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Friday, Nov 26, 2004

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Bartering freedom?

By Peter Beaumon

Embedding, too often, is a pact made with the devil, where the freedom to report is partially surrendered in exchange for access to the battlefield.

I HOPE Kevin Sites is watching his back. Blogs that have appeared on the internet since the freelance cameraman filmed a U.S. Marine shooting and killing a wounded and prostrate Iraqi in Falluja do not make comfortable reading.

While Mr. Sites has many supporters, it is his detractors who are most chillingly eye-catching, suggesting they would like to do to him what the Marine he filmed did to the injured Iraqi.

Suddenly, the freelance cameraman, veteran of Kosovo, Afghanistan and now Iraq, has found himself in the middle of a controversy that he did not invite and could not avoid — facing a petition of 24,000 names supporting the Marine who pulled the trigger.

Since he was thrust into the limelight by his pool report from Falluja, Mr. Sites has kept a low profile, declining to comment on the circumstances of the incident and being shielded by his client, NBC. The only insight into how he felt about the killing comes from comments he reportedly made that he had "witnessed the Marines behaving as a disciplined and professional force throughout this offensive." "In this particular case," he added, "it certainly was a confusing situation, to say the least."

While it may have been a confusing situation — and one that is being investigated by the U.S. Navy — what has been equally confusing has been the response to Mr. Sites' pictures, both among the media, which have struggled to package an eyewitness report of an alleged execution in what they believe is an acceptable way, and among audiences who have watched it.

It is not just that death and the act of killing are still regarded as taboo. Mr. Sites' footage, shot at the height of the battle for Falluja, raises important questions about what the media do in war zones, what is appropriate to show, and — more seriously — whether it is morally defensible to censor or self-censor.

What is critical in this case is that Mr. Sites chose to disclose an apparent criminal act committed by his own country's troops while embedded with their unit. It was a brave act. For embedding, too often, is a pact made with the devil, where the freedom to report on any aspect of what you are seeing is partially surrendered in exchange for access to the battlefield. It is not only that, often you have to explicitly sign away your freedom and report through a military censor. What is more insidious is the expectation that, by embedding, you join common cause with the unit and accept the values of the people you are with.

I experienced this late last year when I found myself in Falluja interviewing both insurgents and U.S. troops. During that assignment, I came across the office of a local businessman and tribal sheikh that had been vandalised by U.S. soldiers. When, a few days later, I embedded with the same unit that had smashed up the office, I was invited to attend the welcome talk for new paratroopers joining the unit. Its colonel mentioned that some incidents of inappropriate behaviour had been committed by his troops. When I asked later whether he meant the vandalism I had seen, he asked me not to write about it.

And it is not just after episodes of potentially criminal wrongdoing that journalists are confronted with attempts at censorship. Around the same time I was with the Airborne, two photographer friends were embedded with a U.S. medical evacuation helicopter when an American Chinook was shot down close to Falluja with heavy loss of life. When the photographers attempted to record the incident, they were pushed around and threatened and a camera was smashed. It is perhaps surprising that Mr. Sites was able to successfully broadcast his footage at all.

What is reassuring is that the Sites episode has not been unique. Despite the criticism of the `mainstream' media by figures on the left like the British journalist, John Pilger, and the American professor, Noam Chomsky, who continue to accuse `corporate journalism' of self-censorship, the reporting of Iraq has seen notable examples of journalists — embedded and otherwise — exposing abuses by the U.S. military.

It was Mark Franchetti of the London Sunday Times, embedded with U.S. Marines during the invasion itself, who exposed the killing of Iraqi civilians in the south by trigger-happy troops. It was U.S. journalists — including the indefatigable Seymour Hersh, who first broke news of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam — who exposed the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

Indeed, as the conflict has changed character, the relationship between journalists on the ground and the military and civilian authorities in Iraq has become ever more strained, as the media have exposed the huge gaps between reality and the wishful thinking that has passed for press briefings.

But it is clear, after an examination of the copy that has come out of Falluja, that too often the reporters accompanying troops tend to succumb to a language of identification with the soldiers whose experiences they are sharing, and use a military language that defines the opposition as `other' and dehumanises the experiences of those outside that tightly corralled point of view. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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