Oral evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee on Wednesday 2 July 2003

Members present:

Mr Bruce George, in the Chair
Mr James Cran
Mr Gerald Howarth
Syd Rapson
Mr Frank Roy
Rachel Squire

__________

Witnesses: MR MARTIN IVENS, Deputy Editor, Sunday Times, MR ALEX THOMSON, Chief Correspondent, Channel Four News and MR MARK URBAN, Diplomatic Editor, BBC Newsnight, examined.

Q770  Chairman: Thank you for coming, gentlemen. I am sorry we have lost one of your colleagues. We had an interesting session this morning with journalists who were embedded and now we are eliciting the experience which you had during the conflict. We have a lot of questions and as a Welshman I am not fit to tell anybody to give brief answers but if you want to escape by five o'clock then brevity would be appreciated. Do you feel that an accurate picture of the war emerged during the major combat phase of operations?

Mr Urban: I was in Shepherd's Bush bravely holding the fort. From the outset it was clear that the conflict had certain characteristics which made it quite unlike some previous ones. If, for example, you were not expecting there to be much organised resistance at the borders of the country and you were expecting the coalition forces to penetrate quite quickly into the country and for some sort of guerilla type of resistance to be mounted, as indeed happened, it was always going to be a little difficult to find out about the nature of that resistance, where the hot spots were, how organised it was, how spontaneous it was. With the exception of that factor, which clearly was a significant factor, as to exactly what was going on in Nasiriyah in the first few days of the war or some of the other towns there, there was a pretty accurate picture in the early days of the war and as it progressed it became more accurate. It was certainly possible, sitting at an information hub to piece together from a wide variety of different sources, including the embeds of course, quite a lot of information which proved to be pretty reliable.

Mr Thomson: I was in the forward transmission unit, which was certainly a unit which was transmitting but not particularly forward; we were in Iraq just over the border from Kuwait. Yes, the picture which emerged was quite accurate, but it emerged almost by accident and emerged in many key instances largely by virtue, to put it politely, of the misinformation which the Army gave to journalists on the ground about what was happening, in particular the fall of Umm Qasr, which did not fall until several days after Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons it had; the first uprising in Basra, which turned out not to exist; the second uprising in Basra which did not exist; the tank column coming out of Basra, which turned out not to exist. The problem with that, as a reporter, was simply that it gave the impression first and foremost that expectations and hopes were raised in terms of the way the campaign was going, only for it then to emerge that in fact what had been said, possibly in the heat of battle, who knows, turned out not to be the case. The emerging picture was that the Fedayeen, the militias, were putting up more of a fight than people expected.

Mr Ivens: You wanted to balance it, so you were not suggesting that the whole campaign was a cakewalk on the one hand, nor that the resistance was of a nature that more over-heated commentators would say was of a Stalingrad nature. It was our job to try to give balance to that sort of coverage of the war. If you took a cooler approach, you tried to steer between those two extremes.

Q771  Chairman: Which parts of the war do you think less reflected the reality which emerged afterwards?

Mr Ivens: There is a pressure of events on twenty-four-hours-a-day news organisations. I agree with my colleagues, that was partly the result of the information which had been pushed out by allied forces, which sometimes led to expectations of over rapid success very unnecessarily. The war, by and large, was successful and therefore to jump the gun over the fall of various strategic positions was unnecessary and does not ultimately aid morale - if that is the concept - back home, does it?

Q772  Chairman: Can you guess which is a genuine mistake, which fog of war?

Mr Ivens: There is a bit of both, is there not? There is fog of war and there is a sense of over-eagerness and anticipation and the allied governments wanting things to work well as soon as possible.

Q773  Chairman: Was there the same problem that there was during the Falklands, where you will recall the MoD suddenly relented and agreed to take a lot of journalists as opposed to the handful they were going to and it appeared that whoever was around in the newsroom was then asked to volunteer to get to Portsmouth, or wherever, the following day. The result was that not every member of that cohort of the press was a PhD in war studies from King's College. Was there problem? Do you feel that a lot of the people who were reporting back, as there were so many journalists, really were as new to war and defence issues as they would have been if they had been sent off to Birmingham to cover a riot of some kind?

Mr Thomson: That is undoubtedly true, more particularly, the people in the forward embeds were, simply because of the numbers involved, not in every case the most seasoned war correspondent. In terms of the examples I have just outlined, every single one of those came not from journalists but from the military themselves. So something. Fog of war? I do not know. Something odd was going on and was going on repeatedly, because they were simply breaking a very basic rule, not just of PR, but of fighting military campaigns. They were reporting back things as having happened when they clearly had not. That was not the journalists.

Q774  Chairman: What about the BBC? I presume you are all great experts out in the field there, seasoned campaigners, men and women.

Mr Urban: The BBC does have the advantage of the size of the organisation. It does have quite a lot of seasoned people - you were talking to Gavin Hewitt this morning. It also has, which pretty much all of the newspapers have lost, a good number of analysts who can be put, whether it is in Shepherd's Bush or whether it is Qatar or one or two other places, and people who are in the business of trying to put it together and make sense of the disparate strands of information. In a sense in a situation like that, one is grateful to be working for the BBC in that environment. Certainly, looking at the newspaper where I used to work and looking at other places, you saw that their ability to respond to a huge story like that by putting informed people all over the place was definitely less, inevitably as small organisations.

Mr Ivens: It depends on the size of the newspaper. I represent the Sunday Times and we were able to field four foreign correspondents who had been given the title Foreign Correspondent of the Year. We had had one journalist in Baghdad whose experience of war went right back to the killing fields in Cambodia and we were able to see things within the light of that experience and we gave our readers an extremely good idea of how the war was being conducted. We had one particularly good illustrative picture of the war from a particular correspondent called Mark Francetti, who was embedded with the 1^st and 2^nd Battalion of Marines at Nasiriyah, who observed American soldiers firing at will on civilians attempting to leave the town at night. Typically, we were praised by New Statesman for providing the best accountant of the war. Given the lead times, you could actually put up quite a good show in terms of correspondents, so I do not think it is just a matter of the BBC being able to field a decent operation, Fleet Street could do rather well at it.

Q775  Chairman: You all represent very reputable organisations, but there must have been a number of people reporting in that vast number of journalists who were distorting, either because of wilfulness, or because of lack of an ability to interpret or to investigate and other reasons. Without in any way asking you to shop your colleagues, did you get the impression that overall outside your own specific areas of employment that your profession did a very good job, good job, reasonable job or not such a very good job as a whole, if one can generalise?

Mr Urban: It is reasonable under the circumstances. It is clearly a problem, if you want to talk about journalism as a whole. What is required in a situation where there are hundreds of embeds and other reporters on beats in northern Iraq and Jordan and all over the place, is a kind of surge capability, in military terms. It is plain that in the culture of many newsrooms in the course of the 1990s knowledge of defence and specialism in defence was held pretty cheap and did decline in importance as a specialism. When required to have a surge capability, some organisations were probably more embarrassed than others, but whether you had been able to put two people with a track record either of war or defence reporting, or whether you had been able to put six, it probably was not going to be enough to fill all the billets required in a surge situation like that. Then of course you do get people - I am sure you can all think of episodes or reports - who are reporting heavy fire fights in certain places. In a way, the definition of a heavy fire fight is one you are in the middle of. It is often the case for soldiers themselves that they may over-estimate enemy casualties as a result of what has happened. They may over-estimate the significance of the episode they have just been involved in. If you feel that you have done reasonably well to get away with your life at the end of a particular day, then you may well over-estimate the importance of the episode and clearly journalists, in common with soldiers occasionally fall into that trap.

Q776  Chairman: You are all veterans of foreign wars. Comparatively speaking were things better this time in relation to the quality of information which comes from organisations such as yours compared with the last Gulf War?

Mr Thomson: I covered the last Gulf War. It is very difficult to say, because it was such a completely different campaign and largely happened in terms of an air assault and then a 100-hour dash through the desert. There really were not the same sort of parameters and equally the same sort of hub and spoke operation had not been put in place. In terms of quality of reporting, to take Mark's analogy, it depends how embedded you get psychologically. If you are going to have a surge, it depends how willing you are simply to take what people are telling you with whom you are surging. Equally there were plenty of instances, let us be frank, of reporters who were not particularly experienced, using words like "enemy", talking about us and reporting the war in those terms with, frankly, complete insouciance about what they were saying, which perhaps some people might take issue with. A little bit of Stockholm syndrome goes on inevitably in these situations, which you have to be aware of and you have to fight against.

