Posted on 12/17/2003 4:45:20 PM PST by Pikamax
DECEMBER 17, 2003 John Burns on Covering Iraq: Then and Now Wolper's Exclusive Interview With 'NY Times' Scribe
By Allan Wolper
NEW YORK -- John F. Burns sat back in a chair in a corner of the Algonquin Hotel dining room in midtown Manhattan, thousands of miles from his New York Times outpost in Baghdad -- his hand curled around a morning cup of coffee -- and spoke publicly for the first time about the ethical remonstrations he created via a taped interview published in the recent book, Embedded: The Media At War in Iraq (The Lyons Press). That oral history was first excerpted at E&P Online on Sept. 15, drawing extraordinary attention and praise, and criticism as well.
"I said some very edgy things about that period of time," said Burns, the 59-year-old senior foreign correspondent for the Times, who was in the U.S. for just a few days before heading back to Baghdad. "I had become known as the most dangerous man in Iraq. It was not a joke. And it put me under tremendous stress. So when I spoke harshly in the book, I had some very raw feelings about this."
The "this" was his contention that American journalists in Iraq often ignored the terror of Saddam Hussein's regime to avoid losing their visas, and plied his ministers with expensive gifts and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to stay on their good side.
"Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance," he told Embedded editors Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson. Burns also told them that a journalist he won't identify "from a major American newspaper" took his clips and those of his competitors to the Iraqi Ministry of Information to prove he was softer on Saddam than Burns and others were.
Burns sat down with E&P on Nov. 26, the day after receiving The Burton Benjamin Memorial Award for lifetime achievement from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) at a Waldorf-Astoria black-tie dinner attended by representatives of the very news organizations he accused of paying off Saddam's deputies. The award was named for the late CBS News executive (and former CPJ chairman) Burton Benjamin, who became a symbol of integrity after attacking his own network for breaking its rules in producing The Uncounted Enemy, a documentary on the Vietnam War.
Months after making his initial charges, Burns wasn't taking anything back but he has forgiven everyone -- including that newspaper reporter in Baghdad who shared his clips with Saddam's officials -- mainly because of how journalists are now behaving in Iraq. "I've seen the same people back at work in a much more dangerous environment," Burns said. "I am seeing people who were not as assertive as they might have been, showing enormous courage in covering Iraq. People who made compromises I thought questionable are now being asked to confront Saddam in a different way."
He also said he was moved by the way the crowd at the awards dinner responded to him. "Editors, television executives, reporters, book publishers, they all came up to me at the dinner," he said. "There are people who are very angry with me, but there are very, very few of them."
But he warned American journalists against setting unethical precedents. "If we are going to hold our government accountable we'd better be pretty sure we don't make expedient compromises ourselves, which is a very hard thing to do -- very hard," he said. "You better get into these places to report on them. You have to get your visas extended to continue to report on them. It is not easy. It's a question of where you strike the balance. I don't think the balance was struck in the right way when Saddam was in power."
The Burns ethical rant in Embedded was actually an expansion of four pungent paragraphs in a 4,657-word story in the April 20 edition of the Times. In that piece, he mentioned the payoffs to Iraqi officials without indicting the reporters involved in it. "Bribes were endemic," he reported in the Times, "with some officials demanding sums in the thousands of dollars for visa approvals and extensions or obtaining exemptions from the AIDS tests required for any reporter remaining in Baghdad more than 10 days ... Some reporters bought expensive gifts for senior military officials, submitted copies of their stories to show they were friendly to Iraq, or invited key officials ... for dinners at restaurants favored by Mr. Hussein's elite."
Burns answered my questions for an hour. The following are some of the highlights of that interview, starting with the impact his statements had on his own psyche.
Q. Are you happy you said what you said in the book?
We don't have much training [in that], oddly, considering that we spend our entire lives covering personalities in the public eye who are under stress. We know very little about the best ways to respond. And occasionally in our lives we find ourselves, however briefly, in the public eye, and under stress. I don't want to go to war with my own profession. I have no reason to. This is my community. These are the people who make my life and the overwhelming majority of them are people who are true to the highest principles of the profession. They are the seekers of truth.
Q. Can you tell me the name of the reporter from the major American newspaper who brought your articles to Saddam's ministry of information?
I am not going to say anything about that. I have not said anything more about that since that last time. And I think it is better for me not to say anything.
Q. Why haven't you identified the television journalists who paid off the Iraqi officials? By not naming them, you wound up implicating the entire press corps.
