, it was apparent that the red tape of the security review process was itself de facto censorship.

The Pentagon constantly claimed that the great numbers of media personnel in Saudi Arabia had dangerously "overtaxed the military's ability to respond" to basic needs as well as emergencies. Though news organizations complained about not being allowed in the pools, the military argued that it was "neither funded nor resourced to provide for all the media personnel that an aggressive and competitive press industry would like to send." As of December 25, there were 260 accredited media members in Saudi Arabia, though as war appeared more likely, journalists arrived at a rate of 50 a day. Journalist Jonathan Alter believed that the military used the large number of media personnel to their advantage. "The Americans with the help of the Saudis set the press up for this by having no accreditation system at all and letting in any reporter from any publication anywhere. That give them a pretty good excuse for limiting access." On January 17, the morning after the bombing began, 127 more news people were flown to Saudi Arabia in an Air Force cargo plane. According to Pete Williams, "The fact that senior military commanders dedicated one of their cargo airplanes to the job of transporting another 127 journalists to Saudi Arabia demonstrated the military's commitment to take reporters to the scene of the action so they could get the story to the American people." On the eve of the allied offensive into Kuwait and Iraq in late February there were more than 1,400 media people in the Persian Gulf region. Of these, 192 of them had been allowed to join military units as part of 24 different press combat pools.

One of the more interesting and perhaps the most visible facet of the press-military relationship during the Gulf War were the daily televised briefings from Dhahran and Riyadh. The military briefings were the main source of official information for journalists not participating in pools, though most who participated in the briefings felt that, in fact, they rarely provided useful information. In a survey conducted after the Gulf War by the Gannett Foundation, 71% of reporters who were in the Persian Gulf said the press briefings were not at all or only somewhat helpful to them. "Dhahran," quipped one correspondent, "was a news free environment." Since the press briefings were conducted in front of television cameras and broadcast live, and since it was known that the Iraqis could watch these briefings, it was somewhat understandable that public affairs officers were unwilling to tell the press very much. Nevertheless, reporters grew angry as "tight-lipped officers avoided questions as simple as what the weather was like over Iraq." Walter Cronkite criticized the briefings as "ridiculously inadequate," and asked, "Why should we not be told what bridges have been hit? Don't the Iraqis know?"

The ultimate result of the Dhahran press briefings was to make the press look extremely bad. In comparison to the patient, authoritative military briefers, reporters looked like

At the beginning of February, after watching the mood turn sour at a press briefing, General Shwarzkopf summoned press representatives to listen to their complaints. From then on, the television portion of the briefings lasted a half an hour with time afterwards for off-the-record questions and answers. After the ground war was launched on February 23, the Dhahran press briefings, for better or worse, were suspended indefinitely.

Generally, the military was strongly in favor of the pool system, and happy with the way it functioned. Though Pete Williams realized that the pools rubbed "reporters the wrong way," he felt there was simply

What pleased Williams most about the pool system was the fact that it gave reporters the opportunity to be with troops in a number of different places when the war started and gave these independent observers the opportunity to be "eyewitnesses to history."

Even though the military used press guidelines of previous wars to develop the ground rules for Operation Desert Storm, Williams stressed that critics of the pool system should remember that the war in the Persian Gulf was quite different from any previous American conflicts. Williams told the U.S. Senate,

Though the pool system did occasionally slow the flow of news, Williams and others in the military did not feel that, as many in the media claimed, these delays had any effect "on the People's Right to Know or upon the Verdict of History, but did have some effect on the competitive positions of news organizations, and upon the careers and egos of journalists, which are often more meaningful to journalists than the People's Right to Know or the Verdict of History."

And the "People" seemed to agree with the military. Throughout the war Times / Mirror polls showed that public opinion was strongly in favor of the White House and Pentagon's treatment of the press. In a January 27 poll, 78% of those surveyed thought that the military was telling them as much as it could and supported the Pentagon's media restrictions. 79% had a great deal or fair amount of confidence that the military was giving the public an accurate picture of the war, yet, at the same time, 76% believed that news reports from the Gulf were being censored by the military. Though three quarters of Americans were aware that the military was withholding information from them, they were seemingly un-interested in knowing much more than the sketchiest details about the war. After an allied bombing in mid-February destroyed a building in which several hundred Iraqis died, the public outcry that arose was not, "for the most part, against the allied bombing strategy but against television networks for showing the grisly footage uncritically and thus once again serving Saddam's propaganda needs." Perhaps the best gauge of public opinion of the press - military relationship was a skit done on NBC's satiric Saturday Night Live. In it, a colonel at a press briefing fielded ridiculous questions such as, "what date are we going to start the ground attack?" And, "where would you say our forces are most vulnerable to attack and how could the Iraqis best exploit those weaknesses?" It was quite telling that rather than choosing the stiff-backed military leader or the bumbling president as its target, one of the nation's premier forums of political satire chose to mock the press. Clearly, if the public did have as big a stake in open media coverage of the Gulf War as many journalists seemed to think, then they were not doing a very good job of getting that point across.

