Information forbidden During America’s War On Terrorism

Information from the government is slowing to a trickle For all the talk of bringing liberation and openness to Afghanistan, the flow of information during the War On Terrorism has been anything but free.

Not that it should surprise anyone.‘Twas ever thus, from the Gulf War to the Falkland Islands and beyond. Militaries and governments,not unwisely, have always been in the business of managing imagery as well as Howitzers and Harriers.

But since Sept. 11, the message-conscious American government has taken secrecy to new heights. And not only abroad: the War On Terrorism is very much a domestic affair.

In October, for instance,* Attorney-General John Ashcroft actively encouraged government departments to keep wraps on data that could be remotely sensitive. His memo (see sidebar on page 12) essentially revoked an earlier directive of his predecessor, Janet Reno, which had encouraged disclosure. As a result,getting access to information — never an easy task to begin with — has become a quasi-Herculean affair.

“The government has been throwing out overall national security issues as the justification," says Lucy Daglish, executive director of the Arlington, Va.-based Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press. “Certain types of information have become difficult to get — certainly with what’s going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan,but there have also been problems getting domestic information as well.” The diminished access to information makes journalists’ jobs all the more challenging.

Just ask Andrew Rosenthal. He spearheaded the New York Times’ coverage of 9-11 and its aftermath, helping guide the newspaper to a record seven Pulitzers this year. He has never seen anything approaching this level of informational control. “Ever since the Pentagon purportedly began to respond to the media’s concerns about openness, the information has decreased with each new engagement,” he says. “And this is the worst of all. We haven’t been lacking in war coverage — but we’re definitely lacking in information from the government.”

So much so, says Rosenthal, that the newspaper’s chiefmilitary analyst faced the ultimate irony: He had to go to London to do his reporting. Only the British government, apparently, was revealing anything useful. And the Pentagon’s contributions, according to Rosenthal? “Pathetic.”

That experience corresponds with that of Lyse Doucet,the globetrotting Canadian reporter who has been filing stories for the BBC. “The first rough draft of history, particularly as it’s spun through the Western government media machines, is very rough indeed,”she says.“Trying to present the story from that side of the world, I was very conscious of the attempts to restrict the free flow of information from Washington.”

There have been, to be fair, plenty of briefings throughout the War On Terrorism. It’s just that they’re hardly revelatory,says Doucet.As a result,the more “uncomfortable aspects of the story”— like Afghan infighting, revenge killings and civilian casualties — tended to be eclipsed by the trivial pressers coming out of the Pentagon and the State Department. “The media are at their best when there’s a genuine crisis or calamity, and journalists go out and gather facts the best they can,” says Washington Post media reporter (and CNN’s Reliable Sources host) Howard Kurtz.“But the war itself, especially given the Pentagon’s restrictions on reports,became quite a frustrating situation for the press.”

Because access was so choked off, the media then had to scramble to fill the news hole. And that, says Kurtz, meant a slow slide into previous bad habits. Media developed the interminable ‘Where’s Osama?’ refrain, which continues to this day.

.“We reached a point in the war where every other hour, somebody would be on television speculating about where Osama bin Laden was, and how close the U.S.was to finding him,”Kurtz laments.“When the news slowed down,we found the usual ways to pump it up.”

Back at home, information proved equally as difficult to get. Investigative reporter Rose Ciotta of the Philadelphia Inquirer felt the chill following 9-11, when previously forthcoming government agencies suddenly clammed up. For instance,Ciotta had previously obtained a database on airport security from the Federal Aviation Administration.“Then immediately after 9-11, the FAA really shut down completely,” she complains.“Not only were they not releasing any comments about airport security at all, they were unwilling to provide background information on this database.”

Moreover, when she and other journalists sent in questions about how to read the database, they never got any response at all. As a result Ciotta had to circumvent the usual official routes entirely,by seeking out former FAA employees who were familiar with the material, to help her decode it. Other government agencies, too, removed material from their websites that had previously been available. And access to information about terror suspects who’d been taken into custody was virtually nonexistent. Their names, the charges against them,what subsequently happened to them were impossible to come by — a situation almost unprecedented in the history of American criminal justice, says Daglish.

Then came John Ashcroft’s memo, which gave Justice Department backing to agencies that wanted to fend off journalists’ Freedom of Information requests.“A lot of people felt his comments would certainly make it easier for government agencies to refuse information,”says Ciotta,who heads up the Inquirer’s computerassisted reporting initiatives.“Now we’re trying to figure out how much that is happening.” According to Dalglish, it’s happening quite frequently.“We’re starting to hear about reporters who’ve been denied access to records, and that the rejection letters cite Ashcroft’s October memo,”she says.And rollbacks to access don’t just relate to the names of terrorism suspects, but even to innocuous things like “library information on bodies of water.” So says Homefront Confidential (http://www.rcfp.org/homefrontconfidential/), a release of the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press,which put together an exhaustive timeline of all the varied ways the American government has zipped its lips.

So what’s a journalist to do in such an altered environment?

Thankfully, not all is lost.Dogged determination often trumps governmental efforts to keep everything closeted. “Stay vigilant, keep asking for information, and let editors know if you come across something that used to be open,” says Daglish.“Be especially aggressive about trying to cover immigration proceedings, because anybody who’s so far gone into court to try to get access, has won.”

Despite the lack of official information, some journalists were able to make the best of the situation, through old-fashioned legwork.

Exhibit A: the BBC’s Doucet,who didn’t rely on official American channels to feed her information. In fact she already had an extensive network of contacts in the region,having lived there for a year in ‘88-’89, back when the Soviets were leaving.When new leader Hamid Karzai arrived in Kabul for the first time, for instance, it was Doucet who snagged the first and only interview that day with Karzai,whom she had known and covered for so many years.

Back home in North America, too, journalists displayed a remarkable resilience, ferreting out information no matter what the obstacles.“I remember metro reporters coming in after having spent literally days down there at Ground Zero, covered in soot and still wearing hard hats,”says the Times’ Rosenthal.“Young people who never expected to be war correspondents, suddenly doing that in our own backyard.And yet reporters were always able to summon up the energy to provide incredible, instantaneous coverage of the next unfolding disaster.”

But often, those journalistic achievements came about in spite of,not thanks to, any government help. And it’s up to journalists, says Lucy Daglish of Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, to stem this tide of secrecy.Do nothing, and government agencies will deny access to more and more areas of information; it’s the natural inclination of those in power.

Editor’s note: In its March/April edition, the American magazine Mother Jones wrote for an interesting profile on John Ashcroft.You can read the story at: http://www.motherjones.com/magazine/MA02/ashcroft.html

Chris Taylor is a staff writer in New York City for SmartMoney, the Wall Street Journal’s personal-finance magazine. He can be reached at ctaylor@hearst.com.