Back From The Front: Journalists Report on Their Experiences in Afghanistan

Transcript

MR. STEPHEN HESS: Good morning and welcome to the 11th session of the Brookings/Harvard Forum on information and the media in the war on terrorism.

Today we start with five journalists who have recently been in Afghanistan and one should note, of course, as the American Journalism Review has said, that this is one of the most dangerous assignments in modern time. Eight journalists have been killed in Afghanistan and this morning as the President of Pakistan meets with the President of the United States we still don't know about the fate of Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal.

We started this program in October with a program on lessons of wars past with Peter Arnett, Ted Koppel, Daniel Schorr, Stanley Karnow. Now we have an opportunity to talk about the lessons of wars present and perhaps to tell us something about the lessons we can lean for wars future.

Our five journalists this morning, Michael Gordon to my left of the New York Times, Carol Morello of the Washington Post, Tom Squitieri of USA Today, Lois Raimondo of the Washington Post, and Kevin Whitelaw of U.S. News & World Report. I'm Stephen Hess the co-host of this program, and on my far left is my co-host Marvin Kalb, the Executive Director of the Washington Office of The Shorenstein Center, Harvard.

If you have an opportunity in the audience to look at the resumes, the little biographies of our five guests, or those of you on television, if you come to the Brookings web site where we post the transcripts of this program and the resumes of our guests, you'll see a quite remarkable group of foreign travelers. Persons who have been in the past in Chechnya, in the Gulf War, Kosovo, Panama. They've been with the mine clearers in Iraq. They've been in China, Tibet, India, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Haiti, Burundi, Lebanon, Cambodia, the Congo. And yet one thing I think we may find as we start our conversation this morning, perhaps these true professional veteran journalists would not consider themselves war correspondents. Perhaps very different, we're going to see, than when we started in October with Peter Arnett who proudly and joyously considered himself a war correspondent.

So these are our five professionals. The one thing that they definitely have in common is they're probably all on Afghanistan time right now.

Marvin, why don't we start the questions?

MR. MARVIN KALB: Thank you very much, Steve.

I would like to ask our correspondents just back from the front if they would all project 20-30 years into the future and they're sitting there with their grandchildren, their grandchildren are looking up and saying, "Grandpa/Grandma, what was the single most memorable experience that you had while covering the war in Afghanistan?" These are very bright kids, you understand. (Laughter) What would that single experience be?

We'll start with Mike Gordon.

MR. MICHAEL GORDON: Well, I guess the most interesting time I had was one that I didn't really plan to be that interesting which was of a period after the so-called fall of Tora Bora where Afghan forces allied with the United States had come down and declared victory and announced that the al Qaida was gone and the area was cleared and basically the war aims had been achieved.

At that point there was a lot of interest by the press to try to get into Tora Bora and see what it was really all about.

In retrospect, it probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, and this I think shows a lot of the problems that my colleagues here had which is you try to do something that's not too dangerous but make a judgment call as to what amount of risk is tolerable. But I hooked up with some of the local so-called Afghan commanders, paid some outrageous fee for a couple of body guards, and went on into there with a photographer and another Times reporter, Barry Barok [ph] to sort of see. The quest there was to see the so-called notorious caves which may not have been so vast and complex as they were made out to be.

From the sort of substantive lesson was, what I learned from this was sort of a graphic illustration of just how lawless Afghanistan is and how there are whole sectors of the country which are really under nobody's control which is a problem Karzai faces now, and how many of the various groups allied with the U.S. aren't allied with each other, which may have been the factor in the death of an American serviceman in Afghanistan, and quarrel among each other.

But what happened, just to sum up a very long story. After getting a couple of miles into Tora Bora, perhaps somewhat naively we stumbled into a situation where we were with a group of fighters in a very smoky, dark kind of outpost, [Haji Sayir's] guys, and we were trying to talk to them and interview them, and suddenly there was a message over the radio and everyone grabbed their guns, AK-47s, went running outside. We thought okay, you know, al Qaida. This is the real thing. The battle's supposedly won but okay, they're still fighting and we're going to see the al Qaida guys. So they went to the sort of Afghan version of battle stations. By the way, none of these people had uniforms, so I'm not quite sure what Don Rumsfeld's talking about when he said that that's a distinguishing characteristic between people who are in a fighting force and people who aren't. We sort of came out with them.

It turned out that the crisis at hand was not al Qaida, but another Afghan group, [Haji Zeman's] guys were sort of trespassing on their turf. These are two forces that supposedly collaborated with each other to cut off the exit of the al Qaida forces from Tora Bora. We were in the middle of this thing. It was a period where it looked like there was going to be a firefight not between the American-backed forces and the Taliban al Qaida forces, but among the American-backed forces, probably over who was going to get to loot what cave, weighty issues of this sort.

I'll just sum up by saying the interpreters and so-called body guards we were with became extremely apprehensive and we dealt with the situation by flight, which was the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances, trying to very quickly get out of there. The problem being the trespassers were also trying to get out of there and we were between these two groups and we were trying to get around or to the side of one of these groups, in case they decided to settle their disputes the old fashioned Afghan way.

We got back and we wrote kind of a colorful story about it, about just what a kind of— My sense was in going from Jalalabad into Tora Bora was going like from chaos into anarchy. But it was both an interesting kind of illustration of the problems Afghanistan faces now, but I think it also shows the kind of problems that the correspondents ran into there, which my colleagues can speak to. But I think many of the risks were not sort of standard, classical battlefield risks, but the fact that so much of the country was under nobody's control, or under this warlord's control, or under a bandit's control, which is a situation that still seems to be the case there.

MR. KALB: I think your grandchildren are going to love that story.

Carol?

MR. HESS: Can I just say one thing which I should have said in the introduction? Lois, who was in a unique position of both writing and photographing the war. She is a great photographer of the Washington Post and we asked her if she would bring some of the photographs that she took, which you'll see over Marvin's shoulders as well as along the room. She agreed that after we're finished at 11:00 o'clock, for those who are particularly interested in photo/journalism and her experiences in that regard, that she'd stay with us and we'd have a form of a chalk talk informally. We appreciate that. That's a special added attraction.

MR. KALB: In that case we'll go to Lois now.

MS. LOIS RAIMONDO: I guess I'll tell a story from the north. You were in the south. For me it was a combination of doing your homework, so when I first went into the north I got all the military maps that I could, knowing where the front lines are, which commander has which post, how many men are there. So I planned to stay for a long time so I was pretty much in the same region for two months.

The other half of it is hanging on when things start to happen. Then of course there's a lot of luck thrown in.

So when the Northern Alliance, I knew that the Ramadan offensive was about to begin. I had a couple of really good sources who were up on the front line and they were relaying messages back to me through wireless. So once Mazar fell, we knew that to get to Mazar from where I was, at that time I guess I was back in Khoja Bajahuddin, there were a number of routes that we could take but there were Taliban ridges all in between. And we of course were doing over the mountains in a jeep where there are no roads so we had to pick our route.

So I sat down with my translator who was connected with the military, in and out for the past eight years, and also a number of commanders, and we plotted our route. So my translator, myself and the driver set out over the mountains.

We bunked in a number of bunkers along the way and used their wireless, and this is where the luck comes in. We figured, okay, if we get here maybe the troops, if we look at where they are, how many people, maybe they'll all converge on this point. So we went over the top of a hill, and that's the pictures that are up here, and we landed on this plain in the middle of the Hindu Kush, and it was landing in the middle of some epic film because thousands of soldiers were pouring over the hills. I just looked at my translator and said I think we got it. (Laughter)

So we ended up marching over the mountains with the army into Taloqan the night that they liberated it. And that was quite remarkable because I had built up relationships with a number of the bunkers along the way, different front line posts, and it was actually quite remarkable because contrary to what I would have expected to have found, most of these men hadn't seen uncovered women in probably eight years, because these are the people who were posted to the north, they were away from their families, and I was so well taken care of. It was unbelievable. When I got to a new town they'd be fighting, they'd have their guns on one hand and then they'd say, "Lois, do you want tea? Do you want sugar in your tea?" This is their life. They're so used to war. And I don't know whether I was a mascot or nobody had spoken to them in so long, they were just so happy to get the attention.

