http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jan2004/jour-j19.shtml
Pentagon lies exposed over killing of reporters in Baghdad
By Mike Head
19 January 2004
An investigation by Reporters Without Borders into the United States
military's killing of two news cameramen at Baghdad's Palestine Hotel last
April raises a series of new questions about their deaths, as well as the
wider casualties inflicted on reporters by US forces during the war on Iraq.
The detailed report, Two Murders and a Lie, demonstrates that the Pentagon
and the Bush administration lied repeatedly about why an American tank
deliberately opened fire on the hotel last April 8. The high explosive shell
killed Ukrainian cameramen Taras Protsyuk (of Reuters news agency), aged 35,
and 37-year-old Spaniard José Couso (of the Spanish TV station Telecinco).
Three other members of the media corps stationed in the hotel were seriously
wounded.
It was the second direct hit within two hours on a building known to house
international journalists. Al-Jazeera correspondent Tariq Ayoub, a
34-year-old Palestinian Jordanian, was killed in a missile strike on the
Arab-language broadcaster's Baghdad offices. Surviving Al-Jazeera staff
sought shelter in the nearby offices of rival satellite station Abu Dhabi
TV, which then also came under US attack.
The attacks came at a vital point in the invasion. US forces were blasting
their way toward the centre of the Iraqi capital, where Washington was
anxious to claim victory in the conquest of the country. Broadcasts from the
Palestine Hotel's journalists, who had defied Pentagon warnings not to
remain in the capital, had showed some of the widespread mass killings being
conducted by US troops in Baghdad's streets.
The next day, April 9, a US tank pulled down Saddam Hussein's statue in
Firdos Square, just below the hotel, cheered by a handpicked crowd. Despite
the carefully stage-managed character of the event, footage and photographs
of the statue's toppling were beamed around the world and became the symbol
of the regime's fall.
French journalist Jean-Paul Mari investigated the attack on the hotel for
Reporters Without Borders, with help from the French weekly magazine Le
Nouvel Observateur. He gathered evidence from journalists in the hotel at
the time, from others "embedded" with the US Army units that fired on the
hotel and from the American soldiers and officers directly involved. Only
one media organisation refused his requests for information: Rupert Murdoch'
s Fox News.
Mari records that Pentagon officials, speaking barely an hour after the
fatal incident, immediately stated that an M1 Abrams tank opened fire on the
hotel in response to "enemy fire" coming from the hotel or the area around
it. They accused the Saddam Hussein regime of being responsible for the
deaths by operating snipers from the hotel. These false claims were
maintained at the highest official level in the days that followed, despite
numerous accounts from surviving journalists denying that any shots had been
fired from the hotel.
On April 8, the Pentagon insisted: "We have reports of Iraqi snipers in the
vicinity of the hotel, operating from the hotel, proving that this desperate
and dying regime will stop at nothing to cling to power." Less than two
hours after the shelling, General Buford Blount, the commander of the 3rd
Infantry Division (3ID), whose tank fired the shot, said: "A tank was
receiving small arms and RPG fire from the hotel and engaged the target with
one round."
This lie was amplified in Washington the next day. Pentagon spokeswoman
Victoria Clarke stated: "Our forces came under fire. They exercised their
inherent right to self-defence." Vice-President ***** Cheney declared that
the suggestion that US troops had deliberately attacked journalists was
"obviously totally false ... You'd have to be an idiot to believe that ...
The attack on the hotel was simply the result of troops responding to what
they perceived to be threats against them."
However, the official line was partially contradicted by the soldiers
involved, who later spoke to several journalists. Sergeant Shawn Gibson, the
tank gunner who fired the fatal shot, and his immediate superior, Captain
Philip Wolford, who authorised it, denied they had fired because of shooting
from the hotel. They said the 4-64 Armor Company of the 3ID's 2nd Brigade,
which was stationed on the Al-Jumhuriya Bridge soon after US troops entered
Baghdad, was seeking to neutralise an alleged Iraqi "spotter" monitoring and
reporting on US military activity. They aimed their fire at individuals with
lenses or binoculars on a hotel balcony, from where some of the media were
filming.
Gibson and Wolford emphatically denied knowing, or being told by their
superiors, that reporters were stationed in the hotel. Three embedded
journalists attached to the 3ID confirmed that their units appeared not to
have been informed that the Palestine Hotel had become the media's
headquarters. One, Chris Anderson, a freelance photographer working for a
photo agency, said his unit was told that the journalists were still at the
Rashid Hotel, the former site of the Iraqi information press centre. In
fact, on Pentagon advice that the Rashid Hotel would be targetted, the media
corps had shifted to the Palestine Hotel three weeks earlier.
Reporters in the hotel reiterated that they and their employers had informed
the Pentagon of their precise location and had been assured by the Pentagon
that they would be safe. Associated Press photographer Jerome Delay had
received a message from the Pentagon, saying "Don't worry we know you are
there." Mari notes that General Blount's 3ID headquarters had ample access
to information from the Pentagon, from the US Central Command Doha base (in
Qatar) and from the media.