That was an unfortunate consequence ... The points I had to make were not personal ones. The points were broader. They were matters of principle ... It's an impossible dilemma. I am not going to talk about individuals. What I found out to my enormous pleasure was that I struck a chord in my profession. Many of my colleagues from Baghdad have written to me, had dinner with me, and approached me at news conferences to say they appreciated what I said.
Q. If you know who the reporters are who bribed Saddam's officials, then the Iraqi people probably know it as well. Why won't they think you are some kind of American intelligence agent?
I don't think that Iraqis hold foreign reporters in contempt for not confronting Saddam. Because, after all, they themselves did not confront Saddam. So they simply saw foreign reporters making the same kind of compromises they had to make.
Q. How do the Iraqis know who are reporters and who are American intelligence agents? Do you carry badges or ID cards around your neck?
U.S. forces have been very slow to accredit correspondents, which would make our access easier. So we manufacture our own press cards that we write in both English and Arabic. [But] you can argue in the case of the Fedayeen that to be seen wearing a press card might be provocation.
Q. At the awards dinner you hinted that American journalists might become targets of Saddam guerillas. Can you expand on that a bit?
I think they believe that anything they can do to weaken the American occupation of Iraq, they will do. If they can create a generalized sense of terror which is, after all what their principle business was for 30 years, then they think they can drive the Westerners out. I don't want to create alarmism, but there is very little reason to believe that reporters would get an exemption [from an attack]. Why would they think they would when these people have driven an ambulance filled with high explosives up to the International Committee of the Red Cross? I think editors face a lot of difficult decisions in employing people in Iraq.
Q. What kind of decisions are you referring to?
One of them is that they feel the need to introduce [to the danger zone] new young people who have done well on metro reporting staffs and elsewhere ... God knows I am the last person in the world who says they shouldn't do that ... I went to China when I was 26 years old ... we had some very good young people in Iraq this summer. But one thing you can say unarguably about young people who have not been in these situations before is they haven't had a chance to accumulate combat zone awareness, in the way that older people have.
Q. Why do you think that AP initially misreported the recent story of the two American soldiers who were supposedly "mutilated" in Mosul?
It is commonly the case that crowds in Iraq turn angry very fast ... you have to get in and out very fast. If you add that to the pressures of deadline writing you have a situation which is nightmarish, absolutely nightmarish. My guess is that when we find out how this happened, there will be enough blame to go around ... A lot of initial information from American briefings are turning out to be erroneous. It is a fact that if the situation is sufficiently chaotic, high-ranking officers often give out information that later proves to be faulty.
Q. Do you have any examples of that?
I covered the incident involving the donkey cart bombings [in November]. We were given a briefing in which at least one pertinent fact was wrong and the briefing was given by a general. He said that two bombs were set off by a donkey with propane cylinders on it. So a lot of people reported that all afternoon long and into the evening, and it wasn't until a corrected version went out about 13 or 14 hours later that they said it was a donkey cart, not a donkey. Now it is a small point, but you just wonder how it can be that something like that can reach somebody as senior as a general 13 hours after the attack and not be right. If it is difficult for the military to get it right ... then how difficult is it for an agency reporter to get it right on the first go-round?
Q. You said that Americans are forced to hire local Iraqis to help them with various tasks. How do you decide who to trust?
That does require very difficult judgments, because under the old regime everyone had to make compromises. If somebody made a contact with an American journalist and did not disclose it, the penalty was death. They killed people who didn't cooperate with them. They killed people who did cooperate with them. We do employ people who have some involvement with the old regime. It would be impossible not to.
Q. That would seem to be a very big problem.
You have to judge by what they do. I have used a driver who is the same driver I used under the old regime. Back then he took risks that potentially were fatal for his family and now he is taking them again. Two weeks ago I was rushing to cover a truck bombing of the Italian military police compound in Nasiriya. We hadn't seen another vehicle for an hour. We were traveling 100 miles per hour when six masked men with Kalashnikov rifles jumped into the middle of the road. Had I been at the wheel with six men facing the vehicle, I would have stopped. He didn't. He switched off the lights. By the time I registered that they wore masks and were pointing guns, the lights were off. He gunned the vehicle to 125 miles per hour. At first he turned left at one group, and then right at the other and they jumped back. I would say that this driver saved my life. I'll never know. Others might say that by doing what he did he exposed us to greater risk. But he came from Nasiriya. He was a former tank officer of the Iraqi Army from the days of the Iraq-Iran war. He said, "I know these people. If we stopped, we were dead."
Source: Editor & Publisher Online
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Allan Wolper (allanwolper@msn.com) is a contributing editor for E&P.
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