The war of the words
"The whole premise of the weapons of mass destruction was total bullshit. The reasons were and always have been oil." Accompanied by an unflinching gaze from a man who has continually probed what we are given to believe through 30 years of front-line reporting. His stern look challenges me to the point that I am forced to look away. The tension breaks and my panic subsides as he quips "How come you aren't taking any notes?" before spotting my notepad perched on my knee under the desk and breaking into a wry smile and a wink.
Charles Glass could have been a movie star in the thirties: dark and rugged American looks are teamed with a trim frame. He is genial to a fault, but there is steel in his looks, emanating from a hawkish face. I know this is no Dan Rather. Sixty-two days in a Lebanese prison camp at the pleasure of brutal Hizbollah terrorists breeds this, as does taking bullets under artillery fire in West Beirut.
His courage is such that he recently compared his ordeal at the hands of Muslim captors to that of the Camp X-Ray prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. "It was a bad time, and it seemed unlikely to me then that I would one day see photographs of my countrymen treating Muslim prisoners much as I was treated. I never saw daylight, but they did turn the electric lights off at night so I could sleep. The men in Guantánamo enjoy no such luxury."
Glass does not dwell on such times nor seeks sympathy. His most frightening experience? "Sarajevo for sure, that was a hair-raising time: the Serbs had total dominance, there was just nowhere you could hide. Somalia was horrible as well - indescribably so. We should have stayed out, the whole thing was just a PR exercise for the Pentagon. We didn't know whether we were relevant anymore."
Such blunt and informed honesty is Glass's trademark, so much so that editors have occasionally shied away from his reports during sensitive times. In 1984 he filed a report, from eyewitness accounts, for ABC on Israeli death squads in south Lebanon. It was never broadcast. "They told me they'd hold it for a day, then three weeks passed: I soon learned." An assassination programme by a state whose armed forces received vast US aid was news, but it didn't make The News. If reports like this inspire the budding foreign correspondent inside you, Glass offers this simple advice: "There were once 24 bureaus in British newspapers, now there might be three - Washington, Tel Aviv, Beijing. These internships are okay, but just go out there and start sending back good stories and the rest will happen."
Having recently covered the second Iraq war for ABC as a veteran of the first, he draws a startling parallel between this war and the Suez crisis of 1956. "It baffles me to hear Blair's apologists defending him thus: 'No British Prime Minister would send soldiers in on the basis of a lie.'. Suez showed exactly that, and the gaps between the propaganda and the actuality are the same today. Back then in 1956 they gave us the modern example for deposing an Arab dictator, and the pitfalls that go with it. Prime Minister Eden was forced to resign from ill health, so you would think Blair would be a bit more wary with his recent heart troubles!" he says with a characteristic twist of bitter humour.
He is forthrightly explicit in his condemnation of the premises for the war and the general US approach, the subject impassioning his normally staid features. "Please remember the US and the French supported Saddam Hussein at the height of all his horror and genocide in the 80s, and then of course suddenly he touches their oil and he's the bad guy. The US doesn't invade a country because they are simply morally repugnant." Couldn't the powers that be change their mind a second time around: is Iraq not simply a safer place without Saddam? "I was in Iraq in 1991 in the north, when President George Bush asked the Iraqis to rise up and overthrow [him]. The people of Iraq believed America would support their action, but we got cold feet as there was no military coup, only a popular revolution. It's clear that the U.S. just wanted another dictator. I will not accept and never accept the notion that they did this recent war to 'save the people of Iraq'".
So what next in Iraq? "The US have made a mess of the thing. Maybe a U.S. trusteeship? Arab League troops? It's all so unstable. Personally, I think it's a good idea to leave soon." He is not afraid to comment on matters of opinion over the war, and adds a great deal of personal insight. "The Lebanon withdrawal was catastrophic in the 1980s for exactly those reasons, and there's a real danger there. The U.S. should leave very quickly." His sense of honour and his journalistic code does put up some barriers despite his honesty. "While there are no 'disinterested' Arab states, I personally should never be allowed to decide. You can't leave a vacuum, but this is not an excuse to stay. It's for the Iraqis to decide".
Glass is unflinching - from popular opinion, from the barrage of further questions that greeted him, and from the lessons of history. Such an attitude could have led to cynicism, but he balances realism with a finely tuned sense of humour and perspective. "This group of guys around Rumsfeld pushed for war all the way through the Clinton era, I've seen the papers. These people really want to change the world, you know."