And of course things we all do. When you get there the first thing you do is you learn the name of the man who serves everyone tea, because in Asia nothing happens without tea. And if you know the guy who serves people tea you'll always have your source.

So I had these people— every time we landed in a new town, as I moved with the army, generals would come by in jeeps and say, "We're heading this way. Come."

The other thing that happened was, as they started taking towns, going across the north, they would be returning to their mothers, their sisters, their families, that the soldiers hadn't seen in say four, six, sometimes eight years. So I would be invited into everybody's home, and I'd be ushered into the inner chamber with all the women. The women would be cooking all night long.

So it was a combination, for me, of being shuttled in and out of the war. That's my war story.

MR. KALB: Carol?

MS. CAROL MORELLO: I think the moment I remember the most is a moment of extreme frustration that in retrospect is almost comical, I guess.

I was with a group of reporters who were in a pool with the U.S. Marines at Camp Rhino, which by the way while I was out there for the first time for five days, we were never allowed to call it Camp Rhino. It was being called that in Pentagon briefings, but we always referred to it as a remote desert air strip within striking distance of Kandahar. (Laughter)

So we had spent five days out there. We had gone out with this sort of grim resolve. We were going into a war zone and the military had given us kevlar helmets and flack jackets and gas masks that we would strap onto our thighs and biochem warsuits, and we were told to sleep with all of the (inaudible) in case there was some sort of an emergency or an alert in the middle of the night. We spent five days sort of being shuttled from one feature story to the next. We had been taken to see church services, we had been taken almost on a guided tour, we had been taken to spend the night with Charlie Company in the foxhole where the most exciting thing that happened was a camel came along and stuck its nose in a foxhole. We had been taken to promotion ceremonies. Any time news came anywhere within an inch of breaking out, we were told that we could not report it.

So we had just been told, we had come back from a night with the grunts in the foxholes and we had been told we were going to be replaced and they were rotating another pool in. So we're sitting there writing our feature stories in this large warehouse when a public affairs officer comes in and says okay, everybody gather around, I have some news to tell you. There are casualties who are being brought in here to Camp Rhino. They are American casualties and they are Afghan casualties. Everybody sort of like hops up, and another public affairs officer goes to a computer he has set up, his laptop, and calls up a press release that has been written 7,000 miles away in Tampa, Florida. The casualties are being brought in to a medical tent that is literally 100 feet away from us, behind us. They are being brought in as we speak. And he's reading the press release written 7,000 miles away saying that this was a friendly fire incident, that it involved a B-52 bomber.

So the reporters were like hungry dogs. What can we do? A photographer says can I go take pictures? He's told no. One of the print reporters says can we at least go stand there and watch? We're told no. The public affairs officer says, what, you want to go see dead Americans? We said well no, we think this is our job. We said can we talk to pilots who flew them back? No. Can we talk to any of the medics when they're done? Well, they're too tired. Can we talk to any of the Afghans who have minor injuries? No, we don't have a translator. News was breaking out 100 feet from where we were standing and we were ordered to stay in that warehouse. We did not get any of it. Pretty much all the information that came out came out from Washington. Half an hour later, we were out of there.

That's what I remember. It was sort of a metaphor for what our entire trip was like. It was an incredible amount of press restrictions. And while it did improve the second time I went out which was at Kandahar Airport. Now the army is running Kandahar airport and I have the impression that some of the restrictions are continuing. I saw the Toronto Star story that was published a few days ago and it could have been written from my own first trip. Reporters are given briefings and told how many tons of cargo were coming in, but if they want to see anything or talk to anybody who has taken part in anything, those requests are basically denied.

It's a very difficult war to cover, at least covering the military. That's what I remember.

MR. KALB: Thank you very much, Carol.

Kevin, you were in Kandahar.

MR. KEVIN WHITELAW: I was in Kabul and Kandahar. The story I was going to tell was actually different than the other ones because I was mostly there for the post— the real conflict part. The simmering that's going on now. I did a piece on the girls' education there and the reopening of the girls schools and it was really quite fascinating to see this and be able to go into these classrooms in Kabul and sit in class and listen to the teacher teach and watch the girls who hadn't been in school, many of them who hadn't been in school for five years, certainly not openly, learn and ask questions and be very enthusiastic. So it was very exciting to actually see the tangible results of what had been a long, protracted conflict. It might not have been the aim of the conflict from the U.S. point of view, but it certainly was at least an immediate and tangible result and it was people trying to make the best of a very unusual situation. School usually is closed in the winter because it's so cold. Schools are unheated. They have no chairs, they have no desks, they have no pens, they have no paper, and they're still there, sitting there every morning freezing and spontaneously going to school and trying to learn. That says a lot about the Afghan people and the strength of their spirit, people who have been at war for 23 years. So I think that was the most heartening thing to see.

MR. KALB: Thank you very much, Kevin.

Tom?

MR. TOM SQUITIERI: In central Afghanistan is Bamiyan where there had been the sites of the two huge buddhas until they were destroyed about a year ago by the Taliban. And I went to Bamiyan to do some research on that as well as check out reports that some of the Taliban had fled to that region.

One morning about 4:30 I was on the sat phone from my desk talking about something else, and I felt something on my back, and it was the sun coming up. The sun rose up in that valley and slowly illuminated the mountainside where the two buddhas and some of the smaller buddhas had been. The beauty of that moment just overwhelmed me, and I realized that years ago whoever chose that location to build those buddhas really knew what they were doing. I just sort of was mesmerized by the whole scene.

I turned around and looked at an ancient fortress on another hill that had been destroyed by Genghis Khan years ago. It just put my whole role in covering what was going on today in Afghanistan in a historical perspective. Not to put importance on myself, but it both humiliated me and inspired me to try to tell the whole story of the people who have come through there who now live there in Afghanistan and who will live there in the future.

Afghanistan has rebuilt cities destroyed by former invaders in the past and towns have come back and the people have come back, and they have fallen prey to themselves and other invaders. And I wanted to make sure that as everyone talked about the new Afghanistan, the 21st Century Afghanistan, that I wanted to be inspired to write my little piece of the story?Shakespeare said there are no small roles, just small actors. So I like to think there are no small stories, just small reporters. In USA Today we don't have that much space but we have a mission like we all do.

So I just felt so inspired by that moment. We all talked about the frustrations of covering this story and others. From that time on I was just so charged up as if that sun filled me up with energy to overcome the infrastructure challenges and the language differences and the inability of Afghans to ever say I don't know and give you wrong information, and all the other stuff that we daily confront.

So that was the moment that probably sticks out among many. I'm glad this is being taped, by the way, because my daughter's only two years old today so I don't know if I will see my grandchildren, but they'll be able watch this on the tape.

MR. KALB: I think it's a wonderful story, in fact wonderful stories. One of the things that occurs to me is that there are so many different ways to cover a war. Reporters can in some cases wander up for a couple of months into the northern regions of Afghanistan; others come in in this kind of war for a specific period of time and cover a different kind of story.

To what extent did you feel that you were dependent upon the U.S. government to get the information that you needed? Obviously Carol did. What about the rest of you?

MR. GORDON: My view of this, and I've covered these sorts of things every which way trying to work with the Pentagon and be part of their operation, which initially I tried to do in this case, and I was in actually Macedonia on September 11th and I saw all this with British army forces in a bar in Skopje, but I came back.

Initially my intention was to go and be part of some Pentagon pool and operation or whatever there was, and I tried to get my name on the various lists, and they were taking names and putting them on lists, and talking about embedding reporters with ground forces. Not this week, maybe next week.

