An apocryphal letter, from someone claiming to be independent, embedded photographer-journalist Michael Yon, was sent to and received by several bloggers, including Australian Richard Fernandez. Last Sunday, Fernandez, mindful of no affirmation to be found on Yon's website (none has appeared in almost a week), reproduced the letter's contents on condition, that being the removal of the name of a military officer accused of — censorship. Censorship? Between scrutiny and discussion with his readers, Fernandez concluded that the letter indicts a single man for obstructing Yon's return passage to either major theater, Iraq or Afghanistan, despite the author declaiming "certainty that the United States military is censoring." That was the substance of the charge. As to the nature of it, Wretchard argued for a sensible medium between military security and public transparency, writing "At some sufficiently general level everyone needs to know the truth."
From this distance, with the information available, there is no need to verify the authenticity of the letter; but the military's forthrightness can be briefly examined. Suppose the letter were from Yon and LTC So-and-So really was misplacing the necessary paperwork for Yon's embedment with a regularity that defied coincidence. How does that compare with our cumulative understanding of the war, soldiers and the media? I have written at length at least twice about the inversion of expectations planted in American culture over thirty years ago. Then, reporters told you what had been hidden; today, Central Command tells what reporters won't to anyone who is listening. "They Saw Potemkin" showed how the broader left's idée fixe of military duplicity has led to a selective and spurious narrative to support belief, not fact; "Demolishing Potemkin" explored the circumvention of a monolithic press made possible by independent journalism, one such party being Michael Yon.
His hand isn't one the brass wants to bite. So: the accusation. Is So-and-So one of many? Are we talking blackout? Deployment cycles provide a large number of veterans who, upon returning home, would be able to contrast the television screen with their indelible memories of service. Newspapers and network agencies would leap at and tug at a thread of conspiracy. But what comes from soldiers most, anecdotally and statistically, is a reprimand of journalists for broadcasting to Americans a front that is unrecognizable from the one the soldiers left.
On principle, the military has reasons for limiting private reporting and controlling information — to preclude warped coverage or, worse, compromising disclosures. Since the "Potemkin" series professional journalism has not been exonerated, instead facing the particular embarrassment of proofing falsehoods of Hezbollah terrorists earlier this year. Baghdadi Omar Fadhil recently wrote "The magnitude of pressure and misinformation the people here are subject to from the media is a factor that cannot be ignored. Since April 2003 and till now virtually all the media kept describing the US presence as a force of occupation even when the legal status of the forces ceased to be so long time ago. For over three years, the media kept focusing on the mistakes and shortcomings of the US military and US administration in what I can only describe as force-feeding hatred to the Iraqi people." Only two years ago a survey revealed the power of aspersion: Iraqi respondents showed no love for American forces, yet only one in four could speak from personal experience.
The gold standard for power over postwar reconstruction media was comfortably set by Douglas MacArthur in his capacity as Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in occupied Japan. The temporary ban on Kabuki plays and the deportation of uncooperative Western journalists tell much of MacArthur's practices. Takemae Eiji, however, in his historical account Inside GHQ, questioned writer Eto Jun's deprecation of occupation years as "a closed linguistic space." "For all its obvious internal inconsistencies, flaws and abuses," answered Eiji, "American censorship was designed to eliminate the infinitely more repressive [militarist] Old Order, allowing a new ethos to take root in its place. ...After all, it was the unstinting cooperation of Japan's reactionary wartime media with militarism that had made some kind of post-defeat censorship inevitable to begin with."
Japan is Japan and Iraq is Iraq but we know that nothing administered to occupied Japan prevented the country's revivification; to the contrary. And the extent of foreign, fascist influence in Iraqi matters, specifically that which leaves people dead, must owe something to coalition lenience. You can't think authorities in the Pentagon and the military, discoursing in hindsight, don't wonder about this.