Q777  Mr Howarth: Do you think the conduct of the campaign was influenced by the media?

Mr Ivens: What does that mean? Can you define your terms a bit?

Q778  Mr Howarth: You had your 700 embeds all out there with their little shaft of light on individual scenes. Meanwhile you were back at base pulling all this information in and trying to build the composite picture from the individual contributions you received for the viewers back home. Obviously the media coverage was influential in the sense that it informs public opinion, but did you perceive from where you were sitting, talking as you were with "experts", that there was a sense in which the way in which you were covering it was influencing at all the military campaign or was it a campaign which had been already forged and it just carried on?

Mr Thomson: General Brims took us to his tent two nights before the invasion began and told us the plan; there it all was on the wall, this was how they were going to fight the war. To me it did not seem particularly that that was going to be done according to the conveniences of the media. To flip the coin for a moment, it would be naive to suppose that the Army would end up in a situation where an awful lot of correspondents were based with units who plainly were not going to do anything, although that did happen in certain cases. For instance, the smart money at one point was on the paras being awfully involved and quite a few journalists spent the entire time sitting out with the paras, doing not very much as it turned out in terms of the invasion. There is both of those sorts of extremes to take into account.

Q779  Mr Howarth: Did you yourself see any evidence of the manner in which the war was being fought being affected by the presence of journalists? Did you get a sense in which the military were hugely sensitive to the presence of the journalists right up on the front line and were tailoring their campaign in the full knowledge that what was happening was coming back through you and out to the public?

Mr Thomson: I suppose I had better answer that as I was there. In terms of Basra, for instance, I genuinely did not, no. They originally said that Basra was never going to be a military target and they were essentially sucked into a situation where it became one by virtue of the deployment of the militias and what they subsequently did. I personally did not think anything was being tailored at all in terms of being done for the cameras, which is basically what you are driving at.

Q780  Mr Howarth: Yes; or not being done.

Mr Thomson: Or not being done. One of the greatest sensitivities, perhaps less front line stuff, is the treatment of POWs, the filming of POWs, for instance. I felt the military on the ground were quite astonishingly aware of Geneva Convention sensitivities and so forth in a way which certainly surprised me compared with 1991. I did not personally detect that anything was being done or not done for the cameras in terms of the assault on Basra.

Q781  Mr Howarth: You did not feel that the presence of media folk right alongside them was in any way influential in the way they treated civilian casualties or in the way they prosecuted the campaign. They did not hold back because they knew there was somebody sitting alongside them, whereas if there had not been somebody sitting alongside them, they might have been rather more robust.

Mr Thomson: I did not see that and actually they did not fully know perhaps that we were even there, because the only reason I went into Basra with the troops when they first went in was because we had peeled off from our embed in an armed Land Rover and just drove in with them. It was a fairly ad hoc arrangement. I am sure they had radios and they had eyes and they saw there was a white armoured Land Rover suddenly between their tanks. The best laid plans and all of that, but actually on the day that is how it happened for us.

Q782  Mr Howarth: There have been reports of an intelligence failure in assessing the threat posed by the Fedayeen, who turned out to be more formidable than had been expected. How do you assess the reaction to a tax by the Fedayeen on coalition forces?

Mr Urban: The media, military or public reaction?

Q783  Mr Howarth: All. You were not there, but perhaps Mr Thomson.

Mr Thomson: I was surprised. I saw - and you have probably seen it too - the second directive which Robin Brims sent out prior to the war and he basically says in black and white that he had no idea, they did not have any human intelligence on Iraq. This is probably the most photographed piece of desert on the planet with satellite technology, but in terms of having people on the ground prepared to live there and all the dangers which go with that, you are almost in a situation of the Americans in Afghanistan. They did not have it and Brims wrote that in his directive. I am sure you can see that. Basically they did not know what to expect. It could have been great, it could have been Kosovo, flowers could have been thrown in front of the vehicles as they went in, it could have been muted. I think Brims would have sent that message very forcefully down the line: go carefully, we have no idea what to expect.

Mr Ivens: We found that one of the advantages of having correspondents in Baghdad, one of whom was an Arab speaker, was that quite early on in the course of the campaign, we were able to establish the presence of an Arab foreign legion, people who had already not gone as far as becoming suicide bombers, but they had gone there in one form or another idealistically to fight. So it was not entirely surprising to us and to the readers of our newspaper that such attacks might occur.

Q784  Mr Howarth: So were you building a picture of the prospects of Fedayeen actually inflicting damage and suicide bombing likely to take place?

Mr Ivens: We had established the fact, mostly from Syria, that there were people who were willing to fight and die in a way which was not expected of the Iraqi Army.

Q785  Chairman: Gerald asked whether the media had any effect on the military conduct of the war in the desert. Did you discern the media had any effect on decision making in national governments, national parliaments?

Mr Urban: Both types of question, the parliament and the military one, require us to get inside the decision-making loop, as I believe the military types call it. I will not say "of the enemy", but they require us to get inside someone else's decision-making loop and clearly your general from PJHQ or Chief of Defence Staff or someone else is much better able to say whether a specific report caused questions to be asked by the Secretary of State, statements to be issued and some alteration to happen on the ground, than we would be. Similarly being in the lobby and feeling the mood of parliament yourselves, you might be better equipped to know whether some specific report changed the atmosphere here in a very dramatic way. If we throw back to 1991, one of the very difficult things about trying to make an honest assessment - they are key questions after all about whether the conduct of a campaign or a political atmosphere has been changed by coverage - is that you will always get the issue of, in the 1991 context for example, whether it is the Scud threat that causes the change in the pattern of the campaign or whether it is the reporting of it. A certain type of reporting which was going on, particularly from Israel, that the missiles were coming in, was engendering a feeling that the whole thing was on the edge, what if the Israelis strike back, etcetera. In the context of the 1991 Scud threat, I remember two weeks into the war Schwarzkopf gave a press conference in Riyadh, which I attended. Basically he described the Scud threat as "a non-militarily significant weapon" at one point. Then he went on to point out that over 2,500 sorties had been devoted to Scud hunting. So I put my hand up and gave him what I naturally assumed was the killer question, which was to say "You just said you have devoted more sorties to 'a non-militarily significant' item than any other type of target. How does that square with what you said before the war started, that you do it by military principles alone?". Of course he did not say "You've got me there". He just said "Well, it was a military target and that is all that matters" and he moved onto the next question. From his perspective, he could justify the activity in terms of the military significance of the Scud and clearly it was highly politically significant. How far the coverage played in, is a very complex question. If you bring it up to this year, okay, attacks going in, particularly on American supply echelons, Nasiriyah, Najaf, as they were moving up towards Baghdad. How far those altered the conduct of the war because of the military circumstances of losing a couple of dozen troops, having people captured, all very difficult questions for them in trying to secure their lines of communication, and how far it was the coverage itself of those issues is a very, very tough one and clearly you would almost have to have someone who was inside the war to make an assessment on that.

Q786  Syd Rapson: The Committee has received consistent reports about equipment shortages. In your capacity you have to choose which information coming in you put out to the public. How significant were the shortages of equipment reported to you at the time? Were they significant? Some people say we have always been short of toilet rolls, short of this, short of that, but some concerns were being raised and there are even more now. How significant was the reporting of those equipment shortages at the time? Did it appear to be interesting or relevant?

Mr Thomson: It was not particularly relevant. I got there a week or two before the invasion. I think I was just post loo rolls actually, if I might put it in non-military terms. There had been a number of those sorts of stories. You got there, you poked around to see whether there was anything really significant to any of this and in all honesty, I do not think there was. The greatest concerns were around the calibre of the equipment, the radio equipment and, amongst soldiers and officers particularly, concerns about friendly fire. Those were pretty much in the forefront of people's minds rather than actual equipment. My understanding is that although an awful lot of equipment did arrive there very late, it did actually arrive. I am only talking about the parts of the British Army with whom I had contact.

Q787  Syd Rapson: So there was no real difference between this campaign and others as far as shortages are concerned and the relevance of it to you? There seemed to be quite a lot of interest at one time when it was being reported in the newspapers and seemed to get out of hand. After the event we are now getting more positive stories about bullets not being right and flak jackets not being available, but at the time it was apparently not significant.