MR. KALB: Explain this idea of embedding reporters. We've heard a lot about that.

MR. GORDON: I've actually never done it, but it's a logical idea. Instead of having, just throwing a bunch of guys in for an hour or so and go somewhere and you leave. You take a reporter and you put it with the unit. The way they talked about it, this never happened by the way, but the way the Pentagon talked about it you would live with the Marines, you would live with the 10th Mountain, or you would live with the 101st Airborne and be part of the unit and maybe you wouldn't even be allowed to file during this period to maintain security. Then you would deploy with this unit and you'd be subject to various security restrictions, but you would understand, you would be an integral part of the unit. It was partly security, partly logistics, and partly would help you understand it. I said send me in, coach. I'm fine. I agree to all this, security guidelines, whatever you say. No problem. I'm eager to do this. Time went by. It became clear none of this was ever really going to happen.

I think it finally happened in a minuscule way when they flew some guys in to be with the Special Forces for four days after almost everything was over.

MR. KALB: Carol, you were what would be called embedded, however, right?

MS. MORELLO: I wouldn't call it embedded, the military called it embedded.

MR. KALB: What is it that you would call it?

MS. MORELLO: My idea of embedded is very much what Michael's talking about. You go and spend weeks, maybe in some cases several months with them. And in fact when I went out with a group of reporters we went out by military convoy. It was our understanding we would be there for weeks and maybe months if we wanted to. However, while we were there the public affairs officers kept saying you're embedded. To me, being there for four or five days is not embedded. You are just starting to sort of get to know people and interview them.

MR. GORDON: Just to complete my thought very briefly. My point is simply this. I waited for— it became clear it wasn't going to really happen in any timeframe that was relevant like to the war, so at a certain point— I got, by the way, offers of far greater cooperation from the British military. Finally, to make a long story short I just went in with a UN flight and just started going around.

What I think is the new types of wars, these so-called proxy wars where the U.S. relies on other people to do the brunt of the groundfighting is a very good thing for journalists because it offers up new possibilities for covering these kinds of conflicts. The people who stuck with the U.S. military in Rhino, including our own corespondent, didn't see very much both because of the press restrictions and also because the U.S. forces in Rhino didn't do very much. But the people who went with the Northern Alliance or who somehow got lashed up with some of the Pashtun guys in the south actually ended up seeing more of the conflict.

The moral I take with this is that if there are future proxy wars in the future the Pentagon will always be the Pentagon, they'll always have these restrictions, and the way to cover the war is just don't work with the Pentagon. Just go in independently and work with the proxy forces the Pentagon is going to enlist to do its fighting.

MR. HESS: Carol, it worked very well for you in the Persian Gulf where you were embedded in that case, were you not? There was a different, as Michael described it, there the fighting was all being done by units of the American forces and they could embed you and take care of you and watch over you and censor you in a way that it wouldn't have been possible in this case?

MS. MORELLO: Well, I was in two media pools during the Gulf War, and it's true it did work better, even with the censorship. But my impression, I believe the evidence suggests this is more a policy with the Pentagon saying all information flow is going to be controlled from Washington.

In this story I read in the Toronto paper, Pentagon-based correspondents were out there and were having to use their sat phones to call back to Washington to work their contacts and find out what was going to where they were. I believe the evidence suggests that this is more a policy decision than anything else.

MR. KALB: I want to be clear about this embedding with you, Carol. This was not your decision. This was the result of a decision that an editor makes to send a reporter into this particular part of the war. It's not your call to be embedded, if I understand it right.

MS. MORELLO: The military offers to send you out to these various places, and obviously the Post had several reporters in Afghanistan, but to be able to have someone in an area and what we believed would be sort of a certain view of the war that we would not have had otherwise, to be with the Marines, it was just another opportunity to have another tile in the mosaic, really.

MR. KALB: Lois, you didn't have any dealings I gather with the U.S. government. You were dealing with the Northern Alliance.

MS. RAIMONDO: By choice. The Director of Photography, I was on the phone with him and he said you can go south to Kabul, the U.S. is moving in, or you can stay in the north. My response to that was that I'm really well sourced here. I want to do the contextual story. I'm in Afghanistan. And it wasn't up to me. We had people who were doing it. I didn't want to go to Afghanistan to write about what Washington was doing, I wanted to go and cover it— It's presumptuous to even think that you can, but as best I could to cover it from the Afghan perspective, which means you dive in deep, as hard as you can, as fast as you can, and spread the branches wide. So he totally backed me on it and said you stay in the north.

As it worked out for us we had a number of reporters who were in the south, then we had some trouble because it was difficult getting into the north so I was in a position to both take pictures and write for the paper, so it worked out well for us.

But my approach to journalism maybe is a bit more anthropological.

MR. KALB: You also mentioned the fact earlier that you had "very good sources" in the north. Every reporter sort of feels whether he or she has a good source. How did you know that you had a good source in the north?

MS. RAIMONDO: Because of the ways that he gave me information. I trusted him completely.

Technically we had satellite phone numbers to every major commander. I could call Dawut Khan, I could call these people on the phone if I needed to, and those were all in his phone book. That's one thing.

But beyond all that, he was incredibly honest with me. He would say things to me like— Another story I remember that hit me hard was after working together and we became actually quite close and I thought things were moving along well, he turned to me and said you are a total sin and I have to pray very hard at the end of the day. And no one in the Foreign Ministry wants foreigners here because we think that you're decadent, we don't like your culture, and all of this. But he was brutally honest with what people were thinking.

We'd go to the market and he would tell me this is what they said about those other four (inaudible). Some of this is gossip but on a much broader level. He got me into conversations with commanders where they talked about globalization and things like this. I was led into safe houses when we took new towns and the Taliban, there were still snipers all about and I was in the safe house with the top commanders and we would be talking about these things. But I could sit there and listen to them, to what they were saying. There were many times I couldn't ask questions because it would be inappropriate because I wasn't supposed to be there at all, so I could listen and use it as background information. So he walked me into any number of situations that were incredibly rare, and also he was just a really, really good person.

MR. KALB: You had a translator with you who —

MS. RAIMONDO: He was my translator. And it was luck. It was luck. I went through a series of bad translators, and the fact that no matter where we were in the war when the sun was rising or setting, he would stop to pray, and I would sit and watch the sunset. I saw more varieties of sunsets in the last two months than I have in my entire life. And your story really struck me because it was a really elemental thing that was— It wasn't the foreign, it was the familiar.

I mean he calls me now on his satellite phone to report on what he's doing.

MR. HESS: Can I ask a very basic question? As a non-journalist for other non-journalists who might be out there and listening. Tom mentioned his sat phone, you did too. We've come a long way from I guess the Crimean War and carrier pigeons.

How actually, technically, did you get your story back, get your photographs back, deal with your editors?

MR. SQUITIERI: We have a lot of great equipment. Afghanistan was really trying on equipment because of the dust and the dirt. It knocked out a lot of computers and phones.

I thought the irony of having great communications and satellite phones which we were able to transmit stories and photographs is that there's no phone within Afghanistan. So you had 21st Century technology but it was almost like the 18th and 19th Century to arrange interviews. You'd send a not over and arrange an interview that way.

So you had this wonderful contract in using this great equipment for which you could file from anywhere in Afghanistan if you hit that satellite and you had power to, but not being able to communicate within the country.

MR. KALB: Tom, you've covered a number of other wars. How was Afghanistan different from those. Or perhaps it's all the same.

MR. SQUITIERI: It's similar, as Michael was saying, these proxy wars where you don't have the front lines as much, although Lois experienced a little bit of the front lines during the sweep, but it wasn't a front line situation. Now the fighting is going on within the parts of the whole country. That's like Bosnia and like Haiti in the sense that stuff would erupt in different parts that would seem calm the day before.

How it's different, however is I didn't feel, and this is just myself, that sort of overshadow of danger lurking about.

MR. KALB: You did not feel?

