OF COURSE, reporters’ time-honored response to the Pentagon’s press stifling is to "ditch the pool." Run that through the jargon decoder, and it means simply to throw off the shackles of the military’s supervision on the battlefield, drive off to the sound of gunfire, dig up stories, and fill in history’s black hole on your own. The Christian Science Monitor’s David Rohde took this approach to the limit when he ducked Bosnian Serb visa requirements and government officials and went off to investigate evidence of the 1995 Srebrenica massacres. He was arrested and detained (and eventually released) by the Bosnian Serbs — but his reporting clinched the evidence of the massacres and won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.

In fact, in the early days of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan, striking out on one’s own was the only way to get the story. In the lockdown atmosphere described by many of the war correspondents on MRE’s panels, reporters were left with little choice but to finagle their way into Afghanistan on their own, hook up with the Northern Alliance, and file stories about the proxy war. As the Taliban fled Kabul last year, for instance, the BBC’s John Simpson went into the city with such panache that there were immodest claims that he had "liberated" it.

Yet the dangers of such an approach have become obvious — especially in Afghanistan. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 10 journalists have been killed covering the war in Afghanistan. Another potential chill on the "pool ditching" approach has been a series of incidents whereby journalists, in the course of reporting the news, have been threatened by the US military or the proxy forces working with them. In April of this year, Ebadullah Ebadi, a translator working with Boston Globe reporter A.R. Lakshmanan, was roughed up by Afghan fighters in view of US Special Forces as an interview request by the reporter was being relayed to the American troops. In December 2001, according to CPJ, proxy Afghan forces gave similar rough treatment to photojournalists attempting to snap pictures of US Special Forces.

A third incident involving Washington Post reporter Douglas Struck excited a strong clash of views among participants at the MRE conference. In January of this year, US troops threatened Struck at gunpoint as he attempted to visit the site of a controversial raid by US Special Forces on an alleged Taliban stronghold near Kandahar. What’s not in dispute between the Pentagon and the journalist is that Struck showed up in the presence of armed Afghan guards to investigate the site and was forcibly prevented from proceeding further. But other elements in the encounter have been hotly debated, including whether US forces explicitly threatened to shoot Struck if he proceeded any further.

The Struck incident is still fresh in the minds of those who cover the military, something made clear in a sharp exchange between Hearst Newspapers bureau chief Charles Lewis and DeFrank. Lewis cited the Struck incident as the most prominent of a number of "frequent" threats by military personnel to arrest or expel reporters. DeFrank hewed to the official Pentagon version of events that portrays Struck arriving in "an Afghan vehicle with Afghans and weapons." Lewis retorted that the incident was "US military personnel telling a US correspondent that he’d be shot."

Struck’s potentially hazardous encounter with US forces was also the subject of another exchange at the October 30 bureau chiefs meeting attended by Rumsfeld. With the Struck incident clearly in mind, Washington Post deputy editor Matt Vita asked Rumsfeld for assurances that American journalists encountered by US forces in the field would be treated as journalists. Rumsfeld replied, "Once again, I can’t give assurances, but there is no question but that US military people treat journalists as journalists." He then went on to lay out scenarios in which journalists may come into harm’s way — being in a bombed building, operating with Iraq’s Republican Guard. The question was clarified: not the journalists in a building that’s bombed, but those engaged in out-of-pool freelancing were at issue. Rumsfeld again gave no assurances beyond stating that "any policy would be to treat them as noncombatants at the outset."

IN HIS INTRODUCTION to the 1984 reissue of Tet!, Don Oberdorfer observes that at first he did not grasp clearly the Tet Offensive’s "significance as the first of a series of real life Big Events abroad to be transmitted home via satellite, with powerful impact on American public attitudes and governmental decision-making. In this respect the Tet Offensive is important not only in its own right but also as a precursor of things to come. Tet! is an early case study of a new phenomenon of expanding dimensions."

In the almost three decades since the end of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon has clearly assessed and mastered these expanding dimensions. In the conclusion to his riveting 2001 account of commanding the NATO campaign against Serbia, Waging Modern War (Public Affairs), General Wesley Clark renders the crucial lessons he believes the military should have learned about the media. "In the Gulf War," he writes, "the military authorities were wary of the media. All of the senior commanders there had seen the press at work in the Vietnam conflict, and most of them wanted nothing of it. The press was fundamentally uncontrollable once you let them in. They asked difficult questions and came with their own opinions — likely different on social issues than the military mainstream.... But in the Balkans, we weren’t able to shut out the press, and even if we could have, we shouldn’t. The Gulf War lasted only a few weeks, and its ground component only four days. For a prolonged campaign, of indeterminate length, you must retain public support."

The NATO campaign taught Clark that maintaining press support for military operations was vital. It also taught him that spicing up the briefings was just as important. "We also kept seeking to present more information in the daily briefings at NATO," Clark writes. "As [NATO secretary Javier] Solana directed me a few weeks into the campaign, ‘Wes, you must find ways to make the briefings more interesting.’ That we hadn’t anticipated. Interesting. He was right."

In some ways, Clark’s assessment has already been weighed and tweaked by Rumsfeld’s Pentagon in light of the strong public sentiment created by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The interesting — and even entertaining — style of the briefings has been retained. But in the short term, the Pentagon has discovered that you can indeed shut out the media for indefinite periods, spin wittily from a single podium, and pay no price for it at all — save the grousing of those few who cover war for a living.

The lack of media access to the military hurts everyone in the United States. It curbs the public’s right to know how their tax dollars are spent and denies them crucial information about the status of the ongoing war on terrorism. Beyond that, it undermines a true assessment of the nation’s ability to wage yet another war with Iraq.

Yet it hurts the military as well. As Clark points out, lengthy operations such as the war on terrorism require sustained support from the American public. Without the media, there is no way to sustain that support. And that is foolishly shortsighted, for shutting out the media and their questions now could pose even more probing and troublesome questions in the near future.

Richard Byrne is a freelance journalist based in Washington, DC. He can be reached at richardbyrne1@earthlink.net