U.S. troops said they mistook his camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and opened fire. Dana was gutsy, but not a crazy risk taker. His killing highlights the persistent miscommunication between the military and the press and it has prompted renewed demands for further investigations into several other journalists’ deaths in Iraq.
Photographers and cameramen–and a few women–take the biggest risks in this business. If they miss the shot, they miss the story. Reuters lost another cameraman, Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian, during the height of the war. He was killed at the Palestine Hotel on April 8 in Baghdad along with Spanish television’s Jose Couso when U.S. troops again opened fire. Dana’s death this week brings the total to 17 reporters killed and two missing in Iraq since the war began. “Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist today,” says Joel Campagna, senior program coordinator for the Middle East at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which is calling for a full investigation into Dana’s death as well as a better explanation of the April killings at the Palestine Hotel.
While U.S. officials in Iraq called Dana’s death a “tragic accident,” there is also a sense in the military that reporters take huge risks and then blame others when danger hits home. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but Mr. Mazen [sic] has been taking chances for a long time,” explains Army Sgt. Maj. Lewis Matson at U.S. Central Command, which has promised an investigation into Dana’s death. Matson has a son who has been in Iraq for seven months and he knows how sketchy it can get. “I want his finger on that trigger,” Matson says. “You have no idea what it’s like when you are there and bullets are flying at you.”
He’s right. I have no idea. I covered the war from Central Command in Doha, Qatar, where I was “enfeatherbedded” at the Sheraton Hotel every night. But I can imagine that some young, scared soldier at the prison really thought Dana had an RPG and that he had only seconds to take him out. I don’t buy the conspiracy theories that some journalists were targeted–the military isn’t that organized. Many reporters at the Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera believe that their Baghdad office was bombed in retaliation for unfavorable coverage. U.S. officials called the Al-Jazeera bombing “a grave mistake” but the military did not launch an investigation. They did, however, do a so-called “after-action review” on the Palestine Hotel incident. I think a lot of their findings are completely credible. Soldiers on the ground said they had no idea that it was a press hotel and that they took action because they thought they were being fired on from the building. Even if they did know about the hotel’s guest list, the soldiers were more worried about getting shot at than accidentally shooting a reporter. But with all the U.S. military’s sophisticated technology and advanced communications there must be a better way to protect journalists–even those taking big chances ultimately at their own risk.
The Palestine Hotel shootings should be a case study for reporters and soldiers alike. As the A Company armored division rolled into Baghdad ahead of schedule on April 8, photographers and cameramen at the Palestine started shooting from their balconies–film not bullets. But to the soldiers, the flashes of light from the clicking cameras may have looked like enemy fire. They had reason to believe that it was. Two men had already been hit. According to a Central Command investigation on the incident released (in part) this month, “The enemy was operating throughout the civilian areas of the city, firing a spectrum of weapons at Coalition forces from the roofs and windows of surrounding buildings.” Initially, our briefer at CENTCOM claimed that the troops had been fired upon from the Palestine. Reporters at the hotel all vehemently denied it, and the released version of the report makes no mention of that original claim.
The A Company commander had also told his team to be on the lookout for an enemy spotter. They were monitoring transmissions from a captured enemy radio and knew that the spotter was calling in strikes. “A Company personnel observed what they believed to be a enemy hunter/killer team on the balcony of a room on the upper floors of a large, tan-colored building,” the report says. They aimed their tank and shot. Whether they hit the team they were looking for or the two cameramen is unclear. But the report says firing from the surrounding area soon ceased. “It was only some time after the incident that A Company became aware of the fact that the building they fired on was the Palestine Hotel and that journalists at the hotel had been killed,” the report says.
Right after the shooting, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised the Spanish government that there would be an investigation. One of our few staunch allies in the war, Spain deserved an explanation, not to mention the Ukraine. But the Spanish government has expressed its “dissatisfaction” with CENTCOM’s report and the Ukrainian government is considering calling for a fuller investigation. The unanswered question is why, if soldiers were given the coordinates of archeological sites and hospitals and told not to fire upon them, were they not warned about the press corps presence at that particular location? “A lot of details need to come out to gain a full understanding,” says the CPJ’s Campagna, who has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the classified portions of the report.
It comes down to this: should the military be in the business of protecting journalists? Most say no. During the war, the military had little but contempt for the “unilaterals”–journalists who were not embedded but in the war zone independently. Like Matson said, they took their chances. Still, the military can and should do better. Even for crass public-relations reasons, killing a journalist makes the military look careless. People wonder, if they are killing reporters, how many innocent civilians who don’t have people writing columns about them have been killed?