Mr Thomson: No. They all thought our flak jackets were better than theirs were and wanted to swop. Apart from that I cannot honestly say, in terms of being on the ground, that was of enormous significance. Friendly fire was a much bigger concern.

Q788  Syd Rapson: May I ask your opinion? How well do you think the British were able to handle the transition from war fighting to peace keeping? There is a general feeling that we did reasonably well compared with the Americans but what is your opinion on how we coped with that transition?

Mr Thomson: It is too early to tell. On the day the tanks went in on the Sunday, the paras went in on foot the next day. I cannot actually remember, but they were probably wearing helmets the first morning and then they came off. As tanks went past on the main route into Basra, people were queuing for buses; normal Basra life simply went on without so much as a blip.

Q789  Syd Rapson: From the information you got, would you know whether the troops were prepared psychologically for the transition or whether they were going in to fight and to win the battle and had no understanding of what was to be done afterwards? I am talking about the British forces. Do you have any knowledge of that at all from what you were picking up?

Mr Thomson: I saw, for instance, the surrender documents which they were dropping in the desert; I am sure you have seen a copy too. They were bending over backwards to go over the border and have a cup of tea with people and persuade them it was not a good idea to fight. Very considerable effort was put in to doing that. Clearly, if it came to a fight, they were prepared to give people a fight and the people who wanted one certainly got one. In terms of speaking to soldiers on the streets of Basra, the paras that afternoon were jumpy but frankly amazed and very pleased. They did not particularly want to be in a situation ... Well, I am sure there were some who did want to be in a situation where they could have a bit of a fire fight and some did say that, but most were astonished. Only 24 hours before, the tanks, the Challengers, had been on the streets and there they were, walking up and down; one or two people were waving but mostly they were ignored.

Q790  Syd Rapson: I watched the television, as did everyone else, and collectively I cannot remember who reported what, but I always watch Newsnight and probably they covered it very well. There appeared to be a lot of looting and criminality and that still carries on. We did not seem to react to that as fast as we could. From a layman's point of view, there seemed to be a feeling of letting them get the anger out of their system and that they wanted to get their own back. The troops did not appear to be prepared to stop the looting as fast as they could or to protect specific critical facilities and the criminality continued. Do you have any collective views on that? Was the appearance of a lack of reaction from our troops real, as suggested by the pictures we were given?

Mr Thomson: Damn right it was; absolutely inaction. What could they do? Basra, depending on what you believe, has anything up to two million people, who have been completely deprived. This is a place which has the two things the area most needs: oil in abundance and water in abundance. The pavements should be made out of marble and you know what Basra looks like from the TV images. When there has been a kleptocracy in place for that long, which has been thieving from the people and depriving them of what they need, then one afternoon a very small number of heavily armed soldiers comes in tanks and sits in a compound, of course people are going to set fire to things and steal everything and remove everything - and I mean everything - that can be removed. We had a shot of somebody with a flatbed truck dragging a cruiser along the road, everything which could be got was got. The British Army's attitude, not unreasonably, was "Let 'em get on with it. We can't stop them" which they could not. Probably they had no orders to stop them; their orders were to go in and to secure their lodgements, the first places they could secure in the town, and go from there and in a few days it would burn itself out. In a few days, on that sort of scale, it did burn itself out.

Q791  Syd Rapson: So it was an acceptable way for it to happen.

Mr Thomson: Criminality is the wrong term to use.

Q792  Syd Rapson: It did appear to be an unexpected way to deal with it, but perhaps we could not have done more as a country to prepare to shore up that part of the peace keeping faster and to gain the support of the people and not lose it. I think we gained a great deal of credibility by coming in and taking over and then that suddenly dispersed when we were unable to protect their hospitals and their supplies of electricity as well as we should. We seemed to have won the battle and lost the hearts and minds. It is very easy for us after the event and I am not trying to be smart, but could we have done more, should we have been more prepared and should we have been trained to be aware of the transition which could happen? We did not appear to be.

Mr Urban: There are some interesting questions, both this one and the question about the Fedayeen which related to internal communications within the armed forces and the people who were planning this operation. It is certainly the case that a contact said to me a few weeks before the war that the main thing they were trying to get their heads round at the moment was what they were calling in Whitehall "catastrophic collapse". I asked what that was. He said it was a planning assumption that because of the nature of the state, the whole thing just implodes and there is absolutely no authority, no order or whatever. Clearly from that evidence you can say that in some department of MoD or cell of the forces or wherever there clearly were some people thinking about that. Equally, one can say with looting, one saw how the Iraqi army left Kuwait City in 1991; one saw trucks driving up the ridge towing steps to aircraft from the airport behind them. Quite why they were taking those home ...? Clearly in that sense one can say that there was some form here as to what might happen in a power vacuum situation, if you allowed a lot of armed people to be let loose on a modern urban centre. On the Fedayeen, I certainly know from conversations I have had, that as soon as you understood from your intelligence gathering methods that the Iraqis did not intend to attempt a conventional defence of their borders - and that was pretty clear a week or two before the operation began - you then began to ask yourself what their strategies were for defending themselves. It was calculated to be a three-tier thing of an inner defence in the Baghdad area, the so-called red zone, by the Republican Guard, a guerilla style defence - and I certainly had discussions about this with contacts and it was reported in a piece we did a week before the war started that a guerilla defence was one of the main options - and the possible use of WMD, which was talked about a lot but clearly did not happen. It is interesting in that context that General McKiernan, made his famous remark about not having war-gamed that option, which was carried by the American press and caused a bit of a stir in Washington about ten days into the war. It is curious, because clearly some people were considering the possibility of the Fedayeen or guerilla type resistance. I am sure of it and it was reflected in some of the coverage even before the war started that this was one of the principal options open to the Iraqis. Similarly the catastrophic collapse was definitely being thought about and discussed and planned for by some people. The question of why these things did not get down to the soldiers on the ground is an interesting one.

Mr Thomson: Although some clearly did, to protect the Al Faw peninsula oil installations in the south and at the other end of the infrastructure the gas oil separation plants (GOSPs) in the desert in the Rumaylah field was an absolute military priority from the word go. There was some thinking along those lines, but frankly they thought "Looting? Civil unrest? Let it go".

Q793  Mr Cran: One of the novel aspects of this particular war was the whole concept of embedded journalists. There have been different views about how successful it has been. I am getting the impression from you that you thought it was successful. I was just looking at a quote from Air Marshal Brian Burridge, and all he was able to say was"... on balance ... the use of the embedded media was just positive". That is not a ringing tone. Could you answer against the background of one other point, which is this. It seemed to me that the embedded journalists were bogged down by a mass of tactical detail, which they were unable to assess and put into a bigger strategic context. Is all of that fair? Against that background was the embedding principle successful?

Mr Ivens: It is half and half, is it not? In Gulf War 1 the embedded journalists had a rather tough time of it and often found themselves locked up either at sea or on land in quarters where they could observe nothing at all. Embedding in this war to a certain extent gave them an opportunity to see things and report on things which would otherwise never have been reported. Speaking in the interests of print media, we found it useful to have both, both the embedded and the unembedded. The MoD and soldiers on the spot were not always very happy with unembedded forces, given the system that they chose to operate, but we would like to have both systems.

Q794  Mr Cran: Mr Thomson, you were embedded, you must have a view on whether the whole thing was successful. Do you have any reservations?

Mr Thomson: Yes, I have plenty of reservations. Of course in some senses it suits the military to have people at the front end - or the second front end, because nobody was at the very front end, let us disabuse ourselves of that from the word go. Being an embed on a spoke means you were probably in the second run of people going up the Al Faw or on the west of Az Zubayr or whatever it was. In a sense, having people there who, when it is going well, can give you, in television terms, all the pictures, because television is a crude beast, it needs the pictures, we live or die by that and frankly whether there is a journalist behind who can understand what is going on is in some senses not the major thing. You need the pictures and at least under this system the pictures can be brought in either to London or to the hub where we were, where we have someone like Chris Vernon or Robin Brims, who can take us on one side and tell us what is going on. It does not matter that there are X hundred people there, what matters is what they are doing and you cannot use that because it is future intent. Do you see what I mean? They did try very hard to put this future intent into context so that we could see what was happening today in the context of what would be happening tomorrow. That was what you had in this hub in the strategic sense, but clearly there are problems and one of the many problems was in fact that you had somebody out on one of the spokes whose material would simply be sent with a track and a commentary, straight back into London, turned round, edited together, bang it is out and it bypassed any kind of process of setting it in context and strategy and detail. I guess if you want a lot of that you would probably read a newspaper.

