Examination of Witnesses (Questions 800-819)
MR MARTIN
IVENS, MR
ALEX THOMSON
AND MR
MARK URBAN
2 JULY 2003
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
3rd Army, as McKiernan had been, former commander of the 24th
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.
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