Not surprisingly, numerous journalists, military people and others were extremely critical of and opposed to the pool system. By the end of the war, three separate law suits had been filed, though in every case courts upheld the military's right to restrict public access during war. As soon as the Pentagon published the guidelines and ground rules for Operation Desert Shield Pete Williams received a slew of letters from disgruntled editors and bureau chiefs. The overwhelming consensus was that the rules far overstepped "the common-sense bounds necessary to protect the security of U.S. military operations," and that they were "at once so broad and so vague that they [were] bound to lead to disagreement and misinterpretation." They argued that the rules were "wildly excessive and seemingly a prescription for total control and gridlock."

The system of military escorts also came under heavy fire. Though Williams continued to insist that the "idea of an escort is not to be a hovering presence. The ratio is not one escort to every reporter. They are there primarily to facilitate reporters getting to where they need to be, to look out for their needs, to keep them moving, to keep them joined up with the unit." Yet, in reporter's actual experiences, the escorts were not quite as unobtrusive as Pete Williams thought.

Even Winant Sidle, one of the major military forces behind the creation of the pool system believed the "business of always having a public affairs officer with all reporters... is incorrect."

The bureaucracy of the pool system also caused tremendous problems for the media. There was a general feeling amongst journalists that the soldiers at the front lines wanted to speak with them and help them while the people at the Joint Information Bureau back in Dhahran were doing all they could to make things difficult. If a reporter only wanted to know the rate of fire of an M-16, he or she would have to fill out a form that gave their name, said who they were with, the date, the time, and what they were looking for. If a reporter wanted to go somewhere there was yet another form. It usually took two to three weeks before responses were provided for any of these requests. Often, the purpose of the hold-ups and the red tape seemed to be only to allow Pentagon officials to break and shape important news stories before journalists could get to them. Correspondents in the Persian Gulf had numerous tales of their reports being held up in the security review only to hear General Shwarzkopf or some lesser briefing officer announce the very same supposedly classified news a couple of hours later. In this way, the military used the pool system to maintain the ability to scoop the media whenever they wanted to.

A number of prominent military people were also opposed to the Pentagon's pool system. Former Pentagon spokesman and member of the Sidle Panel, Fred Hoffman, believed that the pool was misused in the Gulf War. "The pool was never intended to be the be-all and end-all of coverage. It shouldn't have been used beyond the earliest stages of the war." Likewise, retired Army Colonel David Hackworth, the most decorated living veteran in the United States, covered the war for Newsweek. He felt that "the military's paranoia and their thought police" over-controlled the press:

The pool system also raised the important question of access. Of all of the coalition partners with forces in the Persian Gulf the U.S. military was without a doubt the most strict in controlling the media. Though Pete Williams and the Pentagon touted their system as one in which there was no need for censorship, in fact, the military's control over the pools and the lack of access for those reporters not allowed in the pools was an even more powerful form of pre-censorship. As Sydney Schanberg noted, "If reporters can go only where their babysitters decide to take them and can stay only a short time, they have already been subjected to the ultimate form of censorship." Media members in Saudi Arabia were unpaid employees of the Department of Defense rather than independent observers, and quite clearly, as Pat Sloyan of Newsday realized, "The pool was set up to obstruct coverage. Reporters were not allowed to be in key situations at crucial moments. The Pentagon wanted us to go where they wanted us to go." In the end, the experience of Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times best summed up the problem of the combat pools and Dhahran briefings: Murphy said, "A friend of mine took a picture of me the other day taking notes in front of a television set. That's what being a war correspondent has come to."

If journalists in the Gulf War were irresponsible or even if they unwittingly caused security breaches then perhaps the military was justified in levying such tight restrictions. There were incidents in which reporters proved themselves to be unwise if not untrustworthy. Occasionally correspondents seemed to overstep the bounds of acceptable types and amounts of detail about troops to be broadcast on live television. At one point, CBS cameraman David Greene in Khafji told Dan Rather, "Unfortunately, every position between here and the border that was being manned by the Saudis is empty. There's not one Saudi between here and the border. They've all gone.... They could just walk in here, the Iraqis, if they wanted." Similarly, ABC reporter Forrest Sawyer describing Saudi and Kuwaiti border fortifications announced on television, "There are little look out posts that are right at the top of a revetment facing towards the Iraqis. And then there's a trench that they move along in and then another rise of sand where they have pulled in some of their M-60 tanks." He continued, "Now, further behind that are some of the men that are dug in with their mortars, with their 155 millimeter artillery."

