Article

2004-01-05 Iraq

US Forces In Iraq Come Under Literal, not Figurative, Fire From Alleged Reporters

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Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-01-05 12:04:53 AM|| || Front Page|| [3 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 I'm editorializing in the comments, where it will be easier for Fred to delete; I'm beginning to wonder if we're ever going to actually start holding war crimes trials of people we catch doing things like this. I'm fairly sure it would be within our rights, and I worry that by not doing so, we are lending credence to the idea that they're legitimate. I don't think they are, and I don't think putting on a jacket saying "PRESS" counts as the sort of uniform or distinctive characteristic usually used to define a lawful combatant.

Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-1-5 12:10:56 AM|| [http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com] 2004-1-5 12:10:56 AM|| Front Page Top

#2 The freelancers should be imbedded with troops or imbedded with lead. This is a war zone. The press have no special privelages, only what the military occupation authorities give them.

Posted by Alaska Paul 2004-1-5 12:13:26 AM|| 2004-1-5 12:13:26 AM|| Front Page Top

#3 Salem Uraiby was filming the crash scene from a checkpoint using a camera on a tripod and was wearing a flak jacket marked "press."

Hmmm, al-reuters is hiring fedayeen mutts to work their cameras, huh? Maybe we should take a good hard look at the 'press' out there. Surprising there weren't any frenchies in the 'press pool'. But then they would have surrendered when the troops started shooting back.

Posted by 4thInfVet 2004-1-5 12:17:46 AM|| 2004-1-5 12:17:46 AM|| Front Page Top

#4 3 Reuters reporters, and an AP photog, were killed in an incident in Mogadishu back in 1993. The story is that the four rushed to the scene of an American missile attack on a Somali clan meeting and were torn to pieces by an enraged mob of Somalis.
Al Reuters already had a pronounced anti-American slant even then, and I have heard rumors from GIs and Italian Carabinieri that certain reporters were suspected of serving as lookouts and moles for the clan forces.
There was a lot of this kind of speculation after the massacre of 34 Pakistani soldiers on June 25, with whispered accusations that certain reporters had advance knowledge of the planned ambushes and even that they helped set it up, in the hope that American or Italian peacekeepers would be the victims.

Certain media were well-placed enough(remarkably so, in fact) to get some very gruesome video of the aftermath, but it exceeded their apparent expectations in being too graphic to air. (I posted about the Italian accounts of this after the car-bomb attack on the Carabinieri contingent in Iraq a few weeks ago.)

The only eyewitness account of the demise of the 4 reporters a couple of months later came from their driver.
An Italian photog who had followed them got away safely, but did not actually see the attack on the other 4.
No Somali has ever come forward to claim that the 4 were actually killed by the mob.

All we really know is that the 4 went to the scene without escort, their driver bugged out, and the bodies turned up later several miles away.

The incident was regarded as a tragic anomaly, since mobs in Somalia, like crazed killers everywhere, know who is on their side and will not commonly attack reporters.
I am beginning to wonder....

Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2004-1-5 2:14:24 AM|| 2004-1-5 2:14:24 AM|| Front Page Top

#5 "Real, not literal"?

Does a person need to be Greek in order to speak proper English? :-)

Posted by Aris Katsaris 2004-1-5 2:14:28 AM|| 2004-1-5 2:14:28 AM|| Front Page Top

#6 AC, there was a documentary that I saw about a photographer who was killed by a Somali mob in Mogadishu in 1993. Could be the same incident that you mention. What happened was that the photographer took a close-up picture of a dead Somali as he (or she) was being carried out from the building. A family (clan?) member took offence and all hell broke loose. I'm going to try to find the details about this documentary.

Posted by RW2004 2004-1-5 2:38:17 AM|| 2004-1-5 2:38:17 AM|| Front Page Top

#7 No, Aris. Does a person need to be European to make a bigoted generalization from a single statement by one person?

Posted by Atomic Conspiracy 2004-1-5 2:46:59 AM|| 2004-1-5 2:46:59 AM|| Front Page Top

#8 AC> Chill, dude. Notice the smiley and stuff?

Posted by Aris Katsaris 2004-1-5 2:51:01 AM|| 2004-1-5 2:51:01 AM|| Front Page Top

#9 The documentary was called Dying To Tell The Story (1997) and the reporter was Dan Eldon. All four were stoned to death by the mob. Ouch.

Posted by RW2004 2004-1-5 2:56:01 AM|| 2004-1-5 2:56:01 AM|| Front Page Top

#10 First, kill all the journalists.

