Troubling
Why is the US Army using journalists for target practice in Iraq?
by Aaron Glantz
It’s time the U.S. military stopped shooting journalists.
In the last three weeks, the American soldiers have killed at least four journalists in Iraq – each while the reporter was driving his car.
Two of the cases are especially telling.
There is the case of Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi correspondent for Knight-Ridder newspapers. He was driving alone in his own West Baghdad neighborhood when an American sniper’s bullet pierced his windshield and struck him in the head as he approached a U.S. military patrol.
Four days later, a news producer for Iraq’s independent (that is not controlled by the occupation) TV-station, al-Sharqiyah, was shot to death as he drove to his in-laws home in Southern Baghdad. The Associated Press reports U.S. soldiers fired on his car fifteen times when he failed to pull over for an American convoy.
Those killings, plus the shooting death of a Baghdad TV editor and a stringer for a Western news agency bring the total number of journalists killed by U.S. forces in Iraq to 17 according to the International Federation of Journalists.
So much for freedom of speech and democracy. </i>