MR. SQUITIERI: I did not feel that in Kabul after the fighting had subsided. I think outside the city it was more uneasiness that you could feel, but in Kabul itself unlike say Sarajevo or Port-au-Prince you didn't really feel that danger existed in the day time. So in that sense Kabul was an idea of at least superficial safety whereas the other countries more recently where you were able to move about after peace had come in and peacekeepers, didn't feel that way.

MR. KALB: Kevin, you were nodding a moment ago. Did you have that same experience

MR. WHITELAW: Yeah. Kabul, again, by January Kabul felt very safe. Kandahar felt very safe as well, actually. Given the kidnapping of a reporter in Pakistan suddenly all of us in Kandahar felt like we were in the safe place. You could move around. You could move around in the city, a little bit outside the city. It's when you get to the more remote provinces that things got a little bit more risky and reporters had to make a lot of choices.

A good example is the story about the U.S. airstrike up in Oruzgan which is in central Afghanistan, about two or three weeks ago. And reporters wanted to go up there and try to figure out whether— We were hearing reports in Kandahar that it was not Taliban, not al Qaida, civilians. And it was a very difficult choice for them to figure out whether to go or not. I actually couldn't, because I was filing the end of a story, I was on deadline.

MR. KALB: A difficult choice because?

MR. WHITELAW: A difficult choice because no one had any information about the safety. No one had been there. Who do you ask? How do you know if it's safe for an American reporter and a photographer to go to a place that no one's been to?

MR. KALB: Steve was asking before about technological help in reporting a story. I'm trying to remember back. You also need a translator, or you need, Mike was talking about some kind of protection to go into an area. How do you as a reporter, how do you work that out? How do you know whether you've got somebody who's not going to point a gun at you rather than protect you from someone else? How does that happen?

MR. WHITELAW: You don't.

MR. SQUITIERI: It's trial and error a lot of times. Unless Carol had been using somebody and was leaving and hands him or her off to me, you know, like that. Because few reporters— and there have been reporters who have been in Afghanistan prior to this, but a lot of those people unless they were with the Northern Alliance who they had connections with, didn't really have anyone in the south or in Kabul to sort of go back to. So you have to just learn.

The Northern Alliance assigned a lot of translators to people up north, so you were stuck with them initially until you could find somebody else. Some of them turned out to be okay and some of them didn't. The issue of translating is one thing, but the issue of trust and confidence in that person is another, and that's just a trial and error thing. Like Michael was saying, you kind of weight the risk factor involved in going here with this person.

MR. GORDON: What you need is someone— Afghanistan is not really a country. It's a mosaic of different tribes. What you need is whenever you move from one area to another you need a representative of the power in that area. So when I went down to the south I had a Northern Alliance translator, a Tajik, that was of limited value in the south and arguably a liability. So when you get a bodyguard, a body guard is not just a guy with a gun because everybody has a gun. It's a guy who's tied in to the local power structure who they recognize him, they say okay, you're with this guy, you know. You must be all right. They know a lot of the customs.

The person I was with in the south just instinctively, I noticed when I was down there because the first thing everyone would ask me, because the south is different than the north. I've had a lot of experience in the north. But there was an anti-American current there and a sympathy for the Taliban there, and they'd say where are you from? What country are you from? And the guy I was with, because he understood this, would tell everybody he's from Brazil. (Laughter) I said why Brazil? When we were alone. He said because nobody here knows anything about Brazil.

MR. KALB: It's still not clear to me how you find somebody, though. I still don't understand how you find a body guard. Do you look in an ad? How do you find one?

MS. RAIMONDO: The way it happened in the north was all the journalists who came in through the north landed in Kosheba Hoadin [ph] which was the Northern Alliance, it was the temporary headquarters of the Northern Alliance. And they had set up a whole list of translators. You had to go and register and they would assign you somebody. And there were so few people who spoke English that 70 percent of the time you'd get somebody who hardly understood what was happening.

Then you could work your way through, but it was also, it was difficult. If you rejected somebody who was somebody's first cousin your work could be compromised for the next three weeks. So it was delicate at times.

MR. GORDON: I thought the most important hire was the driver/bodyguard, and that turned out to be our best hire by luck of the draw. We happened to get somebody who had been the driver and a bodyguard for General Massoud who had been assassinated a couple of days before —

MR. KALB: Didn't do a very good job.

MR. GORDON: He must have been off that day or else he might have been killed. But this guy was really terrific and he was a straight shooter in more ways than one.

I remember one instance, and I'll say it quickly. We were chasing down a rumor that bin Laden had been sighted in Pakistan early on, and it came out of the Defense Ministry which is located in the presidential grounds in Kabul. We got there, curfew was at 10:00 p.m. in Kabul and we were there by 8:00 o'clock and the rumor proved to be bogus. So we were leaving the compound, like leaving the White House from the front of the White House, going out to Pennsylvania Avenue, and a guard at the string that served as the check point raises his rifle and cocks it and runs over to me, because it's a British drive, he thought I was the driver, and starts screaming that we were out after curfew. Well, it was 8:00 o'clock and this is one of the problems because of an illiterate population, a lot of the guys can't tell time so they just guess that it's after curfew, was about to fire, and the driver just calmly looked at him and just said whatever he said to him and barked something out in, Massoud, I heard the name Massoud several times. The guy just put his rifle down and apologized and walked away.

And repeatedly at checkpoints our driver would just calmly talk to these guys. He had this aura of authority to him, and also confidence, but he was calm. I respected him and admired him for that and thanked him a lot because he got us to places because of that ability.

MR. HESS: Am I getting it right that in the question of security the best way to try to keep yourself alive is to buy as much security as you can? Whether it's called body guards or —

MS. MORELLO: No. Because I think you alienate a lot of people when you go in with that sort of thing. I wouldn't say that.

MR. HESS: Then how —

MS. RAIMONDO: We were shot at more often by the Mujahadin than we were by Taliban.

MR. HESS: When I wrote about this in an earlier study I would always ask reporters what are the tricks of the trade for staying alive. For instance John Pomfret from The Washington Post. He said never wash your car. I said never wash your car? Why? He said if somebody's going to put a bomb under your car they would leave fingerprints.

From all your past wars, do you get any training before you go in? What about the equipment? Carol mentioned the Army was willing to give her a flack jacket and so forth. But when I would talk to reporters these were heavy things. They'd dump them on the side of the road. Eight reporters have been killed in this. Tell us about how you prepare to stay alive, or are you just fatalists and thing when my time's up, my time's up?

MS. MORELLO: I think the killing of those four reporters spooked a lot of other reporters because they seem to have done everything right. When you heard about the three, I think it was three who were killed riding on top of an APC. You could sort of say well, that was sort of a dumb thing to do. But the four who were killed, they were part of a convoy, they didn't go in on the first day, they went in on the second day. They weren't in the first car, they were in the second or third car. They had a local driver. They had someone with them who was Afghan. They did everything right. I had made those decisions before. It's sort of like a gut thing. You try to sort of minimize the risks at a point where you feel okay, it's safe enough, I'm willing to risk it. And a lot of reporters, I've heard a lot of foreign correspondents were talking about the deaths of these four because everybody's made that same calculation before. They did everything "right" and they still ended up getting killed.

I think there's a certain level that you can say okay, it now feels safe enough. And I think the more you do this the more cautious you become. The ones who sort of like leap in and say I'll be in the first day in the first car are the people who are just starting out as foreign correspondents. You sort of develop a feel, I think, for various areas when you've covered it and you go back several times.

MR. SQUITIERI: One of the most frustrating feelings, as Carol said, it feels right, you're doing everything right and you're going down the road and it starts off feeling right, and all of a sudden you go around that bend and you're stuck and that good feeling in your gut that was legitimate that morning turns to a bad feeling and there's nothing you can do. You can't get out of it. You just have to keep your fingers crossed. That's the worst feeling I've ever had, and that happens too often.

