embedded in the floating world
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nmazca.blog embedded in the floating world |
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Geraldo lost his embedded slot for drawing a map in the sand outlining the current position and future movements of his platoon during a live broadcast. According to the military, Bronstein's offenses were entering a restricted area and tampering with live ordnance. To hear Bronstein tell it, her only offense was writing an anti-war slogan on a missile. In the three weeks Bronstein was stationed at the U.S. Air Force base Ali Al Salem in Kuwait, she says, most of the bombs that left the base had messages written on them. One of the military's media escorts had prohibited Bronstein from photographing any messages written on bombs if they contained swear words. Bronstein says at least half of the bombs were decorated with saucy slogans. One day, a flight mechanic offered Bronstein a ball-point pen and asked her to write a message on one of the bombs bound for Baghdad. She declined use of the mechanic�s pen, but instead used her own Sharpie to write: "This war sucks. It will only breed hatred." She was expressing an opinion that differed from the standard military point of view. It was for that, she says, that she was punished. "If I'm invited to express my opinion, should my opinion only be what the military finds acceptable?" Bronstein asks. Lieutenant Col. Franklin Childress of the Coalition Press Information Center in Kuwait sees things differently. Childress calls Bronstein's "egregious violation" the worst he witnessed in an otherwise smooth embedding experiment. "She violated the ground rules and did something foolish and unsafe," Childress says. "Rather than shoot her, they took her into custody." Childress says the five-foot-one, barely 100-pound Bronstein could have caused major damage to the $20,000 missile and $8,000,000 aircraft by writing on it with a Sharpie. "She actively eluded her escorts. She could have damaged the missile or the aircraft," Childress says. "They had reason to shoot her because what she did was not sanctioned by anyone." Not wanting to get Getty Images in trouble, Bronstein apologized to military officials after they complained, but she insists they have a strange way of twisting the story to make her look like a criminal. The photographer admits that she wasn't an ideal candidate for an embedded position, but she also says there were major problems with how the military handled the media at Ali Al Salem. For one, journalists had to share escorts, yet they were expected to seek permission every time they wanted to venture out to report or shoot pictures. Bronstein says she had to hitch rides and make escorts sit around for hours while she waited for shots. "We had to choose between doing our jobs and following their rules," Bronstein says. "There's no flexibility in the way they think, and that's not the way I work. I think they should have assigned an individual escort to every person in the media." There was no sure-fire way to link to this article, so I lifted it from the PDN news page... |
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