IS
THERE SOME ELEMENT IN THE US MILITARY
THAT WANTS TO TAKE OUT JOURNALISTS?
By Robert Fisk in Baghdad - 09 April 2003
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?"
http://www.robert-fisk.com