Cori E. Dauber

“ Felling said. “All the news reporting, all the language, all the written word in the world does not have the effect of one brutal video image.”142 And when anger is subtracted, what is left? What is going to be felt, watching someone wearing an orange jumpsuit begging helplessly for their life? Remember, Bigley was not begging the terrorists holding him for his life, he was begging Tony Blair. How do we feel, hearing these poor men blame our leaders, even suspecting that their statements are under extreme and extraordinary duress? ”

“ The problem for the Army, and the larger military of course, is that it has no way to enforce or even pass on lessons that should be learned by the press. Yet it remains the case that a war against terrorism, or, if you prefer, against terrorists, is by definition a war of wills and therefore a war against propaganda and images. ”

“ But there is also the air war, meaning the war as it exists on the nation’s front pages and television screens. For a democracy, winning one and not the other will always mean losing, and losing in a very real sense, because the loss of public support means that the war will come to an end, period.
This means that the terrorist attack is a media event in the sense that it is designed to attract the attention of the media, to gain the media’s attention, the same way that a political campaign event is a media event, designed to attract the media’s attention and thus garner coverage. ”

“ Terrorist attacks ought to be understood as consciously crafted media events, and while that has always been the case, today it is more true than ever before in two ways. First, the terrorist attack is itself often designed and intended for the cameras. Terrorist attacks are designed for an audience. Their true target is not that which is blown up—that item, or those people—for that is merely a stage prop. What is really being targeted are those watching at home. ”

“ Digital cameras, both still and moving, of increasingly high quality, are now available in sizes that are not just portable but small enough to be embedded in a cell phone, and this technology is more and more affordable to the average person. Also available is the software that permits images to be edited (and manipulated) right on a laptop computer, before being uploaded onto the Internet.49
The modern battlefield is awash in digital cameras, video cameras, and MP3 players that store images as well as music, personal computers, and cell phone cameras. ”

“ It is for that reason that the military force fighting today against a terrorist organization in defense of a democratic state is really fighting a two-front war. There is on the one hand the ground war, meaning the war that has to actually be won on the ground, the state of play on the ground as it exists in reality. ”

“ If enemy propagandists are able to spread false information, and that information is being spread globally—in part through the American media—then the military’s public affairs obligations are not being fulfilled. Enemy propaganda and misinformation, whether textual or visual, have to be answered, whether they are being distributed to a foreign or domestic audience. No law can reasonably be interpreted as meaning the Army cannot correct lies being told to the American people by al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups. ”

“ The infrastructure of the landline
networks may be so decrepit and backwards that it becomes easier
to simply skip over the landline system and go straight to the most
advanced possible cell network. Where people cannot afford those
phones, they combine resources so that an entire village may be
sharing a single phone, and, although the population may not as
a matter of course have access to computers, the phones become
their link to the Internet. ”

“ In this radically different information environment, a situation where not one, but a confluence of new technologies have all become available simultaneously, the possibility for synergistic effects is created, producing an entirely new environment from that of previous wars. Obviously the Internet is first among equals ”

“ There is a vast literature on the potential for new technologies to create a Revolution in Military Affairs or “networked warfare,” but that is a discussion of the impact of military technology on the way the force itself can be used. Today there is a question regarding the impact of new communication and information technologies in the hands of civilians—some of whom are combatants—on the environment in which the force will be used. ”

“ Beginning with the Chechens fighting against the Russians in the early 1990s, one innovation in terrorist propaganda made possible by innovations in media technology was the filming of terrorist attacks by the terrorists themselves. ”

“ Zarqawi launched his jihad in Iraq “at the right point in the evolution of the technology,” said Ben N. Venzke, whose firm IntelCenter monitors jihadist sites for U.S. Government agencies. High-speed Internet access was increasingly prevalent. New, relatively low-cost tools to make and distribute high-quality video were increasingly available. “Greater bandwidth, better video compression, better video editing tools—all hit the maturity point when you had a vehicle as well as the tools,” he said.
The original al-Qaeda always aspired to use technology in its war on the West. ”

“ A corollary, although it was not phrased this way at the time, don’t let terrorists air their propaganda material without comment or critique. For the modern era, it seems that a critical lesson ought be: Certainly don’t let them do so without transparency. What makes this all the more amazing is that in the 1980s, after some high profile decisions by networks covering terrorist events that were widely considered controversial or even of extremely questionable journalistic ethics, the networks agonized over how to handle their coverage of terrorist events. ”

“ This is the case because developing strategies to fight an insurgent enemy has become more challenging as today’s wars are taking place in a radically new information and media environment, and today’s terrorists and insurgents have been brilliant at capitalizing on this environment in their operational art. For today, terrorism is a media event in a second sense. Terrorists and insurgents are now no longer dependent upon the professional media to communicate. In fact, to an unprecedented degree, the professional media have become dependent upon them. ”

“ In fact, while software such as Movie Maker 3 is easily available around the world and easily mastered without special training, it is not really necessary to purchase even something that unsophisticated—someone with just a little computer savvy (and realistically these days that is quite a number of the world’s young people) can download free shareware at zero cost or, with a great deal of computer savvy, hack something for free that is not in the public domain. ”

“ By disseminating enemy propaganda without comment or critique, the press is failing its responsibilities, including, in any event, any responsibility to be neutral, for the media do unwittingly facilitate the terrorist’s purposes. ”

