Civil Liberties: Iraq war. IFJ demands inquiry into beating of reporters
01 March 2003
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has demanded an "immediate and full inquiry" into reports that US and British forces in Iraq arrested, beat-up and detained four journalists alleging that they were spies. The reporters, Dan Scemama of Israel's Channel 1, Boaz Bismuth of Yediot Aharonot and Luis Castro and Victor Silva from Portugal's Televisao Portuguesa, were not officially "embedded" with the troops and they were detained by US military police, despite carrying international press cards, as they sheltered from a sandstorm. In an interview with Democracy Now, Dan Scemama described how five US soldiers beat and kicked one the Portuguese journalists, breaking his ribs, after he asked to phone home. The Sindicato do Journalistas, the IFJ affiliate in Portugal, said that "this appears to be an outrageous failure of military discipline, and those responsible must be investigated." Scemama has named an American unit under the command of First Lieutenant Scholl as being responsible for the assault.
The IFJ had earlier warned of the "unacceptable discrimination and restrictions being imposed on journalists covering the war in Iraq when they are not travelling with army units of the United States or Britain." The policy of "embedding"
journalists was the idea of the Pentagon and in the US many embedded journalists were briefed at "boot camps" before the war. While US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has praised their reporting as "historic", critics have pointed out that the journalists are so enmeshed "that it makes it difficult for them to think objectively. If your safety is in the hands of soldiers, you will be unwilling to criticise them." As CBS presenter Dan Rather put it: "There's a pretty fine line between embedded and being entombed". There were 150 reporters embedded with British forces and 660 with US forces. The IFJ believed that reporters "not travelling under the official protection of the military were being forcibly removed" which they described as "unacceptable discrimination against independent journalism".
For many non-embedded journalists Rather's comments are quite literally true. US military sources have finally admitted that they killed the non-embedded ITN reporter, Terry Lloyd, who was the first journalist to die in the conflict on 22 March. US Marines opened fire on his car, despite seeing clearly marked journalist signs, because they feared that the journalists might have been suicide bombers. Two other journalists travelling with Lloyd are "missing". On 8 April a US Abrams tank fired a round at the Reuters office in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, killing two and seriously wounding several others, in an act that US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, described as "justified" but Independent journalist Robert Fisk said was "murder".
On the same day an American aircraft bombed the Al-Jazeera office in Baghdad, despite having been supplied with coordinates and information by the station. The attack occurred shortly after the US condemned the station for reporting on the civilian casualties of bombing raids. "We were targeted because the Americans don't want the world to see the crimes they are committing against the Iraqi people", said Al Jazeera's Baghdad correspondent Majed Abdel Hadi. This was not the first American military attack on al-Jazeera: America bombed the station's office in Kabul in November 2001 and the US assistant secretary of Defence justified the attack, saying "the building we struck was a known al-Qaeda facility". Her opinion was contradicted by the Committee to Protect Journalists which said that the "bureau in Kabul was clearly a civilian object" based in a residential area.
The attacks on Al-Jazeera continued by other means when the station's newly-launched English-language website was hacked during the war on Iraq. Unidentified hackers took down the website and replaced it with "patriotic American images and text". The site was also hit by a "coordin