Classified "Stuff"

Updated Below:

"Stuff" happens, as the saying goes, especially in war. When a nation sends the children of some of its citizens into combat and expects them to use lethal violence against fellow human beings, oftentimes a split-second decision to employ such violence will prove wrong. It is a totally inevitable consequence of a nation's decision to unleash the brutality of war.

The young soldiers who, through circumstances beyond their control, find themselves in a position where they have made a split-second decision which later proves wrong are often left in solitude as they struggle to reconcile reality with the intent of their actions. As with so many tragedies of war, the rest of our nation's citizenry continue on in ignorance , either self-imposed or forced upon them by their government, of the actions done in their name.

Such is the case as reported in today's Washington Post which provided new details surrounding the killing of two journalists in Iraq. According to the article:

A new book by a Washington Post reporter provides a graphic, second-by-second description of the U.S. military's 2007 killing of two Reuters journalists in Baghdad, an incident that the news organization says it cannot investigate fully because the Pentagon has withheld key records of the event.

The Reuters photographer and driver were carrying cameras and walking with a group of Iraqi men, some of whom appeared to be armed, when a U.S. helicopter crew mistook them for insurgents...

Reuters has been pressing the U.S. military for more than two years to turn over all materials containing information about the shootings on July 12, 2007, of its staff photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, in the helicopter strike in a contested neighborhood of East Baghdad.

...

But the U.S. military has withheld key information on the 2007 shootings on the grounds that it is classified, and has not released to Reuters a video taken from the gunship that captures the complete sequence of radio communications and imagery that unfolded on the streets below.

...

Soon after the shootings, Reuters submitted a request under the Freedom of Information Act for all documents and materials about the incident, Kim said. In April, the U.S. Central Command, which oversees the U.S. military in Iraq, said it had identified eight documents but was withholding two because they were classified and released six others in redacted form, with classified portions blacked out.

Reuters appealed in June, saying the information the military released was incomplete, challenging the decision to classify it and asking for an expedited decision. In July, the Pentagon rejected the request to expedite the appeal, Kim said. He said one of the documents released contains grainy photographs that appear to be captured from a helicopter video, which Reuters is seeking to obtain.

"It's difficult to understand whether the investigation is coming to sound conclusions without actually seeing the evidence," he said. "It is hard to make heads or tails out of the screen grabs from the video, so we would like to see the video . . . the actual unedited version of what happened on the scene."

Frank Smyth, the journalist security coordinator for the CPJ, said the U.S. military has not made public several other investigations involving the deaths of journalists killed by U.S. forces, and said that more transparency is important both for accountability and for preventing such incidents in the future.

Based upon the Post's reporting, it appears that the Pentagon is withholding Apache gunship video on the grounds that it is classified. It is difficult to imagine how such video can be appropriately classified. Per the governing Executive order for the classification of national security information, the only basis for such classification would be that the information concerned military plans, weapons systems, or operations.

Taking each in order, it should be safe to say that the U.S. military does not have any "plans" to kill journalists or other innocent individuals, thus ruling out military plans as the basis for classification. Secondly, the Apache helicopter is a 35-year-old weapon system, and thus cannot in the remotest of situation be considered state-of-the-art. Besides, even a cursory Internet search reveals numerous examples of Apache gun camera video being posted to the web. Finally, this incident involves a military operation from over two years ago. It is difficult to justify that such an incident could be legitimately considered to be classified so long after the event.

The same governing Executive order clearly states that: " In no case shall information be classified in order to:

(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error;

(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency;"

When classifying information, it is usually the "fact of" that justifies official secrecy. This instance involving gun camera video appears to be yet another situation where the government is not classifying the "fact of" but rather the images or other records that substantiate what is otherwise an unclassified fact. This is the ultimate in form over substance.

It is time for the Pentagon to do the right thing in accordance with the governing direction from the President and release the gun camera video in order to allow all our nation's citizens to, as Reuters chief counsel Thomas Kim said, "understand the basis on which the military concluded that the shooting was justified." There is no legitimate national security basis which the government can use to impose continued ignorance on the part of the American people, and the journalists' families, as to what exactly happened to these two individuals.

Update:

The increasing tendency on the part of the government to control access to images as opposed to knowledge of facts such as in the instance above is, in some regards, a more nefarious and cynical form of official secrecy. Whether it is images of official ceremonies for fallen warriors to include flag-draped coffins, pictures of the grievously war-wounded, videos of "enhanced interrogation sessions," photos of detainee abuse, and the like, the government is increasingly attempting to control access to images. By doing so, the government in effect takes the position that while there may be no basis to deny knowledge of the facts of a particular situation, it will nonetheless attempt to control or even preclude Americans' understanding of the facts. Thus is the power of images and thus is the abuse of official power when the government attempts to deny the people access to images of otherwise unclassified events.