“ Most recently, al-Qaeda’s al-Sahab media organization has demonstrated an ability to present, and help others to present, a reliable source of near real-time news coverage from the jihad fronts for Muslims. From both Iraq and Afghanistan—where heretofore the Taliban took almost no interest in media operations—there now flow almost daily, high-quality videos of mujahideen military activity against the forces of the U.S.-led coalitions, interviews with important insurgent commanders and tapes of the retribution exacted from those Muslims who cooperate with the “occupiers.” ”

“ For a list of which newspapers presented the photograph
in what way, see David D. Perlmutter and Lisa Hatley Major,
“Images of Horror From Fallujah,” Nieman Reports, Vol. 58,
Summer 2004, p. 73.
122. This attitude towards the display of the dead body in
news images is very much an American one. While it is shared to
a lesser degree by the Canadian media, and an even lesser degree
by the British, most countries’ news outlets, print and broadcast,
would display as a matter of course extremely graphic images
that would never be seen in the United States. ”

“ It is extremely unlikely that a network would ever air more of a comparable tape, if another one were to be made available. But why not air less? Is it necessary that any of these tapes be aired for an audience to be informed? Indeed, this seems to be the direction that the networks were headed at the end of the spate of brutal executions of hostages in 2004. When Hensley was killed the next day, the video was mentioned by NBC, but no clips were aired. ”

“ The Internet alone is a powerful, even revolutionary, tool; the Internet in combination with these other technologies has the potential to be used as a weapon. Technology, however, and the rapidly improving ways to distribute and disseminate content that technology makes possible, is nothing without the content itself. ”

“ The war against Islamist insurgents will continue to be, in large part, a war against arguments, symbols, and images. That such a war is being fought in an information context unlike any other only complicates the challenges faced by the U.S. Army, and the U.S. military generally. New information and communication technologies are being used to great synergistic effect by the enemy: the military has to understand how this works and be prepared to make use of such technologies to counter enemy messaging to the extent possible, as quickly as possible. ”

“ This does tell us something about the priorities of the terrorist and insurgent groups American forces are fighting. With the exception of the ever escalating offense-defense arms race surrounding the improvised explosive devices,30 there are no reports of weapons being particularly advanced. Rather, they tend to be whatever is at hand, whatever can be found in leftover weapons caches or smuggled into the country, while the equipment used for the creation of propaganda, the cameras, the computers, the software, has continued to advance rapidly. ”

“ They view the media differently. The original al-Qaeda are hiding in the mountains, not a technologically very well-equipped place. Iraq is an urban combat zone. Technology is a big part of that. I don’t know how to distinguish the Internet now from the military campaign in general in Iraq.”29 After all, as they point out, until very recently, when the original al-Qaeda leadership wished to release an audio file (much less a video file) , they went to the effort of getting a physical copy of a tape to an Arab satellite television network, an old-school way of doing things. ”

“ If the truth is known, military spokespeople need to be proactive, to engage in rapid response or, if at all possible, to get out ahead of stories that are predictable. When investigations are necessary, the military must understand that bringing them to closure as rapidly as possible—meaning before the story has fallen off the media’s radar—is absolutely essential. ”

“ That said, the Army has to find ways to go around the press, to reach the American people in particular— and other audiences as well—directly, on the assumption that continuing to depend upon the media, and only the media, to get their message out will continue to be insufficient. The enemy has made today’s technologies work for them; the American military can and should do the same. ”

“ And yet all the networks opted for almost precisely the same image, give or take an additional second of footage. NBC Nightly News and ABC’s World News Tonight stopped the tape just as the killer drew his knife, while The CBS Evening News went a bit further, showing the killer grab Berg by his hair, slam him to the ground and put the knife to his neck. “I just think you really need to let people see as much as they can in a judicious way,” CBS Evening News producer Jim Murphy said after the broadcast. ”

“ Where the technology itself is not the most advanced but is several generations behind, they use it to access cutting edge techniques, and constantly push the envelope in terms of creative applications of what technology allows. For example, the British have complained that insurgents have been using Google Earth to plan their attacks on British compounds in Iraq more precisely. ”

“ If people want to ask questions and find out what is reasonably happening, it seemed to me not an unreasonable thing, when you’re moving them from the vehicle they’re in towards their cells to have them stop in some area prior to that and do what you do to get them in a circumstance that’s more appropriate for being in a cell than how they were arranged in the buses, the ferries and the airplanes. ”

“ It should be emphasized that the near taboo regarding the showing of dead bodies is a near taboo, not an absolute one. Obviously there have been quite dramatic images regularly transmitted from the war in Iraq that involve the human body in extremis, in particular many images of large numbers of dead Iraqis. ”

“ One company is marketing today a piece of equipment that they are calling “basically a live TV truck in a backpack.”57 Now, with “minimal training, anyone who can operate a computer can use it to broadcast professional-quality live video over the internet or on television.”58 It is clear that neither the manufacturers nor the technology reviewers are considering possible downsides to the way technology opens up broadcast-quality access to almost anyone with any kind of agenda. ”

“ Whenever possible the military must be proactive. Opportunities come along to get ahead of a particular story or, on occasion, make news, and the military has too often been too hesitant. For example, when enemy media labs were captured, some of the material found was what might be referred to as Islamist blooper reels, several of which are described in the monograph, and would have been quite powerful if released. Having footage of that nature presents an opportunity. ”