How to Treat Journalists - 101

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
1

So, the bad boys in Iraqi regime don’t know how to treat anyone humanely. The “liberators” will teach the world how to treat the people. Ok. Here is the first test case. Read, and decide.

http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=24644

Western Journalists Beaten, Starved by Americans

Two Western journalists have arrived safely back in Kuwait City after being arrested, beaten up and deprived of food and water in Iraq — by members of the US Army’s military police.

Arab News has learned that Luis Castro and Victor Silva, both reporters working for RTP Portuguese television, were held for four days, had their equipment, vehicle and video tapes confiscated, and were then escorted out of Iraq by the 101st Airborne Division.

Despite possessing the proper “Unilateral Journalist” accreditation issued by the Coalition Forces Central Command, both journalists were detained.

Their ordeal at the hands of the Americans is in stark contrast to that received by Newsday journalists in Baghdad, who yesterday in Jordan described as “humane” their treatment at the hands of their Iraqi interrogators despite suffering various indignities. “I have covered 10 wars in the past six years — in Angola, Afghanistan, Zaire, and East Timor. I have been arrested three times in Africa, but have never been subjected to such treatment or been physically beaten before, ” Castro said in an exclusive interview with Arab News.

“The Americans call themselves liberators and freedom fighters, but look what they have done to us,” he added.

Castro and Silva entered Iraq 10 days ago. They had been to Umm Qasr and Basra and were traveling to Najaf when they were stopped by the military police.

According to Castro, their accredited identification was checked and they were given the all clear to proceed.

“Suddenly, for no reason, the situation changed,” Castro told Arab News. “We were ordered down on the ground by the soldiers. They stepped on our hands and backs and handcuffed us.

“We were put in our own car. The soldiers used our satellite phones to call their families at home. I begged them to allow me to use my own phone to call my family, but they refused. When I protested, they pushed me to the ground and kicked me in the ribs and legs. ”

“I believe the reason we were detained was because we are not embedded with the US forces,” he continued. “Embedded journalists are always escorted by military minders. What they write is controlled and, through them, the military feeds its own version of the facts to the world. When independent journalists such as us come around, we pose a threat because they cannot control what we write.”

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If accurate, then this is pretty shocking.
Incidentally, two other journalists - Dan Scemama of Israel TV’s Channel One and Boaz Bismuth of the Yediot Ahronot daily - have also complained that they were mistreated by the US military.
Surely all four deserve an apology and an explanation.

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"Their ordeal at the hands of the Americans is in stark contrast to that received by Newsday journalists in Baghdad, who yesterday in Jordan described as “humane” their treatment at the hands of their Iraqi interrogators despite suffering various indignities. "

INDIGNITIES?

Are you kidding? The Western Journalists you describe got to listen to Muslims being tortured just yards away from them…

INDIGNITIES?

Read on:

April 03, 2003

Alone but for the screams of the tortured
From Stephen Farrell in Amman

“WE KILL, we kill,” muttered the Iraqi driver of the pick-up truck speeding through the night-time streets of Baghdad bringing his helpless cargo of handcuffed Western journalists to Saddam Hussein’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Thus began the first of eight days in Iraqi captivity for Matt McAllester, a British foreign correspondent, the photographers Moises Saman, Molly Bingham and Johan Spanner, and a peace activist, Philip Latasha, who were seized without warning or explanation from their rooms in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad while covering the war on Iraq.

During the week in which neither families nor friends had any idea of their whereabouts, the terrified quintet sat in adjacent, bare-concrete cells forbidden to talk to each other, their solitude punctuated by the screams of Iraqi prisoners being led away to torture from the cells around them, the thud of anti-aircraft fire and the pounding of US bombs that were exploding uncomfortably close.

Then, after sleepless nights and blindfolded interrogation sessions, they were released as suddenly as they were captured — seemingly after the intercession of Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, and other intermediaries. Yesterday the exhausted group arrived in the Jordanian capital, Amman, where they told for the first time of their capture, ordeal and release.

“I frequently thought we were going to die,” said Mr McAllester, 33, a London-born Scot raised in Edinburgh and now working for the New York Newsday newspaper.

Describing how Iraqi prisoners were in cells across a narrow corridor, Mr McAllester said that he had to turn his back to avoid watching other inmates being dragged away and tortured each night.

“We could hear screams, especially at night,” he said. Unshaven, rib-thin and wearing a crumpled Thomas Pink shirt, he slowly detailed the conditions inside Abu Ghraib, where Amnesty International claims 23 political prisoners, mainly Shia Muslims, have been put to death.

