[A-List] Does The US Military Want To Kill Journalists? - Independent April 08, 2003

["Ralph Johansen" <michele@xxxxxxxx>]

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Please read this all the way through. There is new info discussed herein.
Thanx.
Mitchel

The Independent
April 08, 2003 | A Community of People Commit

Does The US Military Want To Kill Journalists?
by Robert Fisk


First the Americans killed the correspondent of al-Jazeera yesterday and
wounded his cameraman. Then, within four hours, they attacked the Reuters
television bureau in Baghdad, killing one of its cameramen and a cameraman
for Spain's Tele 5 channel and wounding four other members of the Reuters
staff.

Was it possible to believe this was an accident? Or was it possible that
the right word for these killings -- the first with a jet aircraft, the
second with an M1A1 Abrams tank -- was murder? These were not, of course,
the first journalists to die in the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Terry
Lloyd of ITV was shot dead by American troops in southern Iraq, who
apparently mistook his car for an Iraqi vehicle. His crew are still
missing. Michael Kelly of The Washington Post tragically drowned in a
canal. Two journalists have died in Kurdistan. Two journalists -- a German
and a Spaniard -- were killed on Monday night at a US base in Baghdad, with
two Americans, when an Iraqi missile exploded amid them.

And we should not forget the Iraqi civilians who are being killed and
maimed by the hundred and who -- unlike their journalist guests -- cannot
leave the war and fly home. So the facts of yesterday should speak for
themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, they make it look very like
murder.

The US jet turned to rocket al-Jazeera's office on the banks of the Tigris
at 7.45am local time yesterday. The television station's chief
correspondent in Baghdad, Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian-Palestinian, was on the
roof with his second cameraman, an Iraqi called Zuheir, reporting a pitched
battle near the bureau between American and Iraqi troops. Mr Ayoub's
colleague Maher Abdullah recalled afterwards that both men saw the plane
fire the rocket as it swooped toward their building, which is close to the
Jumhuriya Bridge upon which two American tanks had just appeared.

"On the screen, there was this battle and we could see bullets flying and
then we heard the aircraft," Mr Abdullah said.

"The plane was flying so low that those of us downstairs thought it would
land on the roof -- that's how close it was. We actually heard the rocket
being launched. It was a direct hit  -- the missile actually exploded
against our electrical generator. Tariq died almost at once. Zuheir was
injured."

Now for America's problems in explaining this little saga. Back in 2001,
the United States fired a cruise missile at al-Jazeera's office in Kabul --
from which tapes of Osama bin Laden had been broadcast around the world. No
explanation was ever given for this extraordinary attack on the night
before the city's "liberation"; the Kabul correspondent, Taiseer Alouni,
was unhurt. By the strange coincidence of journalism, Mr Alouni was in the
Baghdad office yesterday to endure the USAF's second attack on al-Jazeera.

Far more disturbing, however, is the fact that the al-Jazeera network --
the freest Arab television station, which has incurred the fury of both the
Americans and the Iraqi authorities for its live coverage of the war --
gave the Pentagon the co-ordinates of its Baghdad office two months ago and
received assurances that the bureau would not be attacked.

Then on Monday, the US State Department's spokesman in Doha, an
Arab-American called Nabil Khouri, visited al-Jazeera's offices in the city
and, according to a source within the Qatari satellite channel, repeated
the Pentagon's assurances. Within 24 hours, the Americans had fired their
missile into the Baghdad office.

The next assault, on Reuters, came just before midday when an Abrams tank
on t he Jamhuriya Bridge suddenly pointed its gun barrel towards the
Palestine Hotel where more than 200 foreign journalists are staying to
cover the war from the Iraqi side. Sky Television's David Chater noticed
the barrel moving. The French television channel France 3 had a crew in a
neighbouring room and videotaped the tank on the bridge. The tape shows a
bubble of fire emerging from the barrel, the sound of a detonation and then
pieces of paintwork falling past the camera as it vibrates with the impact.

In the Reuters bureau on the 15th floor, the shell exploded amid the staff.
It mortally wounded a Ukrainian cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, who was also
filming the tanks, and seriously wounded another member of the staff, Paul
Pasquale from Britain, and two other journalists, including Reuters'
Lebanese-Palestinian reporter Samia Nakhoul. On the next floor, Tele 5's
cameraman Jose Couso was badly hurt. Mr Protsyuk died shortly afterwards.
His camera and its tripod were left in the office, which was swamped with
the crew's blood. Mr Couso had a leg amputated but he died half an hour
after the operation.

The Americans responded with what all the evidence proves to be a
straightforward lie. General Buford Blount of the US 3rd Infantry Division
-- whose tanks were on the bridge -- announced that his vehicles had come
under rocket and rifle fire from snipers in the Palestine Hotel, that his
tank had fired a single round at the hotel and that the gunfire had then
ceased. The general's statement, however, was untrue.

I was driving on a road between the tanks and the hotel at the moment the
shell was fired -- and heard no shooting. The French videotape of the
attack runs for more than four minutes and records absolute silence before
the tank's armament is fired. And there were no snipers in the building.
Indeed, the dozens of journalists and crews living there -- myself included
-- have watched like hawks to make sure that no armed men should ever use
the hotel as an assault point.

This is, one should add, the same General Blount who boasted just over a
month ago that his crews would be using depleted uranium munitions -- the
kind many believe to be responsible for an explosion of cancers after the
1991 Gulf War -- in their tanks. For General Blount to suggest, as he
clearly does, that the Reuters camera crew was in some way involved in
shooting at Americans merely turns a meretricious statement into a libelous
one.

Again, we should remember that three dead and five wounded journalists do
not constitute a massacre -- let alone the equivalence of the hundreds of
civilians being maimed by the invasion force. And it is a truth that needs
to be remembered that the Iraqi regime has killed a few journalists of its
own over the years, with tens of thousands of its own people. But something
very dangerous appeared to be getting loose yesterday. General Blount's
explanation was the kind employed by the Israelis after they have killed
the innocent. Is there therefore some message that we reporters are
supposed to learn from all this? Is there some element in the American
military that has come to hate the press and wants to take out journalists
based in Baghdad, to hurt those whom our Home Secretary, David Blunkett,
has maliciously claimed to be working "behind enemy lines". Could it be
that this claim -- that international correspondents are in effect
collaborating with Mr Blunkett's enemy (most Britons having never supported
this war in the first place) -- is turning into some kind of a death
sentence?

I knew Mr Ayoub. I have broadcast during the war from the rooftop on which
he died. I told him then how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if
the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage -- seen across the Arab world
-- of civilian victims of the bombing. Mr Protsyuk of Reuters often shared
the Palestine Hotel's elevator with me. Samia Nakhoul, who is 42, has been
a friend and colleague since the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war. She is married
to the Financial Times correspondent David Gardner.

Yesterday afternoon, she lay covered in blood in a Baghdad hospital. And
General Blount dared to imply that this innocent woman and her brave
colleagues were snipers. What, I wonder, does this tell us about the war in
Iraq.
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