Q795  Mr Cran: Do you accept that one of the weaknesses of the embedded principle is that the pressure is to get the stuff into a twenty-four-hour media, a lot of tactical detail gets broadcast but no context. Do you accept that?

Mr Thomson: I accept that entirely, yes. To go back to Brian Burridge's comment, that is a senior officer commenting in a situation where, by and large, it went pretty well. You have only to imagine what it would be like if things went badly; material simply would not get out. We did not have many examples, but one was when we did a food distribution in Az Zubayr, as I am sure you are aware, and material was held over by at least 24 hours because the food distribution had gone badly, there was a mini riot, somebody let off a few rounds and it was all a bit chaotic and the Brits pulled out. That was basically censored, quite against the censorship rules, but it was censored and that was a very, very minor incident; nobody got hurt, it just did not look particularly good. It looked rather chaotic and it looked as though hearts and minds had not been won. If Brian Burridge said that on a war which went like this did, I think he would tell you pretty clearly what he felt if it had gone badly.

Q796  Mr Cran: Mr Urban, you were back here and I guess you are the individual to whom all of us would look to give context to the material you were getting. Did you feel you succeeded or partially succeeded?

Mr Urban: That really is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly I felt I had quite a lot of good material from the embeds. If you look at the system which was created and the numbers of journalists involved, I do not think you can be left in any doubt - and I am talking now about the central planning, the central command, the American planning rather than any MoD or British aspect of this - that getting the message out or allowing people a window into the military action was deemed more important than operational security. They would not have crafted a system like the one they created, if operational security had been a higher issue on their list of concerns than, call it what you will, information. That is perfectly clear. When I was preparing my presentations each night and assessing where the 1^st Marine Division was and the Brigade of the 82^nd Airborne had become committed, I had a mental list of which embeds were with which unit of the American Army. I would check the website of the Boston Globe, the New York Times, whoever it was, I would listen to Voice of America, whatever was necessary to find out what the 82^nd Airborne Division were doing today. Despite the restrictions about not saying exactly where they were, I was normally able to gain a very good idea both of their activity and their location. It became a daily routine for me to collate all the information which was available, almost all of it, just through the obvious expedient of using the net, or just consuming the media, whether video media, ABC, Fox, whoever, and just by knowing who was embedded with the 2^nd Brigade of the 3^rd Infantry Division, checking their output, seeing where they were, it was always pretty obvious. In that sense, you could see that the whole way the operation was crafted assumed in a way, rightly, that you were not operating against an enemy who would have sufficient military power and cohesion to respond to that information quickly and effectively and say if they are there, then we can attack at points A and B. That was a safe assumption on the part of the American planners, but it was certainly possible to pull that information together and to do so on a daily basis. There were unanswered questions for example, about certain Special Operations Forces or certain squadrons of the Air Force. Apart from that it was pretty clear where everybody was on any given day and what they were doing.

Q797  Mr Cran: I think I am speaking more about the visual media than I am about Sunday heavyweights, which have time to work out the context. Would it be fair to say that in programmes like yours, where at the end of the day you have had time to think about it, you have had time to make the calls and so on, there you do get the context? Where it may go wrong is where you have BBC2 or BBC1 or whatever devoting a whole morning to the war and there is no context at all, it is just moving from one pinprick to another. That is fair, is it not?

Mr Thomson: Yes; if you are saying Newsnight and Channel Four News are so much better than twenty-four-hour news, that is entirely fair.

Q798  Mr Cran: No, I was not saying that at all.

Mr Thomson: I jest. Of course, there is the time to check things and actually make phone calls and check what we think is about right and that can be done in the context of in-depth one-bulletin-a-day news programmes. It cannot always be done in the same way in terms of twenty-four-hour news. That is not to denigrate twenty-four-hour news; twenty-four-hour news is simply doing a different job. I think that they are both perfectly valid.

Mr Urban: Absolutely; it is horses for courses. Clearly in any rolling output there will be an immediacy which has a value to the viewer and what one can say at the end of it all is that for all that output and the angst it causes in some quarters in government, it leaves people much better informed. Generally speaking the results one got from soundings of the audience were generally that it is a mistake to underestimate the intelligence of the audience.

Q799  Mr Cran: I was not implying anything other than the opposite of what you said.

Mr Urban: It is horses for courses. The analytical function of Newsnight or Channel Four News is clearly different to the immediacy type of material and the value of immediacy that you get, whether it is Sky, News 24, whoever, from those networks.

Q800  Rachel Squire: Before we move on, may I just pick up on the angst. You mentioned the twenty-four-hour reporting and the angst it causes to the government. May I ask you to comment on the angst it can cause to service personnel's families when they hear that there has been some helicopter crash somewhere and they have no idea where or whom it might affect and the trauma that can cause on a very large-scale basis?

Mr Urban: I do not particularly want to comment on it, simply because I cannot speak from much experience. I cannot say I was at a particular naval air station the day the accident happened and speak to you about it with some real insight from the point of view of the families concerned. So I would be reluctant to comment on that. As, a long time ago and for a short period, a service member, I think that the bush telegraph in most regiments or squadrons, if something bad happens, tends to work pretty quickly. It creates an imperative in terms of informing next of kin and those very difficult other issues that the forces have to deal with. I certainly think in the recent past, one saw in the recent incident in Iraq, that they were moving pretty quickly, as quickly as they could and also that they wanted to restrict, for example, the fact that it had been a Royal Military Police patrol which ran into difficulty in that particular incident. I think the feeling more centrally in the Ministry of Defence was that until the next of kin had been informed or at least they had gone some way towards doing so, they wanted to restrict that and I think we understood that. I do not believe - I should be interested if you knew otherwise - that Sky, or the BBC or ITN News or whoever, were saying early on that day or in the mid afternoon, "Yes, these six people who lost their lives in the centre of the town were from the Royal Military Police". I think it was understood that as soon as you identified such a small regimental community a lot of people would obviously have a lot of emotional turmoil as a result of you doing that. I think in that particular case, sensitivity was shown.

Q801  Mr Cran: I personally found your programmes quite informative. I found the running commentary confusing, but that is just me. Were you able to negotiate the terms of the relationship between your embeds with the MoD and the Pentagon? Were you able to negotiate the contract, as it were or did they say, "Here's the deal, take it or leave it"?

Mr Ivens: In our most remarkable case, the one at Nasiriyah, we negotiated nothing. After our correspondent had reported on what might have landed us in a court of law, a rather terrible action at night, the American soldiers had a meeting to talk about whether they should allow our correspondent to continue to be embedded with their battalion and they voted to keep him. They said "You reported what you saw. Stay there. On our heads be it". It was quite remarkable. Maybe we just got lucky with the Americans in that particular unit.

Mr Thomson: As for everyone, absolutely everything was up for grabs. You would go to the MoD meetings round here in London and they would be saying "This is how it's going to be, chaps. Here's the list of things. Here are the dos and don'ts. They are set in stone. That is decided. Sign on the bottom line and that is how it's going to be". When you get there, of course everything is different: you have to turn up with a 4x4 vehicle painted a certain colour. It turns out you can turn up with anything you want, including an armoured Land Rover. The embed system was supposedly set in stone and if that is true, how come Jeremy Thompson from Sky ended up inventing his own. There are all sorts of rules about dos and don'ts but politics are more important than the military in fighting a war in some contexts. So it was that the man from The Sun was flung out for upsetting somebody early on in terms of censorship, he bounced back to Kuwait City and was immediately sent up to join our little troop in the desert because The Sun is so politically important to the war. The Ministry of Defence sets out its guidelines, as it has to do. It has to get this corral of different individuals organised somehow and that is how they do it. Of course absolutely everything is up for grabs and the sooner you know that the more you get to grab.

Q802  Mr Cran: Mr Ivens, you said earlier on, if I remember it correctly, that there were advantages in having embeds and unilaterals. What did you mean by that? What are the advantages?

