For much of the two-month military invasion in Iraq in 2003, more than 700 journalists bunked and marched with U.S. and British troops, sticking close to the soldiers whether they were preparing for battle or fighting on the front lines. The result: Riveting coverage of wartime that won high praise from the military itself.

"Battlefield reporting was more current and accurate than ever before and clearly helped the military's goal of rebutting Saddam Hussein's disinformation campaign," Ret. Brig. Gen. Jim Swanson of the U.S. Air Force wrote in a commentary for USA Today.

But as hundreds of journalists left the embedded ranks or returned home after the close of official combat, goodwill between journalists and the military appears to have faded. Two years after the start of war in Iraq, the strong government support of openness and free press activities in conflict overseas has been replaced with hesitation and haphazard, unpredictable practices, including:

• Abuse and sometimes detainment of journalists covering the aftermath of the war. Arab journalists, in particular, appear to have been the target of much harassment and sometimes imprisonment. But reporters from major broadcast networks and U.S. newspapers also reported soldiers stifling coverage and seizing notes and photo files;

• Efforts to control the distribution of news. After the initial invasion, the Pentagon considered several plans to bypass reporting of major news networks and newspapers, including one similar to its short-lived Office of Strategic Influence that was launched more than two years ago;

• Restriction of new media in Iraq. In March 2004, Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer ordered coalition troops to shutter al-Hawza, a newspaper that frequently criticized U.S. conduct in Iraq. In July, the Iraqi prime minister established a media committee to impose aggressive restrictions on burgeoning print and broadcast media in Iraq;

• Shutting out news media from Saddam Hussein's hearing. Much of the world's press was shut out of preliminary court hearings of the deposed Iraqi dictator, following a ruling by an Iraqi judge. Only a New York Times reporter and a CNN correspondent were permitted to attend;

• Hurdles continued for journalists trying to count the deaths of U.S. military personnel, enemy soldiers and Iraqi civilians, the latter two which the U.S. military does not officially count. The military also does not count soldiers killed in "friendly fire" incidents. The reticence to report deaths, Slate reported in November 2004, can be traced back to the Vietnam War and the significant problems that emerged during that conflict when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara overemphasized body counts as a measure of success.

Although government support has not reverted full circle from its wartime height, the significant retreat heightens concerns that journalists might not have the same unique access in covering the continuing war on terrorism as they had earlier.

Coverage success in war time

Within the first six months after the Pentagon began embedding journalists, the process of attaching journalists with U.S. troops in the battlefield appeared to work. The news media got a pass to the front lines; the U.S. military relished in thousands of reports showing the troops at their finest; the American public got a living-room view of war.

Despite the coverage, concerns surfaced that the American press failed to press enough, not only failing to question the need for the war but the actual successes of the war. Critics say the press routinely fell for the government line, noting early reporting of the Pvt. Jessica Lynch saga that played up the heroic aspects of her 2003 rescue. Others pointed to many broadcasts with screens displaying red, white and blue or correspondents using the word "we" when describing movements of American soldiers.

Despite worries that an embedded journalist equated to a compromised journalist, the process allowed the press its greatest access to a battlefield in more than three decades.

And the embed process, for the most part, worked smoothly because the Defense Department opted to refrain from controlling the system too much, even when less flattering reports came to light. In fact, the Pentagon considered making the embed program permanent.

At the time, defense officials had yet to grapple with a rash of news reports it did not want the public to see. Because the United States had been such a dominating force in the war, there never was video showing a bloody defeat of an Army unit or a news account of a blatant violation of the Geneva Convention.

But the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq proved to be the most difficult part, as the United States embarked on reconstruction in an ancient land of 25 million people with deeply divergent ideologies.

Reporters began covering bloody ambushes and insurgent revolts, providing accounts of U.S. soldiers dying in combat almost weekly. Articles highlighted Iraqi casualties, particularly those of women and children, in the wake of bombing raids. Broadcast and print reports included many comments from those who opposed the war and Iraqi occupation by coalition forces.

Perhaps it was the news media's coverage in 2004 of the torture accounts at Abu Ghraib, a former Iraqi prison used by coalition forces to detain war prisoners and captured insurgents, that disturbed government officials most. News of the mistreatment, displayed through graphic photographs and video footage, promised to have long-lasting repercussions for U.S. foreign policy.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee on May 7, 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said more photographs and videos of prisoner abuse in Iraq exist, but that they would not be released in the near future.

"If these are released to the public, obviously it's going to make matters worse. That's just a fact," Rumsfeld testified. "I mean I looked at them last night, and they're hard to believe . . . And if they're sent to some news organization and taken out of the criminal prosecution channels that they're in, that's where we'll be. And it's not a pretty picture."

Sea change in attitudes toward press

The military's appreciation for the news media was seldom as enthusiastic as it was in the months following the Pentagon's plan allowing reporters to accompany U.S. troops in combat, possibly the largest mobilization of journalists in military history.

From the start, defense officials considered the immersion of reporters historic, noting that even during the Normandy Invasion of World War II only a few dozen journalists stormed the beaches with the American forces. Even in the open coverage of Vietnam, reporters were seldom assigned to specific units.

The Pentagon itself handled much of the mind-boggling logistics involved in deploying the journalists, including offering combat training courses for those covering the war on terrorism.

Amid the swelling ranks of journalists stepping forth to be embedded in American military units came cries of press advocacy from unique sources: Pentagon officials and even from Rumsfeld himself.

"We are dealing with a person in the case of Saddam Hussein and his regime that are accomplished liars," Rumsfeld said. "They are consistently, day after day, saying things that aren't true. And it strikes me that having people who are willing to report the truth -- the free press from around the world -- is probably a good thing.

"They can see for themselves what's taking place and be able to, the Good Lord willing, report the truth."

Yet in 2001 and 2002, Rumsfeld and his staff regularly depicted the war on terrorism as something different, something so nebulous that to make military actions of this war transparent would be close to impossible.

What changed their minds the first time? The answer remains unclear.

The new ground rules governing the process of placing journalists -- both American and foreign -- among U.S. troops suggested a mix of good public relations to counter Iraqi claims of American atrocities and a desire to simply get out the truth about U.S. military endeavors.

"We need to tell the factual story -- good or bad -- before others seed the media with disinformation and distortions, as they most certainly will continue to do," read the official ground rules, released on Feb. 28, 2002. "Our people in the field need to tell our story -- only commanders can ensure the media get to the story alongside the troops."

The comments show a marked difference from the Pentagon that refused to acknowledge at the outset of the war on terrorism its 1992 agreement with the news media to embed reporters among troops early in armed conflict, quickly convert to open coverage and to aid coverage in most ways possible. The Pentagon of the last 30 years has not exactly shown itself to be the most transparent government entity but instead one that, on the battlefield, has tried to control coverage.

And that is why there was early skepticism about the embedding plans.

The ground rules for embedding took a first step toward ensuring coverage of a war that cannot be covered through traditional means, but they fell short of advocating open coverage, the default plan from the 11-year-old agreement between the media and the military hammered out between the two sides after the first Gulf War.

A sense of vagueness permeated the rules, language that could offer anything from a slight to a likely possibility that curtains could fall down over the transparency.

For example, Rule 4.F.7. allowed the release of the date, time or location and results of completed conventional missions and actions but "only if described in general terms." And the rules warned that the release of information about details such as friendly force strength, friendly casualty figures and the origin of air operations should include only "approximate" numbers and descriptions. An origin of air operations might be described as simply "land-based."

The Pentagon, to its credit, refrained from taking too much advantage of vague language in the rules and allowed the news media to file thousands of reports with few restrictions during the war.

Some of the riveting stories told of the horrors and mistakes of war, such as a New York Times report from Dexter Filkins of a U.S. Army sergeant who accidentally killed an Iraqi woman standing too close to a target. But there were also stories of soldiers helping Iraqi children or feeding and comforting scared and starving families.

Ted Koppel, the veteran anchor of ABC's "Nightline," joined the embedded ranks himself and enjoyed unprecedented access to the quarters of a commanding general. Koppel also sat in on some top-secret briefings, on condition that he would not disclose U.S. strategy or troop movements in advance.

