Are journalists being targeted in Middle East war zones?

[NNN0LHI]

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2003/08/20/photographer/

The "unconscionable" death of Mazen Dana

Are journalists being targeted in Middle East war zones? To a colleague of the slain Reuters cameraman, it sure seems that way.

By Laura McClure

Aug 20, 2003 | On Aug. 17, Palestinian cameraman Mazen Dana became the second Reuters journalist to be killed by U.S. soldiers since the start of the Iraq war in March. Dana, who had been filming outside a U.S.-controlled prison in Baghdad following the death of six Iraqis the previous day, was fatally shot through the chest when an American tank crew mistook his camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and opened fire. The American military has called the incident "a terrible mistake" and promised to investigate, but some observers now speculate that the shooting was reckless, at best.

"From the eyewitness accounts, it appears that Dana was fired on without warning," wrote the Committee to Protect Journalists in an open letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "He was filming in an area where no hostilities were taking place, raising questions about whether U.S. troops acted recklessly in targeting him."

For Mazen Dana, it would not have been the first time he was targeted by soldiers while filming a war; as a Palestinian reporter covering the intifada in the West Bank town of Hebron for Reuters, he was deliberately shot at by Israeli troops so often that Reuters eventually sent him to Baghdad for what was considered to be a safer assignment. It was a decision that pleased his wife and four children, who remained in Hebron. "Nobody could believe that now he was going to die doing a job somewhere else," says Canadian journalist Patricia Naylor, who reported and produced a "Frontline/World" documentary in March about Dana and other targeted cameramen in the West Bank.

Coming just five days after the partial release of an investigation into the April 8 shelling by U.S. troops of the journalist-stuffed Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, Dana's death has sparked new questions on whether U.S. soldiers are also targeting journalists. Five journalists have died due to American fire, accounting for one-third of the journalists killed in the war thus far. Whatever the investigations may have yielded, the lessons learned were not sufficient to prevent Dana's death.

[stray cat]

1. Absolutely Afghani groups have killed and kidnapped journalists

lets condemn anyone targeting journalists

[hack89]

2. Anything more current than 2003? nt

[malaise]

3. Who do you hate the West?

Don't you know 'freedom of the press' means the right of Western journalists to spew their propaganda and go anywhere they wish? :sarcasm:

[ellenfl]

4. i don't think it's the propaganda spewers who are being targeted by the west. eom