Robert Fisk
The US Military That Wants To Take Out Journalists?
Wed Apr 9 17:01:45 2003
208.152.73.200

Is There Some Element In The US Military That Wants To Take Out Journalists?

By Robert Fisk
The Independent - UK
4-9-3

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?"

© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=395412
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