I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson's comments as well. He said, to paraphase him, that if he had a choice between the form of government which we have and the press he would choose the press every time. Maybe in this instance this is an example of where that statement holds true. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. KASTENMEIER. I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma. Mr. GLICKMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In addition to the first amendment questions, on which I fully agree with my colleague from Oklahoma, I have some questions regarding the kinds of information that we ultimately did get, which came from the military. I have great concern about the flow and the quality of information that came from the military, and my question is: Can we trust that information? We didn't hear anything about the bombing of the mental hospital for several days after it had occurred, and once we heard about it, it was denied. The information on the troop strength was wrong, and I suppose this comes back to the fact that there was not an independent source of information there at the time. But I would ask the question: Can we trust the information that we are getting? Mr. CHANCELLOR. Well, I can respond to that. I think you can, in all probability, Congressman, trust the information that the Department of Defense put out, but that was selectively released information, it seems to me. When I was working for the USIA here in Washington, we used to have meetings in which we would outline themes to be stressed to make the American Government look more powerful, more sympathetic, more intelligent, more understanding, and these themes would be stated in position papers, and anybody who knows the propaganda business knows that that is how it works. Now, nothing that we said at the USIA was ever untrue, but it was the arrangement of the truthful information that made the point, and I think in this case we saw certain themes that the Government wanted us to see. We saw pictures that were quite clear and accurate and truthful of a warehouse filled with boxes of arms that had Russian Cyrillic markings on them. We saw troops in civilian clothes-that were described as troops-I presume they were. They didn't look like troops to me, but I can accept that. And as far as the hospital is concerned and the shifting numbers of order of battle figures, I think that happens in any large military operation. But the themes were there. Mr. JOYCE. If I could add to that, I think there are a host of questions for which we do not have independently verifiable answers, such as who fired first. The Cubans are saying that they gave word to their troops not to fire first. How stiff was the Cuban opposition? Over 600 prisoners out of a total fighting force of between 700 and 800 does not give the impression of having fought to the last man. What happened to the Grenadan Army? There are no reporters who can really answer that for us. And I would like, if it is appropriate, just to respond to a couple of points that Congressman Moorhead brought up. Mr. GLICKMAN. Well, I don't have very much time. If possible, let me just ask a couple more questions, and then if there is time the chairman will go back around again. I would just like to come back on a point that Congressman Synar asked you, Mr. Brinkley, about the censorship of press in previous restrictive and secretive activities. In any of the modern memory of the folks sitting at the table today, has the inedia ever been restricted before in the same way that you are restricted in Grenada? Mr. BRINKLEY. Not to my knowledge. Mr. JOYCE. Not to my knowledge. I can't recall exclusion from a total area of conflict. Mr. CHANCELLOR. I think the answer is that the United States sent a task force of 15,000 people to invade a sovereign country. No military operation of that size, in my experience and in my reading of American history, has ever been done without the accompaniment of the American press. Mr. GLICKMAN. OK, one final question. The Secretary of Defense and others seem to imply that there is some danger in taking the press into their confidence. Is there any such danger? Mr. BRINKLEY. There is nothing in the record to suggest it, Congressman. As I have said, in military operations in the past, including many a great deal bigger than this, the press has been taken into the military's confidence in advance, and there have been no leaks. But beyond that, in those cases, as in this case, the armed services controlled communications between the battle scene and the outside, and so if there were a leak it would be very hard for it to go anywhere. Mr. JOYCE. Congressman, it is important to remember that even if there had been initial secrecy that still does not explain or justify the information blockade that was maintained for days. Even if several hours had gone by with an invasion which had taken place in secrecy, obviously no plans had been made-or I will contradict myself-apparently, plans had been made to bar the press from access to that island. Mr. GLICKMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. KASTENMEIER. The gentleman from Ohio, Mr. DeWine. Mr. DEWINE. I am still