MR. KALB: Did you find that many of your colleagues covering this war had covered other wars, too? Or were there many who were fresh to the experience?

MR. WHITELAW: Both, I think.

MR. SQUITIERI: Yeah. There were so many reporters there. There are only a limited number of people who have done a lot of that. So there were veterans, there were novices and everything in between. People like Peter Arnett and Arthur Kent who are veterans, well respected reporters, were there. So you had Peter's generation and Arthur's generation— I guess Arthur and I are about the same age. We've all covered a couple here, and there were reporters just starting out in their first or second conflict who were there as well. So there really was, as Kevin said a wide variety of reporters.

MR. KALB: What were the sources like? We've heard some of this already, especially from Lois having a feeling that somebody is going to pass on accurate information. But whom did you end up trusting as you went on covering this war?

MR. WHITELAW: Nobody.

MR. GORDON: This was the strangest conflict for me to cover because it was the first time where I felt I actually knew less about what was going on when I was inside Afghanistan than when I was in Washington. Information was very very hard to come by. You'd get conflicting— You'd go from, whether it was commander to commander or ministry to ministry or office to office, you'd get a different story. Then you'd have to sit and try to pick through all these different stories and figure out which one was right.

MR. KALB: There's no such thing as a briefing.

MR. SQUITIERI: Huh uh.

MR. WHITELAW: They had briefings, but there was even less information in the briefings.

MR. KALB: I mean not by just the Americans.

MR. WHITELAW: No, there were briefings by the Foreign Ministry or other —

MS. RAIMONDO: The other complication is that the Afghans were dependent upon the Americans. I mean all the people that I met in the north, all the commanders were waiting to hear from the Americans with the airstrike. My sense of it was that they kept them in the dark for so long— I mean I had generals on the front line saying to me when are the Americans coming? So the people on the ground knew very little.

You would know more about this, but what we were being told was the Americans couldn't decide who they actually trusted on the ground and they were trying to work all that out and whatever, so a lot of the key Afghan people didn't know what was happening, I think.

MR. SQUITIERI: I found it very frustrating repeatedly that the Afghans, I mentioned this earlier, there seemed a propensity among men over there not to admit that they didn't have the answer. That's fine. If someone says I don't know, that's fine with me. And this is a silly example but it sort of made it all come together near the end. The lion at the Afghan zoo, Marjan died after a long and not very healthy life thanks to a hand grenade thrown at him once. But they were going to bury him and have a funeral for him at the zoo. So all the reporters went to cover it, it was a particularly slow day. I was waiting for the funeral service to begin and I was talking to the zoo caretaker and Marjan was being buried on the zoo grounds so I asked him is this the first animal from the zoo to be buried on the zoo grounds. That's a pretty direct question. He said yes. Okay Fine. First one.

So as the service gets underway the Mayor's office, it's a big deal. And someone mentioned about how Marjan now joins Vamboo the elephant being buried on the zoo grounds.

So after the service I went up to him, I said didn't you tell me Marjan was the first one to be buried here? Yes, I did. What about the elephant? I tried to cut him slack. Did he die before you worked here? Oh, no. But I forgot where he's buried so I didn't want to tell you.

It's a silly story but to me it was sort of typical of the problem we had in getting accurate information. Because he was ashamed to admit that he didn't know where the elephant was buried, which he should be—I mean how do you lose an elephant? (Laughter) But it was repeated like that. So you always had to couch the information with the idea that maybe it's not the entire truth or story that's being told.

MR. WHITELAW: You had the same problem with eye witness accounts. Whenever you were trying to figure out what happened somewhere, for instance, the assault on the hospital in Kandahar when the U.S. Special Forces and the Afghans went in to finally get these six al Qaida guys who had been threatening to blow themselves up for two months. To try to figure out how the assault actually went down. Everybody we talked to had a different story. They were all right there, they all saw it unfold, and they all had literally a different story. They blew themselves up. None of them blew themselves up. One of them blew himself up. They were shot, they were not shot. They flooded it and were going to electrocute it. No they weren't. It was— This was a very concrete story, but —

MR. HESS: Michael was there I think largely to do the military strategy part of the story. Wouldn't your sources be importantly Americans? Were they giving you anything that you wouldn't have gotten in Tampa and the Pentagon? What was the relationship? We heard one type of relationship that Carol had with the American military. Was yours a very different one out there?

MR. GORDON: Yeah. I had no relationship with the American military despite repeated efforts to establish one. In fact the only relationship we had was when the Special Forces called in a group of Mujahadin, our photographer Tyler Hicks who is a very intrepid guy who's usually in Africa, so for him this was par for the course, after our adventure in Tora Bora was trying to get some more stuff like this. They went up and they took some pictures of American Special Forces—who by the way were not wearing uniforms again. But that's not even a distinguishing feature of American military in Afghanistan always. And they called in clearly a group of Mujahadin guys who came in a pickup truck which is their military vehicle and heading them off. There was an AP photographer there. Yanked them out, took their cameras, brought them back, and here is one of these situations. They didn't know what they were up against. Are they being kidnapped? Are they being robbed? Are they going to be killed? No. They're having their gear confiscated at the behest of the United States military, American citizens.

So they kind of divined this and they had their cameras taken and they took the chips out because everyone here uses digital cameras because there's no way to process film, something I didn't know when I brought my camera there. They're our photographers, understood. There were some Special Forces types, they yelled out for help, the guys said we have nothing to do with this, we don't know anything about it, but then after a come on down and help us, eventually they had their cameras returned and they couldn't open Tyler's camera for some reason so he kept his chip and they later ran a picture of the Special Forces who generally were Americans who wear the Afghan hat and kind of coat and cape and then some completely non-Afghan thing like blue jeans and sunglasses, and thought they would pass for locals.

But that was my only real encounter with the Americans there. But what I did have was, I could have my sat phone too, and I had e-mail, and I could kind of call back to the Pentagon and say look, this is what I see here. How does this fit with what's supposedly happening?

I think that, I'd gotten all the briefings at the Pentagon, I heard all of that stuff. I think that you got a different appreciation for what was actually happening.

What I learned from being out there from just a military standpoint was that the dependence on these proxy forces was a real, was both a strong point in the strategy and an Achilles heel. It's why bin Laden got away, because they didn't share the same ardor for chasing him that General Franks had. And their war aims and the American war aims didn't entirely coincide. That's what you could see at Tora Bora. And it was the perspective of the war you could never get from the Pentagon.

And just to sum up quickly I remember one day, talk about sourcing problems, the commanders come down off the hill and they say it's over, we won. We won? It's over? Yeah, we won, they're gone, al Qaida's gone and we've got Tora Bora. Finished. Victory.

The next day General Franks says on one of the talk shows, we're fighting, we've still got a long way to go, there's shooting in Tora Bora, it's by no means over. Hmmm. The guys who are doing the fighting for the Americans say it's over and they're not even fighting anymore. They've taken their guys out of the hills. It's over, gone, peace is at hand. The American commander in charge of it says it's not over and he's continuing the fight.

That to me was not so much a sourcing issue, it showed that the Afghan conception of the war, which is we've got our towns back, we've got our loot back, we're in charge here so it's over, was different than the American concept, dragnet. We're going to hunt this man down wherever he is, even after we've installed a new government. It's a view I would never have gotten if I'd hung around the Pentagon briefing room.

MR. SQUITIERI: You reminded me of, this is probably the only moment I'll sort of get on the high horse. One of the chilling things that emerged from a reporter's point of view is the way the U.S. military Special Forces and those guys, some of them in the field had towards journalism. The papers now are, rightly so, looking at possible U.S. mistakes in bombing and that.

One of the other problems that arose was the way, the attitude towards journalists that some Special Forces showed, letting the locals hold them at gunpoint saying oh, don't worry, they won't kill you, and taking equipment away. This sends a really bad signal to the local militia. Part of the U.S. mission and UN mission is nationbuilding, including freedom of the press and respect for opinions. The idea that journalists could be manhandled and their stuff taken away and it's okay, we're sending out the signal it's okay to do this, Special Forces, U.S. Special Forces doing this to U.S. reporters or other journalists, the local people see that, the local gunmen see that, they think it's okay. That's a dangerous path to begin to go down.

