Illustration by Ryan Inzana

In times of conflict, journalism can often be a deadly game. In a report on press freedom for the year 2002, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recorded 20 work-related deaths among journalists worldwide. Already, five journalists have been killed in 2003.

Many of these deaths -- especially those that occur in the heat of battle -- are accidents. Yet over the last week, the specter of military forces specifically targeting media outlets has sown controversy once again. Attacks by US-led coalition forces on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's media
infrastructure began last week. These bombings raise serious questions about the rules of war. Can a TV outlet be targeted simply for telling the truth as it sees it? Can it be targeted for being selective with the truth -- highlighting the enemy's missteps and eliding its successes? If propaganda alone is the criterion for launching a missile at the media, what is protecting pan-Arab network Al-Jazeera or Fox News?

Journalism activists have come down strongly against these attacks, arguing that media outlets are civilian institutions protected by the Geneva Conventions. "I think there should be a clear international investigation into whether or not this bombing violates the Geneva Conventions," Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, told the Guardian. And Amnesty International has said that "[t]he bombing of a television station, simply because it is being used for the purposes of propaganda, cannot be condoned. It is a civilian object, and thus protected under international humanitarian law."

The bombing of state-run media outlets is nothing new. In one sense, it is a simple but extreme case of killing the messenger. In the Gulf War of 1991-'92, for instance, Iraqi television was bombed on the very first night of the conflict. Yet the question of using lethal force on media can prove vexingly complicated as well, a point underscored by the juxtaposition of two cases: Rwanda, where an enemy media outlet left untouched was later exposed as an instrument of genocide; and Serbia, where targeting a media facility resulted in a war-crime investigation.

In Rwanda, taking steps against the media might have ameliorated, if not prevented, a tragic massacre. In her provocative book on America's apathy toward preventing genocide, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Basic Books, 2002), Carr Center for Human Rights Policy scholar Samantha Power argues that the United States could (and should) have destroyed the antennas or jammed the transmissions of the murderous Rwandan radio station Radio Milles Collines in 1994. That government-run radio station's broadcasts were the prime media inciting the horrific genocide launched by the Hutu government against Rwanda's ethnic Tutsis (whom the station dubbed "cockroaches") and its own political opponents (whom the broadcasts often named specifically).

One chilling anecdote from Power's book sums up US inaction in Rwanda and offers a glib, flippant retort to the notion that the media influences armed conflict. Powers notes that when US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Prudence Bushnell and others in the Clinton administration argued for at least jamming Radio Milles Collines, the State Department's legal section advised against it by arguing that it would break international agreements on media and undermine free speech. "When Bushnell raised radio jamming yet again at a meeting," Power writes, "one Pentagon official chided her for naïveté: `Pru, radios don't kill people. People kill people.' " The United States was not a party to the Rwanda conflict, but Power and others argue that international conventions on genocide place signatories -- including the US -- under obligation to take measures to stop it. (Indeed, argues Powers, the US studiously avoided using the word "genocide" in official pronouncements on Rwanda to avoid this responsibility.)

On the other hand, the April 1999 bombing of Radio Television Serbia's headquarters in downtown Belgrade caused a controversy that included an investigation of that particular NATO attack by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). As noted above, opponents of striking media in wartime cite the prohibition in Protocol 1, Article 52 of the Geneva Conventions (Part IV), which states that "attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives."

Others, however, believe media outlets, as part of an opposing force's "command and control," are fair game during wartime. At a briefing last week, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Victoria Clarke repeated those three words twice when quizzed about why Iraqi TV had been targeted. (In fact, much of the recent speculation about attacking Iraqi TV has focused less on why it was attacked, and more on the question, "What took so long?" On Monday, New York Times columnist William Safire labeled "the inability to locate and obliterate all of Saddam's TV propaganda facilities" as the "most inexplicable weakness of our intelligence and air power.")

But the definitions of "military" and "command and control" are becoming more slippery. In his book Waging Modern War (Public Affairs, 2001), Retired General Wesley Clark, who served as supreme allied commander in Europe, offers a number of rationales for attacking enemy media outlets that are strikingly similar to those raised in the present conflict. They range beyond the simple "command and control" mantra into something more convincing militarily -- and more questionable in relation to the codified laws of war.

