Media Endanger Troops, Rumsfeld Says
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Reprinted from NewsMax.com
NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2001
WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday attacked the Pentagon officials who leaked information about commando raids in Afghanistan while they were still going on late last week and scolded the press for airing it.
"The fact that some members of the press knew enough about those operations to ask the questions and print the stories was clearly because someone in the Pentagon had provided them that information," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news briefing. "And clearly, it put at risk the individuals involved in the operation.
"I recognize the need to provide the press - and, through you, the American people - with information to the fullest extent. ... But we cannot and will not provide information that could jeopardize the success of our efforts to root out and liquidate the terrorist networks that threaten our people."
The person or persons who told the press that U.S. Rangers and others were in southern Afghanistan and conducting a military operation against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network clearly violated federal law, he added. Bin Laden is identified by the Bush administration as responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
The issues of operational security and safety of people involved "does not seem complicated to me, and it seems so self-evident that it just floors me that people are willing to do that."
The presence of U.S. commandos in southern Afghanistan, the first insertion of ground troops in the two-week-old war against terrorism, first surfaced in the press Friday, with unidentified sources quoted as the conduit of the information. Later, it was reported that 100 to 200 Army Rangers were clashing with Taliban forces at an undisclosed airbase in southern Afghanistan.
The report, which was true, crowded the world's airwaves while the Rangers and others were still on the ground, and therefore in harm's way.
Rumsfeld noted the conflict and Operation Enduring Freedom were unlike anything before it, and although the Pentagon was working with news organizations to create a framework for dealing with each other in covering the story, these procedures had yet been established.
"In terms of ongoing, perhaps ongoing ground action, we simply can't talk about that right now," said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Like we said Saturday: Some things are going to be visible, some invisible."
The United States, the officials added, was not in the business of giving the Taliban insight into U.S. military thinking or clues as to what is planned.
"Our goal is not to demystify things for the other side," Rumsfeld said. "This is a very complicated set of problems. Our goal is to confuse, it is to make it more difficult, it is to add cost, it is to frighten, and it is to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda."
U.S. reporters are on board U.S. Navy ships in the Arabian Sea and nearby areas but were not allowed to go in with the Rangers and special operations groups, which raided an area to gather intelligence and send a message to Afghanistan's militant rulers that the United States and its allies could attack anywhere at anytime.
Rumsfeld said he was too busy to hunt down the leakers, and he didn't know if anyone was, but "I'd certainly hope that the people who were parachuting in don't find the persons." Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
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