Despite the fact that in these two cases American journalists appeared to be doing Iraqi reconnaissance, during the ground war there was only one breach of ground rules by a journalist -- a story about Air Force tactics used to locate and destroy Iraqi tanks. The violation did not harm operations and, the Pentagon was mostly satisfied with reporting. For as many examples there were of journalists releasing potentially sensitive information there were even more instances where they kept military secrets safe. Weeks before the allied ground offensive was launched, correspondents from CBS, NBC, the Washington Post, and the U.S. News and World Report were all aware of General Shwarzkopf's secret strategy to push north into Iraq and envelop the Iraqi forces. None of these journalists ever considered leaking this valuable information. Frank Aukofer, the Washington Bureau Chief for the Milwaukee Journal was also in Saudi Arabia during the war. He told the story of how

Though the Pentagon did not treat them as such, American journalists repeatedly proved that they were not another enemy for U.S. forces to fight.

The press pools and briefings were two of the most significant ways in which the military maintained tight control over spin and information during the Gulf War and frequently this restrictiveness bordered on censorship. Pete Williams stated repeatedly that in the security review procedure it was not legitimate for the military "to object to something because it is critical or because we didn't like it. There are only two tests. One is security of an operation. The other is the safety of the troops." Despite these assurances there were numerous examples of political censorship. Not only were lines of copy frequently deleted; military censors also took the liberty of changing words. After one of the first bombing runs of the war, pool reporter Fred Bruni of the Detroit Free Press used the word "giddy" to describe young Stealth bomber pilots returning from their first combat mission. Without consulting Bruni a military censor changed the word "giddy" to "proud." Likewise, New York Times correspondent Malcolm Browne told of one story in which his phrase "fighter-bomber" had been stricken and replaced by the word "fighter." Browne speculated,

Clearly, none of these examples of censorship were done for Pete Williams' stated purposes of operational security and troop safety.

Perhaps an even bigger threat than the outright censorship was the fact that journalists who had been selected for the press pool were working with full knowledge that the military could throw them out at any time. When Douglas Jehl of the Los Angeles Times reported that fifty U.S. military vehicles were missing "officials explained that his story, which had been cleared by military censors, was contrary to 'the best interests' of the military. They ordered him to leave the pool." Regarding this censorship Andre Codiescu wrote,

Newsweek reporter Tony Clifton who has covered every major war since the 1960s was even more blunt: "In twenty years, the only nation I've found to be more restrictive -- and not much more restrictive -- was Iraq."

In response to this restrictiveness, many reporters in the Persian Gulf broke away from the system and set out on their own. These journalists, referred to by the military as "unilaterals," ended up doing some of the best reporting of the war. For many of the unilaterals, it was "perfectly easy to get a jeep and drive up any one of the roads and either get yourself arrested or meet somebody who decides not to arrest you and become adopted as a mascot." A British journalist, Con Coughlin, explained how many of these independent correspondents functioned:

Obviously, pretending to be an allied soldier was a potentially dangerous endeavor for journalists armed with nothing more than pens and note pads. There was, however, only one instance of media personnel being captured by Iraqi soldiers. A CBS reporter and camera crew were caught near the Iraqi border but were later returned to the U.S. unharmed. On February 6 there was also an amusing case of four Iraqi soldiers surrendering themselves to a crew of non-pool reporters.

For the most part, the biggest danger unilateral journalists faced was stumbling across American forces. There was the unescorted Time photographer, Wesley Bocke, a 30 year combat veteran, who tried to take a picture of a tank, was seized by Alabama National Guardsmen, spread-eagled, blind-folded, had his credentials removed, and was held in a desert camp overnight. Similar were the experiences of the Reuters photographer who stopped by a U.S. Marine position near the Kuwaiti border to ask permission to take pictures and was held at gunpoint for nine hours, the British television crews who were detained for trying to report on the oil slick threatening Saudi shores, and the unilateral reporter who stumbled across some Marines, had his car surrounded for six hours and was told he would be shot if he moved. And the reason for the Marines' threats: one said they had "orders from above to make this pool system work." The New York Times' Chris Hedges was also seized by the American military and lost his credentials for conducting "unauthorized" interviews without an escort. He had been caught speaking to Saudi shopkeepers along a road 50 miles from the Kuwaiti border.

These clashes between the military and the media were nothing compared to the fighting that went on within journalists own ranks. As Joan Lowy of the Rocky Mountain News put it: "There were two pool wars in Saudi Arabia, one between the military and the media, the other between the journalists themselves.... Once the Pentagon established this pool system and we bought into it, we were reduced to fighting over scraps of who got what slots." By so limiting the opportunities to be involved in the combat pools and by delegating to the U.S. news media in Dhahran many of the decisions about who got pool slots, bitter fights resulted amongst journalists -- a development which one Washington Bureau Chief couldn't "help but believe was foreseen by the Pentagon brass." All in all, media members spent too much time fighting each other, and "too much energy interviewing each other on the failure of the system... and not enough figuring out how to turn it to [their] advantage."

