Killing Journalists – Moon of Alabama

May 3, 2005

Killing Journalists

Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Borders), the media freedom watchdog group is noting that it is already 20 years old and today, on the occasion of the 15th “International Press Freedom Day”, is publishing a couple of reports on freedom in media around the world.

One is its Annual Report on 2004 (see the press release and the full report (pdf, 370 kb)

The other is a report on the gruesome toll for journalists of the war in Irak. see the press release and the full report (pdf, 12 pages)

Iraq is the world’s most dangerous country for journalists and the place where the most are kidnapped. 56 journalists and media assistants have been killed there since the fighting began on 22 March 2003 and 29 kidnapped.

The Iraq conflict is the deadliest inter-state war for journalists since the one in Vietnam, when 63 were killed, but over a period of 20 years (1955-75). During the fighting in the former Yugoslavia (1991-95), 49 journalists were killed doing their job.

The media was targeted from the first day of the fighting in Iraq, when cameraman Paul Moran, of the Australian TV network ABC, was killed by a car bomb on 22 March 2003.

Here’s a graph from the Iraq report:

One third of journalists whose cause of death is known were killed by US forces

Here are some quotes from their 2004 report:

At least 53 journalists were killed in 2004 while doing their job or for expressing their opinions, the highest annual toll since 1995. Fifteen medias assistants (fixers, drivers, translators, technicians, security staff and others) were also killed.

In 2004 :
53 journalists and 15 media assistants were killed
at least 907 journalists were arrested
1,146 were attacked or threatened
and at least 622 media censored

In 2003 :
40 journalists and 2 media assistants were killed
at least 766 journalists were arrested
1,460 were attacked or threatened
and at least 501 media censored

On 1 January 2005 107 journalists and 70 cyber-dissidents were in prison around the world

And here’s what they had to say about the US (and France, for balance!):

The confidentially of sources was also attacked by the judiciary in France through formal questioning of journalists, legal summonses and raids on journalists’ homes and offices. Parliament also approved a law creating new press offences punishable with imprisonment.

As we spend a lot of time on blogs criticising bad journalists and hacks, let us also remember those that take greats risks, including to themselves, to bring us the information without which we would be nothing.

Posted by on May 3, 2005 at 22:26 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Several journalists in the United States were being prosecuted for refusing to reveal their sources to courts. Some even risk going to prison or being held under house arrest, all new in a country where the national constitution says people do not have to testify against themselves.
Sorry Jérôme, this is news framing.
Judith Miller would not be able to testify against herself. She never published on the Valarie Plum/Wilson case. She is not accused and there is no reason why she should be accused.
But there is a serious case of someone in the government who did something criminal and she may be the only witness to prove this – without any further personal involvement.
Why shouldn´t she be made to testify as any “normal” citizen can be made to if she/he witnesses a criminal case?
That is NOT a case of taking great risk. The journalists that lost their life for her Iraq WMD hyping are at risk.

Posted by: b | May 3 2005 22:49 utc | 1

b – I agree with you, but the only way this story has ever been discussed in France (from what I have seen) is through this narrow prism of “source protection” and the supposed threat thereto, without any background on the Plame affair.
I’d give a pass to RSF for being poorly informed on this one, or falling for the NYT bullshit official line.

