Many of the reports filed by Channel 4 News correspondents from Iraq have been while they were "embedded".
This refers to when journalist are assigned to military units, living among the troops whilst reporting a conflict or operation.
Cameraman Tim Lambon, alongside International Editor Lindsey Hilsum, spent three weeks earlier this year with a company attached to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force as it took part in the assault on Fallujah.
A former soldier, Tim has covered most of the major world conflicts of the last twenty years and has made many trips to Iraq.
Here he answers questions arising from the "embedding" process and reflects on the degree to which it serves the truth.
It’s very simple. As long as you are from a known broadcaster, you can basically send an e-mail to the press affairs officers in Baghdad and they will set up an embed for you, in other words they will organise for you to be taken either from a third country into Iraq and then placed with a unit which you will operate with/cover and then withdraw via the same way. Or you can arrive in Baghdad and go to their offices in the Green Zone where you would basically sign on with them and some days later they’ll tell you what unit you’re with and a pick-up will be arranged and you will be taken through to that unit.
The first thing they tell you is, “whatever you are assigned to, don’t moan and complain. That’s the one you’re assigned to”. It’s very much like being in the military. When you’re a soldier they say this is where you’re going and that’s where you go.
We were assigned to a unit called the 2nd Tracks, which is part of the Marine Expeditionary Force and it is a unit of armoured vehicles which then lifts infantry into the attack.
We arrived in Camp Fallujah, they gave us the embed and the rules were, in this particular instance, because there was a specific operation happening, that no operational security information could be given away beforehand. For instance, we couldn’t say we were in Fallujah, we could say “we are near Fallujah” to start off with. We could not talk about numbers of troops, designations of units, disposition of units – where they were and what they were going to be doing – no deadlines or anything like that. But apart from that we had completely free access to talk to whoever you wanted to talk to from the Colonels down to the enlisted men on the ground and once you were actually in the operation and once the secrecy had gone away, the marines were now in Fallujah, the operation was underway, you could use the unit’s name, you could identify individuals within the unit. But what you could not do was identify dead or injured people outside of a 72 hour cooling off period during which time the military would be notifying parents and next of kin of injuries or deaths.
Are any aspects of the embed contrived by the military or stage managed?
No not at all, that’s one of the things that does not happen. You go along and they give you various bits of equipment such as safety glasses, they make sure that you have a helmet, that you have a flak vest if you are going into combat and they put you with a unit and basically you become part of that unit, you are just carrying a camera instead of a weapon. You go with that unit, you eat with that unit, you go to the shower with that unit, you go to the toilet with that unit and you see that unit fighting or doing roadblocks or whatever it is that that unit does. So there’s nothing contrived about it at all, it’s actually what happens on the
So what are the benefits to the military of embedding, how does it promote their message?
Well, the military has discussed this for a long time and obviously their memories go back to Vietnam where the press was instrumental in raising awareness of what was happening, which raised the opposition to the war in the United States. In other operations, they have clamped down and have been very strict about who could go where and what you could film and who you can talk to. Now the British army is very like that – it is very, very difficult to do a decent embed with the British army because they’re incredibly restrictive, they control who you speak to, they want to see your footage before it goes out, all that sort of stuff. The Americans have decided that a policy of transparency is the best way forward on this one and if they are following their principles, which is to spread democracy around the world, then they would have to do that in order for objective journalists to say “this is what is happening”. That’s not to say they’re not happy when certain things happen, and there were incidents that happened in Fallujah that were filmed, that went out which made them deeply distressed, but it didn’t mean that particular individual involved was kicked out of the embed because he was in the end just doing his job.
What were those examples?
A chap from MSNBC, Kevin Sites, a journalist who I’ve known for nearly two years now and somebody who I rate as being an objective journalist, despite the fact that he has been embedded for nearly 18 months with the military pretty much continuously, and he was with the 3rd Batallion, 5th Marines and they were involved in a raid on a mosque. I have not seen the footage, I believe that it shows a marine shooting a particular individual, an Iraqi who was possibly wounded but still alive at the time. The marines were extremely angry about that, the marines who were actually in the unit. He wrote a very coherent article which was published in the Guardian newspaper which explained why he had broadcast that material and why it was important. The command structure immediately initiated an investigation. They did not chuck Sites out. He was reassigned to another unit because obviously his relationship with the actual people on the ground became stressed. But the command actually went and investigated, they got the Judge Advocate General to come in with lawyers and interviewed everybody involved, including Sites.
Do you think that the US military hope that those journalists in the embed will start to really empathise with the people that they’re with to the degree that they get into bed with them?
No, I don’t think so. I think that they in the end believe in what they are doing and if you believe in what you are doing then you don’t believe anybody else will write bad things about you. There are individuals within the military who think that all journalists are out to get people or to show them up in a bad light. If the military is doing bad things and you’re an objective journalist, you will show that. If the military is not doing bad things then you are not going to slag the military off and so a preponderance of the judgement is going to come down on whether the journalist is objective or not and not all journalists are objective. It’s one of the reasons why the British military is so worried about getting involved with journalists is because there’s a strong possibility that there are certain types of newspaper journalist for instance, who are just out there to dig up the dirt on the military.
But it can work the other way – there has been criticism of some of the American networks going the other way and possibly acting as cheerleaders...
Well it’s very difficult from where I’m sitting because I work with these people all the time, to turn around and say “this particular organisation or that particular individual has either got into bed with them or is not objective enough or whatever”. But suffice to say that I do believe that the American nets tend not to be as hard on the whole story as they could be.