Though the Pentagon denied having done it consciously, setting reporters against each other was perhaps their most effective method of restriction and control. There were numerous examples of journalists turning against each other. A French television crew that arrived on the outskirts of the town of Khafji during the fighting there was met with angry shouts from pool reporters who were already on the scene. The crew was then forced at gunpoint to release the video tape it had shot of a wounded American soldier. Unilateral Robert Fisk encountered similar troubles when he stumbled upon a press pool attached to the 1st U.S. Marine Division. His fellow reporters yelled at him, "You asshole, you'll prevent us from working. You're not allowed here. Get out. Go back to Dhahran." With journalists like these, the military's restriction efforts were well facilitated. In all of the criticism the media levelled towards the military during the Gulf War, it was easy to forget how petty the media itself could be. According to journalist David Lamb, "The unspoken issue, as much as providing the public with information, was how to protect your byline or get your face on television." Journalists at times seemed to care as much about self-aggrandizement as they did about freedom of access and Constitutional rights.

By the time of the ground war there were about 1,200 journalists in Saudi Arabia who were not members of combat pools. With military press briefings cancelled and few channels of information left open to them, many of these reporters chose to try to experience combat without the assistance of pools and military escorts. Journalists "poured out of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Riyadh and the Dhahran International and headed north in their own vehicles, waved through checkpoints manned by smiling Saudis." Many of these reporters linked up with Arab units, and with their satellite phones, relayed to the world some of the best accounts of the ground war. Though as BBC's Mark Laity noted, "it was the sometimes self-righteous reporters who steered clear of the official system who frequently got it wrong... official truthfulness was aided because the war was going their way -- there isn't much temptation to lie when the truth is mostly good news," the observations of unilateral reporters were often extremely valuable in differentiating the facts of the Gulf War from the Pentagon's official version. CBS correspondent Bob McKeown's dash into Kuwait City ahead of the allied liberation forces ruined the U.S. military's false claims that Arab forces were the first into Kuwait. The stories and pictures produced by the non-pool correspondents proved that the great majority of journalists were not interested solely in digging up dirt and presenting to the public a sullied picture of the American military. As unilateral New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges said, "by working outside the pool, we could speak with soldiers without the presence of an escort. This did not always mean that we wrote stories that criticized the military."

Without a doubt the most visible and most controversial unilateral of all was CNN correspondent Peter Arnett. Arnett, a Pulitzer prize winner for his reporting in Vietnam, was heavily criticized for choosing to stay in Baghdad under Iraqi censorship reporting the results of the allied bombings. In all of Arnett's broadcasts CNN made clear that he was under heavy Iraqi censorship and restriction. Nevertheless, especially irate about his coverage, Senator Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyoming), "fired off a cruddy old piece of Cold War artillery" calling Arnett an Iraqi "sympathizer," and citing his marriage to a Vietnamese woman (from whom he has been separated for years) as proof of Arnett's disloyalty as an American. Colonel Harry Summers, for the most part a critic of the military's press policy, was also disturbed by an American journalist reporting from within Baghdad: "In World War II that would have been treason. In the Korean War, the reporting, so-called, of Australian Communist Wilfred Burchett and the London Daily Worker's Alan Winnington was seen for what it was, enemy propaganda, pure and simple."

Arnett defended his reporting and his choice to stay inside of Baghdad. Upon his return to the U.S. he said, "I was contributing such a little sliver that I felt that if there was a little unbalance there it would be well compensated by the Pentagon, Saudi Arabian briefings and other information that came over the pike." Arnett also told Larry King, "I was in Baghdad for the people who look at CNN," not for the United States government. There were many others in the press who also defended Arnett and CNN's choice to broadcast from the capital of Iraq. Walter Goodman believed "It was important that people see more of the consequences of the bombing than the photographs through targeting cross hairs beloved of Pentagon warriors. Nothing is harder or more essential to remember in the heat of war than that the other side is made up of humans too." Arnett made the same choice that virtually any journalist would have made, and though his reporting was obviously censored and manipulated by his Iraqi minders, it added an important dimension to the media coverage of the war that otherwise would have been neglected.

