ANTHOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                        217


                      Sareguards and Ground Rules

   In our view the pool system was the only practical way to preposition re-
porters with forward-based units as correspondents in the ground war without
jeopardizing the success of the operation or endangering the lives of Marines
and Sailors.  The Pentagon developed ground rules as safeguards, using as a
basis guidelines handed down to correspondents in conflicts going back to World
War II. While reporters chaffed at these rules, they weren't much different than
those with which their predecessors had to contend at Normandy and Iwo Jima.
They were simply designed to prevent the enemy from learning in a news report
our specific troop strengths and locations, our weaknesses, and our intentions.
   Far more vexing to reporters than the ground rules, which governed the
content of media dispatches, was the requirement that each press report un-
dergo a security review at the source.  The phrase, "cleared by Pentagon cen-
sors" began cropping up on DESERT STORM reports.              One could almost
envision a draconian group of officers in green eyeshades gleefully cutting and
pasting the pool reports. The ersatz "censors"--staff noncommissioned officers
and junior officers who served as pool escorts--were, in fact, very constrained
in what they could recommend for removal from media reports.
   The security review process prohibited any subsequent staffing of media
materials through intermediate commands. If an escort officer couldn't convince
a journalist that his story violated one of the ground rules, he had to "flag" the
report, which would be jointly reviewed at the Dhahran JIB by military pool
coordinators and media representatives. If they couldn't agree that the offending
portions should be deleted, the report had to be forwarded to the Pentagon,
where once again military officers and civilian journalists would try to strike
some accord over the report's contents.
   This tightly controlled appeal process protected the journalists from arbitrary
deletion of information.    But it also discouraged the escort officers from
initiating confrontations over valid security concerns.  The system helped avoid
blatant opsec violations by individual reporters, but still allowed some informa-
tion to be released that could be used by enemy intelligence who could compile
the pool reports from across the front and study the cumulative information. In
a letter in early February to the Dhahran JIB director, I complained that the
process placed our escorts at an unfair disadvantage.    As I noted in the letter;

                 I support the concept of security at the source for
            pool reporting, but I don't think it's realistic to expect
            that all journalists will willingly omit portions of their
            reports solely in response to the persuasive powers of
            our escort officers. Some reporters simply can't grasp
            how the factual information they wish to include in their
            stories can be of value to the enemy and potentially
            endanger American lives.    I believe that the JIB has
            been too liberal in allowing publication/broadcast of