Information on War Key to Public Trust : Media: The Pentagon may be holding back details, but few journalists think it is deliberately deceiving them.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin L. Powell, looked at the crudely rendered drawing of the effects of allied air attacks and offered a bit of a grin.

“I’ve laundered (these drawings) so you can’t really tell what I’m talking about because I don’t want the Iraqis to know what I’m talking about,” he said, struggling a bit over whom he was trying to confuse. “But trust me. Trust me.”

The soldiers and the reporters in the briefing room laughed. But the issue of trust and of laundering information is deadly serious, both sides know, and could prove pivotal to sustaining public support of the war.

Despite Americans’ sense of seeing the Persian Gulf War being waged live on television, journalists concede that much--perhaps most--of this war is not only unseen but unreported. And major questions remain unanswered.

Is the Pentagon not answering those questions because it won’t or because it doesn’t have the information-gathering capability to do so?

The answer, reporters believe, is that the Pentagon may be holding back some details, but there is still much about the conduct of the war the Pentagon does not know.

Nonetheless, few journalists think the Pentagon is deliberately deceiving them.

“The fact is, I do trust him,” Fred Francis, Pentagon correspondent for NBC, said of Powell.

The main unanswered questions, according to reporters, are these:

* Is Iraq’s air force not fighting because it cannot or because it is holding back?

* What damage has the allied bombing done to Iraq’s elite ground forces, the Republican Guard, and what effect is it having on troop morale?

* Does Iraq have the capability to put chemical or biological weapons into its missiles, something it has not used in warfare before?

* How much damage has allied bombing done to Iraq’s command-and-control network?

* How many mobile missile launchers do the Iraqis have--11, 35, 70 or more? Pentagon officials and intelligence sources have variously used all those numbers.

* Does the Pentagon have any information about the civilian casualties in Iraq and Kuwait?

To a large degree, the Pentagon briefing Wednesday by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Powell was designed to tell reporters that the Pentagon was being as candid as prudently possible.

“Some of you have been critical of us for not putting information out more quickly,” Cheney said. “I understand your point, but we want to be certain that we don’t rush down here with premature words of success. . . . That may well not fit the 24-hour cycle that you’re held to (in the news media), but we want to have confidence in what we are saying before we say it.”

Frankly, reporters said, the Pentagon knew that it was losing some control over press management of the war. “Yesterday, with Desert Storm in its sixth day, I noticed a newspaper headline which said, quote, ‘War Drags On,’ ” Cheney exclaimed.

If reporters were frustrated earlier in the week by the Pentagon confusion or lack of information, by Wednesday they seemed calmer.

“I don’t think there is a credibility gap,” said James R. Carroll of Knight-Ridder Newspapers. “Frankly, television is driving the demand for information. It is a monster that needs new information every five minutes so it is not repeating the same thing over and over.”

But others think there is a question of credibility.

“They have waged in the last week perhaps the largest air war in modern history . . . and the American people and the press and most members of Congress don’t know what is happening in Iraq,” said Howell Raines, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times.

CBS Pentagon correspondent David Martin believes three factors contribute to the lack of information from the military.

One is a “strict-constructionist view” of what information might help the enemy.

The second is that bad weather really has been a problem in photographing and assessing bomb damage.

The third is an extreme fear of saying something that later might appear to be wrong and could be perceived as lying.

“I am confident they are not lying to us,” Martin said. “I’m also confident they are putting the best face on the facts” and often leaving out details that might look difficult for them.

The video footage of pinpoint bombing is one example. Martin said he knows, from his sources, that the Pentagon is not showing footage it has of one bomber that hit the wrong target.

In the attack on Libya in 1986, Martin noted, the Pentagon released bomber footage that was accurate, but held back footage that showed civilians running for cover.

But “are they falsifying the number of aircraft downed?” asked Martin. “No.”

Francis of NBC also argues that “there are major flaws in intelligence collection” in the Pentagon.

He cites one example. He and his producer found an engineer in Vienna last year who provided blueprints of one of the Iraqi missile projects. “I had them here hanging in the work space, and the Pentagon hadn’t seen them before. Even after I showed them, a couple Defense Intelligence Agency guys walked in here one day and said, ‘Can we look at those again.’ ”