Just as the Iraqi military was thoroughly routed by the American forces in the shooting war, so too did the U.S. military score a tremendous victory over the press in the information war. From the very beginning, the Pentagon controlled the voice and imagery of the war as tightly as political managers control American presidential campaigns. The brutish and bumbling military public relations tactics of Grenada and Panama were replaced in the Persian Gulf by a Pentagon that ran its war as smoothly as any Madison Avenue public relations firm could have done. As former Reagan aide / image expert Michael Deaver noted, the Gulf War was "such a propaganda success that a team of experts could not have planned it better." Obviously, what Deaver failed to recognize was that the public affairs officials of the Pentagon are exactly that -- a team of propaganda experts.

The lessons about the media which the military learned in Vietnam truly paid off in the Gulf War. According to retired Army colonel William D. Henderson, in 1983

The public relations war was just as well coordinated and planned as the shooting war had been. From the beginning of Operation Desert Storm officials from the White House, State Department, Pentagon and the CIA gathered every morning before dawn to plot the spin of the day. Because of this tight central coordination public relations officials had the ability to "pump out core texts to briefers and politicians around the world." From Washington, these planners "could shift moods, hail victory or exert glum caution with unparalleled control."

One of the best examples of the military's control over imagery and the media's compliance of this was the fanfare caused by the Patriot-Scud missile duels in the skies over the Middle East. Even though 93% of the bombs dropped on Iraq were guided by nothing more than gravity, the high-tech "smart" weapons like the Patriot were the ones constantly paraded before the cameras at the military briefings and upon which the media focused inordinate amounts of attention. Until the ground war in February, Scud attacks and correspondents wearing gas masks were the closest things the media had to combat footage. So even though the Patriot-Scud battles were but a small facet of the war over all, during the first week of the war, they became the main focus. The Patriot's Scud interceptions became a televisual microcosm of the conflict as a whole.

The media became so enthralled by the good guy - bad guy imagery and drama of the Scud attacks that they began to project what they wanted to see on to visuals of the mid-air duels. On January 22, ABC's Sam Donaldson narrated as, on screen, a bright object rocketed across the sky and another climbed to meet it. "A Scud missile is heading towards Dhahran in eastern Saudi Arabia. And rising to intercept it, a U.S. Patriot missile. Bullseye! No more Scud!" But on the screen, the Scud continued through the flash unaltered from its path towards the ground.

The facts of the Patriot missile's success turned out to be quite different from the image originally created by the media and the military at the beginning of the war. In the Winter 1991 issue of International Security, an M.I.T. professor, Theodore Postol wrote that based on their performance in Desert Storm, the Patriots were in reality almost a "total failure to intercept quite primitive attacking missiles." Though in March the Army and President Bush had been trumpeting the Patriot's 45 of 47 Scud interceptions, by December they had lowered that figure to 50% success over Israel and 80% success over Saudi Arabia. Quite often Patriots hit Scud fuel tanks while leaving their warheads to continue along their path. And even after the interceptions, the falling debris of a Scud and the three or four Patriots fired at it, did more damage than the armed Scud would have had it been left alone. But since public perception of the Patriot had been so effectively manipulated, in November 1991 Congress endorsed the goal of developing anti-ballistic missile systems by boosting funds for the "star wars" S.D.I. program from $3.1 billion in 1991 to $4.15 billion in 1992. Pentagon lobbyists also used the illusion of the Patriot's success to push a new $40 billion system called G-Pals, an acronym for "global protection against limited strikes." "The Patriot debate is a sobering indicator that once people 'see' a weapon work, it can be hard to change their minds. A picture is worth not just a thousand words, but a billion dollars."

The battle of Khafji also illustrated the extent to which the Pentagon tried to maintain control over imagery and events, and was a turning point in media-military relations of the Gulf War. On January 31, coalition forces retook Khafji from Iraqi forces. During the eighteen hours which pool reporters were not allowed into the town, the world was just going to have to rely on U.S. briefers to find out what was happening in Khafji. The Associated Press's John King, however, slipped into a U.S. armored personnel carrier and drove into the city with a group of Marines. For political reasons, the Pentagon wanted to give the impression that the battle for Khafji was fought and easily won by their Arab coalition partners with little help from the U.S.. King and other reporters who eventually made it into Khafji were stunned to hear General Shwarzkopf and other military briefers in Riyadh telling the world that Saudi and Qatari forces had successfully retaken the town even as the battle raged around them. Listening to the radio as Shwarzkopf described how U.S. forces did not take part in the liberation, King saw one U.S. officer point to an exhausted Marine who had just escaped from the town minutes earlier carrying with him a charred Iraqi AK-47 machine gun and say, "Tell him that." The Khafji incident laid bare the disturbing willingness of the U.S. to alter the facts to make sure that military goals coincided with political ones. The discrepancies between the official story and journalists' versions that came out of Khafji severely hurt the credibility of the coalition. Reporters' fears that military briefings were telling them partial or manipulated truths were confirmed in Khafji.