Mr Ivens: The disadvantages were very, very clear from Gulf War 1. I was on a different newspaper at the time, I was foreign editor of The Times, but you find you have a correspondent locked away on board ship in the middle of the Persian Gulf, not even allowed to land after the war was effectively over. You also find that you can only see what you are allowed. Hence we wanted both options in this particular war. We wanted to be in the right place at the right time. Just like anybody who is gambling on a successful outcome, we wanted to hedge our bets. We wanted to be with the marines on their advance up to Nasiriyah, but we also wanted to observe some of the fighting away from the troops, purely on an empirical basis that embedding had not always worked for us in the past.

Q803  Mr Cran: Mr Thomson, you were embedded. Would you have liked to have been released, freed and become a unilateral?

Mr Thomson: I was a gamekeeper this time and I was a poacher in 1991. There has to be a place for both. Perish the day when we only ever have embeds or we only ever have unilaterals, independent journalists. There has to be room for both. The problem was in this particular war that it was quite exceptionally dangerous to be up there on your own unescorted and sadly ITN have lost three people as a result of doing exactly that sort of operation. You are on your own and in this case on your own in peculiarly difficult circumstances of having two sets of invading armies and the consequences of that were obvious for all to see as far as ITN was concerned and indeed other organisations who also lost people. There is no point in beating about the bush: if you are going to go unilateral in a war there is a risk and it is a lot greater than going with the British Army. They did everything to prevent us seeing the war, in many circumstances by talking about duty of care, which we long since signed away when we signed up to censorship.

Mr Ivens: Although we would not like our correspondents to be treated with hostility because they are not embedded, in the encounter Mr Thomson relates, one of our correspondents, Christina Lamb, thought on that day, preceding the fire fight, that she had not really been treated with great co-operation by the army in no uncertain terms.

Q804  Mr Cran: The question of the outside expert. Programmes like yours, Mr Urban, wheeled in the outside expert, usually former senior military personnel, who by definition are probably out of date in terms of their understanding of what is going on. On the other hand you have to balance this out by your programme having to look credible. Did this present problems for you, given also that some of these experts probably came with a bit of baggage? Do not ask me which, because I am not going to answer that question.

Mr Urban: We only used four so it would be a short list of suspects if you thought that. Our approach was basically that I was in the hot seat in terms of initially doing the presentation of what happened today and what was significant and what was not. We were not asking them in that sense as people who had been out of the system for some time to detail the current operations. Their role was to explore various issues which might be arising at the military level. Clearly there was the Secretary of State for Defence and there were various other people who appeared on the programme to explore it at a political level. Their job was to explore at the military level some of the implications of things which were happening, what might be going through the minds of commanders on the ground. We tried to recruit people who had specifically had command responsibility either for the very units that were engaged at the time or had been field commanders during the 1991 war and therefore could speak from a position of authority. As to your question about whether they therefore come with some baggage, the question then is whether you want somebody not in a position to comment from experience and with expertise? We assessed that under those circumstances it would help the viewers to understand what was going on a bit better, or what the issues were, or what was going through commanders' minds, if we had very experienced people, a former commander of 3^rd Army, as McKiernan had been, former commander of the 24^th Infantry Division, former commander of air forces in 1991 and another former senior operational commander to do that. I was happy with that and I was happy with the way it worked and it was certainly not their job to do the day-to-day nitty gritty of operations.

Q805  Mr Cran: My last question is simply this: a lot of mystique surrounds UK special forces and I suppose, Mr Thomson, I am looking at you for the answer to this one. Did you come across any knowledge of their activities that you are able to impart to us?

Mr Thomson: Yes. So far as I am aware, they were in Basra, not dressed as local people, on the edges of the town, the far outskirts, acting as forward spotter units, which would be no great secret to anybody. Somebody had to go in there and tell the lads at the back what to fire their big guns at and those people were deemed the best people to do it. Probably they were at work in Al Faw as well, in fact I am fairly sure they were; possibly in more of a combat role in terms of actually engaging people, fighting people. That is about the limit of it. Yes, they were there.

Q806  Mr Cran: So you would not take the view that some would take that special forces are surrounded by far too much mystique, secrecy and all the rest of it.

Mr Thomson: I do take that view.

Q807  Mr Cran: Which they would find unsustainable in a day and age like ours.

Mr Thomson: Personally I think it is completely unsustainable. I do not think mystique suits the Special Air Service, or Special Boat Service, or any of these services particularly. I do not think it has much to do with fighting wars. I filmed them in Sierra Leone for instance and we transmitted it. We filmed then in Afghanistan and transmitted that. They like their mystique but the media should not like the mystique.

Q808  Chairman: It helps sell their books.

Mr Thomson: I could not possibly comment.

Chairman: It is amazing how many authors have emerged from special forces.

Q809  Mr Roy: I should like to explore news management, or, to everyone else, censorship. Were reports sent from theatre censored and if so, in what way?

Mr Ivens: Speaking for a newspaper which was in favour of the war editorially and had been in favour of Gulf War 1 editorially and had taken notice of Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons as far back as Al Abiyah, we did not find it a problem. We were able to run reports which were very embarrassing, I presume, to allied forces. We were able to run correspondents in Baghdad. We did not feel editorially that we needed somehow to make them conform to some sort of editorial CENTCOM in the editor's office, nor did we feel restrained in reporting on what we saw when allied forces either made mistakes or did things which might in post-war light or even at the time be thought to be questionable.

Q810  Mr Roy: So none of your journalists was censored, none of the reporters was censored by the military handlers they had.

Mr Ivens: No. In the most graphic case they did have a meeting afterwards, in the case of our chap with the marines, and said that was what he saw. From our end, we presume to work with a man in the field and that is our business. Similarly we did not encounter problems with censorship from military authorities.

Mr Thomson: There is an extraordinary squeamishness in this country, a very British thing about not calling a spade a spade. Actually senior TV news executives are entirely complicit in this. They will do anything but actually talk about censorship, so it is quite refreshing that you used that phrase rather than news management or restrictions or other such circumlocutions.

Q811  Mr Roy: No; it is censorship.

Mr Thomson: Of course you are censored. One, you sign a censorship form with the MoD saying you are going to be censored. You are censored because your freedom of movement is utterly and completely restricted.

Q812  Mr Roy: Just explain it for a layman. You say you sign a form that you will be censored.

Mr Thomson: Yes, you sign a form. I have one at home, but I am sure you have seen them. It says basically that they are going to censor us for reasons of operational security (opsec), so you do not give stuff away to the other side which could be useful and may get people killed unnecessarily. Fair enough. I cannot understand why anybody would have a problem with that. They also say, interestingly enough, that they are not going to censor us in terms of taste, tone or embarrassment. In terms of taste, in television we all censor ourselves until the cows come home, because most of what happens really happens in war, that is the killing of people, the maiming of people, the injuring of people, which never gets shown on television. In one respect we on the journalistic side of it and our executives are the greatest censors out. I am sure they will thank me for saying that. In the field of course, when the going gets even slightly rough, they will start trying to censor you in terms of taste and tone and embarrassment. We filmed a logistics unit, just a place where they did the buttons and berets and everything. One part of it looked fine to us, but they were desperate that we did not transmit it, because apparently it did not look shipshape. It was silly little things like that, where people watching at home who were in the know would be able to see that. It was that sort of stuff.

Q813  Mr Roy: But you would need to accept the mindset which says you guys are not reporting on a general election in Iraq where you have to give a level playing field and the MoD do not give a level playing field to both sides. You can understand their mindset, if that were the case.

Mr Thomson: I can understand it entirely. I do not agree with it, but I understand it entirely. Equally, Az Zubayr example, slightly more serious, because hearts-and-minds was clearly an issue and, as I have underlined, it was something I believe the British Army worked very hard to try to do the ground work for. When the going got rough, what did they do? They censored it. They stopped it going out.

Q814  Mr Roy: Do you think your viewers accept that? Do you think your viewers expect you to play exactly down the middle, level playing field, treat friend and foe alike, or do they expect when they are watching it that it is slightly slanted?

Mr Thomson: I suspect, from the e-mails we get back from our viewers, that they expect a fair, robust and critical view of what is going on, trying to get to the truth of what is going on in amidst the lies and misinformation which immediately spring up in any single war. I have covered enough of them and there was nothing different about this one. That is what people expect. It is not by and large what they get, but it is what people expect.