Journalists enjoyed access from nearly every Army division, naval ship and command center, offering stories about almost every skirmish and advance during the two-month war. Many, like Koppel, had access to briefings before and after attacks on condition they not report information that could help Iraqi forces.

The American public, in turn, saw a much more complete picture of how its military fights a war -- a sea change difference from what the Pentagon allowed only a year earlier in Afghanistan.

But after Iraq, attitudes changed about press access, and now it appears that the Pentagon may be inching back to its pre-war sensibilities. A military that once seemed to embrace a media presence now appears to be repulsed by it.

In October 2003, Agence France-Presse reported that one of its photographers and another from Reuters were detained for several hours by Iraqi police under orders from the U.S. military. The two were covering an attack on a U.S. convey near Fallujah when they were captured, held at a police station, transferred to a U.S. Army base and released five hours later.

At about the same time, The Associated Press reported that one of its photographers had been detained by U.S. soldiers, handcuffed and then held at gunpoint for more than three hours.

On Nov. 2, 2003, David Gilkey, a Detroit Free Press photographer, said U.S. soldiers erased his film disk while he was covering the crash of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter shot down near Fallujah and then forced him and other journalists to retreat to a site 20 miles away.

In November 2003, Sandy Johnson, Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press, wrote a letter to the Pentagon signed by 30 other news organizations to complain about those situations and a rash of other abuse and harassment. In the letter, the media groups said there were "numerous examples of U.S. troops physically harassing journalists and, in some cases, confiscating or ruining equipment, digital camera discs, and videotapes."

But the abuses continued.

Chip Somodevilla, a Knight Ridder photographer, told Nation magazine that he was with two Iraqi fisherman on a small boat on the Tigris River on Dec. 9, 2003, when shots exploded in the water near them. Somodevilla found that the shots came from an American military official who later attempted to destroy the photographer's press credentials.

On Jan. 5, 2004, U.S. troops detained four Iraqis working for Reuters and NBC, held them for three days, subjecting them to sleep deprivation and other uncomfortable treatment. The troops captured the men after they arrived at the scene of a downed American helicopter outside Fallujah. A brigadier general later told reporters that the crash had been caused by Iraqis posing as journalists.

A week later, Reuters filed a formal complaint citing the "wrongful arrest" and apparent "brutalisation" of its employees. Reuters wrote two more letters to the Pentagon calling its explanation for the detainment "woefully inadequate" and faulting defense officials for failing to provide better security for journalists.

Amid the complaints of harassment and abuse of journalists, the Bush administration appears to have tried a number of methods to take the news reporting aspect of the war into its own hands.

In October 2003, President Bush, Rumsfeld and Iraqi administrator Paul Bremer bypassed the national news media to tell the administration's story directly through exclusive interviews with five regional broadcasting companies. Bush had been quoted as saying that he wanted to "go over the heads of the filter and speak directly with the people" because there was a "sense that people in America aren't getting the truth."

Later, the Pentagon attempted to resurrect something akin to its hotly debated Office of Strategic Influence with a $300,000 grant to a private contractor to consider how to design an "effective strategic influence" campaign. Rumsfeld disbanded the previous office nearly two years ago after it became known that military officials were considering plans to provide false news items to foreign journalists in an attempt to influence opinion and policy abroad.

Bitter, high-level debates continue within the Pentagon over how far it can and should go in managing or manipulating information to influence opinion abroad, The New York Times reported in December 2004. The deceptive techniques risk blurring traditional lines between public affairs programs in Pentagon -- whose charter calls for giving truthful information to media and public -- and world of combat information campaigns or psychological operations.

In December 2003, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon also hoped to transmit its own news footage from Iraq directly to TV outlets in the United States. Dubbed by critics as "C-SPAN Baghdad," the $6.3 million project was designed to provide a more positive coverage of the war by circumventing the major networks and allowing regional and local media outlets access to footage gathered by the Pentagon.

The White House denied it was an effort to manage the news, although it came at a time when it had been especially critical of coverage focusing on deaths resulting form Iraqi conflict instead of on the rebuilding effort. The service began operating in March 2004.

In February 2004, the Pentagon also launched an Arabic-language satellite TV channel designed as an alternative to Middle Eastern broadcasts often critical of the United States. U.S. officials admitted that the network, which will cost $62 million to run in its first year from a studio in Springfield, Va., will compete with both al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, two of the most popular TV channels in the region.

While it was preparing its own news distribution programs, the Pentagon did little to discourage Iraqi government efforts to stifle the development of independent news organizations. In September 2003, the Iraqi Governing Council banned al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya. In a reported vote in a private session, the council called for reporters from the two channels to be banned from Iraq until government officials could review their broadcasts.

In March 2004, Iraqi administrator Bremer ordered the closure of al-Hawza, an Iraqi weekly heavily critical of U.S. foreign policy. Officials closed the paper because it was deemed to have incited violence, a violation of one of Bremer's decrees.

Writing for Newsday, First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said, "Of all the messages the United States could send to the people of Iraq, the sorriest is this: If you say things we disapprove of, we'll shut you up."

The Washington Post two weeks later reported that the shutdown of the newspaper, run by Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr, provoked a violent backlash in Fallujah that eventually erupted into major fight.

On July 28, 2004, Iraq's new prime minister Ayad Allawi established a media committee to impose restrictions on news organizations, although such restrictions had yet to be finalized. But such restrictions would include a prohibition on unwarranted criticism of the prime minister. On Aug. 9, the prime minister closed al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau for a month to examine claims that the network's extensive coverage of kidnappings encourages militants.

Stateside, the Pentagon extended a ban of media coverage and photography of the return of soldiers killed in action, prohibiting picture-taking of any flag-draped casket arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

The issue came to a head on April 19 when Newsday published a photo taken by Tami Silicio, a Kuwait-based cargo worker employed by a military contractor, showing 20 such coffins. Silicio was fired three days later.

The Bush administration defended the ban, saying it protects the privacy of families. But legislation to alter the ban soon appeared in both the House and Senate. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), in his proposal, claimed the ban "prevents the American people from seeing the truth about what's happening." The Senate on June 21 rejected Lautenberg's bill with a 54-39 vote, instead approving a measure from Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) to approve a coffin-photo policy based on privacy.

A different kind of war

Perhaps journalists should have expected such an about face from the Pentagon.

In the days immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, defense officials prepared Americans and the news media for an early display of secrecy in the all-encompassing American campaign against terror by characterizing the war on terrorism as something other than a typical global conflict.

While the past century saw one international alliance stifle Nazism during World War II and a later one liberate Kuwait more than 14 years ago in the Persian Gulf War, they warned journalists and Americans that the first war of the new century promised something different.

Even before the first deployment of American troops to the Middle East after September 11, Rumsfeld cautioned the press and the public that this war would be waged against an often unseen enemy.

"The public may see some dramatic military engagements that produce no apparent victory, or may be unaware of other actions that lead to major victories," he said.

After joint forces defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan, defense officials praised many aspects of that part of the war, claiming that the country no longer harbored nor trained terrorists, the Afghan people enjoyed renewed freedoms and that terrorists had been sent scurrying.

Amid both the presence and absence of conventional warfare, combat preceding the war in Iraq displayed a considerable lack of openness. For most of the first 18 months following the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. officials kept journalists at bay, leaving questions about how much Americans really understood about their country's involvement in the war on terrorism.

Consider:

• The escalation of U.S. forces before the Oct. 7, 2001, attacks on Afghanistan generally occurred without a media presence. When bombing strikes began, reporters watched from afar, with only a few enjoying a vantage point within Afghanistan itself and none with troops in active combat.

• Pentagon officials denounced reports of a late-night Oct. 19, 2001, raid involving U.S. Army Rangers and other special forces near Kandahar, particularly an account from Seymour Hersh in a New Yorker article that detailed the mission as a glorified failure. Officials declined to offer specific information to rebut Hersh's claims.

• Press restrictions early in the war constrained coverage enough that American reporters learned secondhand about the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, a strategic city because of its airfields and roads to Uzbekistan, where U.S. troops were based. Other raids and victories transpired without independent witnesses.

