On the frontlines
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Jul 1 2003
Shooting the Messenger; Battle Lines Blurred
The bombing by U.S.-British forces of Iraq’s state-run television station raised a number of questions and brought an outcry by media and humanitarian watch organizations. Was the enemy government using the facility as a “control-and-command” installation? Was it being used purely for propaganda purposes? Is it a violation of the Geneva Conventions when a combatant country deliberately bombs a media outlet in enemy territory?
IPI wrote to Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, citing Article 52 of the Geneva Conventions, which states that attacks must be limited to military objectives, and Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which protects the free flow of information and ideas through media across any borders. Secretariat Johann P. Fritz cautioned that the attack on the Iraqi television station confuses distinctions between military and civilian targets and sets a dangerous precedent liable to be used in future conflicts for the deliberate targeting of media facilities for censorship purposes.
U.S. officials justified the attack, saying the facility was a “key telecommunication vault” for satellite communications. The media rights group, Reporters Without Borders, suggested that objections to broadcasts by the television station of injured and terrified U.S. POWs may have been an additional motive. In any case, the U.S. military has declined to debate the issue further.
The issue is not likely to receive attention from the U.S. media either. Media watch group FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, released a report following the bombing on the attitude of journalists before and after it took place. According to FAIR, MSNBC’s David Shuster, Fox News Channel’s John Gibson, Andrea Mitchell, “NBC Nightly News,” and CNBC’s Forest Sawyer all wondered, before the bombing, why the station did not appear to be a military target. Afterward, New York Times reporter Michael Gibson and CNN’s Aaron Brown appeared to condone the action. Clearly, U.S. journalists are less concerned about the issue.
More controversial were the incidents in which coalition forces dropped missiles on a neighborhood where the Arab TV stations Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV had offices. A correspondent for Al-Jazeera, Tarek Ayoub, was killed, and another Al-Jazeera journalist, Zohair al-Iraqi, was wounded. The same day, a U.S. tank fired on the Palestine Hotel, known to be a place where many journalists were living and working. Cameramen Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and José Couso of Telecino were killed, and two other journalists were injured.
There is no clear answer to whether these attacks amount to a “war crime,” as Reporters Without Borders has suggested. The group advocates bringing the question to the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission.
Warfare tactics have evolved considerably from those used earlier in World War II, when the carpet-bombing of German cities and use of the H-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki left little room to question whether media facilities should be spared. Now, the U.S. military boasts of its ability to disable precisely targeted objects. Facilities basic to civilian survival, such as water supply and food delivery systems, are considered fair game. Then why not newspaper offices and television and radio stations?
Media watchdog organizations are questioning the propriety of bombing the Iraqi television station and the other independent outlets, Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi. The human rights group Amnesty International has called for an inquiry as well. In future conflicts, the media will need to have a clearer understanding of what are fair targets for the precision bombs that are will no doubt dominate modern warfare.
— Nora Fitzgerald
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Brief and Bitter: A High Toll on Journalist Lives in Iraq
Although just six weeks passed between the “shock and awe” bombings and George Bush’s May 1, 2003, declaration of victory, journalists nevertheless suffered an unprecedented casualty rate while covering the U.S.- and British-led invasion of Iraq.
At the height of the war, there were more than 500 embedded and an estimated 2,000 independent journalists reporting the conflict, making Operation Iraqi Freedom the most covered war in modern history. With such a large number of journalists in the field, the number of deaths might not seem too severe. What needs to be remembered, however, is that these deaths occurred in just a six-week period.
The casualty rate was especially high among non-embedded, or ‘unilateral,’ journalists, who suffered 10 of the 14 total deaths. Perhaps the most unexpected fact about these deaths is that twice as many journalists were killed by American or British forces than by Iraqi forces.
— Jim Reilly
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From the Inside: Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib
On March 25, Moises Saman and Matthew McCallester, reporters for the U.S. daily Newsday based in Long Island, New York, disappeared in Baghdad. They were held for eight days in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, along with American freelance photographer Molly Bingham and Johan Rydeng Spanner, a free-lance photographer with the Danish daily Jyllands Posten.
Photographer Moises Saman spoke with IPI Global Journalist staff about his experiences covering the Iraq War and his time in detention in the Iraqi prison:
From the beginning Matt and I were clear that we wanted to be in Baghdad. There were three official slots available to Newsday, offering the opportunity to be embedded. But we’d been working over there before and wanted to be in Baghdad.
There were some questions about our visa. At one point everybody thought we were arrested because we entered with tourist visas. But they were officially journalist visas that had been issued to us. We entered with a group of human shields, and we were only supposed to do stories about them. But then somebody must have thought that because we were working without minders and running around Baghdad on our own, we were a problem. That’s my thinking. There’s been no official explanation. Those people who arrested us might be dead. They might be in prison now.
They took all of our equipment. We were in solitary confinement; I wasn’t able to talk to Matt at all. More than anything, it was psychologically rough; we weren’t tortured or beaten or anything like that. We were interrogated quite a lot. It was more at a psychological level, the abuse.
I didn’t think the actual guards that we had were aware of what was going on with us outside. We were put under their care, and I don’t know how high up in the government they were. But at some point, it became clear that there was a lot of international pressure to release us.
It was just one of those things where you go to cover this conflict, and you know there are always risks involved. You know you could be arrested and held, it’s always something that could happen to you.
We were held in Afghanistan in November 2001, when there were four journalists who were killed on the road from Jalalabad to Kabul. Matt and I had gone out there to check out the story. We were stopped and robbed; they threatened to execute us.
In terms of this recent situation, I don’t know if I would do anything different. With these kinds of stories, it’s hard. Maybe we tried to do things a little differently than other journalists who were there. I guess we cut corners. We never had a minder (an Iraqi assigned to watch us). It was very difficult to work, and I guess we got caught. I probably wouldn’t do anything different, though. Right now, I’m just concerned about going back and doing some work there because there are a lot of stories to be told.