The report comments: "It is inconceivable that the massive presence of
journalists at the hotel for three weeks prior to the shelling, which was
known by any TV viewer and by the Pentagon itself, could have passed
unnoticed. Yet this presence was never mentioned to the troops in the field
or marked on the maps used by artillery support soldiers. The question is
whether this information was withheld deliberately, out of contempt or
through negligence."
The report concludes that the deaths were a case of "criminal negligence"
and "not therefore a deliberate attack on journalists or the media". It
finds that: "At the top level, the US government must bear some of the
responsibility. Not just because it is the government and has supreme
authority over its army in the field, but also because its top leaders
several times made false statements about the incident. They also talked
regularly about the dangers journalists faced in Iraq."
Reporters Without Borders has demanded the re-opening of the US Army's
inquiry into the incident. The Army's cursory, seven-paragraph report,
released last August 12, completely exonerated all military personnel. "They
fired a single shell in self-defense in full accordance with the Rules of
Engagement," it concluded. The report amended the official line slightly. It
did not speak of direct shooting from the Palestine Hotel but of an "enemy
hunter/killer team" operating from the hotel. Thus, the Pentagon's initial
lie was enhanced and made more vague.
Basic questions remain
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.
It seems that Washington has simply refused to investigate this act of
murder. Reporters Without Borders filed a Freedom of Information request
with the Pentagon last October for the results of any inquiry into Tariq
Ayoub's death. No reply has been received.
4. Why did the White House and the Pentagon warn journalists not to remain
in Baghdad, or try to operate independently anywhere in Iraq once the
invasion started? White House spokesman Ari Fleischer stressed last February
28 the Pentagon's advice to the media to pull their journalists out of
Baghdad. Asked whether this was a veiled threat to "non-embedded" reporters,
he said: "If the military says something, I strongly urge all journalists to
heed it. It is in your own interests, and your family's interests. And I
mean that."
The official responses to the Palestine Hotel killings were laced with
similar comments. On April 8, for example, while expressing "deep regret"
for "the loss of any innocent civilian life," Pentagon spokesman Bryan
Whitman said Baghdad was "a dangerous place for journalists" and accused the
Iraqi government of "intentionally putting civilians in danger". The Army's
August 12 document echoed this line: "Baghdad was a high intensity combat
area and some journalists had elected to remain there despite repeated
warnings of the extreme danger of doing so."
Before launching the Iraq war, the Bush administration established an
unprecedented regime of embedded journalism. In the guise of allowing
greater coverage of the battlefield, the system's rules and logistics were
designed to ensure favourable, sanitised and monitored reportage of the
US-led operation. Some 600 reporters, predominantly from the few countries
participating in the US-led coalition, were assigned to specific military
units. This arrangement meant they could make no independent assessment of
the war or the casualties being inflicted on Iraqi soldiers and civilians.
5. The deaths in Baghdad were part of a wider pattern. The International
Federation of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and the European
Broadcasting Union condemned numerous instances in which non-embedded
journalists were fired upon, detained or roughed up by US soldiers. No less
than 12 were killed in action, at least five by US troops.
They included British ITV journalist Terry Lloyd, who was killed near Basra,
apparently by US fire, last March 22. Lloyd, one of the few non-embedded
journalists who managed to enter Iraq in the early days of the war, was
heading toward Basra, which coalition commanders had falsely reported was
under their control. Two of Lloyd's team, cameramen Fred Nerac and
translator Hussein Osman, are officially still missing. Daniel Demoustier, a
French cameraman injured in the same attack, accused US troops of firing on
their media vehicles to "wipe out troublesome witnesses".
6. There is every reason to conclude that the pressure to silence
non-embedded voices increased as the battle for Baghdad reached its climax
on April 8 and 9. Dispatches filed from the Palestine Hotel observed that
the soldiers seemed unprepared for the fierce, urban guerilla type
resistance they had encountered for days. Other reports indicated that
hundreds of people were being indiscriminately mowed down by tanks and
armoured vehicles in various Baghdad suburbs.
7. Attacks on journalists still continue in Iraq. In one incident, two US
tanks opened fire at close range on a Palestinian-born Reuters cameraman
outside a notorious US-run jail in Baghdad on August 17. Mazen Dana, 43, a
highly respected and award-winning media representative, was fatally wounded
in the chest and bled to death on the spot. Dana was with a group of
journalists in clearly marked vehicles. Colleagues who witnessed the killing
immediately rejected US military command claims that its soldiers mistook
the camera he was holding for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
A month later, the Pentagon also described his death as "regrettable" while
insisting that troops had acted within the rules of engagement. It has also
failed to reply to a Freedom of Information request for further information
on this case.