Posted by: Jérôme | May 3 2005 23:00 utc | 2

BAGHDAD, Iraq – A photographer for a Baghdad newspaper says Iraqi police beat and detained him for snapping pictures of long lines at gas stations. A reporter for another local paper received an invitation from Iraqi police to cover their graduation ceremony and ended up receiving death threats from the recruits. A local TV reporter says she’s lost count of how many times Iraqi authorities have confiscated her cameras and smashed her tapes.
All these cases are under investigation by the Iraqi Association to Defend Journalists, a union that formed amid a chilling new trend of alleged arrests, beatings and intimidation of Iraqi reporters at the hands of Iraqi security forces. Reporters Without Borders, an international watchdog group for press freedom, tracked the arrests of five Iraqi journalists within a two-week period and issued a statement on April 26 asking authorities “to be more discerning and restrained and not carry out hasty and arbitrary arrests.”
While Iraq’s newly elected government says it will look into complaints of press intimidation, local reporters said they’ve seen little progress since reporting the incidents. Some have quit their jobs after receiving threats – not from insurgents, but from police. Most Iraqi reporters are reluctant to even identify themselves as press when stopped at police checkpoints. Others say they won’t report on events that involve Iraqi security forces, which creates a big gap in their local news coverage.
“Tell me to cover anything except the police,” said Muth’hir al Zuhairy, the reporter from Sabah newspaper who was threatened at a police academy.
The fall of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship resulted in unprecedented freedom for Iraqi journalists, who’d suffered torture and prison terms for criticizing the former regime. More than 150 new newspapers and several local TV and radio stations sprang up immediately after the war began – one of the biggest success stories of the U.S.-led invasion. In recent months, however, Iraqi police have begun cracking down on local journalists, creating a wave of fear reminiscent of Saddam’s era.
“If things carry on like this, we will have to carry weapons along with our cameras and recorders,” said Israa Shakir, editor of Iraq Today, an independent Baghdad newspaper. “Under such circumstances, we should be worried about the future of democracy.”
Although Baghdad is the main hub for Iraqi journalists, complaints have poured in from other provinces, said Ibrahim al Sarraj, director of the Iraqi Association to Defend Journalists. In southeastern Iraq, he said, a weekly newspaper was shut down in October for criticizing the governor of the Wasit province. A judge related to the governor sentenced two editors to several months in prison, Sarraj said. The court papers accused the men of “cursing and insulting” the politician.
In the northern town of Baqouba, a cameraman for a local TV station was filming a mosque when Iraqi troops detained him on April 9 for trespassing “in a prohibited place” and for shooting videos that could be used to help insurgents. He’s still in custody, said Salah al Shakerchi, one of the man’s colleagues at Al Diyar TV.
“There was no warrant. It was totally illegal, and he’s being kept in poor conditions,” Shakerchi said. “That’s all we know. We have had no further contact with him.”
Several Interior Ministry officials didn’t return phone messages seeking comment on the journalists’ complaints……

Posted by: Nugget | May 4 2005 1:00 utc | 3

It would seem obvious that using government funds to punish political speech by members of the press and to attempt to coerce commentary favorable to the government would run afoul of the First Amendment. See Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the Univ. of Va. , 515 U.S. 819, 830 (1995) (“[I]deologically driven attempts to suppress a particular point of view are presumptively unconstitutional in funding, as in other contexts.”); New York Times Co. v. United States , 403 U.S. 713, 723-24 (1971) (“The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of governmental suppression of embarrassing information.”) (Douglas, J., concurring); Grosjean v. American Press Co. , 297 U.S. 233, 250 (1936) (government action constituting “a deliberate and calculated device . . . to limit the circulation of information” is unconstitutional).

Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 4 2005 1:26 utc | 4

American soldiers kill journalists, certainly, but do they actually target the journalists they kill? As journalists? Before accepting this serious charge, I’d like to know more about the conditions in general for “friendly fire” in Iraq. I’m haunted by the growing conviction that lots of bad satellite information is being piped to the folks on the ground. I mean, what in the hell are we doing with those satellites anyway, if not linking them up to the soldiers they’re meant to protect? How good is a satellite, exactly (and I’m not just referring to its keen and highly resolved images), and how good are the folks who manage them? How and where is their information processed? It’s a story that I, for one, know absolutely nothing about, and have yet to see discussed in the popular press. Has it been covered in the military trade journals? Can anyone help me out on this one?

Posted by: alabama | May 4 2005 1:51 utc | 5

You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.” – CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on
the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover
stories.

Posted by: Unlce $cam | May 4 2005 2:08 utc | 6

alabama
the death of the majority of arab journalists in iraq is by homicide. the journalists of al jazeera & al aribaya were & are targeted. even the most sympathetic commentary cannot explain away these murders
other journalists have either died by great carelessness on the part of american soldiery or by plain intent. there is also common garden variety negligence
& it has been clear for some time that real journalist who take real risks & leave the green zone are at great risk but the great majority of those hollowed out hemingways never leave the hotel – by their own admission & cited in harpers & rolling stone
what is clear to me through these sites is that the most substantial information is coming from the ground – from bloggers prepared to risk & we are in their debt for the information they have been able to communicate to us

Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 4 2005 2:13 utc | 7

I come from a family of war correspondents, remembereringgiap, so I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt (for good or ill). But this is beside the point I was trying to raise: I’m asking for some reliable information about a certain kind of bad information (supposing that either exists). It’s not exactly off-topic, and it’s the sort of information that MoA has provided from time to time.

Posted by: alabama | May 4 2005 2:50 utc | 8

alabama,
This is probably not going to help but, I remember reading a story (soon after the invasion) think it was in the Seattle P.I. — where they showed these pictures of trailers full of equipment located in either WaDC or Virginia that were set up to moniter AND control electronic imaging mostly from drones (&maybe satallite) over Iraq. The impression was that they were actually doing survalence and interdiction in Iraq from these trailers in the US. I will try to track this down if this is what youre thinking? Now kids turn (again) on this busy computer.

