“There was an online petition on CNN to find a transcript, and fire Jordan if he said the military had intentionally killed journalists.”
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I’m wondering how many, if any, of the articles reporting on Jordan’s demise are reminding readers of these incidents?
The images from last month’s siege on Falluja came almost exclusively from reporters embedded with US troops. This is because Arab journalists who had covered April’s siege from the civilian perspective had effectively been eliminated. Al Jazeera had no cameras on the ground because it has been banned from reporting in Iraq indefinitely. Al-Arabiya did have an unembedded reporter, Abdel Kader Al-Saadi, in Falluja, but on November 11 US forces arrested him and held him for the length of the siege. Al-Saadi’s detention has been condemned by Reporters Without Borders and the International Federation of Journalists. “We cannot ignore the possibility that he is being intimidated for just trying to do his job,” the IFJ stated.
It’s not the first time journalists in Iraq have faced this kind of intimidation. When US forces invaded Baghdad in April 2003, US Central Command urged all unembedded journalists to leave the city. Some insisted on staying and at least three paid with their lives. On April 8, a US aircraft bombed al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. Al Jazeera has documentation proving it gave the coordinates of its location to US forces.
On the same day, a US tank fired on the Palestine hotel, killing José Couso, of the Spanish network Telecinco, and Taras Protsiuk, of Reuters. Three US soldiers are facing a criminal lawsuit from Couso’s family, which alleges that US forces were well aware that journalists were in the Palestine hotel and that they committed a war crime.
CNN should post a questionairre listing them and asking which were likely intentional or accidental. At least a few “patriots” would openly call the al Jazeera incident intentional and well-deserved. The rest would cut-and-run like Jordan, believing it, but not honest or courageous enough to discuss it publically.