Who Cares? They Were Warned!
So I note that coinciding with the savage US push in to Baghdad proper, the Pentagon seems to have taken especial care to seperately target both Al Jazeera’s offices and the Palestine Hotel, where most of the foreign, independent journalists were staying. I recall Kate Adie mentioned that the Pentagon considers unembedded journalists in Iraq as expendable, possibly hostile. I also recall that the Pentagon bombed Al Jazeera’s Kabul offices during their invasion of that country.
Al-Jazeera said its correspondent Tareq Ayoub died and a cameraman was injured when two missiles hit its office, virtually destroying it. US military officials said the building was struck by mistake. In November 2001, American warplanes mistakenly bombed the offices of the same broadcaster in Kabul, Afghanistan during the US-led campaign to oust the Taleban.
News agencies identified the journalists killed in the shelling of the hotel as Taras Protsyuk, 35, a cameraman for the Reuters news agency, and Jose Couso, 37, a cameraman for a Spanish television network. A third journalist, al-Jazeera cameraman Tarek Ayoub was killed earlier in the day when a bomb dropped during a U.S. air raid hit the Arab satellite television station’s office in the Iraqi capital. Another al-Jazeera staffer was wounded.
Brooks said that the decision to open fire on the Palestine Hotel was taken on the ground by a tactical commander and was not ordered by senior commanders. U.S. military officials at Centcom said the journalists bore some responsibility for their own deaths because they continued working in Baghdad even after U.S. officials warned them in the days leading up to the war they should pull out for their own safety.
A Chronicle reporter was in his room on the hotel’s 11th floor in the minutes leading up to the blast, then descended to the ground floor and was walking through the hotel’s lobby as the attack occurred.
It was a time of a brief lull in the fierce fighting that had engulfed the district throughout the morning and previous night. Amid the quiet, with everyone’s ears finely attuned to the proximity of weapons fire, any firing from the hotel would have reverberated loudly and would have been heard by everyone. No such noises were heard.
American forces also opened fire on the offices of Abu Dhabi television, whose identity is spelled out in large blue letters on the roof … journalists in the hotel insisted there had been no Iraqi fire. Sky’s correspondent, David Chater, said: “I never heard a single shot coming from the area around here, certainly not from the hotel,” he said. BBC correspondent Rageh Omaar added that none of the other journalists in the hotel had heard any sniper fire.
Earlier here.