Short and Sweet Blog

Yon in Iraq

Michael Yon, a former Green Beret, went to Iraq and Afghanistan in order to discover the story of our wars from the point of view of those fighting them. In his own words:

. . . [W]hat spurred me to drop what I was doing, get on a plane and fly halfway around the world, to a war zone, was a growing sense that what I was seeing reported on television, as well as in newspapers and magazines, was inconsistent with the reality my friends were describing. I wanted to see the truth, first hand, for myself.

For more than five years Yon has been issuing his Dispatches from embeds with American and UK units both in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has spoken often and powerfully about his experiences and observations. He has shown directness and even bluntness in his assessments, often including implied and explicit criticism of the US and UK upper echelon. He jumped into the political hornet’s nest when he observed that the war in Iraq had morphed into a civil war but did so because he felt it was necessary to be accurate about events on the ground. He has also been particularly direct when talking about the military and police forces of the two host nations. He has always told it like it was and, notwithstanding his sometimes impolitic opinions, for the most part was welcomed by the allied military at all levels.

Last month, despite the terms of a written understanding with the army, Yon was abruptly dis-embedded from his unit, the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division in Aghanistan. There is significant evidence that this action was taken from the level of and at the direction of Gen. McChrystal and staff. D.B. Grady explains the context of the order to dis-embed Yon in the Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/michael-yons-war/57483/.

Despite early optimism, Yon has clearly expressed his lack of confidence in Gen. McChrystal’s capacity to lead the US to a successful outcome in Afghanistan. He has also leveled substantial criticism against the actions of a Canadian General who was subsequently relieved of command. The specifics of these episodes are all beside the point however. The point I am making is that dis-embedding Yon was a form of censorship and a threat.

Let’s ask ourselves some pertinent questions. Is controlling access to non-secret information a form of censorship? When is such access-censorship permissible in a country whose press is supposedly free? Does access-censorship become more permissible when you are in a war and you, as the authority, believe people’s lives may be lost if your war aims are made more difficult to accomplish by reason of the publication of non-secret information or even uncomfortable opinions? Are there written guidelines which are to be applied by the party making the decision to limit access to non-secret information? Isn’t the censorship of Michael Yon worthy of substantial news coverage especially when it acts as an implied threat to others? After all the remainder of the press rallied around Fox News when the White House was trying to isolate and marginalize it. Why is D.B. Grady, a freelance writer, the only one even mildly interested in it? I truly hesitate to make this political connection, but did the fact that President Obama made himself, until very recently, virtually unavailable for press corps questions set the tone in which this action was acceptable? Would the press have pursued the story if Bush’s army had cut off Yon’s embed when he went public saying that the war in Iraq had become a civil war when that conclusion contradicted the Bush party line?

Long before his dis-embed, Yon made this important statement about access to information:

The longer I stayed, the better I understood things. And I began to realize that Americans need to see these things in order to understand what is happening here and come to a more informed judgment of whether this struggle is “worth” the cost, in money and lives. No one can make that determination without a balanced set of facts.

How do we, the American people, reach a reasoned conclusion about the war in Afghanistan without Yon and others like him giving us the raw data? Is a man like Yon, whose embeds are at the discretion of the army, entitled to express opinions about the leadership of the war without losing his observation post thus cutting off his access to information and ours along with him? Is this another issue which must be injected into the political process if the press itself turns away?

This entry was posted on June 5, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.