• The Defense Department refused to field difficult questions concerning the Jan. 24, 2002, raid at Oruzgan, where Afghan residents claim U.S. Special Forces beat, shot and killed men without giving them a chance to surrender. Some say fighters were abused even though they claimed support for the American-backed Hamid Karzai, an Afghan leader.

• Dozens of American soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries and, according to several reports, including a July 21, 2002, New York Times article, several hundred, perhaps thousands, of Afghan citizens have lost their lives, including several dozen at a wedding ceremony. But the U.S. military has refused to offer estimates of the death toll since the beginning of military actions.

From the start of fighting in Afghanistan until the escalation of war in Iraq, defense officials described the war on terrorism as a different kind of war, one they often described as a war with multiple battles along multiple fronts and possibly against multiple and sometimes unknown enemies.

For journalists, that became code for "restricted access."

"We are in a whole new world here," Assistant Defense Secretary Victoria Clarke told Washington bureau chiefs during a Sept. 28, 2001, briefing. "We're trying to figure out the rules of the road. We are trying to figure out how to work with you, how to make sure you get what you need -- while protecting the national security and the safety of the men and women in uniform."

Journalists had heard this talk before, more than 13 years ago as American forces limited press access during parts of the Persian Gulf War. Corralled into pools and daily briefings, reporters later said they felt the Gulf War was remarkably uncovered.

As with the Persian Gulf, the new war arenas -- the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq -- offered little hope of easy access to those reporting about war to the world.

Compromises with the Pentagon during peacetime seemed to disappear. A post-Gulf War agreement -- a nine-point statement of principles forged in 1992 -- designated open coverage, not pools or embedded reporters, as the default coverage system during wartime.

If journalists hoped that such an agreement would stand, they were quickly disappointed.

Despite personal assurances from Rumsfeld that the war in Afghanistan would not go without press coverage, the U.S. military launched a full-scale attack on terrorist camps and bunkers in the heart of Afghanistan without acknowledging the 1992 agreement or crafting a new formal arrangement to take its place.

Like their predecessors in the Persian Gulf War and the invasions of Panama and Grenada, the press covering the war on Afghanistan found itself at the mercy of the Pentagon.

As fighting waned in Afghanistan and attention turned toward Iraq, press bureau chiefs met monthly with Clarke and Pentagon staff to improve access and to consider a more elaborate plan of placing reporters among troops. The chiefs stressed that they did not wish for an invasion on Iraq to occur without their presence as happened with Afghanistan.

For the war in Iraq, the bureau chiefs seemed to have gotten their wish as the Pentagon's mobilization of national and international media stood as the first time since World War II that defense officials actually assigned journalists slots with combat and support units.

Training for combat coverage was extensive. The Pentagon itself trained 238 journalists in four separate week-long boot camps on military bases stateside. Other journalists enlisted in programs sponsored by Centurion Risk Assessment Services, which claims to have trained more than 10,000 reporters since 1995.

To handle the logistics of the largest-ever mobilization of journalists, the Pentagon crafted an extensive set of ground rules explaining how news organizations could place their reporters among troops. Some bureau chiefs examined an early version of the rules dated Feb. 3, 2003. On Feb. 12, the Pentagon began making embed assignments. The final version of the rules was released Feb. 28, a day after defense officials spelled out final plans of the embedding program to bureau chiefs.

The ground rules defined "media embed" as a "media representative remaining with a unit on an extended basis -- perhaps a period of weeks or even months." The Pentagon agreed to provide billeting, rations and medical attention and some assistance with communications if necessary in an effort to allow journalists to "live, work and travel" with units in order "to facilitate maximum in-depth coverage of U.S. forces in combat and related operations."

The Pentagon said it would only allow journalists attached to news organizations. It would allow freelance reporters only if they were attached to a legitimate media group.

The rules, too, required unit commanders to ensure that embedded journalists observe actual combat operations at every opportunity. The rules specifically forbade the commanders from excluding them for safety reasons or for gender. But the rules did allow unit commanders to suggest that embedded journalists be replaced if they could not handle the rigorous conditions of the mission.

The rules forbade journalists to carry or use firearms or use their own vehicles. But the military units to which they were attached were required to provide transportation and protection whenever and wherever possible.

The rules did not specifically bar the use of any communications equipment, but they allowed unit commanders to impose temporary restrictions on electronic transmissions if security needs arose. The rules required journalists to seek approval for transmissions in hostile situations or in combat. With the rules, the Pentagon stated that media reports would not be subject to security reviews and that the standard for releasing information "should be to ask 'why not release' vice 'why release.' " Decisions, the rules stated, should be made in minutes, not in hours.

The rules allowed for the release of considerable details of operations, particularly after specific missions were complete. The military described 14 categories of "releasable" information that ranged from date, time and location of previous missions to general types of forces involved in combat to operation code names to names and hometowns of units and of individual service members with the individuals' consent. All interviews with officials, service members and unit commanders were considered to be "on the record."

But the rules encouraged "security at the source" and placed restrictions upon the release of 19 different categories of information. These included reports detailing the specific numbers of troops, ships and aircrafts, the rules of engagement, intelligence information, future operations, effectiveness of enemy defenses and troop movement.

The rules reminded embedded journalists of the sensitivity of using names of casualties and asked that the names of the dead not be released for at least 72 hours to allow defense officials time to notify next-of-kin.

The rules allowed unit commanders to place embargoes to protect operational security but "will only be used for operational security and will be lifted as soon as the operational security issue has passed."

The Pentagon further required every journalist and news organization participating in the embedded process to sign a "hold harmless" agreement, releasing the United States from any liability should the journalist become injured or killed during the military operations. The agreement also noted that the government could terminate the embedding process at any time and for any reason.

Noticeably missing from the rules were designations for open coverage -- the default system of coverage agreed to more than a decade ago. The rules themselves never discussed an open coverage plan nor did they mention what might happen if journalists ventured off on their own.

But Pentagon staff bluntly discouraged open coverage during the Feb. 27, 2003, meeting with press bureau chiefs. One issue had to do with reporter safety.

"The battlefield's a dangerous place, and it's going to be a dangerous place even embedded with our forces," said Brian Whitman, a deputy Defense Department spokesman and a former special forces major in charge of the embedding process. "It will be even a more dangerous place, though, for reporters that are out there not in an embedded status, that are moving around the battlefield, as I call it, running to the sounds of the guns."

Should journalists wish to remove themselves from embedded status, unit commanders were instructed to drop them off at the first safe location or at a point where they could get commercial transportation to take them out of the conflict zone. They were not given specific instructions on accepting unembedded journalists out on the field, except perhaps to treat them as ordinary citizens.

"So if there is some thought process going on that, 'Well, I'll put my reporter out there, I'll just link them up with a unit as they come into Iraq and then embed that way,' I would tell you that is an unlikely scenario that will unfold," Whitman said.

In essence, the embedding process, not open coverage, had become the default system of coverage for future military conflicts.

But the change hardly occurred in a vacuum. Assistant Defense Secretary Clarke noted that she talked extensively with many of the bureau chiefs about how to help their reporters cover the war. The embedding plan came only with their input, she said.

During a Jan. 14, 2003, meeting of the bureau chiefs, she joked: "Of course, if anybody wants to put their hands up now and say 'No, we're not interested in embedding,' that would really help in the process."

No hands from the bureau chiefs. Only laughter.

The Pentagon began preparing the journalists for embedding soon after that meeting. On March 7, 2003, the first wave of the journalists to be embedded with U.S. troops shipped out. By the time the war started on March 19, more than 1,000 journalists were strewn across the war arena, 662 of them were attached directly to an Army, Navy, Air Force or Marine unit.

Over the next two months, the number of embedded journalists would climb past 700. But by the time President Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq on May 1, 2003, the numbers had dwindled considerably.

On July 14, 2003, Editor and Publisher magazine, which had been maintaining a regular tally of embedded journalists, reported that only 23 journalists remained attached to a military outfit. Most journalists had struck out on their own by that time, willing to brave the hostilities of a post-war Iraq without military support.

