BY NORM DIXON
The international journalists' rights group Reporters Without Borders on April 8 called on US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld to provide evidence that the offices of the pan-Arab TV station al Jazeera and the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad were not deliberately fired on by US invasion forces earlier that day. The attacks killed three journalists. Three others were wounded.
General Buford Blount, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, claimed: "The tank was receiving fire from the hotel, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire, and engaged with one tank round. The firing stopped."
However, Reporters Without Borders' secretary-general Robert Menard said that US claims that shots were being fired from the Palestine Hotel were untrue. "Film shot by the French TV station France 3, and descriptions by journalists, show the neighbourhood was very quiet at that hour and that the US tank crew took their time, waiting for a couple of minutes and adjusting its gun before opening fire", he said.
The TV France journalist and editor who filmed the attack, Herve de Ploeg, said: "I did not hear any shots in the direction of the tank, which was stationed at the west entrance of the al Jumhuriya bridge, 600 metres north-west of the hotel.
The film shows the tank's turret is moving toward the Palestine Hotel, the gun carriage lifting and waiting at least two minutes before opening fire. "It was not a case of instinctive firing", de Ploeg said.
"This evidence does not match the US version of an attack in self- defence and we can only conclude that the US army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists. US forces must prove that the incident was not a deliberate attack to dissuade or prevent journalists from continuing to report on what is happening in Baghdad", Menard said.
"We are concerned at the US army's increasingly hostile attitude towards journalists, especially those not 'embedded' in its military units. Army officials have also remained deplorably silent and have refused to give any details about what happened when a British ITN TV crew was fired on [by "coalition" troops] near Basra on March 22, killing one journalist and leaving two others missing."
Al Jazeera camera operator Tarek Ayoub was also killed earlier on April 8, when the Baghdad offices of the Arab TV station were bombed by US warplanes. Reporters Without Borders expressed outrage at the attack, which also damaged the nearby premises of Abu Dhabi TV.
Menard, in a letter to General Tommy Franks, commander of US military operations in Iraq, noted: "To ensure the safety of its journalists, al Jazeera's management has been careful to inform the Americans of the exact location of its crews right from the start of the war. The US army cannot therefore claim it did not know where the Baghdad offices were.
"Did [US forces] at least warn the journalists about an imminent bombing?", Menard asked.
An al Jazeera journalist who was in Baghdad until a few days before the attack told Reporters Without Borders that "it could not have been a mistake. We've told the Pentagon where all our offices are in Iraq and hung giant banners outside them saying 'TV'."
One of al Jazeera's vehicles, which was clearly marked, came under fire from US forces on a motorway near Baghdad on April 7. The station said its office in Basra was shelled on April 2.
Four members of the al Jazeera crew in Basra, the only journalists inside the city, were fired at by British tanks on March 29 as they were filming the distribution of food by Iraqi government officials. One of the station's camera operators, Akil Abdel Reda, went missing and was later found to have been held for 12 hours by US troops.
The al Jazeera offices in Kabul were bombed by US forces during the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in November 2001. Reporters Without Borders asked US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the time for an explanation of the attack. It got no answer.
Respected British journalist Robert Fisk, writing from Baghdad, asked on April 9: "Was it possible to believe [the April 8] attacks were accidents? Or was it possible that the right word for these killings — the first with a jet aircraft, the second with an M1A1 Abrams tank — was murder?... So the facts should speak for themselves. Unfortunately for the Americans, they make it look very like murder."
[Visit Reporters Without Borders web site at <http://www.rsf.org/>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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