Clark notes that it was "difficult to get political approval" from NATO countries for striking Serbian television, "in part because it seemed undemocratic and perhaps illegal." Yet in the conclusion of the book, he offers a detailed description of the effect of Serbian propaganda on the NATO bombing campaign that could easily be substituted for present circumstances merely by substituting "Iraqis" for "Serbs" and "US-led coalition" for "NATO":

The Serbs, reflecting the totalitarian methods at the heart of communist rule, were excellent in organizing press coverage and directing it toward NATO mistakes. From the outset we had seen that the Serbs would do all they could to portray the NATO strikes as targeting civilians, rather than the Serb military and police. For the first few weeks we avoided playing into their plan, but eventually, the accidents and misfortunes inevitable in any air campaign took over. The fact was, the Serbs were on the ground and we weren't. They had an immediate advantage in knowing when the bombs struck and, when the result was embarrassing to NATO, they could assure world media coverage faster than we could investigate and explain it.

They had the advantage in time and space. They had access to the media representatives in Belgrade. And though they did their best to avoid coverage of NATO's successes, we found that there was usually an element of truth when they shone the spotlight on NATO failures.

The public to-and-fro over alleged missile attacks directed at markets in Baghdad perfectly illustrates Clark's point. Images of the civilian carnage at both marketplaces were gruesome and widely broadcast in both Iraq and the rest of the world. Yet analysis of the visual evidence has produced a credible argument that one -- and perhaps both -- of last week's explosions were the result of stray Iraqi anti-aircraft ordnance, and not the bombs of US-led coalition forces.

Like the Serbs in Clark's account, Iraqi media have time, space, and access advantages in covering such bombings. And the media scrum over responsibility for civilian casualties in Baghdad does recall similarly virulent battles over responsibility for massacres in Sarajevo markets during the Bosnian Serb siege of that city. As Slate blogger Mickey Kaus points out in a Sunday entry: "It's true that, in the past, when the United States has been accused of killing innocent civilians with an errant missile, the charge has usually been proven accurate. But I'm still skeptical about the Iraqi claims that two U.S. missiles have now struck crowded marketplaces and killed dozens. Why do these errant missiles always fall in crowded marketplaces and kill dozens? Why don't they ever fall in back alleys and kill one or two people?"

Yet the opposing views of such incidents bring us back to the main questions involved in targeting media outlets during war. Does the fact that the other side is broadcasting its version of events -- or even propaganda -- transform its media outlets into legitimate military targets? And if propaganda alone is reason to strike at the journalism practiced by the opposing side in war, is the pan-Arab channel Al-Jazeera -- fiercely attacked by British prime minister Tony Blair's press spokesman on Monday as broadcasting "fiction" -- a legitimate target for bombs or cyber-warfare?

To put it more simply, if state-run media indeed can be targeted legitimately for disseminating propaganda, what constrains the military from targeting other (and independent) media operators who put out what one combatant views as "propaganda"? Can such reasoning be turned on its head to justify suicide bombings or other terrorist actions as legitimate acts of war? As with so many other things in this conflict, military targeting of the media may well lose clarity in the proverbial fog of war.

IN BELGRADE, a simple gray monument stands in a park just a stone's throw away from the headquarters of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) on Takovska Street. Etched on its face in large Cyrillic letters are 16 names and a simple one-word question: ZASTO? ("why?").

The monument is a memorial to the 16 low-level RTS workers who were killed in a bombing raid on RTS headquarters on April 23, 1999. The attack on Belgrade television is a rich and provocative case study, because it almost perfectly straddles the hot-button issues involved in the targeting of media facilities. It has been the most heavily investigated and analyzed such incident -- raising questions about the culpability of Serbian media and NATO forces.

The country once known as Yugoslavia was already fracturing in the years after the death of its long-time communist leader, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, in 1980. But most of those who have analyzed the country's bloody dissolution highlight the media's role in disseminating and exacerbating ethnic tensions to the point of sheer hysteria. In particular, analysts such as Mark Thompson (author of the pioneering study Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Kemal Kurspahic (former editor of the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje during the Bosnian Serb siege of that city) point to the Belgrade-based media under the control of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic as particularly effective and brutal in fomenting wars within the former Yugoslavia.