But, I ask him finally, what keeps you going in a job with often unpalatable subjects and cynical central characters? He deadpans: "I need the money". But don't you ever become disillusioned? "I've never had any illusions."
Photo: Sam Skinner
How accurate a picture did you get of the war in Iraq? How fair was the media coverage? How could reporting of future conflicts be improved? These are some of the questions which the conference 'Caught in the Crossfire' at the Maison Française tried to answer. Stephen Jukes (until recently Head of Global News at Reuters), Steven Wittle (Editorial Policy Controller at the BBC), Abdel Bari Atwan (Editor-in-Chief, Al Quds), David Loyn (BBC Developing World Correspondent) Renaud Bernard (France Info), and Francois D'Alancon (Diplomatic Correspondent of La Croix) were just some of the journalists who came to discuss the way the media handled the war in Iraq.
The practice of embedding journalists with military units was used on an unprecedented scale in this war, and proved highly successful for the Pentagon, as images of direct combat were captured by cameramen travelling with the soldiers and became the major focus of the evening news. Embedded journalist David Loyn was surprised to find he was not censored by the army, nor was his work vetted - although the soldiers did become increasingly hostile to the presence of cameras when their occupation began to run into difficulties and, as he was restricted to travelling with the unit at all times, his view was limited.
Francois D'Alancon described the difficulties he faced trying to find fuel and keep safe without military protection. He was left with only four or five hours in the day to actually investigate and report, which made in-depth investigation an impossibility. To seek assistance and shelter with military units, as some journalists did, may be the easier option, but it does risk compromising the objectivity of the independent reporter.
Meanwhile, Renaud Bernard had been reporting from Baghdad for France Info (a 24-hour news radio network) and encountered the difficulty of having to distinguish fact from fiction as Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Information constantly tried to mislead the journalists. It was, he admits, not always hard - he was present during the famous incident when the Minister assured journalists that the US army had not reached Baghdad while the reporters could see US tanks coming up the hill behind him.
Together, all these different viewpoints provide a mosaic of images and stories from which a true sense of the war can be gleaned. From the thousands of images and stories generated by the hundreds of journalists who were reporting on the war, editors had to select which to promote as the main news of the day. The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue was a relatively minor event, and when the cameras panned out, you could see there were only a few people present, but its symbolic significance made it the main event in the British and US media that day.
The quest to present the most truthful version of events risks becoming overshadowed by commercial and social pressures - 24 hour news needs to be fed constantly with information, however insignificant it may be; the real importance of events may be skewed in the need to generate stories. Certain images are deemed unsuitable for the social climate; one picture of an Iraqi boy - head half blown off, brains hanging out - was judged inappropriate for release in the British and US media, but was widely disseminated in Arab-speaking countries.
Did the media give us an overly sanitised version of the war? David Loyn suggested it was to the BBC's discredit that they didn't show more of the victims of the war, and other journalists expressed the same sense of regret that more exposure wasn't given to the Iraqi casualties.
How could reporting of future conflicts be improved? The conclusions included more training for the journalists who report on war, teaching them about the history and philosophy of war as well as the cultural and religious background of the countries involved, so their reporting could be of greater depth. The physical and psychological suitability of the reporters sent out to war may need to be assessed in the future.
Nineteen journalists died in this war, a record number in such a short space of time. Commercial pressures, competition, and the thirst for knowledge push journalists ever closer to the action, and into taking more and more precautions - at the same time risking the quality of the reporting. To wear a flak-jacket and carry a gun in a war zone are precautions which some news companies are now starting to insist upon, but these alienate the local population and prevent journalists from doing their job properly.
A major step forward would be a coalition between the different media companies in order to challenge the diktats of the US military, and to push for independent inquiries into the deaths of journalists, particularly those working as unilaterals with no military protection. Without such measures, the only safe way to report on war will be as an embedded journalist - with all the drawbacks that entails. Hopefully this conference will mark the beginning of this sort of collaboration.
It is easy to lambast the media for failing to present an accurate and balanced picture of events, but listening to these speakers, it was reassuring to see how aware they are of their limitations, and how willing to find new ways to overcome them.
30th Oct 2003