As the Pentagon did its best to act like a public relations firm, the Kuwaitis were busy hiring real public relations firms -- seven in all -- to aid their cause. Hill & Knowlton, headed at the time by Craig Fuller, George Bush's former vice presidential Chief of Staff, was one of the biggest and most active of these firms. Hired by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a group funded by the Emir of Kuwait, the extent of the firm's involvement in war propaganda was truly extraordinary. In November 1990, a Kuwaiti refugee girl called Nayirah appeared before a Congressional caucus hearing with an emotional appeal for the United States to rescue her country. Her story about Iraqi soldiers tearing new born infants from incubators received wide coverage and was frequently cited by President Bush. What was not frequently discussed, however, was that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and that she had rehearsed her speech before cameras at Hill & Knowlton. On November 27, another Kuwaiti woman identified only as a "refugee" appeared before a televised session of the U.N. Security Council. The woman was Fatima Fahed, wife of a Kuwaiti government official and herself a well-known television personality in Kuwait. She was coached and her wardrobe and script were prepared by Hill & Knowlton. Later, Fahed admitted that she had lied and had no first hand knowledge of the things which she told the Security Council. This firm was also the source of a number of amateur videos shot inside Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation and smuggled out. The videos were screened and edited at Hill & Knowlton's bases in Riyadh and Dhahran and the tapes were then distributed free of charge to Western television networks. The firm also helped to arrange Free Kuwait Day and was directly involved in lobbying the United States Congress.

The military was also adept at using disinformation to manipulate the press in the Persian Gulf. Towards the end of January, U.S. censors and briefers began allowing information to slip about the unpreparedness of American forces as well as rumors about plans for a massive amphibious landing on Kuwait. Both were untrue and as the press found out later, American military strategists had been using them to spread false information to the Iraqis. The disinformation campaign did little to increase the media's trust of the government and proved once again exactly how dependent journalists were on the military to provide them with information.

The most successful tactic of the Pentagon's public relations offensive was simply to keep the press busy. Whereas in Panama reporters sat and stewed in a windowless little room, in the Persian Gulf, military escorts constantly had hardware to show off and places to bring reporters. Though they often appeared to be getting a lot of information from the military, journalists were usually being diverted from the events that were truly newsworthy. As Norman Shwarzkopf said, "Listen, I ain't no dummy when it comes to dealing with the press. And I finally understand that when you try to stonewall the press, and don't give them anything to do, then before long the press turns ugly, and I would just as soon not have an ugly press." Indeed, Shwarzkopf and the others who planned the information war were not dummies at all.

Just as Shwarzkopf wanted to avoid having an "ugly press" neither did he want an ugly war. The most important element of the military's image management process was to present "Operation" Desert Storm as clean and clinical. They accomplished this by allowing the world's television cameras to see as little blood and human destruction as possible. For the most part, the Pentagon was highly successful in its sterilization of the war imagery. As Sydney Schanberg said, the public only saw "superficial brush strokes across the sanitized surface of war. Bombs fall remotely and perfectly and no one seems to be bleeding. The examples of this sterilization were many, down to the smallest words and phrases chosen for maximum distance and technicality: "Attriting" was another way of saying "killing," "engage" meant "attack," to "service the adversary" was a euphemism for "killing the enemy," and when the servicing and attriting were done the "K.I.A.'s" were all neatly tucked away in "human remains pouches." Swear words uttered by soldiers and accounts of fighter-bomber pilots watching pornographic films before their mission were struck from journalists texts, even though this could not have been for any imaginable security reason. In Newark, New Jersey, the former People's Express terminal was converted into a medical reception center for the wounded; however, journalists were not allowed to go inside of it or report about it. Likewise, the Pentagon prohibited filming or coverage of war dead at Dover Air Force Base, the main military mortuary. There would be no flag-draped coffins in the Gulf War. The vast majority of the time, the only "combat footage" reporters and the public ever saw were video game images of smart bombs striking buildings and bridges through super-imposed cross hairs with pin-point accuracy. The military never released video tapes of their smart bombs missing targets. Though the American public heard plenty about the types of military equipment being used, the tonnage of bombs dropped and the numbers of aerial sorties per day, they were never given an idea about what these figures meant in terms of dead and wounded human beings.

On rare occasions the military did show reporters combat footage with humans in it. John Balzar of the Los Angeles Times described the video he viewed from an Apache helicopter's infra-red camera: "One by one [Iraqi soldiers] were cut down by attackers they couldn't see or understand. Some were literally blown to bits by bursts of 30 millimeter exploding cannon shells. One man dropped, writhed on the ground, and struggled to his feet. Another burst tore him apart." Balzar filed a pool report about this video tape, and although it was not censored, members of his pool were never again allowed to witness combat. When television did capture the images of what happened at the other end of the allied bombing, such as at the Amiriya bomb shelter in Baghdad and the Mutlah Gap road out of Kuwait City, American networks deemed the pictures to be too horrific to use. Either because of tight military control of access or network self-censorship, television was thus largely unable to illustrate to viewers the brutality of the war. As Malcolm Browne so aptly put it, "this war seemed to smell more of greasepaint than death."

The Pentagon's picture of clean warfare was nearly shattered on February 13 after a Stealth aircraft dropped two laser guided bombs into a crowded underground shelter in the Amiriya suburb of Baghdad. Though the Bush administration and military officials continued to claim the "bunker... was a military target, a command and control center that fed instructions directly to the Iraqi war machine," eye-witnesses and television pictures told a different story. An Iraqi professor of geology whose wife and four daughters were killed in the bombing claimed that of the approximately 1,600 people in the shelter, 99% were civilians, mostly women and children, and that it had absolutely no military purpose. The Iraqi government lifted all censorship restrictions on Western journalists that day, allowing them to film rescue workers removing remains barely recognizable as human. Of this footage, Western television networks broadcast no more than a few seconds and rarely were the burnt bodies shown. Laurie Garrett of Newsday was one of the few people who did see the bomb shelter tape unedited:

The White House and Pentagon reacted to the bombing not by admitting that they had perhaps made a mistake -- instead they continued to claim that the shelter was a military target and that pictures of the bodies being removed from it were propaganda. White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater told reporters, "We don't know why civilians were at this location but we do know that Saddam Hussein does not share our value of the sanctity of life." The media swallowed the warped logic of this story line and redirected the significance of the gory footage by focusing primarily on the public opinion damage caused by the bombing rather than trying to find out the facts of the incident and discover what went wrong with allied intelligence. The evening of the attack, the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour presented a five man panel which unanimously discounted the importance of the massacre. Likewise, NBC's Tom Brokaw was quick to shift the blame for the bombing and tell viewers to remember that it was "Saddam Hussein who put these innocents in harm's way." As CNN's Charles Bierbauer pointed out, the Amiriya incident illustrated "the problem for Washington in a sense was that the image of precision bombing fostered by the constant stream of official videos had promoted an illusion of infallibility which had suddenly been exposed."

The one other incident in which the human destruction of the war became clearly visible was the Battle of Mutlah Gap. On the road from Kuwait City to Basra, Iraq, just south of the Mutlah Gap, television cameras caught some of the bloodiest carnage of Operation Desert Storm. Yet, as was the case with the Amiriya footage, American viewers mostly never saw this video. On Tuesday February 26, Iraq announced its withdrawal from Kuwait and a lengthy column of civilian and military vehicles loaded with Iraqi conscripts and Kuwaiti plunder began fleeing northward. The allied forces, however, chose to view the column of vehicles as a military retreat rather than a withdrawal in compliance with U.N. resolution 660 and allied aircraft launched a full scale attack on the Iraqis. It was not until March 1, once the war had officially ended, that the first television pictures of the road to Basra appeared. With a ridge on one side, a mine field on the other and allied armor to the north and south, the fleeing Iraqis were trapped and as one pilot commented, were "like shooting fish in a barrel." Pool reporters attached to the 2nd Armor Division later drove through the "vast traffic jam of more than a mile of vehicles, perhaps 2000 or more," and one wrote,

Numerous other reporters described equally horrific scenes, and at least one pundit speculated that "awareness of what the TV pictures of the slaughter at Mutlah Gap might do to public opinion at home played an important part in President Bush's decision not to pursue the Iraqi troops any further, and certainly not to take the war to Baghdad." For the most part, though, Western television ignored the Mutlah Gap slaughter and focused on the images emerging from the liberation of Kuwait. Ultimately, neither the carnage of Amiriya or the road to Basra had significant impact on American public support for Operation Desert Storm.

No matter how much the American media complained after the war about the restrictiveness and censorship of the military, the fact remains that they themselves did a poor job during the war of being the critical, objective sources of information upon which the American public and policy makers depend. From the beginning, the mainstream American media, particularly the television networks, were unabashedly pro-war. Just after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait Americans were overwhelmingly squeamish about the prospect of fighting a war in the Persian Gulf. An August 10 Washington Post poll showed that most Americans viewed "the prospect of U.S. military engagement in the Middle East with a mix of skepticism, frustration, confusion, and outright fear." 68% of those surveyed felt that the U.S. should not go on the offensive to liberate Kuwait, while a New York Times poll showed 40% thought that Bush had been "too quick to send troops." Despite the public's obvious ambivalence the Washington Post began an August 24 article, "After several weeks of nearly unanimous public support for President Bush's moves in the Middle East...." In this way, the media did not just report on public opinion, it helped to mold it in favor of the Bush administration's pro-war policies.