These ongoing killings point to an orchestrated campaign to intimidate
journalists and suppress unvetted coverage of the Iraq operation. All the
media victims were attempting to operate outside the "embedded" regime
adopted by Washington, with the willing collaboration of the major media
conglomerates. It is clear that no inquiry by the military can be trusted to
reveal the truth. There must be a genuinely independent inquiry into the
entire edifice of official deception surrounding the Iraq war, leading to
the criminal prosecution of those in Washington responsible for war crimes.
===========================
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=9045
15 January 2004
Two murders and a lie
An investigation of the US Army's firing at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad
on 8 April 2003
Download the report :
Two murders and a lie
http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/Palest_hotel_report.pdf
(PDF, 897.1 ko)
Reporters Without Borders called today for the reopening of the enquiry into
who was really responsible for the US Army's "criminal negligence" in
shooting at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on 8 April 2003 and causing the
death of two journalists - Ukrainian cameramen Taras Protsyuk (of Reuters
news agency) and Spaniard José Couso (of the Spanish TV station Telecinco).
The call came in a report of the press freedom organisation's own in-depth
investigation of the incident, which gathered evidence from journalists in
the hotel at the time, from others "embedded" with US Army units and from
the US military soldiers and officers directly involved.
The report said US officials at first lied about what happened and then, in
an official statement four months later, exonerated the US Army from any
mistake or error of judgement. The report provides only some of the truth
about the incident, which needs to be further investigated to establish
exactly who was responsible.
Pentagon spokespersons said right from the start that an M1 Abrams tank
opened fire on the hotel in legitimate self-defence in response to "enemy
fire" coming from the hotel or the area around it. This line was maintained
and emphasised at the highest official level in the days that followed.
Sgt. Shawn Gibson, the 3rd Infantry Division (3ID) tank gunner who fired the
fatal shot, and his immediate superior, Capt. Philip Wolford, who authorised
it, denied they had fired because of shooting from the hotel. They said the
4-64 Armor Company of the 3ID's 2nd Brigade, which was stationed on the
Al-Jumhuriya Bridge soon after US troops entered Baghdad, was in fact
seeking to neutralise an Iraqi "spotter" monitoring and reporting on US
military activity. Some of this data caused the US Army to change its line
slightly in its official report released on 12 August 2003. It did not speak
of direct shooting but of an "enemy hunter/killer team" which required a
response in legitimate self-defence. This too was a lie - by omission.
By focusing only on the rules of combat, the US authorities have remained
silent about the real cause of the tragedy. The Reporters Without Borders
investigation found that the soldiers in the field were never told the hotel
was full of journalists.
The US shelling of the hotel was not a deliberate attack on journalists and
the media. It was the result of criminal negligence.
At the bottom level, Capt. Wolford and Sgt. Gibson reacted as soldiers in a
battle situation. They directly caused the death of the journalists and
wounded three others, but should not really be held responsible because they
did not have information that would have made them aware of the consequences
of firing at the hotel.
Their immediate superiors - battalion commander Lt. Col. Philip DeCamp and
brigade commander Col. David Perkins - also appear not to blame. Their
reactions and the accounts of embedded journalists indicate they too had not
been properly informed by their own superiors.
At a higher level, the headquarters of 3ID commander Gen. Buford Blount
bears a heavy responsibility. The Division's command had access to
information from the Pentagon, from the US Central Command Doha base (in
Qatar) and from the media.
It is inconceivable that the massive presence of journalists at the hotel
for three weeks prior to the shelling, which was known by any TV viewer and
by the Pentagon itself, could have passed unnoticed. Yet this presence was
never mentioned to the troops in the field or marked on the maps used by
artillery support soldiers. The question is whether this information was
withheld deliberately, out of contempt or through negligence.
At the top level, the US government must bear some of the responsibility.
Not just because it is the government and has supreme authority over its
army in the field, but also because its top leaders several times made false
statements about the incident. They also talked regularly about the dangers
journalists faced in Iraq.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer stressed on 28 February the Pentagon's
advice to the media to pull their journalists out of Baghdad before the war
began. Asked whether this was a veiled threat to "non-embedded" reporters,
he said : "If the military says something, I strongly urge all journalists
to heed it. It is in your own interests, and your family's interests. And I
mean that."
The argument that journalists had been warned of the danger reappeared in
the Army's 12 August report. This amounted to creating two kinds of
journalists - those who were "embedded" and so able to report on the
fighting while under the protection of US forces and those who were advised
to leave the war zone or face being ignored.
The Pentagon thereby refused to accept any responsibility for the death of
the two journalists.
The Reporters Without Borders investigation was carried out by French
journalist Jean-Paul Mari, with help from the French weekly magazine Le
Nouvel Observateur, which Reporters Without Borders warmly thanks.
Download the report :
Two murders and a lie
http://www.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/Palest_hotel_report.pdf
(PDF, 897.1 ko)
===========================
See Also:
Journalists' organizations demand inquiry
US bombs Al-Jazeera center in Baghdad
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/jaz-a09.shtml
[9 April 2003]
US military kills another journalist in Iraq
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/aug2003/kill-a21.shtml
[21 August 2003]
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