Shooting the messenger
By Phillip Knightley Posted Jul 1 2005
AP photo/Alessandra Tarantino
A U.S. Marine searches a journalist at a security check point outside Palestine hotel in Baghdad. The U.S. Marines joined hundreds of international journalists who turned the now-famous Palestine Hotel into a noisy, crowded island of rumor and gunshots after an American tank fired a shell at the Reuters suite on April 8, 2003.
In 2002 the BBC sent one of its top reporters, Nik Gowing, to Washington to try to find out how it was that its correspondent, William Reeve, who had just re-opened the Corporation’s studio in Kabul and was giving a live, down-the-line TV interview for BBC World, was suddenly blown out of his seat by an American smart missile. Coincidentally, four hours later, a few blocks away, the office and residential compound of the TV network al-Jazeera was hit by two more American missiles.
The BBC, al-Jazeera and the Committee to Protect Journalists thought it prudent to find out from the Pentagon what had gone wrong, and if war came to Iraq, what steps they could take to protect their correspondents. Pentagon spokesperson Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, deputy assistant defense secretary for public affairs, was frank. Nothing had gone wrong. Quigley said the Pentagon was indifferent to media activity in territory controlled by the enemy.
All three organizations concluded that the Pentagon was determined to deter Western correspondents from reporting any war from the “enemy” side, viewed such journalism in Iraq as activity of “military significance,” and might well bomb or shell the area.
This is exactly what happened, but with the extra complication provided with the arrival of the ‘unilaterals’ — correspondents who declined the Pentagon’s offer to be embedded with coalition military units and set out to report the war independently.
The figures in Iraq during the actual fighting tell a terrible story. Fifteen media people were dead and two were missing, likely dead as well. Relative to how short the campaign was, Iraq will be notorious as the most dangerous war for journalists ever. Also, of the 15 dead, the largest single group were unilaterals reporting from the Iraqi side, and the largest single group were killed by the American military. General Vince Brooks, deputy director of operations, has said the American military does not target journalists, but some war correspondents do not believe him. Spanish journalists have held demonstrations outside the U.S. embassy in Madrid shouting “murderers.”
There will be no Pentagon directive saying: “It would be a salutory message to unilaterals and their organizations if we were to take any opportunity to target them. A few deaths would bring home to them the advantages of being embedded.”
I believe, however, that the U.S. administration, in keeping with its new foreign policy, has decided that its attitude to war correspondents is the same as President Bush’s when declaring war on terrorists, “You’re either with us or you’re against us.” Reporting from the enemy side was seen in Washington as “being against us.” If the correspondents did not like this, the Pentagon did not care. Welcome to the new and highly dangerous world of the war correspondent in the 21st century.
First, look at Terry Lloyd of ITN and his team of unilaterals. Daniel Demoustier, survivor and cameraman from the four-man team, says they heard Basra had fallen (it had not) and headed down the road toward it. They ran into Iraqi fire, so they turned around and went back toward Kuwait. “We came under fire again,” Demoustier, who was driving, recalls. “The firing came from American tanks. I ducked down under the steering wheel. The windscreen disappeared. I looked to my right. Terry had gone.”
And look what happened on April 8. As Coalition forces closed in on Baghdad, a U.S. plane bombed al-Jazeera’s offices in the city, killing Tarek Ayyoub, one of its cameramen. Ibrahim Hilal said Al-Jazeera got the message: “Americans want war done without any witnesses.” That same day two other war correspondents were killed by Americans at locations that the Pentagon knew housed media. Reuters camerman Taras Protsyuk was killed when an American tank fired a shell at the Reuters suite on the 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel. Jose Couso, a camerman for the Spanish TV channel Telecinco, was wounded in the same attack and died later in the hospital. American forces also opened fire on the Abu Dhabi TV office, whose identity is spelled out in large blue letters on the roof.
When news of the attack first came, the American command said nothing — until it emerged that the French TV channel France 3 had filmed the tank aiming and firing. The Coalition then put out a series of contradictory accounts. Colonel David Perkins, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade, said Iraqis in front of the hotel were firing rocket-propelled grenades at the tank. Then the Division’s commander, General Bouford Blount, issued a statement saying that the tank had come under sniper fire from the hotel’s roof and had fired at the source of the shooting that had then stopped.
Correspondents in the Palestine Hotel insisted that there had been no grenades and no sniper fire. The tank was beyond their range. Sky correspondent David Chater said he had not heard a single shot. The BBC’s Rageh Omaar said none of the other journalists in the hotel heard sniper fire. But the most telling evidence that the tank fired without provocation was that France 3’s camerman had started filming some minutes before the tank opened fire, and his camera’s sound track records no shots whatsoever.
An official Spanish government statement on the death of Couso announced that the Coalition had declared the Palestine Hotel a military objective 48 hours before it was attacked. This was news to the correspondents who denied knowledge of a warning. The Committee to Protect Journalists, a watchdog group that defends press freedoms, joined Reporters Without Borders in demanding an investigation and said in a letter to US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, it believed the attacks on correspondents violated the Geneva Conventions. There has been be no official explanation from the Pentagon beyond the statement that the Americans had fired “in an inherent act of self-defense,” and there has been no apology.
There has, however, been a defense of the tank crew from an American correspondent embedded with them. Jules Crittenden of the Boston Herald wrote that Gibson saw an Iraqi forward observer post, someone with binoculars and a telephone, in a tall building across the Tigris. Wolford gave him permission to fire. Crittenden agrees that the crucial question is: did Gibson or Wolford know that this hotel was packed with correspondents?
Crittenden says investigators for the Committee for the Protection of Journalists were unable to show that Wolford knew about the hotel — hardly a robust defense. Crittenden concludes: “It is indisputable that the Pentagon should have ensured that units in Baghdad were aware of sensitive sites. By failing to do so, they failed their own soldiers and placed our journalistic colleagues in jeopardy. But a lawsuit by the Cuoso (sic) family targeting the soldiers involved and the CPJ’s second-guessing aspersions are not helpful.”
The Pentagon made it clear that it did not want correspondents to report from enemy territory. It repeatedly asked media organizations in the United States and Britain to withdraw their people from Baghdad. It warned them and their bosses how dangerous it could be if they decided to remain. Before the war the Pentagon said it was indifferent to media activity in territory controlled by the enemy and would not allow the presence of journalists to inhibit it from attacking areas of military significance. The BBC, the CPJ and al-Jazeera all came to the conclusion that journalists might well be out at risk as a result of this attitude.
When queried about the consequences for correspondents of such a potentially fatal policy, a Pentagon officer replied, “Who cares. . . They’ve been warned.”