Soon after her resignation in 2003, Clarke told USA Today that there was a connection between the dwindling embedded ranks and a spike in bad news coming out of Iraq that summer.

"We went from hundreds of journalists all over Iraq covering every aspect of the war," Clarke said. "I don't know what the number is now, but it's a fraction of that now and I think that is too bad. There are some really important things going on in that country. Many are good, some are bad, but if there were more coverage and more comprehensive coverage people would get a clearer picture."

Clarke said the Pentagon would be encouraging news organizations to send more journalists.

But such an "invitation" to rejoin U.S. troops and forgo open coverage never appeared.

However, on June 22, 2004, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz testified before the House Armed Services Committee, blaming journalists for only offering Americans a partial picture of America's mission in Iraq. In his testimony, Wolfowitz said reporters were afraid to travel, content only to "sit in Baghdad." Wolfowitz apologized for his comments three days later, noting that "many journalists continue to go out each day -- in the most dangerous circumstances -- to bring us coverage of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Wolfowitz's and Clarke's calls aside, most of the world's press were stymied in their efforts to cover the June 29 transfer of power from the coalition to the new Iraqi government as well as the first appearance of Saddam Hussein in an Iraqi court.

Coalition officials gave journalists scant notice of their plans to transfer power two days early. When the journalists arrived, they were ordered to surrender their cell phones, agree to using one pool camera and embargo the news for more than two hours.

As for Saddam's hearing, only two reporters -- one for the New York Times and one from CNN -- were allowed in the courtroom due to a ruling from an Iraqi judge.

The press, the military and the American public were all winners in the U.S. military's program embedding journalists in Iraq, according to a RAND Corp. study released in December 2004.

"Allowing journalists to move with combat units appears to be the best solution to date at balancing the needs of three core constituencies -- the press, the military and the public," said Christopher Paul, a RAND social scientist and lead author of the report.

The number of embedded journalists topped 800 at the height of combat in 2003, but dwindled to double digits by 2004, Editor & Publisher reported. As the January 2005 Iraqi elections approached, however, there was a surge in news organizations seeking embedded slots with the Marine unit in Fallujah. E&P reported that all 70 embed slots with the First Marine Expeditionary Force were filled in January 2005, compared to 15 embeds one month earlier.

Obstacles to coverage

Perhaps surprisingly, American reporters have always been free to go into the battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, although at the risk of being captured or killed by the Taliban or Iraq's Republican guard or snipers.

But the Pentagon did not improve reporting conditions much during the opening months of the war in Afghanistan by offering pool transportation to military units, by creating information centers or by embedding reporters with U.S. troops, all goals detailed in the 1992 agreement.

The buildup of American and alliance forces along the Afghanistan border following Sept. 11 generally occurred without the media. When America unleashed its first wave of attacks on Oct. 7, 2001, only a handful of journalists enjoyed a vantage point within Afghanistan. Although Pentagon officials allowed 40 journalists to join military forces on the USS Enterprise and two other warships, they had placed them on ships incidental to the strikes at hand and imposed restrictions on what they could publish.

In effect, most American broadcasters and newspaper reporters during the Afghanistan conflict scratched out coverage from Pentagon briefings, a rare interview on a U.S. aircraft carrier or a humanitarian aid airlift, or from carefully selected military videos or from leaks.

Although bureau chiefs persuaded military officials to boost briefings to as many as a dozen a week, their reporters seldom scored interviews with troops or secured positions near the front during the early months of the war.

The truth is, the American media's vantage point for the war in Afghanistan rarely came from the front lines with American troops.

On the occasions that reporters neared the battlefield, they reported that they were threatened with arrest, confiscation or even death, sometimes even by American troops.

For example, Washington Post reporter Doug Struck claimed that an unidentified U.S. soldier threatened to shoot him if he went near the scene of a U.S. Hellfire missile strike in Afghanistan in mid-February 2002.

Defense officials denied that a troop leader would knowingly threaten an American citizen, stating that it was likely the officer was merely trying to protect the reporter.

In interviews, Struck called such a story "an amazing lie" and evidence of the "extremes the military is going to keep this war secret, to keep reporters from finding out what's going on."

The administration was not completely truthful about other incidents, either. For example, White House officials have since backed away from a story they spread on Sept. 11, 2001, about threats to Air Force One to justify President George W. Bush's delayed return to Washington, D.C., that day.

During the first six months of the war in Afghanistan, the Defense Department either continually avoided answering questions or offered misleading answers about completed missions, including an Oct. 19, 2001, Army Rangers raid on Kandahar or a Jan. 24, 2002, Special Forces raid at Oruzgan or an estimated death count of Afghan citizens.

After the start of bombing, the Pentagon limited access to U.S. troops so much that journalists had to base reports on the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif and other Taliban strongholds on secondhand reports.

Perhaps the most outrageous slight to press access came on Dec. 6, 2001, when Marines locked reporters and photographers in a warehouse to prevent them from covering a story about American troops killed or injured by a stray bomb north of Kandahar. The Pentagon later apologized, but the damage had been done. The press had to resort to accounts filtered through military sources.

In other situations, the press accused U.S. military officials and soldiers of encouraging Afghan fighters to seize photos and digital images from photographers and occasionally deceiving the public about military operations. The press also criticized the Pentagon for crafting an exclusive deal with satellite companies, preventing news organizations from purchasing photos of Iraq and Pakistan for three months after Sept. 11.

Journalists faulted the Pentagon for ignoring the 1992 agreement. In an Oct. 17, 2001, letter to Rumsfeld signed by a variety of journalism organizations, including The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, journalists urged him to activate pool coverage, place reporters among troops and pressure allies to grant visas to American journalists covering the war.

Journalists finally got a break on Nov. 27, 2001, when reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters and the Gannett newspaper chain became the first to accompany U.S. troops in the war. The reporters followed a Marine unit to a military airstrip in southern Afghanistan.

On Dec. 13, 2001, Assistant Defense Secretary Clarke unveiled "The Way Ahead in Afghanistan," a memorandum that was the Pentagon's closest statement to acknowledging the 1992 agreement until the release of the embedding rules.

The "Way Ahead" memo briefly outlined the Pentagon's effort to open three Coalition Press Information Centers in Mazar-e-Sharif, Bagram and Kandahar. Each center was to have between five and 10 staff members charged with helping journalists get interviews, photographs and other information covering the war.

A short time later, the Pentagon opened coverage in Afghanistan and declared the end of pool coverage on Dec. 27, 2001.

For early war coverage in Afghanistan, though, that was too little too late. Most reporters and troops had already left Mazar-e-Sharif and Bagram. Poor access to troops stationed in Uzbekistan and Pakistan remained for months afterward because the Pentagon cited "host country sensibilities."

At the end of February 2002, the Pentagon quietly began allowing a handful of American journalists to join U.S. ground troops in active combat. Reporters joined the troops in eastern Afghanistan so they could witness assaults on suspected al-Qaida and Taliban fighters who had regrouped near the town of Gardez.

The reporters joining the operation agreed to withhold filing their reports until U.S. military officials gave them permission, Rumsfeld announced on March 4, 2002.

By then, the war was 149 days old.

But even those efforts did not go without hitches.

Some Washington bureau chiefs expressed concern that military officers in the field often felt inclined to withhold approval much too long, particularly when much of the information was made public outside of the battlefield long before.

American correspondents rarely traveled with American soldiers even after March 4, 2002, a marked difference from coverage in past wars. Without cooperation from the U.S. military, the reporters resorted to traveling on their own into exceptionally dangerous areas or securing passage with Afghan commanders.

Even as military officials allowed open coverage, reporters said they continued to face harassment from U.S. troops. Craig Nelson of Cox News Service reported that he was thrown off the base in Kandahar after writing about the arrival of Australian special forces. E.A. Torriero of the Chicago Tribune said he was forced to lie down in the dirt when he walked into restricted areas near Gardez.

American and foreign reporters continued to complain about heightened restrictions on coverage of about 500 detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. In April 2002, U.S. military officials transferred the captives to a new, permanent prison that is far from view of journalists on the base.

At Camp X-Ray, the original detainee prison camp, journalists could view the detainees in their chain-link cells and often write about their detention. But at the new Camp Delta, journalists had little contact or view of detainees.

