Spars and stripes: the Pentagon puts the squeeze on its own newspaper.

• Author: Schlesinger, Robert
• Position: 10 Miles Square

Last summer, as major combat operations in Iraq gave way to a wearying occupation effort, the military newspaper Stars & Stripes began to receive scores upon scores of letters from American troops complaining about conditions in-theater. Although senior officials at the Pentagon were making glowing public statements about morale, Stripes decided to take a closer look. Over the next few weeks, teams of Stripes correspondents fanned out across Iraq to assess how troops were faring, surveying some 2,000 American servicemen and women. Published last October as part of a series titled "Ground Truth," the results were alarming. Among other findings, nearly one third of all Army troops surveyed rated their unit's morale as "low" or "very low:' Forty percent of those surveyed said that what they were doing was not close to or had nothing to do with what they had trained for, and a similar number said their missions were not clearly defined--fanning fears that re-enlistments would drop steeply, exacerbating the military's post-9/11 overstretch.

The next day, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stepped up to the podium in front of the DOD's seal in the Pentagon's briefing room for regular sparring session with the press. It was here that Rumsfeld made his reputation for hectoring, demeaning, and entertaining reporters with his quasi-professorial, mostly uninformative answers to their questions. Rumsfeld is not the sort of senior official who encourages a lot of open discourse or the airing of bad news. Indeed, under his tenure the "Early Bird," the Pentagon's in-house news clipping service, last year began to exclude articles that reflected poorly on the administration's policies. So it was no surprise that when asked about low morale in the field, Rumsfeld responded by questioning the surveys' credibility in his usual Little League coach manner, cheerful but condescending. "I'm not an expert on it, but I'm told it was an informal and admittedly non-scientific poll," he said. ".And one would have to say that if you take a couple hundred thousand people and looked across them, you're going to find people at every point in the spectrum in terms of their views and whether they're up or down or happy or sad or whatever?'

Having attacked the message, the Pentagon leadership commenced attacking the messenger. Despite enjoying the biggest defense budget since Viemam--and the $87 billion in emergency cash appropriated by Congress for the occupation--the...