out of breath, Mr. Chairman, from running back from the vote. Thank you very much. Mr. KASTENMEIER. I hope you made it. Mr. DEWINE. I did, yes, sir. Thank you. It seems to me, aren't we really, gentlemen, dealing with a balancing test? Don't we in society balance every day certain interests along with the question of access? I am not saying we balance freedom of speech or freedom of the press, but when we are talking about access, don't we balance that? Now, the absurd example, which may not relate at all to this, is a suicidal person who is going to jump off a 10-story building. There may be some attempt to rescue that person by the police. The press would not necessarily be right there on the scene. I mean, it seems to me it is a balancing test, for example, the situation that other countries have had, such as the Israelis/Entebbe situation or the aborted Iranian rescue of the United States. I would like your comments on this and see if you agree with my basic premise-that what we are really talking about today is how those interests are balanced and at what point the access should be granted. It seems to me that what you are saying is that access should have been allowed much earlier in this situation than it was. The administration would look at the different days and say on the third day there were so many journalists and on the fourth day there were so many. What you are saying is they should have been in at a much earlier point. Is that a fair statement? I mean, you are not saying, are you, that there is a total right to access? In other words, I don't think the American people would accept the premise that if the safety of an American soldier would in any way be jeopardized by the press' presence that their right to know, the people's right to know, would take precedence over getting an American soldier killed. We may not be dealing with that situation here, but just to take it to its final example. Could you comment on that? Mr. BRINKLEY. Well, the American people would not accept that, and neither would we. We have never advocated any such thing. Again, in the case of the Grenada invasion there probably was reason for secrecy so as to achieve surprise. There was, nevertheless, a leak, which was down in the Caribbean. It didn't come from here, and it was all announced in a Caribbean newspaper the day before. Secrecy, again, could have been protected by the military keeping control of communications, which it had and still has. Mr. JOYCE. Congressman, there was no outcry when the raid, which failed, the raid to release hostages from Tehran took place. There was no outcry that a pool camera was not aboard one of the helicopters. So I think your point has merit. Mr. ABRAMS. Congressman, can I just add that it seems to me that when you talk about rescue operations such as Entebbe and Iran, that you do have to say that the balance is a different sort than is involved here. If this had been an in-and-out rescue effort-American troops landed, picked up students, and got out-I think we would have a very different situation. Here was a full-fledged military force remaining on the ground and occupying a country, and I think that that should be borne in mind as you try to strike a balance in terms of when the press was allowed in to start reporting independently to the American public. Mr. CHANCELLOR. Congressman, I think one important point here is that there are established procedures that go back many years for guaranteeing that the press not report an important story. The difference is that the press is allowed to be there and report it later. When President Johnson visited Southeast Asia in, I think, 1966 the press, a pool of reporters accompanying him, was called into a hotel room in Manila by the White House Press Office. The door was locked. They were told they were going to Cam Ranh Bay with the President. They all walked out another door, virtually under guard. Nobody complained. They went to Cam Ranh Bay. Security was not broken on that at all. But the important thing for the American people was that the press was there to observe the President in a combat zone, and the press came back and told the American people about it. It doesn't have to be done the same day, and it doesn't have to be done the same week. Mr. DEWINE. OK, that was, I guess, my point, and the response I was trying to get from you was that at what point should that take place. That, really, is what we are talking about here today. Mr. Chairman, if I could just have one last question for Mr. Joyce, and, Mr. Joyce, this is something that has bothered me for the last several days, and I have the opportunity today to ask you about it and I wish you could respond maybe to set my mind at ease, or not. I don't know. But I heard over the weekend a story that apparently has been circulating here in Washington. I did not see the actual broadcast, but this has to do with, I believe, something that ran on your network on the news and had to do with the Soviet ship that was in a port in Nicaragua. And it is my understanding that the source of the film was a Cuban source, yet your network did not tell the viewers that fact, and they were told that it was a source friendly to Nicaragua. First, I would like for you to comment and tell me if that is true. If it is true, how do you justify that, when everything I have seen for the last 10 days, or at least for the first few days of the invasion, had stamped all over it on every network that I saw that the source was the Pentagon or U.S. Government or U.S. military? Mr. JOYCE. That was, indeed, a ship that Mr. Reagan had mentioned at a news conference or a-I believe it was a press conference. One of our people in Central America learned that film was available from a free-lance crew. There were Cubans as part of that crew, and, indeed, it was clearly labeled in an attempt to help viewers understand the nature of the film, that this was a source friendly to Nicaragua, an attempt to clearly identify it as material that you might choose to be skeptical about. Mr. KASTENMEIER. The time of the gentleman has expired. Mr. DEWINE. But if I could have just one followup, with the chairman's permission? My understanding of your testimony today then is that it was not from the Cuban Government; the source was not the Cuban Government? Mr. JOYCE. That is correct. That is my understanding. Mr. DEWINE. That is your understanding? Mr. JOYCE. Yes. Mr. DEWINE. OK, thank you. Mr. KASTENMEIER. I would like to now call on the gentlewoman from Colorado, Mrs. Schroeder. Mrs. SCHROEDER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I thank the distinguished panel for being here. First of all, Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask unanimous consent to insert into the record William Safire's article "Us Against Them" that was in the New York Times on Sunday, October 30. It delineates a lot of the other things that have been going on in the attempt to control information coming out of the Government-the lie detectors and all other sorts of things. I chair the Civil Service Committee. We had intensive hearings on this and found that the main source of leaks were White House political appointees and not, A, the press or, B, bureaucrats or, C, others. So it is very important to put this in. Mr. KASTENMEIER. Without objection, that will be received into the record. [Committee insert:] [From the New York Times, Sunday, Oct. 30, 1983] ESSAY: US AGAINST THEM (By William Safire) WASHINGTON, Oct. 29.-The same vicious virus that infected the Nixon White House and caused its ruin is now raging through the Reagan Administration. "The press is the enemy," Mr. Nixon used to say. That contempt and hatred for an unelected elite led to the bunker mentality of "Us Against Them," and then to an obsession with leaks and the excesses of Watergate. The same baleful mood permeates the White House and the Pentagon today. But this President skillfully masks his animosity toward reporters; he limits to private counsels his denunciation of his earliest journalistic supporters as "hostile." Not merely "critical"-the word the President uses is "hostile": They have crossed over to the enemy, to "Them." To defeat "Them," he has directed a campaign now reaching crescendo: 1. Lie Detectors.-To frighten government officials away from reporters, Mr. Reagan signed an order making it possible for a bureaucrat to demand that his employees take polygraph tests whether or not leaks have taken place or the employees are under suspicion. Asked if the Administration would administer these random tests, Attorney General William French Smith replied, 'Why on earth would it do that?" But while the head of the Justice Department professed ignorance, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard Willard, 35, the John Dean of the Reagan Administration, curried favor in the Oval Office by testifying to the contrary. 2. Memoir Censorship.-Mr. Reagan has ordered that all government_officials be required to sign lifetime agreements to submit future writings for Government clearance. This attempted rape of the First Amendment would force all outgoing officeholders to plead with their replacements to allow the publication of memoirs or informed criticism of the new administration's ploicies. under this rule, if President Reagan did not like President Carter's book he could have suppressed it. The White House counsel stands inexcusably mute. 3. Control of questioning.-In seeking to gut the Freedom of Information Act, in requiring all White House officials to report to a central authority before returning calls from reporters, and in undermining the tradition of regular press conferences, this President has made a policy of avoiding questions that might show him out of touch. Not since Watergate in 1974 has a healthy President avoided reporters for as long as Mr. Reagan did this fall. 4. Blackout of War News.-Fearful of television pictures of casualties and impressed by Mrs. Thatcher's management of a supine British press during what I will now call the Melvinas war, the President dictated that coverage of his Grenada invasion would be handled exclusively by Pentagon press agents. He not only barred the traditional access, but in effect kidnapped and whisked away the American reporters on the scene. The excuse given for this communications power grab were false. Casper Weinberger, with an inarticulate martinet at his side, pretended that reporting was |