[Reader-list] Is there some element in the US military that wants to take out journalists?

[Rana Dasgupta]

9 April 2003
The Independent.co.uk


Robert Fisk:
Is there some element in the US military that wants to take out journalists?
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=395412



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 the 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 libellous 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?

'The American forces knew exactly what this hotel is'

The Sky News correspondent David Chater was in the
Palestine Hotel when the hotel was hit by American
tank fire. This is his account of what happened.

"I was about to go out on to the balcony when there
was a huge explosion, then shouts and screams from
people along our corridor. They were shouting,
'Somebody's been hit. Can somebody find a doctor?'
They were saying they could see blood and bone.

"There were a lot of French journalists screaming,
'Get a doctor, get a doctor'. There was a great sense
of panic because these walls are very thin. "We saw
the tanks up on the bridge. They started firing across
the bank. The shells were landing either side of us at
what we thought were military targets. Then we were
hit. We are in the middle of a tank battle.

"I don't understand why they were doing that. There
was no fire coming out of this hotel ­ everyone knows
it's full of journalists.

"Everybody is putting on flak jackets. Everybody is
running for cover. We now feel extremely vulnerable
and we are now going to say goodbye to you." The line
was cut but minutes later Chater resumed his report,
saying journalists had been watching American forces
from their balconies and the troops had surely been
aware of their presence.

"They knew exactly what this hotel is. They know the
press corps is here. I don't know why they are trying
to target journalists. There are awful scenes around
me. There's a Reuters tent just a few yards away from
me where people are in tears. It makes you realise how
vulnerable you are. What are we supposed to do? How
are we supposed to carry on if American shells are
targeting Western journalists?"