US battles for public opinion through media in Iraq

1.00pm

BAGHDAD - Impartial information is increasingly hard to come by in Iraq.

As fighting has intensified on the ground, US authorities have stepped up a separate battle for public opinion, tightly controlling the flow of information to journalists whose ability to move freely in Iraq has been limited by increasing danger.

The US military, battling Sunni Muslim insurgents to the west of Baghdad and Shi'ite militants to the south, holds almost daily briefings and issues statements from offices in Baghdad.

But gaps between statements read from the briefing room podium and information coming from the ground have widened in recent weeks. Many queries to the army press office remain unanswered, and sometimes official reports emerge days after an event.

"I think it's important to understand that they view public information as an area of battle," said Carl Conetta of the Project for Defence Alternatives, author of a report on how Washington has been trying to manage news coming out of Iraq.

"They call it a battle space.

"They understand that, both within Iraq and outside, the direction of public opinion, the weight of public opinion, is very important in terms of what freedom they have to act."

Nowhere is the media war more evident than in Falluja. US Marines launched a crackdown in the Sunni town last Monday, in response to the killing and mutilation of four American security guards there.

Deflecting questions about civilian casualties, the army's chief Iraq spokesman Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt has described the Falluja operation as "tremendously precise, tremendously circumspect and well within the rules of engagement".

The few independent pictures that have come out of the besieged town of 300,000 would suggest otherwise. Reuters footage that took a day to make it from Falluja to Baghdad showed dead children, old men and women lying wounded in overfull makeshift clinics.

Hospital directors in Falluja estimate about 600 people have been killed in the past week, many of them civilians. More than 1000 have been wounded. Doctors say ambulances have been shot at. Residents say air strikes have killed families.

Kimmitt said he has no accurate information about the civilian casualties and denies the United States withholds information about its military activities.

"We have never actively held back information, the only thing I hold back are those things that are classified. I think we run an extremely transparent operation here," he said.

He told a news conference on Sunday that news outlets which said American forces were responsible for large numbers of civilian casualties should simply be ignored.

"On the images of American and coalition forces killing innocent civilians, my advice to you is change the channel...The stations that are showing Americans killing women and children are not legitimate channels," he said.

While the issue of Iraqi casualties is problematic for an operation aimed at maintaining Iraqi support and that of other Arabs and US allies, there appears also to be an attempt to manage the dissemination of information about Americans hurt.

When residents of Falluja burned and kicked the corpses of the four Americans, the graphic pictures shocked America and seemed to play a part in polls showing shrinking support for the Iraq war and for president George W Bush's re-election.

At a background briefing at the US Central Command five days later, officials seemed to be trying to limit the damage.

"It's worth mentioning that in Falluja, when that occurred, I mean, there were obviously a lot of people out on the streets, but they didn't stay for very long," a senior US official said at a media briefing, a transcript of which is on the internet.

"When we went back over the area about an hour afterwards, most of the crowds had dispersed. And the crowds were not nearly as big as they are when you put them on camera and show a scene over and over again."

Yet journalists who were in Falluja that day saw children and men playing with the bodies hours after they died. The mob mutilated the corpses and hanged two of them from a bridge. There were no US troops or Iraqi security forces in sight.

The US stresses its might, saying it will also "destroy" the army of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr which has seized parts of several Shi'ite towns -- a message analysts say is intended to scare the enemy as much as to keep allies on side.

US spokesmen play down the size of that insurgency and the increasing criticism of US tactics by leading Iraqi politicians. In the new Iraq, officials say, every one is entitled to his own opinion.

It used to be relatively easy for journalists to move around the country to see events for themselves. But the new threat of kidnapping and familiar dangers of being shot by US forces or Iraqi guerrillas has left many journalists trapped in Baghdad.

The US military has urged the media to join Marine units around Falluja -- "embed" with the troops, in the jargon -- to see evidence that it says will prove its critics wrong. Some reporters have done. The Marines say they can now take no more.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq