The Fromson File

THE CASUALTIES OF WAR The mess in Iraq is becoming messier. No one knows with any certainty if the war or the economy will emerge as the hot button issue of the election campaign. But there is a lot of detectable anger in the hinterlands. Consider what these non-descript towns in Middle America have in common: Bauxite, Arkansas; Dunn, North Carolina; Unadilla, New York; Farmington, New Mexico; Jefferson, Iowa; Orange, Texas; Moose Lake, Minnesota and Oak Ridge, New Jersey. Not the places either President Bush or John Kerry have visited on their campaign stops so far. Nonetheless, they are some of the hometowns of 14 American servicemen who went to Iraq enthusiastically not long ago but now will return only in caskets. Half of those among the KIAs on the April 9th and 10th casualty lists released by the Pentagon were teenagers. The cumulative impact these personal tragedies will have on parents, wives, brothers, sisters and other close relatives who decide to vote is something worth watching. IRAQ VS. VIETNAM The war that supposedly was over nearly a year ago seems to be far from it. The unexpected uprisings in the towns and cities bracketing Baghdad are beginning to resemble the intifada in the Gaza Strip. As tempers rise in this country, comparisons also are being drawn between Iraq and the Vietnam War that I covered extensively. In combat terms they bear little resemblance. Vietnam truly was a war. American forces in Iraq are coping with what amounts to an insurrection, urban warfare involving undisciplined street mobs, unlike the Vietnam conflict that was waged oftentimes with battalion-sized units and mostly in the jungle or countryside. But politically and psychologically there are some chilling similarities. For one brief period during the 1968 Tet Offensive, the focus shifted to the Vietnamese capitol. While the U.S. military command insisted that it had dealt the Communists a resounding defeat nationwide, the video and photographic coverage in Saigon suggested something else: that the U.S. had lost control of the war. Rightly or wrongly, it inexorably had an impact on American public opinion. The drama of Vietcong guerillas having invaded the U.S. Embassy began the erosion of American support for the war. America’s living room war had become a nightmare for the president who involved us in it in such a profound way. The video and photographic coverage of the intensified street fighting in Baghdad, Falluja, Najaf and Kuja now underway undoubtedly is giving Americans the impression of another U.S. commitment gone wrong. But there is a different dynamic at play over Iraq. It is a conflict unaccompanied either by an anti-war movement or a draft, even though the thousands of National Guardsmen in Iraq are there, never expecting that their weekends in uniform at home ever would include months in a desert under fire so far away. The debate is beginning over whether U.S. troop strength is sufficient to cope with the problems in Iraq. It was an argument that affected U.S. operations in Vietnam for years. There never seemed to be enough troops to cope with the Communists. A hundred thousand more here and a hundred thousand more there, and soon we had more than a half million Americans sucked into the quagmire. The problems that plagued Lyndon Johnson are beginning to sound like those confronting President Bush. But whereas LBJ withdrew from a likely re-election campaign, George Bush has no such intentions. Nonetheless, his political counselors know that before November he will have to deal with these issues as gingerly as staring down a coiled Texas rattlesnake. THE DUCK HUNTER’S GAG RULE Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a jurist who makes his own rules, no matter how outrageous and even unlawful they may seem. By now, you may have read about his insistence that no tape recordings be made of his speech- about what we don’t know- last week to a college audience in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. However quaint the rule may be inside the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court, it stretched the bounds of decorum when Scalia insisted on mugging the press out in the real world. Mind you, this was not the request of the college that presumably is a private institution. Within the bounds of propriety, it could have asked the journalists to shut off their tape recorders or not even bring them into the auditorium. But this was an associate justice of the highest court in the land who claims to be an advocate of free speech, demanding that there be no recordings of his talk. What was so precious about his remarks? Was he going to defend the propriety of his recent private duck hunting trip with Vice-President Dick Cheney? We’ll never know. The Bush Administration and its appointees like Attorney General John Ashcroft have one of the most abominable records in recent times when it comes to the protection and understanding of free speech and free press. That was not the worst of this story. It was not even that a loopy Deputy Marshal named Melanie Rube insisted that an Associated Press reporter erase a digital recording of the justice’s comment. It was not even that her boss, U.S. Marshal Nehemia Flowers, defended the deputy’s action on the grounds that one of the U.S. Marshal Service’s responsibilities is to provide a traveling Supreme Court Justice with security. Which left me to wonder if Flowers was afraid the tape recorder would attack Scalia. What was incomprehensible was the willingness of the reporter, Denise Grones, not only to turn over her tape recorder to the deputy marshal, but to actually show her how to erase the recording she had made of Scalia’s remarks. What I find just as ludicrous is Scalia’s density and his failure to recognize that most print journalists use tape recorders to ensure the accuracy of their reporting. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Associated Press and three other news organizations filed protests, pointing out that the deputy violated the Privacy Protection Act that stipulates government officials may not seize journalists’ materials. Personally, I hope the AP takes Ms. Grones to the woodshed to explain the First Amendment to her. As one of the national correspondents covering various aspects of the anti-Vietnam war movement in Chicago in 1969, I faced the threat of a subpoena from the Nixon Justice Department to disclose the names of my sources in the anti-war movement, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims. Believing it was a violation of our First Amendment rights, I let it be known that I would do jail time rather than submit to a government-issued subpoena. I proposed the founding of the Reporters Committee and with the collaboration of the late J. Anthony Lukas of the New York Times set out to contact journalists across the country to join us as members of an organizing board that was formalized in March, 1970 on the campus at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, Mike Wallace of CBS News and Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times were among those who eagerly signed on. For the past 34 years, the Committee has gone to court on innumerable occasions to represent individual journalists in defense of their First Amendment Rights. Take note Ms. Grones. The next time a cop or a marshal reaches for your tape recorder, call the Reporters Committee. The telephone number in Washington is 1-800 336 4243. Help will be on the way before you can say Scalia! What is particularly frightening is that if Chief Justice William Rehnquist retires, as he has indicated he would at the end of the present Supreme Court term, President Bush might attempt to name a successor-- and guess who that might be? Given Mr. Bush's track record in appointing the most conservative judges he could find for the Federal bench, don’t be surprised if the next nominee for the highest judical appointment in the land just might be Scalia!