As US troops approached Baghdad last spring, senior army officers sought to win the surrender of enemy forces by orchestrating news coverage by journalists traveling with front-line fighting units, military officers said this week.
At a three-day military-hosted conference on the media's role in Operation Iraqi Freedom, officers said the Army arranged for an embedded US television crew to film airborne troops embarking in the desert in hopes that Iraqi commanders would realize how far north US forces had advanced.
And when phony Iraqi government claims that American troops were pinned down hundreds of miles from Baghdad appeared to stiffen Iraqi resistance, an Army tank commander rounded up journalists for a televised "thunder run" through the city to prove that the US force - and not Saddam Hussein - was in charge.
"I just wanted them to report what happened. If having the media report accurately is using them, then they were used," said Col. David Perkins, who as commander of the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade had organized the tank foray into Baghdad specifically to garner publicity for the US advance.
"The main intent ... was to get the story out," he added. "I don't know why anyone would want anything other than that."
This week's conference at the US Army War College in Pennsylvania included combat officers and some of the journalists who traveled with them in a discussion of the Pentagon's embed program. All told, 527 journalists traveled into Iraq with Army, Marine and British ground forces during the six weeks of major combat operations that ended on May 1st.
The program drew a divided verdict from media critics who welcomed the coverage but worried about possible self-censorship among reporters dependent on the US military for their safety.
Journalists, who agreed to abide by a set of military ground rules, produced up to 6,000 articles a week, including many that Army officers described as "positive" contributions to the military's IO, or information operations, effort.
Reporters said the revelation that some military operations were designed to help achieve publicity aims was disturbing but not entirely unexpected.
"I was keenly aware that I was getting only one side of the story," said Steve Komarow, a USAToday correspondent.
Major Gen. James Thurman, who was chief operations officer for the land war command, said a crowning achievement of the embed program was live television coverage of US soldiers toppling a flag-draped statue of President Saddam Hussein after the fall of Baghdad.
"I felt chills in my body," Thurman recalled. "The signal that sent, it's powerful," he added. "The power of information - it is phenomenal."
Some media critics have said the scene gave the misleading impression that US soldiers were removing the statue at the behest of crowds of cheering Iraqis.