Shades of the "five o'clock follies"

The centre of the Iraqi town of Samarra has been devastated after ambushes of US troops sparked a massive response in which the military claimed 54 insurgents killed, but the only bodies were of eight civilians, according to the local hospital.

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The general acknowledged that the one insurgent now confirmed in custody was a sharp reduction on the 11 claimed captured by the commanding colonel in Samarra earlier in the day.

"Some of those early reports might have been a bit off," he said.

Brigadier General Kimmitt also sought to play down earlier reports that many of the attackers wore the uniforms of the disbanded Saddam Fedayeen militia of the ousted regime.

Each evening in Saigon, public information officers held a news briefing -- correspondents mockingly called it "the Five o'clock Follies" -- to report the government's version of the day's military action. Over the years, correspondents such as David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Malcolm Browne, and Peter Arnett regularly pointed out discrepancies between those reports of the war's progress and what they observed firsthand in the rain forests and highlands of South Vietnam.

Journalists enjoyed virtually unlimited access to the battlegrounds and the troops, and -- unlike World War II and Korea -- zero censorship of their dispatches. Television correspondents traveled the country at will, hitching free rides on helicopters and cargo transports. Print reporters in the battle zones used the military's field telephones to shout their stories back to Saigon. The Pentagon, dismayed by the putative results of all that generosity, decided that never again would it be so lenient. When the gulf war broke out in 1991, journalists' movements and access were severely circumscribed.