Posted by: anna missed | May 4 2005 3:17 utc | 9

From 2003: Pentagon threatens to kill independent journalists in Iraq
Whatever method the U.S. military uses to monitor and ‘lock onto’ satellite ‘phones not only did the threat described in the article above inhibit – as it was presumably intended to do – unembedded journalists from carrying out their work but it has also, touching on alabama’s point, led to a number of killings throughout Iraq. It would appear that whatever surveillance technique is (was?) being used tends (or tended) to treat satellite ‘phone users as immediate HVTs (high value targets), a fact borne out by a number of seemingly inexplicable killings such as those of villagers and sheep smugglers in Dhib. What was the attack on Dhib about? The initial U.S. explanation was that they were targeting a convoy carrying Hussein and his sons. However, the sequence of the attack and who and where got attacked strongly suggests that it was the satellite ‘phones that had triggered some alert somewhere and made targets of sheep smugglers. alabama is correct, I think, to surmise some ‘eye in the sky’ that selects targets and transmits instructions to U.S. military units. Unfortunately, whatever criteria are employed to identify and initiate action against targets they are apparently so promiscuous that the ‘eye’ may as well be blind to possibilities that there may be less sinister reasons for signals emanating from vehicles or buildings than the spotters seem to assume. As wedding parties and other unfortunates have discovered, the ‘eye’ may be ‘all seeing’ but it is certainly not ‘all knowing’.

Posted by: Nugget | May 4 2005 3:29 utc | 10

Many thanks, anna missed–that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m trying to imagine. Surely things have changed somewhat since our actions in the former Yugoslavia. Do you recall the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, mistakenly targeted (if memory serves) by a CIA operative in Langley, plotting his own “coordinates” on an actual map (and by-passing standard targeting procedures in the process)? No doubt the same clueless attitude (and remoteness from the terrain) currently applies, but even more so. Maybe the current process has eliminated “human error” entirely, with satellites functioning as gunsights of some kind (pointing the guns on the ground, so to speak). Maybe satellites have become the “brains” of the entire operation.

Posted by: alabama | May 4 2005 3:54 utc | 11

Nugget, you’re definitely helping me along here. I wonder how I missed that stuff….And the telephone! Calipari was on a telephone, talking in a language other than English (not that satellites try to identify languages….or do they?).

Posted by: alabama | May 4 2005 4:00 utc | 12

On a simular vein, my favourite Hearst story is when he sends a reporter to cuba before the Spanish American war. The journo telegraphs Hearst saying “No war coming home” Hearst replies “I’ll provide the war, you provide the stories” he was almost president too, I believe it was a sex scandal that did him in. Further,
at the turn of the century there were 30,000 independent newspapers in North America. Today (1999) all North American newspapers are owned by 12 corporations, 9 in the U.S., and 3 in Canada. Imagine six years later…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | May 4 2005 4:29 utc | 13

RSF, the same guys who say Chavez is a blood-thirsty dictator because he’s pissed at the major newspapers in Venezuela being all corporate hacks of the right-wing with no objectivity, no balance, and all bent on seeing him hung or shot – and they’re not very subtle about this. All this, when Chavez hasn’t even ordered the execution of any journalist, reporter, or political opponent.
“La liberté de la presse ne s’use que quand on n’en use pas” indeed. So, should complete hacks with no ethics still be considered journalists? I mean, all the Western hacks bitching about freedom of the press and jailed journalists in Burma or N Korea always crack me up, because there’s usually nothing common at all between both types. I’d even tend to think that those who have the freedom of the press and have nothing to fear at all from being a journalist but *betray* it for corporate profits should be deprived of their status, if only for the sake of those who actually deserve to be considered journalists in areas where it is life-threatening to be so.
Alabama: Well, there are a few troubling spots, still. Like the fact that Al-Jazeera, scared after seeing his Kabul office bombed, who phoned and mailed the coordinates of its Iraqi offices to the US HQ, so that they’ll know this isn’t an enemy position but a neutral journalist office. The result was that the next day the whole thing was bombed. This one can hardly be ascribed to accident or coincidence. There are other cases where it could be the usual fucked-up mess, akin to GIs blowing people up at checkpoints. Though that doesn’t mean that the unofficial US policy is basically to scare or, barring that, to kill or let be kidnapped every non US-embedded journalist.

