THERE have been quite a large number of journalists killed by US forces in Iraq, among them employees of Reuters and other European news agencies.
The US forces sought from the start of the Iraq war to press journalists into being embedded into their ground forces, all the better to try to be able to exercise some control over what they witnessed and what they wrote.
The propaganda war was held to be decisive, and the allies did not want independent agencies interfering with this propaganda war by supplying a dose of the truth.
These embedded reporters were jocularly said to be actually in bed with the occupation armies so keen were the US military to establish the closest relationship.
Those reporters and media agencies that were outside this relationship came in for not a little hostility.
In fact, the agencies whose personnel were the victims of US ‘friendly fire’ have never been able to get satisfactory explanations for the deaths of their employees, or proper investigations into how they were killed by US forces. Both the International Federation of Journalists and the European Federation of Journalists have protested at the failure to adequately investigate how these journalists died.
Among the first journalists to die from US fire in Iraq were Italians killed in the Palestine Hotel, hit by fire from a US tank on a bridge near to the building just before the city fell into US hands.
Also killed by US fire in both Afghanistan and Iraq have been journalists and camera crews employed by the Al Jazeera satellite TV station based in Qatar. In 2001 there was a direct hit on the Al Jazeera’s Kabul office in Afghanistan. In November 2002, Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, was destroyed again by a US missile. In April 2003, an Al Jazeera journalist died when its Baghdad office was struck during a US bombing campaign.
These strikes on Al Jazeera led to a joke that before the Americans invaded a country a primary task for their forces was to locate the Al Jazeera office so that it could be taken out as early as possible.
Now we know that independent news gatherers, especially those like Al Jazeera who looked at the war from an Arab viewpoint, were not only seen as the enemy, but were seen as the enemy to be eliminated.
Yesterday, the Daily Mirror published part of a secret Downing Street document that proved that on April 16th 2004 Bush revealed to Blair that he intended to use US forces to destroy the Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha, the capital of Qatar, a country which was a US ally.
This proposal was too provocative even for Bush’s only ally, and his objections were enough for Bush to scrap the plan, for the moment.
Blair feared that such a strike, in the capital of Qatar a key Western ally in the Gulf, would spark revenge attacks.
Even Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle has remarked that 10 Downing Street ‘ought to clarify what exactly happened on this occasion. If it was the case that President Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera in what is after all a friendly country, it speaks volumes and it raises questions about subsequent attacks that took place on the press that wasn’t embedded with coalition forces.’
It seems that Bush revealed to Blair his policy of how to deal with the ‘anti-American media’, and Blair kept his mouth shut about it, for fear that it would hurt his strategic alliance with US imperialism. Meanwhile, journalists were dying from ‘friendly fire’.
There is no point in demanding another cover up inquiry. The Blair government must be brought down and be replaced by a workers’ government carrying out socialist policies.
