The criticism against him reached rather exaggerated levels at the generally respectable war nerd blog Small Wars Journal, where commentator Bing West, after making a series of reduction ad hitlerum remarks about journalists being unpatriotic, asserts that “It is morally wrong for an American citizen to deceive friendly troops in order to sneak into enemy territory in the company of enemy soldiers.” West longs for the days of moral clarity when people like Rosen, caught behind enemy lines, who simply be shot:
Rosen described how he and two Taliban fighters deceived the guards at a government checkpoint. Suppose during World War II an American reporter had sneaked through the lines with two German officers wearing civilian clothes. “When we caught enemy combatants out of uniform in the 1940s,” a veteran wrote in The American Heritage, “we sometimes simply executed them.” The Greatest Generation had a direct way of dealing with moral ambiguity.
An argument for the summary execution of journalists who take a look across enemy lines?
I assume folks with military expertise will weigh in, but I assume that if Rosen had been caught and his companions identified as Taliban *at the time* it might have been legitimate for coalition soldiers to have taken him into custody and questioned him and so on (a risk I’m sure Rosen knew he was taking) but to whine after the fact that it was unpatriotic for a journalist to have tried what he did, well, that’s just whining – a journalist will do what s/he has to do to report, and surely the military knows that, as do the Taliban. Should journalists who, conversely, embed with the US or British military to try to get to talk to, say, Iraqi insurgents, also be subject to attack by those insurgents simply because s/he used available means to get reporting done? Would this Bing West expect an embedded journalist to help the troops s/he was embedded with, translate for them, etc, or would he respect the fact that journalists have to be neutral? Would West extend this with-us-or-against-us mentality to excuse the Taliban if they were to, say, kill a journalist who embedded with them for revealing information that could be useful to the coalition forces?
The responses to West’s post at Small Wars Journal were quite interesting, Many posters pointed out that it’s really useful for counterinsurgency to have information on the enemy.