“They were being taken from their cells for a session, or meeting or whatever you want to call it and were being beaten in front of us, a yard or two away from where we were sleeping, with some kind of implement,” he said. “One night one guy was moaning for about an hour and it sounded like they brought a doctor for him.

“I have no idea who was doing it, whether it was the interrogators or the prison guards, but we saw a lot of people inside that prison who had been in there a lot longer than we were and who didn’t have the support network to get them out.”

Latest news & breaking headlines | The Times and The Sunday Times

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Two Western journalists have arrived safely back in Kuwait City after being arrested, beaten up and deprived of food and water in Iraq — by members of the US Army’s military police.

So much for America's moral superiority over others. Obviously these western journalists must have discovered more evidence of American war crimes in Iraq for them to be so beaten up?

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Re: How to Treat Journalists - 101

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Faisal: *

“I believe the reason we were detained was because we are not embedded with the US forces,” he continued. “Embedded journalists are always escorted by military minders. What they write is controlled and, through them, the military feeds its own version of the facts to the world. When independent journalists such as us come around, we pose a threat because they cannot control what we write.”
[/QUOTE]

Yep if they are not in-bedded with the military they pose a danger to pentagon. As all of the in-bedded reporters conversations with ZNN are cleared by the pentagon before going on the air. Thus pentagon is able to use ZNN for their advantage. The independednt reporters obviously pose a threat to the propaganda spewed on ZNN.
I understand Robert Fisk is also in Bad Dad! And he is an independent reporter. Im looking forward to his articles.

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A Most Peculiar Day in Wartime Baghdad
Robert Fisk, The Independent

BAGHDAD, 2 April 2003 — It was a most peculiar day. Overnight, the Americans had pulverized a neo-classical office block next to what was — before a previous pulverization — the Iraqi government’s Department of Air Armaments. Then, just before 10 yesterday morning, an aircraft could be heard diving high over Baghdad and a clap of sound from the other side of the Tigris, along with the usual gray-black column of smoke, signaled the end of another annex belonging to the sons of Saddam. Then came the bus trip.

The Iraqis wanted to take the press to see another example of US and British “imperialist-racist violence” and so we were trucked off to the outskirts of the city, to the campus of what was described as a ladies education college. Campus it was, with agricultural blocks and plant testing fields and a perimeter of palm groves. And the crime against humanity to which we were taken? A large crater in the lawn beside a women’s dormitory, a hundred smashed windows and some broken power lines. A hundred meters away, I found four black and white cows tethered in the grass and, perhaps 30 feet from the crater, a slit trench with sand bags; surely, we told ourselves, an ordinary part of any college campus.

Now let’s be fair. College staff have every right to take their own protection against America’s notoriously inaccurate “smart” bombs. But did they dig the slit trench? Did they park the civilian trucks and buses, scattered around the empty campus, 30 meters from each other and always under the foliage of trees? And if college personnel normally worked the gates, why was the campus guarded by armed and green-uniformed militiamen? The crater was 20 feet deep — the classic cruise missile’s gouge in the ground — and its blast was enormous. Internal doors were torn from their hinges, desks overturned, beds thrown across rooms. But no one was hurt; indeed, the college had been abandoned long before the attacks.

Now fast-forward to a press conference a couple of hours later by the ubiquitous, bespectacled and uniformed minister of information, Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf, who announced casualties in Baghdad for the previous 36 hours of air raids as 125 wounded and 24 dead.

His figures for other governorates were, of course, somewhat less: 18 wounded in Qadisiyah and three dead, in Babylon more than 100 wounded and 18 dead, including nine children in the Hilla district.

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Re: How to Treat Journalists - 101

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Faisal: *
So, the bad boys in Iraqi regime don’t know how to treat anyone humanely. The “liberators” will teach the world how to treat the people. Ok. Here is the first test case. Read, and decide.

http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=24644

Western Journalists Beaten, Starved by Americans

I believe this article was an “exclusive.”

8

Well, I guess just capturing them and beating them wasn't getting the message thru. Today, a coalition tank fired at a hotel in Baghdad where journalists were staying and killed one journalist. Then the coalition aircrafts fired at the Baghdad office of Abu Dhabi Television, killed another journalist. And also fired at Al-Jazeera office in Baghdad, and al-Jazeera is claiming it was deliberate attack.

Source: CNN Headline News live.

Man, these Coalition dudes sure know what they are hitting. And then they come back with the excuse that we were being fired upon from those hotels, where the journalists are staying, so we fired at them in self-defence.