Posted by someone 2004-1-5 3:22:50 AM|| 2004-1-5 3:22:50 AM|| Front Page Top

#11 OOps, I guess I made a mistake. I didn't mean it as a joke, in fact, I rewrote the subject four or five times in hopes of making it look less like a joke. If Fred's reading this far and it's possible, could the subject be changed to "Literal, not Figurative" instead of "Real, not Literal"? Thanks.

Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-1-5 10:27:15 AM|| [http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com] 2004-1-5 10:27:15 AM|| Front Page Top

#12 Mr 4thInfvet

Your comment is so stupid, arrogant, ignorant and racist (even if the French are not a race) that you could pass for a French. I am proposing you for honorary French citizenship.

Posted by JFM 2004-1-5 1:04:13 PM|| 2004-1-5 1:04:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#13 Acutally, JFM, 4thIV isn't far wrong--the French journos have gotten some "scoops" in Iraq that wouldn't have been possible if they weren't virtually helping the "insurgents."

And this incident is totally believable to me after that al-Rooters photog Mazen Dana, who declared himself to be a "Palestinian" and who had a history of tangling with the IDF in the Paleostinian territories, got shot by US troops in Iraq because they "accidentally" thought he was helping the bad guys.
Al-Rooters still carries a memorial tribute to him on the webpage of every news story.

Posted by Jennie Taliaferro 2004-1-5 5:08:56 PM|| [http://www.greatestjeneration.com] 2004-1-5 5:08:56 PM|| Front Page Top

#14 Mrs (or is it Miss?) Talaferro

My grip was about the "surrendering as soon as the troops started shooting back". I would suggest to him he reads a good book about the battle of France (who was lost by the generals not by the soldiers), a couple articles about 3 july 1940 at Mers-el-Kebir, another one on the period 1789-1815, another one on WWI and, in order to unswollen his head, read something about Chatanooga, Task Force Smith, George Washington's early life and last but not least, meditate about Kasserine and what would have happenned if the US army had taken the full impact of the Blitzkrieg two years before (ie without the lessons learned in the interval).

Now let's be clear: the French society is gangrenated by leftism and pacifism so I don't believe in its capability to mass-produce heroes. However judging individuals by their nationality or race is... And this is a present (ie 2003) condition. It has nothing to do with 1940 and is not limited to France: it is still worse in Germany and Spain.

The kind of untasteful jokes he makes about surrendering French is of the same kind than the untasteful and racist hate speech in France towrds Americans. That is why I persist in nominating him a honorary French.

BTW I see nowhere in the article that the journalists or the paper employing them were French. About the apaper who filmed the crew who tried to down a DHL plane, I would have been suspicious if it had been employed by "Le Monde" (aka Al-Jazeera-on-Seine) or Liberation (aka Propaganda Staffel but my own nick-names are Occupation and Petainisation) but Paris-Match is, AFAIK but I haven't read it in years, a strictly apolitical, amoral and sensationalistic paper. The day the Americans will show a Moab impacting on bin Laden's skull Paris-Match will be the first to publish the photos

Posted by JFM 2004-1-5 5:48:00 PM|| 2004-1-5 5:48:00 PM|| Front Page Top

#15 JFM, I have spent major time in Paris and spoken French since I was 6, but I still consider them an enemy now.
There may be a few instances of their "bravery" in the past and even as recently as WWII, but don't ask the British about Dunkirk, or ask about how many French Jews ended up in Nazi death camps, or even why the US ended up in Vietnam after the French pulled out (after being slaughtered at Dien Bien Thu).
The point is that France betrayed their friendship with the Anglosphere by their actions in the UN last spring, even though they needed liberating themselves in 1944.
(It's Chirac who's invited the Germans to the D-Day commemoration ceremony, for G-d's sake!)
French journalists have aligned themselves with the terrorist bad guys in Iraq supposedly to "get the story."
Several times they've succeeded in covering up stories when "Made in France" weapons were found, too.
I'm convinced that France wouldn't support us in the UN because Jacques ChIRAQ is in it up to his neck with every Muslim tyranny in the Middle East--Iraq, Iran, Syria, "Palestine," and possibly even Saudi Arabia.

Posted by Jennie Taliaferro 2004-1-5 6:08:25 PM|| [http://www.greatestjeneration.com] 2004-1-5 6:08:25 PM|| Front Page Top

#16 JFM My second YUT is spending his junior year in Paris... (In the US dorm..). He likes it, I listen to his waywardness. I laugh. He constantly wants soap.. but so what... LOL. I'm slowly changing my mind. My wife just came back with photos that were just damn stunning... Paris looks good in winter. Say Laveee yawl.

