The press and the planning of the Israel-Lebanon War

One question that has puzzled me for a while is one that has lso occurred to the good folks at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting):  Down the Memory Hole: Israeli contribution to conflict is forgotten by leading papers 07/28/06.

I raised the question in Planning for war against Lebanon The Blue Voice 07/21/06.

Here's FAIR's version:

"Of all of Israel’s wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," Gerald Steinberg, a political science professor at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, told the San Francisco Chronicle (7/21/05) [sic; the article actually appeared 07/21/06]. "By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we’re seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it’s been simulated and rehearsed across the board." The Chronicle reported that a "senior Israeli army officer" has been giving PowerPoint presentations for more than a year to "U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks" outlining the coming war with Lebanon, explaining that a combination of air and ground forces would target Hezbollah and "transportation and communication arteries."

Which raises a question: If journalists have been told by Israel for more than a year that a war was coming, why are they pretending that it all started on July 12?  By truncating the cause-and-effect timelines of both the Gaza and Lebanon conflicts, editorial boards at major U.S. dailies gravely oversimplify the decidedly more complex nature of the facts on the ground.  (my emphasis)

My version of the question at The Blue Voice actually included several realated quesions:

I did a real double-take when I read that ... paragraph ... First of all, if American journalists were given detailed "presentations" - Kalman's report uses the plural - why weren't they reporting on this on, say, July 13? It's obviously relevant to a major story. Now, I don't have Lexus-Nexus access, and I can't claim to have read every major article published on this war over the last week. But I have been keeping up with the story. And this is the first I remember hearing about this.

Our "press corps" is becoming as addicted to secrecy as the Cheney-Bush administration, it would appear.  Okay, the Israeli military official's name was anonymous, but should the other "diplomats, journalists and think tanks" be anonymous?  And an "off-the-record" presentation means that the name of the presenter is to be kept secret; a "deep off-the-record" presentation would mean that the information had to be kept secret. S o the term Kalman is using meant that under the terms of the briefing, they could have reported the substance of the presentations right away.

And why wait until July 13?  Wasn't this newsworthy enough to publish "more than a year ago"? Maybe they were, but this is the first reference I recall seeing to these briefings.

Another serious implication of this article is that it tell us that the US State Department was briefed "more than a year ago" about an Israeli plan for a massive three-week campaign against Lebanese Hizbollah.  So, when the clearly disproportionate Israeli response to the Hizbollah attack of July 12 started, the State Department at least had good reason to think that we were seeing the implementation of these war plans.  So, when the US took an initial position to refrain from pressing for a mutual cease-fire, our diplomatic corps at least had a very good idea of what they were facilitating.