For months, numerous complaints about the detention conditions surfaced, contentions ranging from extremely poor living arrangements to beatings and torture.

Military officials denied such claims. But there has been little independent verification from outsiders about the living conditions of those detained and very little from journalists.

War correspondents became so frustrated with the obstacles to their coverage efforts that they formed Military Reporters and Editors, borrowing the Army acronym for Meals Ready to Eat. The group hoped to improve talks with Pentagon officials and, thus, access to the battlefield.

On Dec. 12, 2002, MRE joined the signatories of a second letter urging the Bush administration to abide by guidelines established by the Pentagon and media groups and to ensure access to action not only in the Middle East, but stateside as well.

Since then, the Pentagon has offered assurances of improved access, the most significant action, of course, being the embedding process. The first wave of embedded journalists shipped out on March 7, 2003.

The war on terrorism was now 517 days old.

Although the access improved considerably, the embed process had its own shortcomings.

The very nature of an embed -- the permanent attachment of a reporter to a single fighting unit -- created obstacles. The reporter only viewed what the fighting unit viewed. Had reporters whose troops did not see action decided to leave their units, they were not allowed to re-embed. Those that remained naturally developed a strong attachment to the soldiers with whom they shared bread and bunk.

"All of the embeds have a strong stake in the outcome of any hostile action they might encounter, hence their understandably enthusiastic embrace of the plural pronouns 'we,' 'our,' and 'us' to describe the progress of the units to which they're attached," wrote Jack Shafer in his media criticism column for Slate. "You'd probably use the same words if you were dune-buggying your way to Baghdad."

Such attachment also meant that reporters often developed a working relationship beyond the simple act of reporting news.

In some of the more personal accounts from an embedded reporter, Ron Martz of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about consoling a wounded soldier as a frantic medic attempted to bandage his wounds, about him and photographer Brant Sanderlin holding intravenous bags for wounded civilians, and about two U.S. soldiers wounded by bullets that likely would have killed him.

"Had they not been there, I most likely would not be typing this now," Martz wrote.

Some reporters took a step further in aiding U.S. troops.

While traveling with the First Marine Division, Boston Globe reporter Scott Bernard Nelson was the only one in the unit who spied an Iraqi sniper and informed a Marine gunner. The marksman fired 100 rounds and killed the sniper. Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald wrote about how he called out Iraqi positions to soldiers in his division.

"Some in our profession might think as a reporter and noncombatant, I was there only to observe," Crittenden wrote in an April 13, 2003, account. "Now that I have assisted in the deaths of three human beings in the war I was sent to cover, I'm sure there are some people who will question my ethics, my objectivity, etc. I'll keep the argument short. Screw them, they weren't there. But they are welcome to join me next time if they care to test their professionalism."

Despite the attachment to their units, reporters said they could step back and tell the important stories about the war.

"If I found a story they didn't want me to tell, I'd do it," said Rick Leventhal, an embedded correspondent for Fox News, during a forum hosted by New York magazine and The Guardian. "For example, when we ran low on food, and we were eating one to two meals a day instead of three, they didn't want me to report that, but I did."

Some embeds, however, found that their reporting was being stifled by the very commanders ordered to allow it. Reporters attached to the USS Abraham Lincoln learned that they had to agree to restrictive guidelines set by Rear Adm. John M. Kelly as they boarded the ship. Kelly banned reporters from the general mess deck and required them to have a naval officer accompany them for every interview.

The restrictions later vanished when reporters complained to defense officials in Bahrain.

Although embedded reporters faced a variety of obstacles in covering the war, they had an easier time of coverage than the unilaterals -- the name given to independent reporters who opted against official attachment to a military division.

The unilaterals faced the hostile Iraqi battlefields -- not only bullets but sandstorms and unbearable heat -- on their own without the considerable resources of a U.S. military division. Unilaterals attempting to reach Baghdad by themselves often ran out of gas, food and other supplies, resorting at times to pleading to passing military divisions for assistance.

The Pentagon repeatedly discouraged reporters from going out on their own. Assistant Defense Secretary Clarke later reported that U.S. troops bailed out a Newsweek correspondent who got caught in a fire fight only hours after being warned by soldiers of the danger. Clarke said troops twice helped a CBS television crew -- once because they ran out of gas and a second time after they ran out of water.

And there was the simple act of survival for the unilaterals. After all, they comprised most of the 27 journalists who lost their lives in Iraq from the start of war through summer 2004.

One of the most formidable challenges for nearly every journalist covering the war abroad and stateside has been covering the U.S. and British governments' efforts to demonstrate that the Saddam Hussein regime actually pursued weapons of mass destruction.

But the press accounts of the lack of success in uncovering such weapons have subjected reporters to scorn and charges of unpatriotic reporting. With the embed process, independent coverage and the immediacy of news reports, the chance for a clear picture of the war came into focus sooner rather than months or even years later.

Steven C. Vincent became the first American journalist attacked and killed in the war in Iraq in August 2005 when he was kidnapped and shot by masked gunmen in the southern city of Basra. Vincent, a freelancer whose work appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, was investigating the burgeoning influence of extremists and alleged corruption in the Iraqi police force.

The March 2005 shooting of an Italian journalist by U.S. troops after as she was being driven to freedom after a month in captivity sparked controversy after her version of what happened and the U.S. military's version did not jibe. Italian military officer Nicola Calipari was killed and journalist Giuliana Sgrena was wounded in the encounter.

In a television interview, Sgrena described the shooting as a "rain of fire," a description the White House called "absurd." The White House nevertheless promised a full investigation and a subsequent Pentagon report cleared the U.S. military and said soldiers involved should not be charged with dereliction of duty. Italian officials blasted the report and called for a further investigation. An Italian report a few weeks later refuted the U.S.'s exoneration of its troops saying, among other things, that the car whisking Sgrena to freedom was moving at 30 mph -- not 50 mph as the military claimed -- near a U.S. checkpoint that was not clearly marked.

Sgrena was injured on "Death Street," a 10-mile, attack-prone route out of and into Baghdad International Airport. Censored information in a government report contradicts a report by a Western security company about the number of attacks on the road, The New York Times reported May 31, 2005.

Journalists in Iraq are kept on a short leash, holed up in their hotel rooms unable to do man-on-the-street interviews or leave the heavily fortified U.S.-government protected "Green Zone" without military escort. In November 2004, non-embedded reporters were barred from traveling through towns south of Baghdad.

Reuters' Iraq bureau chief, Andrew Marshall, who in July 2005 finished a two-year stint in Baghdad, wrote on the CJR Daily Web site that "mobility has shrunk to almost zero over the past two years. The risk of kidnaping is extremely high and it is no longer possible to travel freely around the city. Even going to a news conference in the Green Zone has become a major logistical operation involving armoured cars, two-way radios and heavy security precautions."

Newsweek correspondent Joe Cochrane, who returned to Iraq in July 2005 after 18 months away, said journalists aren't adequately covering the war, but it's not their fault. Journalists are kept on a short leash as security worsens, he reported.

"The security situation has deteriorated so badly that journalists rarely venture out unless they're embedded with U.S. soldiers. That wasn't the case early last year, when foreigners could walk the streets outside the Green Zone, shop in local markets, and, most important to journalists, talk to the Iraqi people. Those days are long gone. . . . I would love to write about new schools being built and local village leaders learning about democracy, but I can't go out to see such things. "

The obstacles to reporting led news organizations to weigh the risks of Iraq coverage.

"The question for foreign news organizations in Iraq now is whether half a story is better than none. For the moment, most think it is," CBS News correspondent Tom Fenton wrote in January 2005.

Despite the increase in western journalists leading up to the January 2005 elections, major U.S. news organizations began facing resistance from journalists reluctant to cover Iraq, The Washington Post reported. "The people who have experience there are exhausted," Marjorie Miller, foreign editor of the Los Angeles Times, told The Post. "It's terribly dangerous in ways that other wars haven't been. You could always get killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here, just by being a westerner, you're perceived, or fear you're perceived, as a partisan. Reporters don't want to be seen as partisan at a cost of their lives." Tim McNulty, the Chicago Tribune's assistant managing editor for foreign news, agreed. "The pool of people willing to go has steadily shrunk over the last two years," he said. "The number of people who have spent a good deal of time there have said they've done their time and are not eager to go back. . . . If they say no, I don't ask the reasons."

