Pentagon lies exposed over killing of reporters in Baghdad

[Euphen]

Pentagon lies exposed over killing of reporters in Baghdad
By Mike Head
19 January 2004

<snip>

Despite Mari’s report, there are good reasons to doubt that the killings simply resulted from official negligence and to conclude that a re-opened military inquiry would only produce another whitewash report. Several basic questions must be posed.

1. If the incident were merely a terrible mistake, why did the Bush administration, from Cheney down, go to such lengths to lie about it? Mari records that US Secretary of State Colin Powell twice restated the original false claim well after the event, including at a Madrid press conference last May 1. “Young American soldiers trying to liberate that part of the city came under enemy fire and their lives were in danger so they responded,” Powell asserted.

2. First-hand accounts by Palestine Hotel reporters pointed to a calculated, unhurried attack. France 3 TV footage showed US tanks deliberately firing at the hotel. “They (US tanks) headed there, moved their turrets and waited at least two minutes before opening fire,” said Herve de Ploeg, the journalist who filmed the attack. “It was not a case of instinctive firing.... I’m very specific because I was due to go on air.”

3. How can the claim of mistake be squared with the intentional strike on the Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV offices just before the Palestine Hotel was shelled? As the World Socialist Web Site reported at the time, the strike on Al-Jazeera’s broadcasting facilities was undoubtedly deliberate. Al-Jazeera had written to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last February 23 giving the precise location of its office so as to avoid being targetted.

.................................

http://wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/jour-j19.shtml

[pansypoo53219]

1. everything under Bush

is spackled, primed, and faux finished.

[teryang]

2. Excellent article on journalist targeting

This is a persuasive interpretation of the American regimes media policy in Iraq.

I posted my own interpretation on another related thread two days ago:

My personal take on journalist targeting

Edited on Sat Jan-17-04 02:14 PM by teryang
...is based on the notion that information from the battlefield regardless of the source is regarded by most military personnel as a threat. There are two dimensions to this, tactical and psychological. The latter is a political consideration in the notion of prevailing in the conflict. (This goes along with the mistaken notion that the press was instrumental in loss of the Vietnam war. We never could have prevailed no matter what we had done.)

If a helocopter is shot down and it is not reported, politically it is as if it weren't shot down. If photographers are recording the shootdown, it assumes a political dimension the military and the government seek to deny to the enemy. As a tactical response will occur as a result of shootdowns, bombings, or other casualties, the presence of the press can become an immediate threat theoretically as well as a propaganda threat. One rarely if ever sees pictures of American dead or wounded. Underlining the whole hypocrisy of American treatment of the press, is the notion that Iraq is "free" or has a "free" press.

That is why there seems to be a pattern of journalists being shot at, wounded, arrested or killed in the vicinity of tactical incidents. Safeguarding journalists isn't the priority for battlefield units. They regard themselves as safeguarding themselves when taking action against journalists. Iraq is an active combat zone not a free country. There is definitely an element of coercion in not informing troops that there are journalists in a hotel. Just as telling journalists that they were on their own if not embedded was an implied threat. In my opinion many of these "accidents" have a calculated aspect to them and to pretend otherwise is simply political convenience.