ISLAMABAD: There's a new front in the "war against terror". For days now, verbal air strikes on the media have been proliferating. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spent about half of a news briefing during a recent visit here castigating questioners from newspapers and television networks about their "failure to understand what we're doing".
British ministers-even Tony Blair who ranks with Bill Clinton as one of the great all-time handlers of media-are constantly critical of TV pictures of suffering Afghans, and commentators who point out that bombing of Afghanistan has yet to produce visible results.

By contrast, the verbal campaign has scored a significant victory. CNN is now putting "health warnings" on its coverage. A report showing pictures of dead Afghan civilians, or the catastrophic humanitarian situation there, will also have to mention that "Afghanistan harbours terrorists who have praised the September 11th attacks in America that have killed more than 5000 people".

Praising an atrocity is now enough to justify war, at least for CNN's management. Their journalists in the field aren't happy with this, but none have yet protested publicly. Interestingly only the American people are deemed worthy, or perhaps in need of, the health warning. CNN's international service, seen everywhere but the continental United States, will not be required to add comment to coverage of casualties.

My own frequent employers, the BBC, are horrified at this, although a spokesman said it was up to individual correspondents to add what context they deemed fit to such reports. Other American networks, who capitulated to earlier pressure from the US administration to stop showing videos of Osama bin Laden, have drawn their line in the sand well short of what CNN has agreed to. American newspapers have roundly condemned the news network, in part because a print journalist rarely misses an opportunity to rubbish colleagues in television for being much less in-depth. And more popular, I daresay.

The Pentagon has hired a PR firm to monitor the media around the world, particularly in Muslim countries. That's throwing good money after bad in many ways since so few of those countries have a free media. If the local authorities deem the American message to their taste, it gets on. If they don't, it exists only on the BBC, CNN and the World Wide Web. But the Pentagon, never forget, throws far more money around than ordnance.

Truth, it's famously said, is the first casualty of war. Phillip Knightley, the author of a book called The First Casualty has challenged Rumsfeld, Blair and others who attack the media for its Afghan coverage. He is calling for wartime censorship-if necessary- to be overt, and justified by a full explanation of what is to be gained from restrictions on the press, other than political advantage for elected politicians worried that they are failing to get their message across, and finding reporters an easy scapegoat.

Winston Churchill, for many the greatest wartime leader of all, not only imposed censorship during World War Two. He is alleged to have prevented information from decoded messages getting to the people of the English city of Coventry that might have saved lives in German bombing raids. The reason? Enemy spies would deduce from an evacuation that their secret codes had been cracked and endanger the future war effort. "The truth," he told his cabinet, "must be protected by a bodyguard of lies."

Perhaps. But consider also these words from a woman who lives a few miles from where the World Trade Centre used to ominate lower Manhattan. "As appalled, horrified and saddened by the events, (the lingering sickening smell alone reminds us New Yorkers constantly) I am more enraged by the blatant manipulation of the press. It is as painful to watch and hear...as it is to view the formally spectacular skyline where the towers have simply vanished."

Me, I think the journalist must always try to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable-a cliche that came about long before television and politicians (and now terrorists) began the devil dance that blurs entertainment, enlightenment and the peoples' legitimate right to know. It's going to be a long war, and this front will be no easier than the one in Afghanistan.