MR. KALB: That's an excellent point, Tom, and you've led me into my question which has to do with civilian casualties and the reporting of civilian casualties. Now within the last week or so we have had a rush of reporting about civilian casualties. My memory may be faulty, probably is, but I don't remember that kind of reporting taking place at the time that the casualties were inflicted.

Now did any of you or speaking for yourselves and from what you hear, did any of you know about either this story of civilian casualties or others that you felt, for whatever combination of reasons, that it shouldn't be reported? Or I'll do this later?

MR. SQUITIERI: I think Kevin and I were both in a briefing in Kabul when they spoke of one incident in eastern Afghanistan where a U.S., and it might be one of the ones that's being written about now, and the U.S. claimed allegedly strafed civilians fleeing in the middle of the night and all of that. Reporters questioned the UN spokespeople on that. Who told you this? What's the sourcing on it? Because it was a skepticism as well as a determination. Obviously if it happened we want to be able to find out about it.

A few days after that some reporters were able to get down to that part of Afghanistan and do some reporting to determine whether there was a munitions cache there or not. Steve Kamorow who works for USA Today, he went down and was able, he said, because of the right connections and the right local warlords to get pretty close. There was an attempt at reporting of these allegations. It was very difficult then because of the safety and ability to get to places. I think the roads have opened up a little bit more now, people are coming out more. So the timing is better to do some of the on-ground reporting.

You remember that, don't you?

MR. WHITELAW: Most of these sites were pretty remote, and it's in remote central and eastern Afghanistan they were very hard to get to at that point. The UN had come out of their briefing and they said there were no Taliban, there were no al Qaida, we have a reliable source. Okay, who's your source? Can't tell you. Well what do you do with that? There's not much you can do with that. If you find a villager three days later who's just come from there, had been taken through the dead bodies, and he said yeah, there were a lot of Taliban guys and a lot of innocent villagers. Okay, what do you do with that? There were still innocent people. There might have been Taliban, there might not have been. We couldn't get there.

MR. KALB: So the major reason —

MR. WHITELAW: It's hard.

MR. KALB: For an outsider then to understand the major reason that the stories are now being focused on rather than a month or two ago was that a month or two ago you couldn't get there to confirm anything?

MR. SQUITIERI: I think that's part of it. I think the other thing that's going on is the U.S., the intelligence is getting harder and harder to get, they're more and more desperate for little dribs and drabs, and now these factional disputes are starting to play out and they're getting sucked into this.

MR. GORDON: The other thing is that the head of the interim government in Afghanistan, Karzai, is taking his concerns to the American government.

MR. WHITELAW: That gives it a little bit more legitimacy.

MR. HESS: Lois, would you jump in on this? You were there longest, and as a photographer you had to be, by definition, closest to where people were killing other people. Did you see any of this?

MS. RAIMONDO: Every town that I was in, one of the first things I did was to go to the local hospital and meet the doctors. So whenever there were civilian injuries somebody would come and find me. So I spent quite a bit of time photographing that. I did a number of stories out of the hospitals.

The way that I was doing it, if there was something hard news happening there was the war, but when there wasn't I would work through the hospitals. I sort of wove some of that into what I was doing.

MR. KALB: Thank you very much.

It's now our time to go to the audience for questions. If you do have a question we'll have somebody come with a microphone. Identify yourself and just ask the question.

Q: Al Millikan, Washington Independent Writers.

Everyone seemed to know and have an opinion about Osama bin Laden and al Qaida and also when you would encounter or interact with praying and religiously observant Muslim, did you have any sense that you were being viewed as an infidel or a fellow believer of the book or just some poor rich lost soul?

MR. SQUITIERI: My encounters with any Afghans on a religious basis mostly was around Christmas time, and it would be the staff and we were talking about the different religions and how they're all the same. I think each Afghan who I would encounter and got to know a little bit probably judged me as an outsider and a Westerner, never one of the fold. But I think it goes back to opening remarks about Armian [ph]. I think there's a central similarity between all religions of the world. When I'm a reporter I try to find what's common among people so our readers can identify with them. That's the attitude I always bring. I try to bring intelligence, understanding, tolerance and humor, and I don't try to lose my own values.

I think when you're legitimate like that, and I'll say I am, people, most normal people will recognize that.

MR. KALB: Aside from the fact that the Afghans have been fighting one another for hundreds of years now, is there from the point of view of religion a sense of tolerance of other faiths?

MS. MORELLO: I really can't talk about Afghanistan because the only Afghans I saw were a couple of guys who were walking to the latrine, really. I mean I've spent a lot of time in the Middle East. My sense is that with the Islamics, particularly the militant Islamists who think that the way to address the problems in the Middle East in general and sort of return Islamic civilization to the glory it once had, that tolerance is not necessarily the right word. There's a sense that in the proper order of the world the other religions in these countries need to be subjects, they need to be minorities and subjects or second class citizens, with certain rights as people of the book, but not necessarily, tolerance is not the word I would use.

So I don't think that's Afghanistan —

MR. SQUITIERI: When I think of the word tolerance in Afghanistan, I mostly apply it to the way the different ethnic groups treat each other initially. Our Tajik staff, for example, had nothing good to say about Karzai who was Pashtun or ministers who were Hazara. So I think when I hear tolerance, I think the tolerance issue has to be worked on between the ethnic groups.

MR. KALB: That's an ethnic problem that you have identified. I'm talking about religion.

MR. SQUITIERI: I realize that. I'm saying I think that's —

MS. RAIMONDO: My translator was an absolute Fundamentalist. This is the one who declared that I was a sin and he needed to pray very hard. By the time I left, one of the last conversations, he came to me in tears and said that he knew I must be Muslim because he had seen how I treated people in refugee camps and that the way my heart was I must be Muslim. In his case it was just lack of exposure to anything else. He was incredibly intelligent, very passionate about his religion. And I would go to schools, an Islamic school, and I had a 13 year old kid come up to me who was very articulate and he just said are you a Muslim or are you a heathen? So I had long discussions with these kids. And what the teachers would come and say is we believe that Islam is the first door to get to paradise the best way possible. We believe there is tolerance for other religions but you will get there last. It's our job to get you there first.

There was a huge range. But so much of it was just lack of exposure. My experience was that people just didn't have any conversations about other things.

MR. WHITELAW: I think that's right. Afghanistan was very, very cut off from the world. The schools for the past five or six years have been teaching nothing but Islam. That was the subject. At least half the class was devoted to religious teaching for the boys who were allowed to go to school and that meant Islam.

There were also other differences between the north and the south that you could see in terms of the level of religious commitment and tolerance isn't the right word, whatever the right word is, of awareness and acceptance of the existence of other religions.

Q: My name is Thomas Klanikaker [ph] with (inaudible), Washington correspondent.

You were talking about the reliability of sources. Maybe Afghan sources or the U.S. military. As we learned, there is a third party involved in this conflict, that is the CIA, as we just the other day have seen with the incident that they shot a missile at some people in eastern Afghanistan that now it's questionable whether they hit the right target or not.

Is there, or for you in your experience in Afghanistan is there any way to get any information about what they are doing? Because obviously there aren't any briefings either in Washington, and I assume there aren't any in Afghanistan. Is there any way journalism can deal with the fact that there is an agency that's even more secretive than an army naturally has to be in a conflict like that? And how can journalism deal with that fact?

MR. KALB: Not a new problem.

MR. GORDON: I don't have great insight on this. There are a couple of institutions that are very hard to deal with in Afghanistan. The CIA is one. The SAS is another one.

MR. KALB: The SAS being what?

