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February 6, 2005
War Reporting in the Battle of Baghdad
When I was working for a Marine engineer battalion in Iraq, a new kind of communication and tracking system was fielded. Called the "Blue Force Tracker," (BFT) it was two separate components: a Panasonic Toughbook laptop computer, plugged into a GPS receiver and mounted inside a Humvee.
The BFT had two capabilities: it allowed anyone else with another BFT to see the location of every single BFT on the battlefield. The GPS system sent signals to a satellite which were then transmitted down to every other system and displayed on the Toughbook screen, on an overlay of the imagery of a given area. The other capability was email -- very short and simple text messages could be sent back and forth between differing BFT's.
We used our three BFTs in two ways. We either attached them to the battalion headquarters, or we would send one on a convoy so we could track convoys traveling over long distances.
We also had some small shortwave radios. These were battery-powered and also had a dial at the back which could be spun to recharge the batteries. In Kuwait, we had been able to receive Voice of America broadcasts, but in Iraq we were mainly restricted to the BBC World News Service (or some such).
When Marine and Army forces made it to Baghdad and entered the city, no report of this was made on the BBS radio news. But we could see it happen. We could see where individual Army and Marine humvees were inside Baghdad, overlaid on imagery of the city.
Later, the BBC quoted Iraqi news organs as saying that the presence of US forces inside Baghdad was a fiction, and propaganda by the US government. Still, we could see our own vehicles all over Baghdad -- we could even pinpoint a specific vehicle and ask the system which unit each was attached to. We were 60 miles or so away and could see the infiltration of American units throughout the city.
The next day, the BBC reporter came on and mentioned that his Iraqi news minders hadn't shown up that day. There's the rub. He was restricted from reporting what he saw with his own eyes. How much more so was CNN restricted when making a deal with Saddam to put its bureau there for a decade, as I've asked at Easongate.
Posted by Chester at February 6, 2005 2:57 PM
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