The media also did this by consistently ignoring anti-war viewpoints. According to a January 16 survey conducted by the media watch-dog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, of 2,855 minutes of television coverage of the Gulf crisis from August to January, only 29 minutes, approximately 1%, dealt with popular opposition to the military build up. Foreign policy experts associated with the peace movement such as Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, or the scholars at the Institute for Policy Studies never appeared on nightly network news during this time period. The popular Sunday talk show guests during these critical months were Secretary of State James Baker, Defense Secretary Cheney, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, and their opposition were "left-wingers" like Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wisconsin) and Senator Sam Nunn (D-North Carolina) who merely had tactical objections to Bush's plans. Additionally, while the Emir's Citizens for a Free Kuwait spent millions, all four networks consistently rejected advertising from peace groups.

Also from the earliest days of the Gulf crisis to the end of the war the press consistently failed to challenge the administration with the "healthy, feisty skepticism of government hoopla that is supposed to characterize a free press." In the early days of the allied military build up, the press tended to focus more on trivial logistical questions than substantial political and historical ones. When President Bush announced in early November the commitment of another 200,000 U.S. troops, earnest debate finally began in the American press on the legitimacy and wisdom of going to war against Iraq. But it was too late. "By then, we already had a quarter million troops practicing offensive maneuvers in the desert who, according to the debate we were suddenly having, shouldn't have been there at all." Rarely was there discussion in influential sources of news about the path the president had chosen and what the costs would be. There were numerous examples of smaller incidents also left unquestioned by the press. At one U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia a banner suspended inside a hangar depicted an American superman holding in his arms a limp terrified little Arab with a hooked nose. Pool journalists deemed this blatant racism unworthy of even a mention. Likewise, when after a bombing run a U.S. Marine pilot described the view from his airplane as "like turning on the kitchen light and the cockroaches started scurrying.... We finally got them out where we could find them and kill them," this too went unquestioned by reporters.

It was no wonder that the media did not get to ask any of these potentially penetrating questions. They were simply too busy acting as the Pentagon's unofficial cheerleaders. Down to the smallest phrases and word choices, news reports were incessantly pro-war. Rather than calling it the "Iraqi Army," newsmen used negative sounding descriptions like, "Saddam's million man Army of battle hardened troops." ABC's Peter Jennings talked about the "brilliance " of American laser guided bombs while referring to the Iraqi Scud as "a horrifying weapon." CBS praised "two days of perfect assaults" and called the initial bombing of Iraq a "marvel." Correspondents in Baghdad on the first night compared the assault to a Fourth of July celebration at the Washington Monument. Melodramatic declarations like the Philadelphia Inquirer's, "Thursday morning was one of the moments suspended in time... paving the way for a dawn of hope" sounded more like lines from a bad 1940s war movie than news. CNN correspondent Brian Jenkins again showed the subjective bias of the media when in one report he said that captured Iraqis looked like "fearsome... war-like people" while the Saudis he was travelling with were "gentle mild mannered people." Sports metaphors such as Dan Rather's "The allied fast break offense is running, gunning, and going good," were thoroughly odious in the way they simplified the war, and any hope of impartiality was lost as NBC's Fred Francis and Tom Brokaw used the words "we" and "our" as though they were members of a Pentagon strategic planning team. And then there was the Los Angeles Times post-war article that declared: "Hooray for us! We kicked butt! America the Great! We take guff from no one no more no how." So much for the free and independent fourth estate.

Though most Americans never knew it from watching their televisions, the Persian Gulf War was not clean and bloodless. Estimates of Iraqi military casualties ranged well past 100,000, and there was no way of knowing how many more civilians were killed. The world learned of the war from their televisions, and though Americans, for the most part, were satisfied with the information they received, never before in warfare had so much gone unseen and unreported by independent observers. Just as new technology gave the military the Patriot missile, it provided the media with the power to see more, transmit information faster, and reach a larger audience. Yet, just as the technology of the press changed, so too did the Pentagon grow more sophisticated in its manipulation and management of the media. The pool and briefing system used in Operation Desert Storm was established solely for the purpose of restricting access and information and to allow the Pentagon and White House to break and shape news events at their whim. As the Battle of Khafji and other incidents proved, U.S. officials were never above manipulating the facts to make certain that events coincided with the political necessities of the moment. Though the press's cries of unconstitutional restriction and unfair censorship were long and loud after Operation Desert Storm, during the war the major news organizations included in the press pools acted more as Pentagon mouthpieces than as inquisitive sources of independent information. Government control and media complicity together produced a war that was packaged, marketed, and successfully sold to the American public like bars of squeaky clean soap.