I recall an incident in which you and Lindsey may have gotten into trouble with your particular unit because of some images which got through. Do you recall getting into trouble with your unit?
What happened here wasn’t to do with the Sites footage, it was to do with some footage taken previous to that by another, American, camera crew who were in the same operational area, in other words they were also operating with the 1st Batallion, 5th Marines, as we were. They had filmed a similar incident which seems to have gone unnoticed – it wasn’t as visual or as well documented as Sites’ footage. But it did go out and one of the things that people don’t understand is how footage gets used. A lot of our footage went back to a satellite dish in Camp Fallujah and was uplinked to people who were participating in what was called the “pool” and the pool basically is where, because you can’t be in all places at once, one team who might be with a particular unit in say, the south of the city, might get something which is spectacular or of great news value and somebody sitting in the north might not see any of that at all.
But in order that their organisations still have access to that material all material is pool. And so this material was sent back to the pool, possibly with not enough information accompanying it to say what it was and what had happened and what was going on around the footage, and it was analysed and broadcast on Channel 4 News by a reporter in the newsroom in London who was not in Fallujah and in fact did not have any communication with us in Fallujah as to what this might have been. Then that was picked up by Amnesty International who called for an investigation. Amnesty International’s statement was picked up by a particular Sunday newspaper in the UK, which amplified it and from their description of the footage its sounds like they didn’t even see the footage but merely fantasised about it. This was on the Sunday and it was picked up on the Monday by the Pentagon who had also been aggravated by the call from Amnesty for an investigation and it came all the way down the line until, eventually, it ended up in the north of Fallujah where we were, with the Colonel in charge of the 1st Batallion, 5th Marines who we were attached to, who sent a radio signal in to our specific field unit saying, “those two journalists from Channel 4, bring them back”. Now, they were not “dis-embedding” us, we were not in trouble.
What there was, was an investigation being carried out by the Judge Advocate General – the JAG – which is the legal unit that the US military uses to investigate any crimes of war etc. So, they hauled us out to be interviewed by the JAG. If we had filmed this particular incident of a marine shooting an Iraqi individual, then they would need a statement from a witness, so we were hauled out as witnesses but not as people who had gone against the rules of the embed. We had no knowledge of the incident at all. The whole incident made us extremely angry.
Has the embed system changed or evolved since they first introduced it or does it change from situation to situation?
It does change from situation to situation, it depends on how far back you want to go and also the attitudes towards the war the journalists have. For instance, in the Second World War, you had an embed system. When you were a journalist with the armed forces in a unit you became a member of that unit. You wore the uniform, you had what was called a journalist’s passport which was like a military pass, you has an honorary rank and you were expected to cover the war in a partisan fashion and in fact that’s how they did it. In those days journalism, in the fight against nazism, was not necessarily a neutral thing. So, journalists involved in an embed system in those days were almost propagandists, they were reporting on just the one side and they were quite open about that, they made no attempt to report from the other side.
In the 21st century, we’ve moved on from that somewhat and if we go back to the last Gulf War - Desert Storm - there was a much more restrictive embed system and the restrictions were in fact not a physical censoring of tapes and things, it was actually a logistical. So with units that were so far forward in the field, tapes that were shot that day couldn’t be broadcast because we didn’t have the technology in those days that we have today, and so they had to be transported back by land, basically by hand, back to a central point where they could be broadcast, so they were usually about 2 days late, which, even in the 1990’s, we were into 24 hour rolling news and so that was bad for broadcasters and they moaned a lot about that. I think that there’s a lot of mud that was thrown around about that which was a little unfair and was down more to practicalities and technology than down to actual censorship. This time of course we have that technology.
I was sitting in a amphibious armoured vehicle which has a roof which opens if it’s not dangerous, so you can have access to the outside and as soon as the vehicle stopped I would be putting two satellite phones up on the outside of the vehicle in the right direction and sitting with the computer that already had the footage stored on it, to send that straight back to London. Nobody looked at it. There was not a single officer that ever looked at any of this footage and said “no you can’t show that” or “that’s great footage” or made any comment about it whatsoever. I went and shot it, I shot the interviews, I downloaded the stuff, edited it and sent it straight off to London without any interference whatsoever. In fact a lot of the time they never even saw it and because Channel 4 doesn’t get broadcast on satellite, the chances of them ever seeing that footage was very remote.
So the future then : live, streaming battlefield footage on 24 hour rolling news, helmet cams, what have you? Can you envisage the war live in our living rooms from the soldier’s point of view?
I can, but I have to tell you that it’ll be incredibly dull. Because having been a soldier and a combat cameraman for more than 20 years, one of the major features of combat like this is actually incredibly long periods of nothing happening. At all. The 3 or 4 minute package which you see on Channel 4 News shows you an edited version of a very short space of time when the action actually took place. In the war that I fought in as a soldier, action was statistically down to 28 seconds of contact, so the chances of actually getting that on camera was virtually nil. Obviously, when you go into urban fighting situations as we had in Fallujah you could have contact for around 2 to 3 hours, but of that, very little time is specifically dangerous. The opposition to a modern marine unit does not last very long because they have a preponderance of firepower and they will lay that firepower down and even if it doesn’t kill the opposition, what it’ll do is keep their heads down so that they can’t fire back which makes the whole thing a lot less dangerous.
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