After returning from Iraq, Army 1st Lt. Paul saw a void in American news reports about the war and created "Operation Truth," a program to link rank-and-file military members with journalists, Editor & Publisher reported in April 2005. Even with reporters on the scene, the ongoing system of embedding reporters actually limits the stories they can tell. "You need access from the military for your story," Rieckhoff said. "At its very foundation, as long as the military is controlling access to your story, you've got to play ball. Not to say that they're totally in bed, but you have to play along. If you don't, next time they'll deny you access."

Satellites

An exclusive deal between satellite companies and the U.S. government precluded news organizations from purchasing photos from Iraq and Pakistan for three months after Sept. 11. Some media organizations called the tactic "checkbook shutter control" and worried the trend would continue.

But during the initial invasion of Iraq, no such exclusive contracts existed. High-resolution satellite imagery gave newspaper readers and television viewers a new perspective on this war. In some cases, satellite images provided perspective when no information was available on the ground.

The New York Times used satellite imagery from Spacing Imaging to show the house in Mosul, Iraq, where Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay were killed.

When no reporters were allowed on the U.S. Air Force base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, satellite imagery confirmed that the U.S. government was constructing two B-2 bomber hangers there.

Satellite imagery has captured activities in North Korea where no reporters have been able to report from the ground.

In recent years, more companies have entered the satellite imaging business. Israel, France, Japan and India have launched high-resolution satellites, creating a wider supply of images.

But administration policy still allows for controls over distribution and collection of satellite images. The Bush administration in late April 2004 announced a new policy that makes commercial space photography -- instead of photos taken by government satellites -- the primary source for government users.

The policy replaced the policy set by the Clinton administration, which limited the activities of the space companies. The new directive will require federal agencies to buy the photos from private companies. But shutter control provisions in the policy allow the government to halt the gathering or distribution of satellite imaging to "protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests."

Other limits on release of satellite images are either part of contracts satellite companies have with the U.S. government, or internal policies of the companies. Two key players in this venture are Colorado-based Space Imaging and Digital Globe. In 1999, Space Imaging launched its IKONOS satellite, which collects one-meter resolution black-and-white images (meaning a 1-meter-by-1-meter object can be seen in the image) and 4-meter resolution color images.

Digital Globe limits access to photos that would reveal U.S. military troop positions. And, as part of its licensing agreement with the government, the company waits 24 hours before releasing anything of an 82-centimeter resolution or better. Space Imaging claims to have no such policy for delayed distribution.

The new Bush administration policy has been hailed by imagery firms, which likely will see increased business as government agencies make greater use of commercial satellite imagery.

But the move to increased use of commercial vendors also poses new concerns for government openness advocates because it moves more government functions to private companies and allows the federal government to control information relating to national security or foreign policy.

Even though official policy allows the government to shut off satellite imaging or distribution of imaging through shutter control, that policy has not been used.

But some users of satellite images still say the market is not really open.

In early 2005, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency announced plans to remove topographic maps from the public domain as of Oct. 1. Such information involves airport layouts, coasts and harbors worldwide, as well as flight information, gathered via satellite. By keeping the maps secret, the agency said among the things it hope to accomplish is preventing access to data by those intending harm to the United States.

Security concerns also prompted the doctoring and blurring of satellite images of the White House, the Capitol and U.S. Senate and House Office Buildings that are publicly available on Google maps.

It is difficult to say how exactly the administration's policy will affect organizations that use satellite images because the policy itself is classified, though excerpts and analyses of the policy have been released.

Development of war coverage in the 1990s

Until the second war in Iraq, many Pentagon officials considered the Persian Gulf War to be among the best-covered wars in history, noting considerable real-time coverage from CNN and pages and pages of news during the two-month conflict.

But it took months and sometimes years of persistent questioning and research by the press for Americans to learn that most U.S. casualties during the 1991 Gulf War were due to friendly fire and that the so-called "smart bombs" were successful less than one out of five times.

Real-time coverage surfaced again during the Afghan war. But journalists fear that too much of the most important details of the war unraveled outside the view of independent observers and, thus, might never be revealed to the public.

Journalists often make convincing arguments about the importance of coverage and the right to know what the U.S. government is doing in the name of the American citizens. The Department of Defense, too, has recognized the importance of informing the public and, as official policy, requires its officials to provide maximum access to the press whenever security concerns allow it.

But the actual practice of granting access developed informally over the years, mostly evolving with each new conflict and rarely changing in peacetime.

During World War II, censorship ran rampant, but journalists enjoyed incredible access to troops and commanders, often wearing uniforms and traveling with active units. The Office of War Information and Office of Censorship gave explicit instructions on what journalists could not include in their reports, including troop size, location and movement.

The military lifted almost all journalistic restrictions during the Vietnam War and regularly provided transportation to reporters and photographers. But for the military, the war turned into a public relations nightmare, leaving officials to swear that they would never let reporters enjoy as much freedom covering combat again.

The Oct. 25, 1983, invasion of Grenada dramatically changed the media-military dynamic.

When troops invaded the island, journalists were not there to document it. The Pentagon restricted all access to Grenada for more than 48 hours and did not ease all restrictions on reporters until Nov. 7, 1983.

The treatment irked the press corps, which demanded immediate changes. A commission, led by retired Maj. Gen. Winant Sidle, determined that while open coverage of conflict would be the preferred method, a pool of reporters would be acceptable and, at times, desirable in covering early stages of combat or surprise attacks.

The 1989 invasion of Panama offered few assurances that things had changed. The Pentagon activated the press pool too late to cover the launch of attacks and then hemmed in reporters for the first two days of action in that conflict, keeping them from the front lines.

After the Persian Gulf War, reporters demanded more changes.

The resulting nine-point statement of principles signed by the Pentagon and news media representatives on March 11, 1992, stated that "open and independent reporting will be the principal means of coverage of U.S. military operations."

The new principles allowed the Pentagon to establish credentials for journalists, organize pools in limited and extreme circumstances and eject those who fail to adhere to ground rules. The principles also called for the military to provide transportation and information centers for the press whenever possible.

But it was clear that the agreement was tenuous.

In signing the agreement, Pentagon officials stated that the department "believes that it must retain the option to review news material, to avoid the inadvertent inclusion in news reports of information that could endanger troop safety or the success of a mission."

The press, in turn, wrote: "We will challenge prior security review in the event that the Pentagon attempts to impose it in some future military operation."

Legal precedent for war access

For the most part, the conflicts between the media and the military avoid the courtroom. Perhaps that is best for the press, for in the few instances such matters came before a judge, the results were not amenable to forcing the Pentagon to accept journalists on the battlefield.

The first notable case, Flynt v. Weinberger, came more than eight months after the Grenada invasion. Hustler publisher Larry Flynt challenged the Pentagon's decision to prohibit press coverage during the initial stages of the invasion.

But a federal judge granted the Pentagon's motion to dismiss on June 21, 1984, determining that the case was moot because the open coverage Flynt sought was granted by defense officials on Nov. 7, 1983.

The judge also refused to impose an injunction on future efforts by the Pentagon to restrict coverage. The judge wrote that the invasion of Grenada, like any other military event, is unique and that Flynt could not show that such a press ban would be imposed in the future.

And court action, the judge suggested, might raise separation of powers issues if the judicial branch attempted to restrict the executive branch on conflicts yet to occur.

"An injunction such as the one plaintiffs seek would limit the range of options available to the commanders in the field in the future, possibly jeopardizing the success of military operations and the lives of military personnel and thereby gravely damaging the national interest," the court wrote. "A decision whether or not to impose a press ban is one that depends on the degree of secrecy required, force size, the equipment involved, and the geography of the field of operations."

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. (D.C. Cir.) remanded the decision with instructions to the district court that it simply deem the matter moot. The lower court did so.

