Tag Archives: Robert Gates

Gates adds new title to resume: ‘quote machine’

By Marina Cracchiolo

WASHINGTON — Former Defense Secretary and author Robert Gates can add one more title to his growing resume: walking quote machine. The charismatic leader who stood next to two presidents during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and sparked controversy with his new book criticizing President Barack Obama, showed off his lighter side during an appearance Thursday night at Politico’s cocktail evening at the Mayflower Hotel.

Gates strolled onto stage in a neck brace and took aim at everyone and everything from himself, Washington, Obama and his critics. He started by poking fun at himself and his clumsiness. He then moved on to mock North Korea’s dictator family, the Kims, saying each one is swimming shallower and shallower in the gene pool. Dozens of Tweets were posted during the informal public speech. One audience member even posted on Twitter: “Gates has one of the best senses of humor I’ve observed of cabinet officials.” Here’s a roundup of some of Gates quotable Twitter quotes.

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The media and the military: ‘dysfunctional marriage?’

By YEWON KANG

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced last July he would tighten the rules on engagement with media, a long-time dispute resurfaced: to what extent should the military be open to the media?

Gates’ memo requires approval by his Public Affairs office before any military or Defense Department officials can give interviews that may have “national or international implications.”

And many journalists have not been happy with the Pentagon’s raised guard on media engagement.

During an interview with PBS NewsHour on July 8th, Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell said:

All we’re asking for is, when something rises above one’s individual area of responsibility, that we eventually get visibility on it, … because the reality is, somebody speaks to one thing that they may know about, but it (may) have a ripple effect throughout the rest of our operations, including decisions that are being made in the NSC (National Security Council) or within our department or across the river in other departments.

Christopher Hanson, Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Maryland, said this will have a chilling effect on access to military officials and information.

“There will be a bottleneck in the Pentagon where these requests for interviews will be sitting,” Hanson said in an interview. “The public will end up getting less information that it needs.”

But the Pentagon’s senior Public Affairs official, Assistant Secretary Douglas B. Wilson, defended the new policy at a panel discussion (Oct. 29) sponsored by the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative

Wilson said the new guidelines are not intended to draw an “Iron Curtain” against the media, but rather to alert Pentagon insiders and ensure that when they deal with media “[they] know of what [they] speak and find out what [they] don’t know.”

“Hopefully this memo has not had any discernable effect on how the media works,” Wilson said.

At the panel discussion, journalists also raised concerns about government agencies giving “on-background” interviews more frequently than before. “On-background” means that reporters can use the quotes but may not attribute them to the speaker by name, instead using phrases like “senior defense official.” For example, during the recent confusion about court rulings that affected the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” issue, the Pentagon held a background briefing with a senior official but did not allow his name to be used.

“The bottom line is (they say) the issue is too controversial, but that excuse is (used) for any number of briefings,” said Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times’ Pentagon correspondent, during the discussion.

In response, Wilson said the Pentagon has a dual responsibility:  to be as transparent and timely as possible with the media, but also to ensure security of the men and women in uniform.

“It’s a hard tight rope to walk, but we walk it,” Wilson said.

The military and the media have long had a love -hate relationship or “a dysfunctional marriage,” as Thom Shanker, a Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times, calls it.

“It’s a dysfunctional marriage at times—to be sure—but we stay together for the kids” Shanker said during an interview with Maj. Gen. Mark Hertling in a Military Review article in 2009. Shanker explained that military “kids” are the soldiers and the media’s “kids” are its audience.

Maj. Kirk Luedeke, a senior Army press liaison, that illustrated Shanker’s point. As a brigade public affairs officer, Luedeke was once on a vehicle with a group of young soldiers in Baghdad who were talking about live in the war zone.  The staff sergeant who was the vehicle commander said: “Shh, we have media in the vehicle.” Luedeke had to explain to the soldiers that he was one of them, and not “the media.”

“It reminded me that as much work as we had put into training our soldiers about media awareness, we still have a long way to go,” he said.  “There’s a disconnect [between the soldiers and the media].”

In the magazine interview, Shanker said trust is the key to making this “dysfunctional” relationship work, particularly in the war zones.

“In the information age, the first casualty of war is trust,” he said, “trust between those who fight the wars and those whose job it is to report them.”

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Reporting in Guantanamo

The Pentagon’s “Media Policy and Ground Rules” pamphlet for reporting on Guantanamo starts off badly and quickly veers into silly.

The bad start: Reporters may only fly to Guantanamo to cover the military commissions by using military aircraft, although they can leave on commercial planes. Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald noted that she had to fly via commercial plan to Washington so she could take a military flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Cuba. She used to fly from Miami to report on Guantanamo.

The turn to silly: “Etiquette” rules prohibit chewing gum, standing and stretching or sleeping in the courtroom.

What these examples demonstrate: A military culture that results in arbitrary restrictions on reporters at the whim of a public affairs officer.

The New York Times reported last week about how the media guidelines are enforced at Guantanamo, exposing the public affairs officers as petty, controlling and fearful of journalists. Through the guidelines they established, these PAOs have undermined Defense Department efforts to build relationships with the media. Recently, in announcing rules for military officials’ interactions with reporters, Secretary Roberts Gates stressed the need for aggressive reporting on the military.

He told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that The Washington Post series about problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center “have been a spur to action for me. The kind of reporting you do … is one of the tools I have in trying to lead this department and correct problems.”

Some senior officials at the Defense Department have agreed to meet this week with representatives of several news organizations demanding the some of the Guantanamo rules be rescinded.

Much of the focus is on rules that prohibit reporters from revealing information the Pentagon decides is protected even if that information is learned from non-government sources.

Rosenberg and several other reporters were expelling from Guantanamo in May for publishing the name of an Army interrogator even though that name had been aired in numerous news stories previously – because the rules allowed only an anonymous moniker given to him in court documents.

Rosenberg and lawyers for the media companies say the rules are a violation of the First Amendment.

This week’s meeting offers an opportunity for the Pentagon to acknowledge the obvious as a start in rebuilding a damaged relationship and, more important, allowing Guantanamo reporters to do their job in the best interests of the public.

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