Posted by: Clueless Joe | May 4 2005 8:54 utc | 14

The US army can track and identify any sat. call / caller In Iraq (i. e. the person who owns the phone/account), and locate them within a few meters. In the ordinary run of things they cannot (or do not) understand the content of encrypted phone calls. Similarly, they cannot identify callers using Binny phones (as they are called here) as there is no account holder – here in Switz. until recently it was possible to buy and pay for phones/calls anonymously. (The US put a stop to that..) They may identify the voice, that is a different matter. Voice reco. is 99% accurate but only used I suppose in extreme cases (e.g. catching Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.) Of course millions of people have phones that cannot be correctly linked to a particular user (stolen, etc.) (afaik – from my reading, on sites such as below..)
Gyre tracks the next military and technology evolutions Link
The on line journal of Space communication:Link
The federation of American Scientitsts Link

Posted by: Blackie | May 4 2005 9:38 utc | 15

alabama & interested – today’s fas secrecy news list contains this item

SPACE SUPPORT TO ARMY OPERATIONS
The role of space technology in supporting U.S. military operations is discussed on an unclassified basis in a new Army field manual.
In short: “The Army is critically dependent on space capabilities to enable and enhance land warfare. Virtually every Army
operation uses space capabilities to some degree. Today, we use space largely for its ability to enhance the effectiveness of our
combat forces. We can communicate; navigate; target, find, and fix the enemy; anticipate weather; and protect our forces based on combat and support assets available from space. We also strive to control space so adversaries cannot overcome our asymmetrical advantages in space.”
See “Space Support to Army Operations,” Field Manual (FM) 3-14, May 2005 (130 page, 5 MB PDF file):
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-14.pdf

Posted by: b real | May 4 2005 18:15 utc | 16

i don’t see any war correspondants there worthy of that name. perhaps the guy from the sydney morning herald
& it seems that at this point – that journalist writing for arab papers are the only ones getting substantial information & or the iraq stringers who are paying the cost
i would almost take it as a given – that any journalist who works outside of the green zone is regarded as enemy – concretely, practically & technologically

Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 4 2005 19:16 utc | 17

of the reporters wounded/killed in iraq by non-iraqi recruits of the coalition forces, how many have been “accidently” targeted by non-u.s. troops? i haven’t seen a figure. are british & italian troops, for instance, as accident prone?

Posted by: b real | May 4 2005 19:29 utc | 18

rgiap – i don’t see any war correspondants there worthy of that name. perhaps the guy from the sydney morning herald
I can think of some, Dahr Jamail did some good coverage, Christopher Allbritten and other freelancers stayed outside the green zone and tried some serious reporting.
You are a bit harsh here – it is not a easy and comforting job and I am sure many try but fail because the circumstances are just bad.

Posted by: b | May 4 2005 19:40 utc | 19

b
i thought both jamail & allbritten were essentially bloggers even tho i have read them at common dreams – i made particular note of the bloggers because that is the only real information to com from fallujah for example – but the big boys & their toys working for the man never seem to leave the green zone or amman, jordan

Posted by: remembereringgiap | May 4 2005 19:57 utc | 20

Iraq: U.S. checkpoints continue to kill
(Washington D.C., May 5, 2005) — The failure of U.S. forces in Iraq to implement basic precautions at checkpoints has led to unnecessary deaths of civilians two years after these inadequacies were identified, Human Rights Watch said today….
Tucked away in this article is the following revelation about the Calipari shooting:
… Equally disturbing was that U.S. forces manning the checkpoint destroyed duty logs from the unit that took part in the shooting…..

Posted by: Nugget | May 5 2005 3:33 utc | 21

“I’m haunted by the growing conviction that lots of bad satellite information is being piped to the folks on the ground. I mean, what in the hell are we doing with those satellites anyway, if not linking them up to the soldiers they’re meant to protect? How good is a satellite, exactly (and I’m not just referring to its keen and highly resolved images), and how good are the folks who manage them?”
– alabama
I was reminded of your comment as I came across the following two paragraphs from a defense writer’s summary of an OIF-lessons-learned Rand study (linked by Juan Cole today):
“The study also cautioned the Pentagon to move very carefully as it shifts the Army to a family of lightly armored fighting vehicles heavily reliant on networked systems of intelligence information until such time as those fighting the war at lower levels have the wide-band satellite communications to access the information and trained personnel to interpret the images of what’s waiting up ahead for a fast-moving tank column.
“Rand said that division commanders and above were well served by the increased situational awareness provided by aerial sensor aircraft and satellite coverage in Iraq, but lower-level commanders actually fighting the battles didn’t get the specific intelligence needed in time to make use of it.”
And this turns out to be a problem of relatively long standing: More often than not, intel from aerial and space-based platforms doesn’t make it down below division or battalion in a timely manner because the communications systems that present it to the user aren’t widely available at lower echelons, at least for conventional forces. Bad intel (rather, bad analysis) being “piped in to the folks on the ground” could be an occasional problem – for which I gather we would gladly trade the more current, aggravating, and dangerous one of insufficient plumbing.