Another federal district court in New York City on April 16, 1991, similarly dispensed with a lawsuit brought by the Nation, Village Voice and other media plaintiffs concerning restrictions imposed during the Persian Gulf War.

Although the Nation plaintiffs filed the lawsuit on Jan. 10, 1991, before the actual war began, the court decided the case after the Pentagon lifted press restrictions on March 4, 1991.

But in rendering the case moot, the court said "the issues raised by this challenge present profound and novel questions as to the existence and scope of a First Amendment right of access in the context of military operations and national security concerns."

This was not the case to determine the answers to those questions, it said.

"We conclude that this Court cannot now determine that some limitation on the number of journalists granted access to a battlefield in the next overseas military operation may not be a reasonable time, place, and manner restriction, valid under the First and Fifth Amendments," the court wrote.

In the most recent battlefield access case, a U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., decided on Jan. 8, 2002, not to impose a restraining order against the Pentagon for its press restrictions. The lawsuit, Flynt v. Rumsfeld, was the Hustler publisher's second war-related suit against the Pentagon.

The court said Flynt "was not likely to suffer irreparable harm" and that he and other publishers enjoyed some access to the war despite the restrictions. The court noted, too, that circumstances had changed since Flynt filed his lawsuit and that open coverage was in place in Afghanistan.

In a final ruling on Feb. 14, 2003, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman threw out Flynt's lawsuit against Rumsfeld, noting that the Pentagon had placed one of Hustler's reporters on a list of embedded journalists.

Friedman said that because the Defense Department did not formally deny access to the Hustler reporter, the judge could no longer address the issue of whether journalists have a constitutional right to join U.S. troops engaged in combat.

"The mere existence of a legal disagreement about the scope of the First Amendment does not make that disagreement fit for judicial review," Friedman wrote.

Again, the court said such an injunction might be justified in another case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed Friedman's decision a year later.

Such a case would likely have to involve major news organizations, such as The Associated Press or The New York Times, seeking satisfaction after being excluded from press pools or other coverage. Perhaps news organizations that actively maintain a foreign bureau system or Pentagon correspondent even during peacetime would fare better in the courts.

But news organizations historically bargain with the Pentagon at the onset of invasions to avoid rolling the dice in courts or alienating the officials who maintain the pool or, in this new case, the embed program.

Perhaps the strongest case for the press on military matters is New York Times v. United States, the Supreme Court case holding that the publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers could not be restrained by the government on national security grounds.

But the case is one on prior restraint, not right of access. Presumably, if the press gained access to the battlefield and collected information, the government would bear the burden of showing that strong and compelling national security issues require halting publication.

Concerning a right of access, the courts have not historically recognized that the press enjoys such a privilege. The First Amendment spares the press from prior restraint; it may not guarantee it can gather information in the first place.

The Supreme Court itself said in the 1971 case Pell v. Procunier: "It is one thing to say that the government cannot restrain the publication of news emanating from certain sources. It is quite another to suggest that the Constitution imposes upon the government the affirmative duty to make available to journalists sources of information not available to members of the public generally."

Indeed, attempts to make the argument about rights of access place a strong burden on the press, not the government.

The press lost an argument on military access in 1996 before a federal district court and then before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. (D.C. Cir.).

In JB Pictures Inc. v. Department of Defense, a group of photographers and veterans contested restrictions the Defense Department placed on picture-taking at Dover Air Force Base, the main military mortuary for soldiers killed abroad. The court agreed to hear the case because the policy is ongoing, not temporal, such as restrictions during wartime.

The court determined that the government had sufficient interest to limit access to the base to reduce the hardship of grieving families and to protect their privacy. The court further stated that it could not rule on whether the policy prohibited groups from speaking on the base because the plaintiffs did not raise such a claim.

The courts might have to address the issue again if a news organization, veterans group or relative of a deceased soldier decides to challenge the most recent ban on photos of flag-draped coffins.

Pentagon reports and codes

Case law aside, the press can cite the Pentagon's reports and regulations as compelling arguments for open coverage at war time.

The Sidle Panel Report released on Aug. 23, 1984, documented the findings of a Pentagon-sanctioned committee studying press restrictions in Grenada and recommended the creation of a press pool. As a result, the Pentagon established the Department of Defense National Media Pool, a cadre of journalists from the leading news organizations ready to cover the early stages of conflicts provided they agree to security restrictions and share their reports with non-pool members.

After the invasion of Panama, the Pentagon commissioned Fred Hoffman, a former Pentagon correspondent for The Associated Press, to review press restrictions in that conflict. Hoffman found that an excessive concern for secrecy by the Pentagon and then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney destroyed the effectiveness of the pool and slowed the transition from pooled to open coverage.

The 1992 agreement drafted after the Persian Gulf War was codified first on March 29, 1996, and then again on Sept. 27, 2000, by the Defense Department with minor rewrites as part of its policy on "Principles of Information."

With this in mind, press advocates could argue that the Pentagon violates its own regulations should defense officials attempt again to keep reporters from conflicts.

At first blush, the newest ground rules suggested that the Pentagon had opted for much more media access to the battlefield. One positive for war correspondents is that they are no longer relegated to a briefing room as they often were during the Persian Gulf War.

But the word "embed" implied "stuck."

Indeed, Pentagon officials strongly discouraged news organizations from allowing their reporters to roam the battlefields or potential theaters of conflict. And they noted that reporters once embedded probably would not be embedded again should they wander off.

The "hold harmless" agreement includes a clause that allows the Pentagon to withdraw the embeds at any time for any reason. Should coverage of the war not progress as U.S. military leaders see fit, the embedding process -- and, thus, an important part of wartime access -- could come to an end.

But the process has not come to an end. Rather, defense officials have roundly praised it. In fact, the Pentagon has started discussions about making the embedded program created for the war in Iraq a permanent one. Shortly after she announced her resignation on June 16, 2003, Assistant Defense Secretary Clarke said the Iraq war proved that the embed program worked in many ways, including providing the American public the information it needed about U.S. military affairs.

"Transparency works," Clarke said at a June 17, 2003, Brookings forum. "The good news gets out. The bad news gets dealt with quickly."

And the war on terrorism has proven a variety of other important points on the need for battlefield access to remain as open as possible:

• Security issues. Pentagon officials and Congress should note that journalists have a long history of keeping secrets. During World War II, dozens of journalists joined the Allied forces for the Normandy invasion, agreeing to conditions that they not file their reports until after Gen. Dwight Eisenhower declared the invasion a success. A New York Times reporter later in the war rode with the bombing squadron on its way to Hiroshima and waited three days before offering his account of the mission.

During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon reported fewer than a dozen serious national security violations because of journalists and most of those violations were from foreign journalists. None caused the death of American troops.

During the Persian Gulf War, journalists knew of the United States' infamous "left hook" invasion plan but never revealed that the amphibious attack planned for Iraq's Gulf shore was merely a ruse.

During the war in Afghanistan, reporters, knowing an initial strike was evident in early October 2001, never leaked the news. And during the war in Iraq, reporters routinely observed military briefings on condition they not compromise operational security. They for the most part complied with the rules.

Defense officials, however, complained about three incidents involving reporters.

Geraldo Rivera of Fox News was told in late March 2003 that he could no longer accompany U.S. troops in Iraq after he allegedly revealed troop positions on the air by drawing schematics in the sand.

Military officials on March 26, 2003, kicked freelance journalist Philip Smucker out of Iraq saying he revealed too much military information during a live interview with CNN. Smucker had been working for the Christian Science Monitor and The Daily Telegraph of London.

Officials removed one embedded reporter -- Brett Lieberman of the Harrisburg, Penn., Patriot News -- in late April after a commanding officer thought one of his stories revealed too much military detail. Patriot News editor David Newhouse defended Leiberman's reporting in that April 29, 2003, article.

Five journalists were booted from embed slots in the late 2004 and early 2005 for reporting secure information, Editor & Publisher reported. "They were all for operational security reasons, (revealing) something that would have been of use to the enemy," Maj. Kris Meyle, who runs the embed program, told E&P from Baghdad. "Generally, it gets done very quickly. Usually it was something that was not done intentionally by the reporter." Meyle declined to disclose the identities of the "disembedded" or the news organizations for which they worked. But she did not recall any from newspapers. "I remember them being broadcast," she said.

