Published: February 19, 2007 12:00 am

Rockport reporter puts himself in harm's way to provide boots-on-the-ground dispatches from Iraq
By Sam Carter , Correspondent
Gloucester Daily Times

At Camp Taji, 12 miles north of Baghdad, freelance journalist Peter Dolan is coping with something other than the dangers of day-to-day life in one of the world's deadliest countries.

"It rains fairly often this time of year, and there is no grass on (Camp) Taji," Dolan, a Rockport summer resident, wrote in a Feb. 10 e-mail. "The mud that results is extraterrestrial. It seems to have elements of Krazy Glue in it, and just when everything has sufficiently dried to let you clean up, it's raining again.

"But you adjust to all that, and it helps (soldiers here) build the camaraderie that is so evident," he continued. "(Former Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld wasn't right about much, but when he called Iraq a 'long, hard slog,' he hit the nail on the head."

True glimpses like Dolan's into the lives of our troops half a world away come less and less frequently these days. As the embedded reporter in Iraq becomes a thing of the past - too expensive and risk-laden to maintain - media outlets in Baghdad's protected Green Zone are sending out Iraqi stringers to do their reporting.

War correspondence isn't new. Reporters literally embedding themselves within units of soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen dates back to the Civil War. But prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, embedding had never been done on such a large scale.

Dolan, 40, a financial advisor who keeps a summer house on Long Beach in Rockport, has taken a six-month leave of absence from his office in Woburn, and beginning Jan. 19, embedded himself with the Massachusetts National Guard's 1060th Transportation Company. The 1060th runs convoys in the Sunni Triangle, between the cities of Baghdad, Ramadi and Tikrit, and frequently is attacked by improvised explosive devices and small-arms fire.

Dolan, who is unmarried and has no children, said he was "frustrated with the American media's disinterest in the tactical aspect of the war in Iraq since the end of 2004," and that was his main reason for deciding to head to Iraq and report what he sees.

"The low number of embeds prevents the public from hearing about what our men and women are facing in Iraq," Dolan wrote. "Every major newspaper has opinion pieces and editorials on the merits of the war, ad nauseam, but where are their reporters covering the fight on the ground?"

Numbers vary depending on the source, but at the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, 500 to 800 embedded journalists accompanied the American military in the push toward Baghdad. Major operations were declared over once Saddam Hussein's government was toppled at the end of April 2003, and many of the embeds disbanded.

By the end of 2003, roughly 100 embedded reporters were in Iraq. That number dropped to 48 in 2005. Last September, Michael Yon, a war correspondent and former Special Forces soldier, claimed only nine embedded journalists remained. Army Staff Sgt. Wiley, a military spokesman in Baghdad who declined to give his first name, said in an e-mail last week that "there are approximately 45 total journalists embedded in Iraq right now," but couldn't provide information regarding those journalists' affiliations or nationalities.

Lou Ureneck, chairman of Boston University's journalism department, favors embedded journalism, but believes there are limits to what the journalists can do.

"What they see is the war in front of them, and that's a problem. Early on we got a lot of coverage from the soldier's eye ... but (that kind of coverage) has to be balanced by a broader view" of Iraq as a whole, Ureneck said.

A 2004 report by the Institute for Defense Analyses, claimed "The support of the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff ... built the framework for (the) success" of the Pentagon's embedded reporters program.

But in a speech to the Senate Appropriations Committee on April 27, 2005, then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld stated that challenges facing the American military in Iraq included, among other things, "24-hour worldwide satellite news coverage, with live coverage of terrorist attacks, disasters and combat operations; global Internet; e-mail," and "embedded reporters."

Rumsfeld's claim runs contrary to what the Institute for Defense Analyses found in its assessment of the embed program. "Commanders appreciated having an impartial witness to record the truth - good or bad - for the world to know. Embedded media provided independent but accurate and objective reports about incidents and combat operations they witnessed, and these reports were significantly different from what was being reported by the Iraqi information minister."

Following Rumsfeld's speech, journalists began to notice it was becoming more and more difficult for them to embed in Iraq. Whether they face opposition from Pentagon officials, costly equipment and travel arrangements, expensive life insurance policies or the very obvious danger of being killed or maimed, every embedded journalist has a theory as to the low numbers.

"Yes, the risk is clearly a factor here," Dolan wrote. "As more (journalists) have been killed, fewer have chosen to come here. Prior to 2006, it was relatively easy to gain an embed slot. That changed sometime around October. Now a reporter must have his or her organization state, on company letterhead, that the reporter is covered by life insurance which will be effective should the reporter be killed in a war zone. These policies are ... sufficiently expensive to make that rule enough to have many newspapers decide that sending a reporter to embed would be prohibitively expensive."

Hajar Smouni, from the Paris-based Reporters Without Frontiers, stated in an e-mail last week that since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 148 media professionals - journalists and their assistants - have been killed.

Any way he looks at it, Dolan can't come to grips with the low numbers of embedded journalists in Iraq. "It's unfortunate, because citizens must know what is occurring on the ground in order to formulate a current opinion on the war. In 50 years Americans will be looking for details of this historic event, and post-2005 they simply won't exist."

An archive of Peter Dolan's articles can be found at www.PeterDolanIraq.com.

Ellie