Earlier this week, President Bush effectively labeled the Los Angeles Times an enemy of the state for the paper’s reports on anti-bomb technologies. Defensetech blogger and WIRED contributor Noah Shachtman has written much on counter-IED gadgetry over the years, and is among many who feel the White House and Pentagon are simply trying to bully reporters off of the story. Noah says:
Last summer, a U.S. Colonel in Baghdad told me that I was America’s enemy, or very close to it. For months, I had been covering the U.S. military’s efforts to deal with the threat of IEDs, improvised explosive devices. And my writing, he told me, was going too far — especially this January 2005 Wired News story, in which I described some of the Pentagon’s more exotic attempts to counter these bombs.
None of the material in the story — the stuff about microwave blasters or radio frequency jammers — was classified, he admitted. Most of it had been taken from open source materials. And many of the systems were years and years from being fielded. But by bundling it all together, I was doing a “world class job of doing the enemy’s research for him, for free.” So watch your step, he said, as I went back to my ride-alongs with the Baghdad Bomb Squad — the American soldiers defusing IEDs in the area.
Today, I hear that the President and the Pentagon’s higher-ups are trotting out the same argument. “News coverage of this topic has provided a rich source of information for the enemy, and we inadvertently contribute to our enemies’ collection efforts through our responses to media interest,” states a draft Defense Department memo, obtained by Inside Defense. “Individual pieces of information, though possibly insignificant taken alone, when aggregated provide robust information about our capabilities and weaknesses.”
In other words, Al Qaeda hasn’t discovered how to Google, yet. Don’t help ’em out.
Link to “The Enemy is Me.”
Image: an IED (improvised explosive device) in Iraq, constructed with a cellular phone. One call missed. Link.
Reader comment: Not telling says,
If you assemble enough unclassified information into one well organized and cogent document, then you could potentially have created classified information. This is referred to as Classification by Compilation. I’m not saying that this applies to the Los Angles Time in this instance, but given the tenacity of many journalists, and our governments penchant for classifying anything, I’m not surprised this has come to verbal fisticuffs.
Reader comment: Xopl says,
I think Bush is confused when he says Iran is giving Iraq the most sophisticated IED technology. Clearly, the country to blame is Finland.
Reader comment: Allen Knutson says,
More here about Bush’s attempt to smear the LA Times: “10 months later — and after a prototype destroyed about 90% of the IEDs laid in its path during a battery of tests — not a single JIN has been shipped to Iraq. The Times spoke to several Defense Department officials before the article appeared. None expressed concern that publication could endanger U.S. troops (…) Before Bush mentioned the report Monday, no U.S. officials had contacted The Times to raise those concerns.”