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List of Journalists Killed in Iraq
By The Associated Press
ASSOCIATED PRESS

News organization employees killed in combat situations during the war in Iraq, which began March 20:

  • Tareq Ayoub, Jordanian journalist for Al-Jazeera, Qatar, April 8, at the Al-Jazeera office in Baghdad

  • Kaveh Golestan, Iranian freelance cameraman for the BBC, northern Iraq, April 2

  • Michael Kelly, editor-at-large, The Atlantic Monthly, U.S.A., April 3, near Baghdad

  • Christian Liebig, journalist for Focus weekly, Germany, April 7, south of Baghdad

  • Terry Lloyd, correspondent for Independent Television News, Britain, March 22, southern Iraq

  • Paul Moran, freelance cameraman for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, March 22, northern Iraq

  • Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed, a Kurdish translator working with the BBC, April 6, northern Iraq

  • Julio Anguita Parrado, reporter for El Mundo, Spain, April 7, south of Baghdad

  • Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian television cameraman for Reuters, April 8, at the Palestine hotel in Baghdad

In other deaths, disappearances:

  • Two other Independent Television News journalists, cameraman Fred Nerac of France and translator Hussein Osman of Lebanon, have also been missing since the shooting incident March 22 in southern Iraq in which Terry Lloyd was killed.

  • Reporter David Bloom of NBC News died April 6 from an apparent blood clot while covering the war south of Baghdad.

  • Gaby Rado, a correspondent for Channel 4 News, Britain, died March 30 after apparently falling from a hotel roof in northern Iraq.

  • Marcin Firlej, a reporter for the Polish TVN24 news channel, and Jacek Kaczmarek of Polish state radio were abducted by unidentified men Monday but called in Tuesday to report they had escaped

Bang!

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
.....
INDIGNITIES?

Are you kidding? The Western Journalists you describe got to listen to Muslims being tortured just yards away from them.....

.....
[/QUOTE]

A competition with Iraq, eh?

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I wonder what happened to this French reporter and his interpreter?

Britain and France urged to investigate disappearance of ITN cameraman Fred Nérac and Lebanese colleague.

Reporters Without Borders today called on French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin and British defence minister Geoff Hoon to make a joint investigation into the disappearance in southern Iraq on 22 March of French cameraman Fred Nérac and Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman, both of the British Independent Television News (ITN). “Reporters Without Borders welcomes the decision, even though it has come late, by the British defence ministry to open a criminal enquiry into their disappearance,” said the organisation’s secretary-general, Robert Ménard in a letter to the two ministers. "Nérac is not only French but a citizen of the European Union. As Britain and France work to build that union, it is both legitimate and desirable to have a joint investigation by Britain, which controls southern Iraq, and by France as part of its obligations to French citizens around the world.

“France must demand that its investigators be allowed to work in Iraq, in full cooperation with British colleagues and Britain should not refuse this extra help in the enquiry,” Ménard said. Reporters Without Borders firmly supports the request of Nérac’s wife Fabienne for such a joint enquiry, made to the French government on 28 May, the day the British investigation was announced. Earlier, on 9 May, Hoon had told ITN he could not start an enquiry without proof that a war crime had been committed. ITN, which is making its own investigation in Iraq, has repeatedly asked for help from the British government and for an official enquiry. The US authorities told ITN unofficially on 28 April they would open a military enquiry themselves. The two men were part of a four-member ITN team caught in firing between US Marines and Iraqi forces as they drove towards Basra. Reporter Terry Lloyd was killed and Belgian cameraman Daniel Demoustier was injured. Nérac and Osman disappeared.

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Killed by Iraqi troops Malik?

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I assume the US Army ran out of bullets so just released the two.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by hskhan: *
I assume the US Army ran out of bullets so just released the two.
[/QUOTE]

Most probably, after all the American's are known to tank blast hotels where reporters are staying and kill them, or bomb and kill reporters from Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi tv.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Malik73: *

Most probably, after all the American's are known to tank blast hotels where reporters are staying and kill them, or bomb and kill reporters from Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi tv.
[/QUOTE]

agreed....the americans knew where the aljeezera headquarter was but they still bombebed and killed 1 off thier repoter

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Iraqi media maybe freer than before, but only as free as the US occupation regime will allow it…

**Reporters Without Borders called today for speedy action to replace restrictive media regulations imposed by the US and British forces occupying Iraq with clear and coherent laws. **](Homepage | RSF)

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Baby steps Malik, baby steps.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by underthedome: *
Baby steps Malik, baby steps.
[/QUOTE]

What a colonial mindset. In the meantime I guess the US army will carry on arresting journalists who speak out against the occupation, raid or bomb their offices, or even kill them.