MR. GORDON: The British Special Forces. The Americans by no means have all the special operations forces in Afghanistan. The British have a chunk of it too. I think the Australians are in there. God knows what the French are doing.

MR. KALB: What about the —

MR. GORDON: — Pakistanis are not welcome. And in fact when I left Pakistan they didn't have an embassy in Kabul, but I guess they're going to crawl back in there.

There were some sort of gratuitous moments when the CIA was captured on film which was in Mazar-e-Sharif and the put-down on the prison uprising where their interrogation of some of the prisoners, including Walker, was filmed by Afghan film crews and some of the other film crews in the area.

MR. KALB: And where a CIA person was killed.

MR. GORDON: Right. And there are some pro forma things I think you can get out of it. But it is interesting that they played a part in the war itself, not in intelligence gathering. The Predator system, the armed Predator which is flying over Afghanistan and blowing up things now is a CIA asset essentially, something that the Air Force is still trying to get into its inventory.

MR. SQUITIERI: The basic answer is the only way into it is to try to find some of the various Afghan commanders to talk about the money they're getting from the Americans. But who do you believe and how much do you believe them?

Q: Mitchell Rakusin, National Peace Foundation. I just wanted to ask a couple of quick questions.

MR. KALB: Just one, please.

MR. RAKUSIN: Okay. Did you ever get a chance to confer with your counterparts from Al Jazeera or other Arab or oriental media outlets that might have a different perspective on what was going on out there?

MR. SQUITIERI: Yeah, there was an Al Jazeera correspondent who was in Kabul and I chatted with him on a regular basis during briefings and other events. Their New House was located pretty close to where our house, the house that we rented, so we ran into them in the market and stuff like that.

MR. KALB: That's an interesting question. Were there— Here's a country in Central Asia, the Middle East. Was there from that point of view a lot of reporters that you might have met from those countries? Were there Saudi reporters, were there Jordanian reporters, Egyptian?

MR. SQUITIERI: I don't remember that many, do you Kevin?

MR. WHITELAW: I don't remember very many either. A couple of Al Jazeera and one or two of the other networks. But Middle East —

MR. KALB: So where do they get their information?

MR. HESS: And go beyond that, Tom or others. One of the things that reporters do with each other is share information. Not their scoops, but general information. You said you passed them on the streets, you had conversations and so forth. Did they tell you anything that was useful to you from a different point of view that you weren't otherwise getting on your own or from Western reporters?

MR. SQUITIERI: Useful yes in the sense of just a perspective of, the feel in their countries. What the popular opinion was, what they were running, what kind of stories were getting better responses. No information as opposed to insight in what this part of Afghanistan's government going to do.

MS. MORELLO: When I was based in Cairo and I covered the Middle East for the Philadelphia Inquirer there were many local correspondents who were not only colleagues but friends of mine and they would sometimes pass on story ideas and we would go have dinner and drinks some nights, so I think when you're based in a region you get to know an awful lot of the local correspondents and socialize with them and share story ideas and perspectives. I think those influence each other, moreso than when you sort of parachute in.

MR. WHITELAW: There weren't that many local correspondents. Afghan television did have at least one team which almost got run over during a violent game of Buzkashi —

MR. HESS: Michael, you had been stationed in Moscow for years. Did you run across your old friends from Russia there and share any information?

MR. GORDON: Well, Afghanistan was a bit of a reunion for the Moscow Western press corps because they all came down there through Tajikistan so I saw a lot of Americans and Spanish and European reporters.

MR. KALB: What about Russian reporters?

MR. GORDON: There were Russian reporters there, and I'd gone around with the Russian press in Chechnya, actually. I'm sure they were there because the Russian embassy personnel were there, or the American embassy personnel as a matter of fact, but I didn't encounter them.

MS. RAIMONDO: I took one trip with a guy who was working for, he spoke four different Afghan languages, he was Russian, and he was teaching at a military institute in Moscow. He had been in Afghanistan a decade earlier working as a translator for the Afghan army. We spent four days together and went up to different front lines and it was interesting because it was a whole other dimension of Afghanistan and how people reacted to him. He was basically terrified the whole time he was there and he left in about a week. But the conversations between he and my translator went in a whole other different direction. Where it was, and look what you did to my country. And he was a great guy and he was really smart and he said I was a 20 year old student when I came here. I had no choice.

MR. HESS: Michael reminded me of something that Stan Karnow often would say. He said, and he talks about it in sort of a glorious time for foreign correspondents when they would gather in Kabul and say hey, I haven't seen you since Sarajevo. What's going on? We were together in the Six Day War. Nobody has expressed that same sort of excitement and enthusiasm for being part of a special group that distinguishes you from all the other people.

MR. SQUITIERI: I feel that way. I saw colleagues who I hadn't seen since Sarajevo and Haiti and other places. I've always felt pretty privileged to have this kind of job. When I covered the invasion of Panama, Mr. Arnett sort of favored me and gave me tips on how to survive in a war zone, and I attribute a lot of that instruction when it wasn't needed immediately, to preserving my career and life as it is today. So I feel, I've always felt part of a long string of reporters, men and women over the years who have really done a lot of stuff more incredible than any of us on this stage have because they didn't have the technological advantages and health advantage and all that. So it was great to see a lot of people who I don't get to see except in these kind of places.

Q: — Kinder. I'm a student at American University for the semester. I was wondering as journalists what is the farthest extent that you will go to to get a story in a war-torn area? Is this any different from your normal inclinations towards dangerous situations?

MR. HESS: How much risk will you take?

MR. GORDON: There was a moral issue in Afghanistan that, I don't think for people on this panel but there was one, which is it wasn't really a matter of personal risk. It's that you have to imagine, especially in the south, a place that's utterly corrupt. So you have to pay for everything. You have to pay for a body guard, you have to pay for a driver, and depending on what area you're in, he's under the influence of a warlord, the warlord's taking a cut, they were selling accommodations in Tora Bora on the top of the mountain for $300 a night to a wire service, a news magazine and a photographer and a major American network was paying $600 a night. They wanted to be up there for the day when bin Laden was caught to do the stand-up. The accommodations weren't great. Some of the guys had to live in an unheated bus. But they were on the plain where it happened.

Now I can assure you the peasant or mountain guy who's house it was who was kicked out of his house to make room for the network wasn't getting any of that money. Okay. You're paying for lodging, $600 a night.

But what happened was, I actually thought about trying to do that because it's three hours up and three hours back, but then it ended.

But what happened was these guys came out of the caves, our allies, and said this is al Qaida stuff. I'm going to give it to you for $5000. I'd say well, you know, I can't quite do that. What's it say? Why not? You can pay $5000. You'd look at it and there would be drawings of bombs —

MR. KALB: They had no idea what they were selling, right?

MR. GORDON: Well, it was in Arabic. Some days they'd have Arabic translators, or when there were prisoners picked up in Tora Bora and they displayed them for the Western press. I was offered access to them for $900. You can do an interview with them. Well, we don't really do that. We're not going to pay for a story.

That I think was a hard one because I think some people did pay. I don't know that they were Americans, but —

MR. KALB: The Wall Street Journal I believe.

MR. GORDON: No, the Wall Street Journal had, through a pure— They didn't pay for a story. They bought a computer in Kabul for their new Kabul bureau, and a piece of office furniture and then discovered that the hard drive contained, that the computer had been looted from an al Qaida house in Kabul and that the hard drive contained al Qaida stuff. So they didn't buy it, it wasn't a case of that. But this sort of thing did happen, especially with journalists from other countries. So that I think, in addition to the risk actor, was a moral factor. We'd pay for a body guard, and maybe the body guard would be expensive, but he guaranteed you some protection. But we wouldn't pay for information. That's where we drew the line.

MR. HESS: Mike Getler, when he was on this panel called you reporters in Afghanistan walking ATM machines. The idea was you had to carry an awful lot of money and that was one reason why you were so much in danger.

Tell us how much money were you guys carrying?

