The great Charles Hanley reminds me why I grew up admiring journalists:

War is “an abomination, an evil,” and will one day be banished to the dustbin of history, but only if reporters are able to get to the truth, said Hanley.

For 161 years The AP has been committed to a single mission: communicating facts, said Hanley. “It’s the closest thing to a straight news source. There’s no advertising, no hyperventilating over exclusives,” he said.

But in times of war its efforts are sometimes stymied by military and government bureaucracies that want to control the story. That is the case in Afghanistan and Iraq where the military has adopted corporate-like public relations models.

“The military wants to control the story beginning to end,” said Hanley. “They’re suppressing the realities of war, which is something we need to fight against constantly.”

How can this be? No man in uniform would ever betray-us, would he?

In case you don’t know his byline, Hanley is one of the few media professionals who actually had the Iraq War story right, as he was on the ground in Iraq when the (pending) war was in its final throes of being sold to the American people, and he wrote courageously about what he saw (or rather didn’t see, which were weapons of mass destruction in sites where Powell claimed they were).

He’s filed many stories of note (from which I quote frequently) ever since — and before, too, including his Pulitzer-winning exposé of the No Gun Ri atrocities.