In Forging War, Thompson notes that Milosevic's regime treated RTS "as a party-state resource like the police and army." What the state television pumped out before and during the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia was truly amazing in its virulent racism and untruth -- and truly powerful in its omnipresence on the media scene. As Belgrade journalist Milos Vasic famously put it in a statement quoted by historian Noel Malcolm in his book Bosnia: A Short History (New York University Press, 1994): "You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line -- a line dictated by David Duke. You too would have war in five years."

For instance, a study of RTS broadcasts on the Bosnian war cited by Thompson observed that the mainly Muslim Bosniak forces defending themselves against Bosnian Serb attacks and widespread ethnic cleansing in 1992 and 1993 were referred to as "evildoers," "cutthroats," "mujahideen," "jihad warriors," "commando terrorist groups," and "Muslim extremists." Thompson also noted that -- in the universe of RTS during the Bosnian wars -- "the Serbian side never attacks; it responds to enemy provocations, assaults, crimes and genocide. At the beginning, Serb forces were often `unarmed defenders of centuries-old hearths'; this was shortened to `defenders' and often `liberators' of towns and territory."

Thompson cites literally thousands of such examples from Serbian media outlets -- and his updated 1999 version of Forging War was published before it could include the propaganda put out by Serbian media that year as Milosevic attempted ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and triggered the NATO air campaign. Kurspahic puts it even more simply, writing in Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace (United States Institute of Peace, 2003) that the "ideological line" of Serbian nationalism that was "developed fully by Serbia's intellectuals . . . embraced and enforced by the ruthless new regime [of Milosevic] in 1987, aggressively and systematically promoted by media with an audience of 90 percent of the Serbian public -- laid the ground for the mayhem of the 1990s."

The Serbian media's culpability in provoking the Yugoslav wars was clear -- and it was a key factor in NATO's decision to strike not only RTS transmitters, but also the Serbian media's headquarters in downtown Belgrade. Yet, as noted previously, the Serbian media's skill in getting pictures of NATO "mistakes" into the world media was also an inducement.

A subsequent ICTY war-crimes investigation of the NATO bombing campaign explored the blurry line between valid military targeting of the Serbian media and a war crime against civilians. The ICTY report noted questions in two important areas in the targeting of RTS. The first was whether it was a legitimate military target. NATO argued that the RTS building was targeted simultaneously with other command-and-control facilities in a coordinated military attack. Yet the report also noted that "more controversially, the bombing was also justified on the basis of the propaganda purpose to which [the building] was employed." The second area of concern noted by the ICTY involved discrepancies in accounts over whether there was adequate warning of the attack, which might have prevented the 16 casualties.

In the end, the ICTY sided with NATO and did not order further investigation of the RTS bombing. Yet the fallout from targeting the Serbian media continues. In one development that bolsters the ICTY's decision, former RTS director Dragoljub Milanovic was convicted of creating a "grave danger to public security" by failing to evacuate all employees from RTS headquarters. After hearing testimony that Serbian officials were warned of the attack in advance and that government officials had signed an order to evacuate countermanded by the RTS director, the court found Milanovic guilty and sentenced him to 10 years in jail.

An ideological debate also continues. In a personal aside to Prime Time Crime, Kurspahic recalls that a colleague from Belgrade called him for comment after the April 23 RTS bombing. "I told her my reaction was mixed," he wrote. "My heart is bleeding for the innocent people on duty, who were there as hostages to their institution's propaganda war against NATO -- why else would there be a make-up artist on duty at 3 a.m. -- but I honestly have trouble thinking of Belgrade TV as a `media institution.' The mission of media is to spread the news, while their mission was to deny the news; the media's role is to inform, their role was to misinform; and, after all, force and even murder were used in imposing that TV station's propaganda in Bosnia in 1992."

Veran Matic, editor in chief of Belgrade's independent B-92 radio and president of Serbia's Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM), takes a different view. No Serbian broadcast media outlets were as heroic as B-92 in fighting the propaganda spewed by RTS under Milosevic, who yanked the plug on Matic's station on numerous occasions. Yet, in an e- mail, Matic writes, "I think that radio and television stations should not be military targets. Except in special cases, as in Rwanda, where the radio stations served for issuing directives for conducting murders.