MR. GORDON: Thousands. In hundred dollar bills.

MR. SQUITIERI: I would wrap all my hundreds and fifties in ones, the dirtiest ones and fives I could scrounge up, because that would immediately turn off people. They didn't want small bills. So in a case when I ever had to pull out money they'd see that. That would help discourage a little bit, entrepreneurs.

MS. MORELLO: Even with the Marines I think I carried $5,000 in hundreds and fifties in, the idea being that I didn't know what was going to happen and I could easily find myself in a situation where I'd turn around and the Marines were gone and I'd have to figure how to get out myself. So I went to the ATM and American Express and got 5,000 bucks before I went in.

MS. RAIMONDO: I think this is also one of the reasons why when you ask were there people— There were certain countries that just couldn't be represented because it was too expensive. I worked for awhile with a woman from Irish TV and radio and they lasted a week and a half because it was $300 a day, and she said we're busted. So they just left.

The other thing that drove prices up every place were the American television networks would come in and pay enormous —

MR. WHITELAW:: Almost all television. Japanese —

MS. RAIMONDO: Well Japanese too, right. I was at one refugee camp where a Japanese minibus pulled up and these guys threw dollar bills out the windows so they could have 3,000 refugees run with the camera pointed out the window at the minibus. That's one example. It was a Japanese television network. I don't know which one.

I also know there was an American wire service reporter who paid a woman to take her burkha off in a refugee camp, which the repercussions came back to us because the foreign ministry, this is when my translator came and said they hate you. You're destroying our culture. It wasn't me, but of course it falls back on us.

So these single incidents become so huge, and they all happened out of money. He paid her I think $20 to take off her burkha.

MR. KALB: We've got time for one or two more questions.

Q: My name is Jasmine Huda. I'm from Internews.

I was wondering if you could talk about the existing media in Afghanistan, and as journalists, can you tell— As American journalists can you tell us about what you think about any existing news media and how that's conducted there.

MR. KALB: The Afghan media? Is that what you mean?

MR. SQUITIERI: Right before Kevin and I left the Kabul weekly newspaper resumed publication. I think it's a weekly. It's published in Dhari, Pashtun and in English. That was done in large part with grant money from media from around the world.

The Italian government is going to pay to rebuild Afghan radio and TV facilities so that will give them a big boost. Afghan TV is back on the air with male and female commentators and showing movies and stuff. So it's getting its toehold again. Like everything else it's a long way to go but there's been a start this month. And it's really a good thing for— Each of the areas of Afghanistan, whether it be the museums, the media, the hospitals, it's an opportunity for colleagues of them from around the world to do their part to help fund and provide guidance and be kind of start-up help. So I think the different media organizations probably around the world can help kick in the funds to buy the equipment and perhaps buy training and that. Afghan Americans and Afghan Brits and all the others from around the world go back and help rebuild the media and the other areas as well. It's a good way to get started in the next six months.

MR. WHITELAW: Having said all of that, most Afghans are accustomed to listening to the BBC or Voice of America local language services, and that's where they get their news. They trust that more than they would I think any Afghan TV for awhile.

Q: Geneva Overholser from Missouri Journalism here in Washington.

I wanted to go back to Marvin's very interesting question about the proliferation of stories really over the past week on civilian casualties. You all make a point that both there is greater access now to these remote areas, but also there is greater legitimacy for what you are already hearing in some ways, both legitimacy given by the government, raising it with our government, but also legitimacy among villagers talking about it.

I get the sense from reading a little bit on line that some of the other nations presses, the Irish press, the Australian press, maybe the English press, earlier gave greater legitimacy to those reports? I don't know if that's right. But it raises the issue about have we been sort of the home team covering it? I know you all have thought about that and I wonder if you have any thoughts you could share with us.

MR. WHITELAW: The best answer I could give you on that would be to say that I think some of the European media were running those reports a lot earlier, but they were getting, they were running on what the UN said. Quoting an unnamed source, they found one villager who'd traveled to Kabul from the area. They weren't for the most part able to get to a lot of the villages either, so they were relying on piecemeal accounts. A lot of us felt that wasn't enough to base a whole story on when you can't actually get there and you can only talk to whoever happens to pass through somewhere. So I think there might be a different level of sourcing that maybe I felt comfortable with versus what other reporters might have.

MR. KALB: But the larger point I think is to press again, did you at any point in the coverage of the war, and I'm not addressing you individually, but also in terms of what you've heard from other reporters, your feeling. Did you hold back because of the rush of patriotism and the effect that that had upon some of the reporting that went on?

MR. SQUITIERI: Not at all, no.

MS. RAIMONDO: It was the opposite, if anything. It makes me more vigilance.

MR. SQUITIERI: Also, I wanted to follow up, I think waiting two and a half, three weeks actually for these stories to come out in the Post and the LA Times and the New York Times, it's two more weeks of reporting. We were just assuming that no one did anything in the last two and a half weeks. You can't make that assumption. These reporters may have been trying to develop a story to make it hold up beyond one or two civilian sources. Have a better story. The rush to be first is not always the best way to approach journalism. The rush to be accurate is probably better, especially in such a high intense area as civilian casualties caused by flagrant U.S. bombing attacks.

MR. WHITELAW: Especially when it's so hard to tell the difference between Taliban and non-Taliban. Who do you believe when someone says there were Taliban and there weren't Taliban? It takes a long time to get to the bottom of who these people actually were that were caught up in this and how a strike unfolded and what happened? You don't get that from talking to the one or two villagers who happened to walk through somewhere.

MR. GORDON: I didn't do any of these civilian casualty stories because I didn't happen— not for any particular reason. But I think the reporters that did did a very good job. I think that what we had was Admiral Stufflebeem standing in front of the Pentagon briefing and on a number of occasions saying this didn't happen, this column, we knew, we had information. We can't share it with you but we have it. We know there's this sign and that sign. We're very confident.

There was a recent case where he said that and within the span of a week completely flipped around after Karzai went to them and said you've got to take another look at this. The press reports happened first.

I think that an interesting, just an interesting fact, the Pentagon was always reluctant, always acknowledged its mistakes reluctantly after the fact, and I don't think these incidents would have been on the public record had not correspondents from the newspapers gone to these sites, talked to these people, asked them what happened and begun to raise questions about it. My impression is that only then, and as kind of a public relations reactions would the Pentagon begin seriously investigating.

MR. SQUITIERI: We were ready to leap. When they told us that at that UN briefing, reporters wanted more information, they were ready to go. And every time we in Kabul had access to anyone in the government Dr. Abdul had a press conference shortly after that. We peppered him about these things and they couldn't provide information. So I really reject the idea that people in Kabul didn't want to move on it. I think at the time we did as much as we could, and I think the circumstances have now opened up to permit deeper and better coverage of that.

MR. WHITELAW: Keep in mind that what these reporters have done, the ones who have gone to these sites, it's very dangerous. It's very risky reporting. They're taking a lot of body guards with them and they're taking risks. They're going to places that no one's been to. There are difficult choices for reporters to make in those situations to evaluate whether you're going to survive or not.

MR. SQUITIERI: You don't have a lot of information to base that decision on.

MR. HESS: On that note, I think we are concluding our program. We should thank Michael, Lois, Tom, Carol and Kevin for a truly fascinating opportunity to hear your stories and what you got out of it.

I have two minor announcements. Next week is President's week, so to celebrate from George Washington to George W. Bush Marvin and I will take the week off. And the week after, which is the 27th I believe, 9:30 to 11:00 we'll be back here again. Our subject for that discussion will be dissent.

Again, we've very fortunate this time that we have Lois Raimondo with us and some of her photographs. You can see over Marvin's left shoulder and around the room. She has agreed to stay with us for a little while. For those of you particularly interested in photo/journalism would be happy to be over there by her photographs and you can ask her questions about that.

Again, thank you all, our wonderful audience, our wonderful panel, and see you in two weeks.