But such incidents proved to be exceptions to the thousands of reports transmitted from the Iraqi desert.

Even in the aftermath of the invasion and amid numerous complaints about the content and quality of war reporting, there was not another contention raised that a reporter had transmitted or released vital U.S. military secrets.

• Reporter safety. The Pentagon repeatedly raises reporter safety as an issue whenever it declines to allow journalists access to the battlefield. For the war in Afghanistan in particular, military officials at first said the combat would be too dangerous for the kind of embedding that occurred in Vietnam and World War II.

"It is not a set of battle lines, where Bill Mauldin and Ernie Pyle can be with troops week after week after week as they move across Europe or even across islands in the Pacific," Rumsfeld said on March 4, 2002. "This is a notably different activity. It's terribly untidy."

But war correspondents understand "untidy." In conflict after conflict they willingly risk their lives to tell the world the truth about events, as the tragic deaths of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and other journalists during the war in Afghanistan shows. And in Iraq, it is important to note the enormous numbers of reporters who have signed up for combat training so that they could tolerate the trials of war themselves.

U.S. authorities in Iraq ranked 108th on a list of countries posing the biggest dangers to journalists worldwide, according to a global survey of press freedom released in October 2004 by Reporters Without Borders. The organization gave the U.S. its own separate ranking in Iraq because of the number of journalists reported killed by U.S. military gunfire.

Between March 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, and May 2005, 45 journalists died while covering the war in Iraq, according to the Freedom Forum. By comparison, 69 journalists died in all of World War II and 63 died during 20 years of conflict in Vietnam and Cambodia. Given the shorter duration of the wars in Iraq, it might be the most dangerous conflict journalists have ever covered.

Bounties of as much as $10,000 were reportedly being offered for murdering a journalist or an Iraqi translator in an area dubbed the "triangle of death" south of Baghdad, The Associated Press reported in January 2005.

A TV journalist was shot dead in September 2004 as he made a live broadcast from Baghdad when U.S. helicopters fired on a crowd gathered around the burning wreckage of a US armoured vehicle. Mazen al-Tumeizi, working for al-Arabiya, an Arab satellite TV channel, was killed in the incident.

An Iraqi journalist working for a U.S.-funded television station and his son were killed by gunmen in the southern city of Basra in February 2005.

In June 2005, A U.S. military sniper apparently shot and killed an Iraqi special correspondent for Knight Ridder, Yasser Salihee. The shot apparently was fired by a U.S. military sniper, though there were Iraqi soldiers in the area who also may have been shooting at the time. Salihee, 30, had the day off and was driving alone near his home in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Amariyah when a single bullet pierced his windshield and then his skull.

• Benefits of independent verification. Throughout the war in Afghanistan and the subsequent imprisonment of captured fighters at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military has come under fire for failed air raids and poor detention conditions.

Assurances from military officials hardly quell the criticism. But the presence of reporters for independent observation certainly boosts the veracity of their claims.

For example, the Pentagon itself referred to published news reports as evidence that the U.S. military did not cover up evidence from a July 1, 2002, air strike in Afghanistan that locals say killed dozens of people celebrating a wedding in the province of Uruzban.

Military spokesman Roger King said: "The only shrapnel and bullets and blood samples that were picked up by U.S. forces were picked up by the fact-finding team that we had a reporter with, who reported that we picked up shell casings and shrapnel and blood."

Capt. T. McCready, a press affairs officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed to bureau chiefs recently that having independent press coverage enables the military to examine the battlefield in numerous ways.

"I've got to tell you from a pure military perspective, it's a great benefit for us to have cameras behind what could potentially be enemy lines and I'll just lay that to you flat out because we can pick up stuff off of just your normal, everyday broadcasts," McCready said.

Some press critics, however, have faulted journalists for failing to question the military enough about its failure to find damning evidence proving Iraq developed or was in the process of developing weapons of mass destruction. The news media also came under fire for verifying and correcting details of the saga of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, the soldier whose dramatic rescue was widely publicized, although the details were overstated to the news media by military officials.

And a reporter's eye can offer a different explanation for events, such as when soldiers open-fired on a van packed with 15 Iraqi women and children sped toward a checkpoint near Najaf on March 31, 2003. Depending on the account, 25 mm cannon rounds from American Bradley tanks destroy the van, killing either seven or 10 of the passengers.

Hours later, officials at U.S. Central Command in Bahrain called the incident tragic and faulted the driver of the van for failing to heed warning shots. Defense officials report the death toll at seven. But a journalist at the scene -- William Branigan of The Washington Post -- wrote an April 1, 2003, account that 10 people died in the accident and quoted a U.S. captain yelling at a platoon leader for failing to fire warning shots fast enough.

Defense officials responded with plans of an investigation despite initial reports describing the incident as a suicide bombing. Such a reaction likely would not have happened had Branigan not been there as an embedded journalist among U.S. troops.

• Improved military-media relations. Over the years, journalists have harped on the argument that a well-covered war enables the military to better understand the role of the journalist. But it is actually the opposite take that makes the better argument: That access to the military makes for the better journalist.

Military experts and officials often complain about journalists hyping a minor shooting skirmish or improperly identifying military equipment. Col. David Hackworth, a decorated Korean and Vietnam veteran and longtime war correspondent for Newsweek, made much of this ignorance before any of the fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq.

"From my experience, and this is one of the shockers, is that, in the last couple of decades, most military reporters don't know a tank from a turd," Hackworth said. "So they don't know what is secure and what is not secure, what is important and what is not important."

But after covering the latest war from the front lines, the media has an enormous cache of reporters that hold a better understanding of military affairs and war. The military, on the other hand, has a new generation of soldiers and officers who appreciate the role of the press.

• Open coverage logistics. The war on terrorism brought new rules and concerns. The Pentagon claimed in the Persian Gulf War and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that the unique circumstances of modern warfare preclude open coverage in the early and sometimes latter stages of a conflict.

But one only has to look at the intermediate conflicts in Somalia, Haiti and Kosovo, to see that open coverage can and does work. And few reporters and military officials, if any, complained about coverage or the treatment of the news media during those conflicts.

While the 1992 agreement called for embedded reporters, it also recognized the need for reporters to be able to step aside from the military units and cover the war from a variety of vantage points. The new ground rules did not even acknowledge open coverage. In fact, Pentagon officials strongly discouraged open coverage and continue to do so long after the start of the war in Iraq.

Reporters still in Iraq are mainly free to pursue open coverage, and are largely responsible for their own security.

• Right to know. The American people have a right to know what is being done on behalf of the U.S. citizenry. They have a right to see the atrocities of war, not for a sick fascination, but for the benefit of understanding what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq entail and, if they wish, to change their minds about supporting it.

And it is journalists, not government officials, that have pieced together for the public how 19 hijackers assembled and completed their Sept. 11 mission. Reporters, too, revealed details on how and why the military and the CIA failed to capture Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. And again, the journalists are the ones working to keep the public informed about the trials of detained foreign nationals and Taliban fighters.

And the American people have a right to view the victories as well as the defeats.

"We made a huge mistake trying to restrict press coverage in the first Gulf War because of our Vietnam mentality," Gen. Wesley Clark, a former presidential candidate and CNN military analyst, told Walter Isaacson and Eason Jordan for an essay published in the Wall Street Journal. "We had a First Armored Division tank battle that was just incredible, perhaps the biggest armored battle ever, but not a single image was reported or documented for history by the press. I hope we don't make that mistake again."

The American people have a right to learn if evidence exists of an Iraqi scheme to develop weapons of mass destruction. They have a right to observe how the U.S. government develops a new government in Iraq designed to ensure the people there have a say in their own government.

The Pentagon's guidelines and practice of embedding reporters made a positive statement in ordering that the release of information be the default standard when reporters asked for battlefield details. But the rules also offer numerous opportunities for military officers to withhold the information and access should things get nasty.

Without this right to know, the real casualty of war is knowledge -- whether we will really ever know what happened in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the war on terrorism.

Next section: Access to terrorism-related proceedings