From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Something like

major combat is underway again in Iraq. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S.

forces there, spoke of a turning point in what he called the war. The New York Times cited

aides to Sanchez, who said the choice of the word war,

was, quote, part of a conscious effort by senior military officers

to inject realism into debates in Washington.

Meanwhile, hostility between the military and the media in Iraq is also mounting

with increasing incidents of verbal and physical abuse,

detentions, and confiscation of equipment.

On Wednesday, the president of the Associated Press Managing Editors sent Pentagon officers a protest letter,

urging them to, quote, immediately take steps to end such confrontations.

NPR's Deborah Amos has recently returned from Iraq, and she joins us now. Welcome to the show.

Thanks, Brooke. When you heard about how the Coalition Provisional Authority officials tried to block NBC's Jim Miklishevsky from filming the October 26th attack on the El Rashid Hotel, where Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying, were you surprised? Not at all. A day later,

there was a bombing on the Red Cross headquarters and four police stations. And that afternoon,

we always have a briefing every day, whether it's on the record or off the record, there's an

official that's made available to reporters just about every day. And when reporters wanted to know, in each individual police station, how many died, we were told that

that was too morbid a question. And we weren't given those details. It took a while to ferret them out.

I mean, the thing about Iraq is you can always find out. But it was interesting to watch them

try to put a positive spin on a horrible day.

With regard to that attack on the Al Rashid Hotel, how did the coalition authorities try to explain it to the press?

...