Posted by: Pat | May 5 2005 11:52 utc | 22

Thanks for the post, Pat. Occam’s razor prevails over the paranoid reading, and it’s best to go with the Italian version of the affair, where “insufficient plumbing” really makes sense–especially in the light of Nugget’s post @ 11:33 PM, which sounds like an account of the unit’s effort to protect a patrol that messed up in actionable ways. But still, I’d like to know more about good and bad information, and about remote commands to the men on the ground (if any such there be). And what about the insurgents’ skill at foiling or twisting our communications? Judging from the coverage, they don’t have that skill. Is this plausible?

Posted by: alabama | May 5 2005 13:17 utc | 23

since the military uses the various theaters of war to test out new toys & concepts, and darpa has been working on its “contact zones that see” program since at least 2003, it sounds very plausible that iraq & afghanistan could be prime proving grounds. and the darpa solicitation from 2003 specifically stated:

Stage 2: Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) Configuration. The MOUT Configuration incorporates the development activities and lessons learned from the Force Protection (FP) Configuration, plus additional technology to provide a Combat zones That See configuration optimized for mobile forces in urban combat settings. Rapid deployment of a large video network is the central concept that differentiates the MOUT Configuration from the FP Configuration. Additional capabilities for analyzing the derived vehicle track data should be developed and demonstrated. Initial MOUT Configuration integration and development should occur in the Combat zones That See system integrator’s lab prior to deployment to Fort Belvoir. Once the technologies have matured and the system has been hardened and evaluated, it also will be deployed to an overseas location for additional evaluation.

an article in the village voice at the time mentioned tests at checkpoints –

Approach a checkpoint at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during the test and CTS will spot you. Turn the wheel on this sprawling, 8,656-acre army encampment, and CTS will record your action. Your face and license plate will likely be matched to those on terrorist watch lists. Make a move considered suspicious, and CTS will instantly report you to the authorities.

another article from 2003 summarizes the program overview:

According to contracting documents reviewed by The Associated Press, DARPA plans to award a three-year contract for up to $12 million by Sept. 1. In the first phase, at least 30 cameras would help protect troops at a fixed site. The project would use small $400 stick-on cameras, each linked to a $1,000 personal computer.
In the second phase, at least 100 cameras would be installed in 12 hours to support “military operations in an urban terrain.”
The second-phase software should be able to analyze the video footage and identify “what is normal (behavior), what is not” and discover “links between places, subjects and times of activity,” the contracting documents state.
The program “aspires to build the world’s first multi-camera surveillance system that uses automatic … analysis of live video” to study vehicle movement “and significant events across an extremely large area,” the documents state.
Both configurations will be tested at Ft. Belvoir, Va., south of Washington, then in a foreign city. Walker declined comment on whether Kabul, Afghanistan, or Baghdad, Iraq, might be chosen but says the foreign country’s permission will be obtained.

of course, if that country didn’t/doesn’t have a legitimate govt…

Posted by: b real | May 5 2005 19:37 utc | 24

“But still, I’d like to know more about good and bad information, and about remote commands to the men on the ground (if any such there be)”
alabama, this romote command idea struck me, based on my own experience, as unlikely in the extreme. But I did ask someone with far more extensive and current experience in theater operations at various levels – and who has also managed collection and analysis in the air and on the ground – and the answer was unambiguous: One would never act on a command or tasking coming directly from outside one’s chain of command. “Remote” orders are never given; “remote” orders cannot be accepted and executed. Furthermore, all op orders provide the specific authority, or command origin, of the order in the heading of the order itself – meaning each is verifiable upon receipt and so cannot be issued from an anonymous or dubious entity.
You can make further enquiries and dig around, but I don’t think you’ll find any information to enliven or confirm your suspicion.
I haven’t been able to read the Italian report, but the destruction of duty logs, for instance, could be a most unwelcome reminder of the 1994 gondola incident, in which one or both individuals directly involved were determined (in that particular case, by the DoD) to have destroyed evidence pertinent to the investigation, with the intent to deceive.

Posted by: Pat | May 6 2005 0:34 utc | 25

commentary on Reporters Without Borders’ NED funding & “facade” of accountability while “at the service of governments and the powerful economic and financial interests”

Posted by: b real | May 16 2005 18:35 utc | 26

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