Q815  Mr Howarth: Do they expect you to be cognizant of the fact that you are British, that it is British lives at stake out there?

Mr Thomson: Absolutely; and covering one of the most historically unpopular wars this country has ever embarked upon.

Q816  Mr Howarth: But a very sharp change in attitude as soon as they crossed the start line.

Mr Thomson: A very sharp change in attitude the other way now they have supposedly gone over the finish line.

Q817  Mr Howarth: Indeed, but you were concerned and we are concerned.

Mr Thomson: But you take my point. This was a highly politicised war.

Q818  Mr Howarth: All wars are politicised.

Mr Thomson: Of course they are and of course people got on side once the shooting was under way. People wanted to support "our boys" and all the rest of it.

Q819  Mr Roy: Is it your job to judge that?

Mr Thomson: Our job is not to judge. The job of a war correspondent is not to compile his or her views according to what the mood is at home; that is entirely irrelevant. Our job is to find the truth of what is going on, in so far as we possibly can, with the limited means at our disposal.

Chairman: As a result of a question, you were listing different forms of censorship and Frank cut you off in mid sentence. Could you come back and list the other forms of censorship, either self or externally generated when we come back? Give it some thought. Thank you very much

The Committee suspended from 3.59pm to 4.18 pm for a division in the House.

Q820  Mr Roy: Levels of censorship.

Mr Thomson: I have desperately being trying to think up more. As perhaps is inevitable, I do not know, one can be a bit precious about it, there was a departure; obviously once battle commences sensitivities get very high about things like tone and taste and embarrassment and issues like that. Just the examples I quoted were fairly minor because obviously the invasion went reasonably well. One can only guess again that what needs to be stressed is that these media operations grow organically. What we have here did not just happen, it grew out of the Falklands and it grew out of Kosovo and it grew out of 1991 Gulf War and that is pretty much now the blueprint. What has to be taken on board is that this is fine and the military are getting coverage which would break the budget of any advertising agency in terms of showing what you are doing on television. When things start to go wrong, as they inevitably will in future conflicts, one wonders at that stage how things will play out in terms of holding back material, withholding material, preventing material getting back and so forth.

Q821  Mr Roy: You said earlier that it was the most unpopular war.

Mr Thomson: No, I did not. I said it was an historically unpopular war.

Q822  Mr Roy: Can I tell you that in my constituency, that was not the case. In my constituency it was not historically the most unpopular war.

Mr Thomson: This is an important point. I did not say historically the most unpopular war. I said it was an historically unpopular war as wars go. For instance compared to Kosovo, compared to the last Gulf War, compared to the Falklands, in terms of recent history, this was a good deal less popular.

Q823  Mr Roy: Therefore it is more unpopular.

Mr Thomson: Yes.

Q824  Mr Roy: Does your perception - and that is your perception - - -

Mr Thomson: No, no; that is not my perception. It is important. That is a matter, I think, of demonstrable fact, in terms of opinion polls, at least one million people demonstrating in London. It is not a matter of perception, it is a matter of fact.

Q825  Mr Roy: The United Kingdom does not finish in the streets of London, let me tell you. What I really want to get at is that if that was your viewpoint, would that then follow through to the type of reporting you would do, or your organisation would do, on a particular war which was historically unpopular or historically popular? I am trying to connect this to censorship and things. Does that come through in the type of reporting you do?

Mr Thomson: Unquestionably yes. It was incumbent on people like me for instance to ask the likes of Robin Brims and equally soldiers on the ground whether it affects their morale knowing that they are out there to fight this war, which the government have embarked upon, knowing that war is very unpopular in many quarters. It is clearly not a question one would ask in terms of some other conflicts which have involved this country.

Q826  Mr Roy: Equally, do you take into account the effect that could have on the service personnel reading, listening and viewing the news? We were told this morning that did have an effect on the service personnel. Are you aware of that?

Mr Thomson: Then that is reality: it had an effect on service personnel. I would say to you that I would suspect that effect was already there. There were soldiers who would say that while it does have an effect, a lot of the lads were asking questions about what it is all about, that sort of stuff, they were actually very forthcoming - and this speaks well for the military that you are not in a situation completely where "You can talk to anyone you want, so long as you talk to him, him and him" and him, him and him all say the same thing. We have moved slightly beyond that. Soldiers are thinking people, their families are thinking people. They do not, nor should they, live in a vacuum, without information, without questioning what is going on.

Q827  Mr Roy: What would you say if I said to you that we have already been told that some service personnel became disillusioned during the war after reading the reports, not before it, as you are saying. They obviously had their own opinion before it, but they became absolutely disillusioned on reading the reports and listening and viewing. Are you aware of that?

Mr Thomson: If those reports were the truth and they responded in that way, then that is the reality of it. We are not here to imbue the troops with any feelings whatsoever for or against the war. We are there to find out what their views are about fighting the war, if they feel able to give them. If those feelings are positive or negative, so be it.

Q828  Mr Roy: What kind of responsibility do you have to the United Kingdom citizens? Do you have any responsibility?

Mr Thomson: If you are trying to argue that it is the business of the press and the media to uphold the morale of the troops in times of war, I disagree.

Q829  Mr Roy: Let me be clear. I am not trying to make an argument, I am just trying to fish out exactly what your feelings are about whether you have responsibility?

Mr Thomson: What my job is, is to go and find out what is going on. In this case - and this is not my perception, it is a matter of incontestable fact - this was a very unpopular war. I am not saying that most people opposed it: I am just saying that an awful lot of people had very strong feelings about the war and why it was fought. That being the case, soldiers not living in a vacuum, it is incumbent upon journalists to reflect what the feelings in that regard are on the ground, in so far as they can get them.

Q830  Rachel Squire: Did it encourage you to look for criticism and discontent?

Mr Thomson: In the sense that meant did I go out there and ask soldiers those sorts of questions in this conflict, which perhaps would not have been in the forefront of my mind in 1991, or in Kosovo, then the answer to that is yes, of course it did. I would not be doing my job, if I did not.

Q831  Rachel Squire: Where does journalistic impartiality come into that when your questions had a clear bias to them?

Mr Thomson: My questions do not have a bias to them. My questions were reflecting that there was unpopularity at home. It is an interesting and perfectly legitimate job to find out whether that is having an effect on morale in the field. I cannot see anybody having a problem with that.

Q832  Mr Roy: I accept that there was unpopularity at home. During the time of the conflict did you reflect that that had actually changed once the war began?

Mr Thomson: Yes. In the context that this is before the war began. Once the war began, fine, we have had our demonstrations and there has been a big political row about what has been going on or otherwise; a lot of people had question marks. That was then and now here we are going over the border and frankly there are much more congruent issues to talk about and report on once the troops are over the border and invading another country.

Q833  Chairman: If you are TV or radio, there are public standards you have to adhere to in terms of balance. If you are a newspaper, it appears there are no such standards. If you happen to be supporting the government and reading The Independent, The Guardian, the Daily Mirror, then you are in a losing corner, because you are unlikely to get a great deal of information to sustain your views. This is not asking a question but what irritates are the newspapers who, the deeper they went into the war, the more successful the war was from the standpoint of the government, the more their hostility was made obvious. This is irritating when public service broadcasters and television and radio broadcasters, who do have to adhere to certain standards, produce one set of broadcasts and information which is reasonably fair - there are exceptions - but the others can just hammer away incessantly undermining morale with no impetus whatsoever, either internally or externally generated, to be fair, if by fair it means treating the British Government as fairly as they would treat other combatants. That is what truly rankles. I would never expect the media simply to shout appreciatively and wave their flags, but it is possible it is quite damaging if some newspapers go in absolutely the opposite direction. You can produce evidence with certainty and so can I, but I admire those journalists who try to be fair.

Mr Ivens: Yes, but we must be fair to newspapers which have been opposed to the war before the campaign began. They are very often broad churches and we were editorially out of sympathy with some of the newspapers you describe, but they would have different journalistic perspectives and they would try hard to have a more balanced view of the war than just something which was programmed by the office to say that they were to do their damnedest to oppose it in what they reported from the field. There is a danger of being a little too hard on them.

Mr Thomson: In times of war the last thing you want to do is live in a country where none of the media rankles you with what they are saying. Being rankled is a sign of health.

Q834  Mr Roy: May I go back to the issue of censorship and whether there was censorship and in what form?

