[mattdeboard]

I was the public affairs chief for Regimental Combat Team 6 (USMC), with a "territory" covering half of Al Anbar Province including Fallujah & Ramadi in 2007. I met scores of journalists and had high level visibility into the Marines' handling of journalists in Iraq.

The first thing I want to say is that Manning is describing the Army's approach to journalism coverage. It is quite different from the Marines' approach, which as far as I could tell (and from my vantage point I was in a good position to have a clear understanding) was extremely open. I do not recall any cases of "blacklisting" or otherwise limiting access of journalists to events, leaders or units in our area of operations (AO). I did hear stories about how the Army was handling it and it was, in typical Army fashion, being handled very poorly. I realize this might sound like glib "Semper Fi" jingoism but you'll have to trust me there was a real difference. (BTW the Marine Corps isn't guiltless, I'm sure, but during my time I was pretty proud of our commitment to openness.)

Second, about the tally of reporters. In 2010 the coverage had wound almost completely down because frankly the American people had lost interest. Even in 2007 the number of embed requests we received declined when "peace broke out" during the Anbar "awakening". There's no reason to think that the reason the official count of embeds never rose above 12 (if that's true) because of official limitations. Instead I think it's pretty reasonable to think that is because most embeds would have been quite boring at the time, relatively speaking. It was much easier to sit inside the Green Zone in Baghdad and report from there.

I don't really have a punchy conclusion to put here. Basically, don't believe everything is black or white in this matter. Like everything it was/is a complicated system with a lot of moving parts, and to clump it all into some homogenous bucket is basically give up on actually understanding.