"This whole issue is connected with the question of war and every other kind of propaganda. Are there rules for war propaganda? What's permitted and what is forbidden in any kind of propaganda? The Geneva Convention regarding war does not treat this issue."

Matic observes that if propaganda is a war crime, "every journalist who participates in propagating certain political or war goals would be treated as a war criminal." Propaganda is a legitimate right during war, he argues. It is a function of "the right to self-defense."

Matic notes that in the case of the RTS bombing, the Pentagon argued that the frequencies were shared between the military and the media, thus making the transmissions legitimate military targets. He points out, however, that if the goal is merely to stop the signal, "it is possible to destroy transmitters." NATO chose to strike at the headquarters, Matic observes, giving the bombing a strongly "symbolic" component. "Civilians should not be sacrificed," he says, "because of actions [that are] symbolic in nature."

BOTH KURSPAHIC and Matic make strong and compelling points, which proves just how muddy the issue of targeting the media in wartime has become. Do journalists who aid and abet propaganda fit the bill of war criminal and legitimate target?

Right-wing ideologue Ann Coulter once told a writer for the New York Observer that "my only regret with [Oklahoma City bomber] Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." Was Coulter suggesting that the New York Times was a legitimate military target for right-wing terrorists? Her comment is clearly propaganda of the most vile sort. Is she a legitimate target for anyone who disagrees?

Such anti-media sentiment already pervades the current conflict. On his Web site, blogger Andrew Sullivan has launched a jeremiad against the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), dubbing it the "Baghdad Broadcasting Company" and mewling that "[t]he BBC trusts Baghdad more than London." (It's a hackneyed joke; the BBC's studied objectivity and even-handedness also earned it the soubriquet "Belgrade Broadcasting Company" during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign.)

Yet nowhere has the accusation of propagandist -- with its accompanying justification for "targeting" in a military or other sense -- been as startlingly clear and ominous as in the case of pan-Arab TV network Al-Jazeera. For the West, the station has been a controversial window not only into the war in Iraq, but also into the mood of the channel's many viewers throughout the Arab world. It has run afoul of many Westerners for showing not only the carnage of the Baghdad-marketplace explosions, but also footage of US-led coalition dead, wounded, and prisoners of war. The latter footage, in particular, has raised complaints that Iraq is breaking the Geneva Conventions -- and that Al-Jazeera is Saddam's accomplice in this violation.

The price for Al-Jazeera has been high. Its Web sites -- both in English and Arabic -- have been attacked by hackers, who replaced the site with a graphic of an American flag. Al-Jazeera correspondents have been banned from the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ Stock Market. They have also been targeted by coalition spinmeisters such as Alistair Campbell -- Tony Blair's spokesperson -- who complained in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that "when you look at some of the output, from not just Al-Jazeera but some of the other Arab media, we have got a huge uphill battle on our hands, and we have got to engage in it."

But how far should the US and other coalition forces take the battle against Al-Jazeera? During the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, for instance, Al-Jazeera's office in Kabul -- where it was the only channel broadcasting during the US attacks -- was struck by US bombs. The channel accused the Pentagon of deliberately targeting its bureau. Pentagon officials denied this accusation, but offered no explanation of the "mistake" other than a flat denial that the US would target independent media organizations.

As the line between bombing media as part of "command and control" and bombing it for pumping out propaganda blurs in the minds of the military and the public, an obvious threat to free media has emerged. "Command and control" can be verified. Propaganda, however, is in the eye or ear of the beholder. To blithely condone the use of lethal force against media outlets as a tactic in a simple war of words and images is the first step on a very slippery slope, with ominous implications for journalistic freedom. In an age of embedded reporters, the separation between the media and the military has already shrunk in practical terms. Placing any media outlets or reporters -- even those in the combat zone -- in the category of target remains problematic at best. Without the strongest proof that such media are helping to commit war crimes or aiding directly in the command and control of troops engaged in the field of battle, such attacks will cost innocent lives -- and violate the customary rules of conflict.

Richard Byrne can be reached at richardbyrne1@earthlink.net

Issue Date: April 4 - 10, 2003