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

["Thomas Beer" <tbeer@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Ralph,

please send or cc: your mail to the alist for email sorting.

Thanks in advance Thomas

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ralph Johansen" <michele@xxxxxxxx>
To: "Ralph Johansen" <michele@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2003 4:07 AM
Subject: [A-List] Does The US Military Want To Kill Journalists? - Independent
April 08, 2003


> Fwd by mitchelcohen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx :
>
> 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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