Mr Urban: This is where I have the disadvantage of weathering the conflict in W12. The short answer to your question is no, there are not nightly phone calls from some strange government committee, call it the D-Notice Committee, call it what you will, saying you will not report on these two members of the SBS who are now E&E-ing their way towards Syria because they had an unfortunate mishap with their Land Rover. We did show their Land Rover, but we were not even aware, say in that case, that there were two people on the ground and there was no attempt, in that case, for example to say to us "Don't use those pictures". They had already been all over Iraqi television. In that sort of heavy-handed, overt, obvious way, it does not happen, but, equally, like Alex, I would agree that we need to be grown-up about it and when we sometimes have voluntarily agreed or we have entered into an arrangement, we need to be mature and to confess or be honest with ourselves or our viewers or our readers that yes, there are certain circumstances, clearly in the context of the embeds, where you were not going to reveal future operations. There was one situation where, after a discussion with the Ministry of Defence, I decided not to do a particular story at that time. Was that censorship? No, in the sense that it was clear at the end of the conversation that we were perfectly at liberty to go ahead and broadcast the story or to talk about the subject I wanted to talk about. In that sense there were not late night phone calls to the DG, nothing like that. There was no attempt in any sense to say "Drop the story" or "If you run the story, there'll be trouble". However, there was a discussion in which the pros and cons of running it were discussed and I decided on balance, with the editor of Newsnight, it was probably best not to run it at that time. I do not know whether that is censorship or not?

Q835  Mr Roy: I suspect all the programmes and newspapers were read and watched and radio listened to very closely. You mentioned the embeds there. Could the embeds have become a tool of propaganda? Was there a danger? Did you ever feel there was ever a danger that they could become tools of our government propaganda, MoD propaganda, or, worse, inadvertently a source of intelligence to the Iraqis.

Mr Urban: My assessment would be that if you had an Iraqi military intelligence cell monitoring the output of all the embeds - and let us not forget the vast majority of these people were with the US forces and they were Americans - that you could learn an enormous amount of military value. For example, it was fairly clear to me roughly what the plan was beforehand from various sources and I decided that the commitment of the 101^st Airborne Division would be a significant factor when it happened. So every day I would check up on Rick Atkinson, who was a very celebrated writer and author of one or two very good books, a top class journalist and who was an embed with the 101^st Airborne Division. I would check up with him on the Washington Post to see where he was and what he was up to and generally if he did not file, or if he said "Preparations to move out", I knew which corner of Kuwait they were in and I could understand that when the 101^st Airborne Division was committed it would be a good sign about the 3^rd Army's main axis.

Q836  Mr Roy: Were you never tempted to mention the 101^st Airborne before they committed?

Mr Urban: Yes, we did mention them. I am pretty sure that when they started moving we mentioned it, because it was then on the Washington Post website. I am quite convinced that an army that was capable of large-scale effective resistance could have gleaned much of value from the embed system, but that the assessment of the Pentagon was that they would not be capable and that the requirement of getting the message out, call it what you will, was higher in their list of priorities than the danger to operational security. Following what Alex said about the way these things develop, I am sure he is right, but equally, like Afghanistan, if for some reason in the future, in a large-scale military operation, they decided it was not in their interest to have embeds, I am sure the system would be uninvented over night. In Afghanistan you had mainly special operations forces for some weeks operating at the sharp end. Clearly they did not want lots of journalists running around and there were various other considerations. They just did not want them there and they were not there. After a while they took a few people into that base near Kandahar and all the journalists were chafing at the bit and saying they had not been told anything. I think that was clearly a war where they judged that the operational security benefits of not having embeds were greater. In this one, they made their judgments. I certainly think it is the case that you could derive much of military interest from the reports of embeds.

Q837  Mr Roy: Did you need to verify that? I understood that in a twenty-four-hour news cycle there was not an awful lot of time to verify stories. Could you talk us through that? Was there a need to verify or did people just wing it at times and is there a lesson to be learned from the lack of verification?

Mr Urban: No, we are talking now about the specifics of whether a particular brigade or something is engaged and then where they are and what their mission is. I got various things wrong or misunderstood at the time and it showed in the presentations. That was not one of them. I do not think we ever showed a significant error on where we placed any of those units. The reason was that there was normally more than one embed in each brigade, many in each division, which allowed you to get some collateral and sometimes there were other contacts by phone or whatever other method with colleagues and they would say "We've just been north east of Kuwait and there are 300 helicopters there".

Q838  Mr Roy: So that allowed you to back check?

Mr Urban: Yes. We would not have run it on the basis of just talking to a colleague, because then you get into the whole opsec thing. The fact that it was on the Washington Post website and you could get collateral, then gives you the confidence to draw the line on the map, as it were.

Mr Thomson: May I just say, because I think it is an important feature, that the Americans were far less concerned, for the reasons Mark has just outlined, on the issue of opsec, the future stuff, than the British were. There is no doubt about that.

Q839  Mr Roy: Was it a cultural thing?

Mr Thomson: Possibly. I was not with the Americans. I cannot speak for them. It was the first and only commandment with the British that you do not give away opsec and that was it and everyone knew that, so much so that nobody ever sat in on our edits or anything like that. They could have done and we would have objected, but nobody bothered because they knew what we knew; we had had the broad-brush picture and they trusted us.

Q840  Mr Roy: So no one was tempted. To go back to the 101^st Airborne, you knew they were going to go into action at some point, so nobody was tempted to look particularly intelligent and say a couple of hours before that they thought the 101^st Airborne might come in at some point? Was there a temptation to do that?

Mr Thomson: Huge; yes, for me. Brims showed us how he was going to fight the war.

Q841  Mr Roy: Did you succumb?

Mr Urban: We did succumb, yes. Before the war we ran a thing which included this assessment that guerilla resistance would be an important factor, in which the war plan was addressed and discussed in very broad-brush terms. Clearly it was not based on any official briefing at all, because self-evidently the terms on which that would have been given, as with Alex, was that ... you know. It was based on the common sense of deployment and the fact that basically the marines were going to be on the right and the army was going to be on the left and that Saddam was not going to defend his frontiers, all of which took you in certain directions. There was only one mechanised division. It was pretty obvious, once you knew they were on the left, that they were only going one place and it was obvious where it was going if you looked at it.

Q842  Mr Howarth: May I ask you a question about the embedded journalists in Baghdad? To what extent did you, back at base, filter the information which was coming out of Baghdad, knowing that they were under these restrictions? We all got bored of hearing that these reporters were reporting under Iraqi restrictions, but quite a strong resentment was developing that these embedded people had developed a bit of a Stockholm syndrome. To what extent were you, particularly the BBC, who perhaps came in for more flak than other broadcasters, concerned that the wrong impression was being given, that somehow the BBC was being neutralised between good and evil?

Mr Urban: I have to say that is above my pay grade. That is a question for editorial management. It was not my personal responsibility to define the terms on which those reports should be introduced or to try in some sense to balance or correct or whatever else. It really was not a job which fell to me personally.

Mr Thomson: They were not embedded. That is a curious use of the term "embedded".

Q843  Mr Howarth: That was deliberate.

Mr Thomson: They were in a hotel and if you stayed at the Rashid or the Palestine you might think it was embedded.

Q844  Mr Roy: May I move on to news values? How aware of western news values were you when you were editing the images of the combat itself, that is dead bodies, body parts? How much did that play in your final product, that is what the viewers saw, heard and read?

Mr Ivens: Do you mean on grounds of taste?

Q845  Mr Roy: Yes.

Mr Ivens: If that is western values, then we were influenced by them.

Q846  Mr Roy: Did you have to edit them down?

Mr Ivens: It is a sensitive matter whether you show horrific pictures altogether. There are degrees of taste about it and we would not go for something which we would consider to be needlessly gratuitous.

Q847  Mr Roy: Would you like the openness of the images that al-Jazeera were able to broadcast? Does it play a part in the mindset in the United Kingdom that it has to be edited down to make it more socially acceptable?

Mr Thomson: Yes; absolutely. Television does. If you are working for a programme which goes out at seven in the evening, there are enormous considerations that children often are watching.

Q848  Mr Roy: If that is the case, how would you square that with live television? What is the mechanism you would use? At some point in time, some soldier is going to lose his life at five o'clock in the afternoon when the kids are back from school and it is going to be an absolutely horrific scene.

