US offers journalists ringside view of war

At least a fifth of those are from foreign news organisations like Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arabic news network that gained prominence after September 11, 2001 by airing videotaped messages from Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

‘‘Clearly there is nothing in my memory, or history that I know of, that is of this scale,” said Bryan Whitman, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Public Affairs who engineered the plan.‘‘If you look at World War II there are probably only a few dozen reporters that were with US units on D-Day,’’ he said.

‘‘We are talking about several hundred reporters being with our forces at the commencement of hostilities should it come to that.’’

The plan is a far cry from the 1991 war with Iraq when only small pools of US reporters were placed with frontline units, or the war in Afghanistan when reporters made their own way to the Northern Alliance frontlines on horseback and on four-wheel drives.

So this time, it is taking along journalists partly in hopes that eyewitness reporting by neutral observers will dispel inflammatory Iraqi propaganda and show the world the professionalism of its forces.

‘‘He’s skilled in disinformation, and having reporters on the battlefield in large numbers, giving independent objective accounts of what is going on is certainly one way we can counter large amounts of disinformation that the Iraqi regime has been known for,’’ Whitman said.