DISPATCHES
The High Price Of An
Unforgiving War
BY
MICHAEL MASSING
At
the Coalition Media Center, on the As Sayliyah military base,
the reigning sentiment was frustration. More than 700 journalists
were registered at the center, and all were competing for the
same small morsels of information from a public-affairs staff
notably stingy with it. Fortunately, I had come on a different
kind of mission — to monitor issues of journalistic safety
and access on behalf of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
I hoped to raise matters of concern with someone in authority
at the U.S. Central Command. Soon after my arrival, I found that
person: an Air Force colonel who, with nearly three decades in
the service, was one of the senior members on the Centcom press
team. He said he’d be happy to field my queries.
Over the next two weeks, there would be many of them. The war
was proving unforgiving to journalists. In some cases, the attacks
they suffered were the unavoidable cost of covering a war. Journalists
died from land mines, suicide bombs, and accidents on the battlefield.
Four journalists in Baghdad, including two from Newsday,
disappeared — at the hands, it turned out, of the Iraqi government,
which accused them of being spies. Pressure from Newsday,
CPJ, and many other organizations eventually helped win their
release.
Many incidents, however, involved the U.S. military. I duly took
them up with the colonel. At first, he seemed responsive. Early
on, for instance, I raised with him the case of four journalists
— two Israelis and two Portuguese — who had been detained
by U.S. troops at gunpoint in central Iraq. According to the journalists,
the U.S. — accusing them of being spies — had held them
for more than forty-eight hours, denying them food and water.
When one of the Portuguese journalists tried to talk with the
soldiers, he was beaten, thrown on the floor, and handcuffed.
Eventually, the journalists were flown by helicopter to Kuwait
City and released.
The incident raised serious questions about the military’s
treatment of “unilateral” journalists. The colonel said
he would look into it but needed to know more about where the
journalists had been picked up and by which unit. After getting
more details, I forwarded them to him in an e-mail. That was the
last I heard of the matter.
Next, I approached the colonel about the case of an ITN TV crew
who had been caught in crossfire near Basra. Correspondent Terry
Lloyd had died in the attack. His cameraman, Fred Nerac, and translator,
Hussein Osman, were still missing. Reports from the field suggested
that the crew had been hit by both coalition and Iraqi fire. Fred
Nerac’s wife was appealing to the U.S. government to help
find him. CPJ joined in her appeal, and to help push it, I sent
an e-mail to the colonel asking him what, if anything, Centcom
was doing to investigate. Again, I never heard back.
Then, on the morning of April 8, the war came to central Baghdad,
and journalists were prominent among the casualties. In one incident,
a U.S. air strike severely damaged the office of al-Jazeera, killing
one of its correspondents. (See “The Bombing of Al-Jazeera,”
page 37.) Moments later, another explosion damaged the nearby
office of Abu Dhabi TV. Finally, a U.S. tank opened fire on the
Palestine Hotel, the main base for journalists in Baghdad. One
cameraman was killed, and a second would die shortly after.
The attacks sent shock waves through the media center. At that
day’s press briefing Brigadier General Vincent Brooks was
peppered with questions. In response, he said that the United
States regretted the loss of life and extended its condolences
to the families of the fallen journalists. He insisted that the
United States did not target journalists. Brooks said that coalition
forces operating near the Palestine Hotel had come under fire
from its lobby and that a tactical decision had been made to fire
back. When asked if the coalition forces could be ordered not
to fire on journalists’ strongholds, he replied: “We
don’t know every place a journalist is operating on the battlefield.
We only know those journalists that are operating with us,”
i.e. those who were embedded. Any other journalists on the field
of battle, he added, were “putting themselves at risk.”
The next day, I asked to see the colonel. He received me at his
desk inside the Centcom press office. I handed him a letter that
CPJ had sent to the secretary of defense expressing its grave
concern over the attacks and urging the Pentagon to investigate
them. I said my purpose in meeting now was not to discuss why
these attacks had occurred but rather how future ones could be
avoided. Let us, I said, take at face value Centcom’s claim
that the attack on the Palestine Hotel was an accident. Let us
further assume, as reports from Baghdad were suggesting, that
the commander of the tank unit that fired on the hotel had not
known that it was packed with journalists, and, moreover, that
he may have mistaken a cameraman on a balcony for a spotter for
Iraqi fighters. Would it not be possible in the future to inform
commanders in the field about sites where journalists were staying
so that they could avoid attacking them?
No, the colonel said flatly. Journalists were there at their own
peril; the only way for them to stay safe would be to leave the
combat zone. I pointed out that only a handful of sites were involved.
At its daily briefings, I added, Centcom had noted that it exercised
special caution with regard to schools, mosques, hospitals, and
historic sites. Would it not be possible to add journalistic sites
to the list?
No, the colonel insisted. Baghdad was a battlefield. If troops
believed they were coming under fire, they had a right to return
it. Providing journalistic locations in advance was out of the
question. I tried pressing the point, but the colonel grew irritable,
and the meeting quickly broke up.
I understood the colonel’s position. Soldiers in the field
have one main mission — to defeat the enemy while minimizing
costs to themselves — and they don’t want to jeopardize
it by having to worry about a bunch of journalists. But journalists
have a job to do as well, and, given the U.S. military’s
stated determination to avoid civilian casualties, refraining
from attacking a building full of journalists would not seem to
be asking too much.
The colonel’s stance, together with Brooks’s comments
at the briefings, led me to one disturbing conclusion — that
the U.S. military believed that only reporters who were officially
embedded had the right to protection. Everyone else was at risk
— and expendable.
To read more from
Michael Massing, click here.
Enjoy
this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
Michael Massing is a CJR contributing editor.