Mr Thomson: It is an absolutely horrific scene.

Q849  Mr Roy: I know it is, but they have never seen it before.

Mr Thomson: No and you are going to. You are going to see it. Sooner or later it is going to happen. How they deal with that, I do not know. I really do not know. Fortunately I am not paid to make those decisions. Yes, technology being what it now is, you can and will in the future be sitting on that APC and something is going to happen. Yes.

Mr Roy: I remember watching some live footage coming in on a Saturday afternoon with two guys lying on concrete shooting at something and I thought that if these guys got shot, it was ten past three on a Saturday afternoon and it was going to be absolutely horrific.

Q850  Rachel Squire: You were talking earlier about the dangers faced by the lone unilateral journalist. Going to the other extreme, the impression we all got from the media information centre at CENTCOM, was that you just had massed ranks of media. Would you like to comment on how you felt that CENTCOM media information centre operated and, frankly, whether you found its output disappointing or very positive?

Mr Thomson: I could not comment myself. I just had no contact with it. I did not see it.

Mr Urban: The problem is that none of the three of us was there. We would be reluctant to talk on behalf of colleagues.

Q851  Chairman: It seemed to be a pretty superfluous exercise out there.

Mr Urban: Yes, it is a matter of recorded fact that they waited rather longer to mount their first briefing than the baying mob they had at the front would have liked. It is interesting when you hear in this debate post war from people in the military or the MoD this idea about the mosaic or the snapshot or whatever. Clearly from their point of view, the media operations plan involved having this CENTCOM central briefing. I know there was some discussion about whether they should do something in Kuwait on a similar pattern and it was decided to keep it in Qatar. I think it disappointed the military. One of the responses in London centrally was that MoD started putting on briefings and making certain people available for interview more often. The Secretary of State was able to appear on Newsnight quite a few times. You would have to ask them, but my understanding was that they had to do more here than they had originally anticipated doing because CENTCOM had disappointed in terms of being the central, whatever you want to call it, rebuttal or information point that people had thought it might be before the war.

Q852  Rachel Squire: Media organisations themselves came in for some criticism from all sides during the war. Fox TV in the US was considered far too much in favour of the war, the BBC got it from both sides, from the military and being at times critical but the anti-war movement saying you were biased. Then, those of us who watched al-Jazeera's output from time to time got a very different slant on the war to that of the western media organisations. Would you like to say anything about whether you felt there was a very different approach amongst the different networks to their coverage of the war and to what extent the western media was too much influenced by western attitudes in its coverage?

Mr Thomson: That is a big one. The overwhelming thing is simply self-censorship in our country, in our culture. It probably just is almost a British and Irish thing. Even in Europe standards are different and tastes are different as to what you can show. So much so that Channel Four, for instance, put out The War you never saw at half eleven at night principally to get over the fact that in a war people get killed. It made one or two other significant points as well. That is an expression almost of the feeling that we had sanitised this one just like we sanitised the last one in 1991 and to some extent Afghanistan as well. It is very hard to see a way around it, it really is, particularly for programmes like mine at seven in the evenings. It is very difficult.

Q853  Chairman: It is the bias of the media we keep banging on about. Forgive us for this. What happens if you are a journalist in a certain newspaper and the editorial line is very gung-ho for the war or very hostile to the war? What if you then send up a story that does not reflect that editorial or ownership bias? Do you think the organisations you serve were reasonably fair in their output?

Mr Thomson: I never saw the output, because I was there.

Q854  Chairman: You were the output, were you not?

Mr Thomson: Yes, to some degree. No, a colleague of mine, Nick Parker, from The Sun came there to do The Sun thing and that is "I'm Nick Parker. I'm from The Sun. It does what it says on the tin".

Q855  Mr Howarth: Could you just explain what you think The Sun thing is, apart from Page Three?

Mr Thomson: Apart from Page Three, "Our boys done a great job". That is The Sun's line and Nick was there and did a very good job and I am sure he did what his editor and the editorial line wanted. That is a given, is it not? The job pays your mortgage. You are not going to turn round and give the editor what he does not want. In so far as I can understand it, that is the newspaper world.

Mr Ivens: No, it is not the entire newspaper world. I think that is absolutely wrong. By and large you got rather interesting coverage of the war. People may have been over zealous for and against the war before the war started, but a lot of the papers which were pro or against the war said some rather interesting things about that campaign during its course which did not reflect the editorial line of their newspapers. The readers by and large wanted that. In the case of my paper, they knew where we were: we were in favour of it. We would have broken trust with them if we had not written things which were not embarrassing to the allied cause. You have to be very careful before you broad brush the newspapers in that fashion.

Mr Thomson: I was simply saying what I saw with my good friend and colleague Nick on The Sun, that is all. I was not making any bald point at all. Clearly some newspapers have an editorial line and some reporters follow that pretty much to the letter; others do not.

Q856  Chairman: We had Air Marshal Burridge before us, who said these flattering words of your profession "you stand for nothing". What do you think he meant by that? I suspect it was in terms of journalistic impartiality or partiality.

Mr Thomson: I think what he means by that is that we do not stand for what he stands for.

Q857  Chairman: That is a clever answer; a good first try. What else do you think he meant? That you had no sense of loyalty, patriotism, playing the game? Do you think the Ministry of Defence expected a greater sense of empathy with the military?

Mr Ivens: It is an interesting question. I do not think it deserves a simple answer. The statement came at a particular time in a particular campaign. Had we been talking about a war against the Nazis or putative World War 3 against the Soviet Union, there might have been a different reply. You are talking about complicated, despite what looks like the large scale of it, medium-sized campaigns, which were reflective of this country's own experience in the 1940s and 1950s by and large, which were controversial in that context. If you look back at the campaigns in Cyprus, Aden and other post-war conflicts and the Mau-Mau rising in Kenya, those were not somehow politically isolated. A very, very good example would have been Enoch Powell, of all people, who criticised the behaviour of British troops in the Mau-Mau campaign. You are not talking about a war to the death of British society, are you? To throw it back: what do you expect of us? We are there to give you uncomfortable truths at a difficult moment.

Q858  Chairman: The Cold War. Those were the great days. That was when MI5 were safely embedded in the upper echelons of the BBC. Things have changed since then.

Mr Thomson: Christmas trees.

Q859  Chairman: What are your views on the hiring of armed guards for unilateral journalists? I know you were not unilateral.

Mr Thomson: We were actually towards the end.

Q860  Chairman: Did you have armed guards?

Mr Thomson: I do not think so, but I never actually frisked them to find out. The context of that was that as the embedding process broke up, as it inevitably does, it fractures and falls apart, there were two security guards on site basically trying to find out what had happened to Terry, Fred and Hussain and investigate that, recover bodies and so forth. That was what they were there for, but they were living where we were living and you get chatting, you begin to take their advice, they see the world as soldiers do, which is enormously beneficial because as a journalist you will never do that. In terms of using armed guards, it is without question one of the most serious issues now facing journalistic organisations, just in terms of health and safety, because there have been a number of instances, particularly since the invasion finished, where a number of companies have quite definitely had people who not only accompanied them with guns, but have at least brandished them and I think I am right in saying maybe even used then on a number of occasions. It is extremely dangerous.

Q861  Chairman: Are there any guidelines for the hiring?

Mr Thomson: Do not carry guns. Do not do it.

Q862  Chairman: I presume in some cases they might be soldiers and in some cases militia and in some cases maybe hired contract security guards. I know of occasions when the BBC, going into dangerous areas, has to hire protection. I just wondered.

Mr Thomson: It just depends. When I was working in Mogadishu, for instance, the first vehicle I was involved in had a horizontally mounted four-bar anti-aircraft rig and the man who was driving that said "Taxi, Sir?". That is Mogadishu. You do not exactly stand out. When it is in the culture that everyone goes around with people who have an AK, that is how it works and that is kind of understood. What we are getting to in somewhere like Baghdad is a very different situation, when you may very clearly become a target through misunderstanding. Somebody might see people with you have guns, might suspect you of being special forces or something like that. It is pretty obvious and it is a pretty dangerous path.

Chairman: Gentlemen, we would go on much longer but thank you very much, very enlightening. Although we do find your profession somewhat irritating on occasions, as you occasionally find ours, I am afraid we are both stuck with each other and you generally do a very, very professional job. Thank you so very much.