Posted by Shipman 2004-1-5 6:37:11 PM|| 2004-1-5 6:37:11 PM|| Front Page Top

#17 Ahhh, french pride rears it's pointy head.

I stand by it. You don't like it? Too bad, france has earned every bit of scorn that gets piled upon them. At least the Brits got up off the mat and fought back. The french have been hostile to the U.S. since the minute the ink dried on the German treaty (if not the moment Grandpa liberated them). Kicking out NATO, shouting "non!" as foreign policy, not letting the F-111s fly over to Libya, getting in bed with terrorists nd dictators. The list of french perfidies is long and shameful. You don't like it? Make changes at home.

But of course I am only an uncultured American slob, right? I can't believe a frenchie is lecturing about arrogance and racism.

Posted by 4thInfVet 2004-1-5 6:43:13 PM|| 2004-1-5 6:43:13 PM|| Front Page Top

#18 Times like this is when a Mad Greek is handy... Hey Aris you out there? Say something we can all be angry with. :)

Posted by Shipman 2004-1-5 7:14:00 PM|| 2004-1-5 7:14:00 PM|| Front Page Top

#19 Guys, you're comparing apples and oranges. Chiraq and his ilk are elitist politicians scheming against everything American. JFM is proof himself that not every Frenchman subscribes to Chiraq's politics. Also, checkout the caption underneath the photo here.

Posted by RW2004 2004-1-5 9:48:52 PM|| 2004-1-5 9:48:52 PM|| Front Page Top

#20 Gay Paree isn't all of La Belle France. Not even all of Paris is. I enjoyed most of the time I spent in France, and I confess to liking most of the Frenchies I know.

I went to the 275th anniversary party of Fredericksburg, VA, a couple months ago. The guest of honor was the French deputy military attache. He read from a diary that one of his ancestors had kept, recording his participation under Rochambeau in the battle of Yorktown. We've been friends for a very long time, whether we've agreed or not. Keep in mind that a few years later it was a tossup as to whether we'd go to war with Britain or France. Lafayette barely escaped with his life from France a few years after distinguishing himself as a friend of liberty here.

France is not always right, and under people like Chirac she's usually wrong. There's much silliness that passes for sophisticated thought - but we can't point the finger too vigorously because we have Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky. Think of France as a country governed by the first cousins of our own fifth column. They produced Zola, who had the nerve and the eloquence to defend Dreyfus; they also produced the evil Zola was defending him from; and they produced Dreyfus himself, a nonentity who would have gone unremarked, an entry in a birth registry and a name on a headstone, without his enemies and his defenders. Pretty much the same situation still remains today.

Posted by Fred 2004-1-5 11:11:29 PM|| 2004-1-5 11:11:29 PM|| Front Page Top

#21 Fred, the point I was trying to make--which I guess you missed, too--was that before last year, I was as big a Francophone as you'd hope to meet.
Often I was the only person defending them in a normal crowd.
I firmly believe the time for looking fondly at France, via our reverence for humanity's greats like Lafayette and Zola, is long past.
(I was in France doing my Master's thesis on Art History so I know about the best French minds, also.)
What we're discussing now is "What has France done for us lately?" (or to us, I should say.)
Big Time Perfidy.
And it's not just the government, as you should know.
Polls and recent news accounts of the French people show that they dislike Bush intensely, think Jews and the Mossad and/or Bush were responsible for 9/11, have sided with Islamists in the WOT every time, including the PA, and have tried to amass an extra-NATO force against us in Europe.
And we're not through.
This article was about their journalists following the lead of their politicians and aiding and abetting terrorism and perhaps actually trying to kill our soldiers under the guise of newsgathering.
Why can't we stay on message?
I do NOT appreciate being lectured about how fine and respected the French "if only I weren't too ignorant to realize it" are at this stage of the game and the war!
If you feel the need to denegrate my contribution ("Gay Paree isn't all of La Belle France."), perhaps I shouldn't post in your forum any more.

Posted by JenLArt 2004-1-5 11:32:48 PM|| [http://www.greatestjeneration.com] 2004-1-5 11:32:48 PM|| Front Page Top

#22 P.S. There wouldn't have needed to be an article called "J'accuse" by Zola if there hadn't been a Dreyfuss case, which was emblematic of deep-seated French Anti-Semitism.
Clearly, that hatred of Jews is still alive and well in France today, given not only their ambiguous (to put it politely) stand on our War on Terrorism, but the increased attacks on Jews in France since the start of the Intifada and the 9/11 attacks.
And I forgot to add that France has yet to pony up any money or troops for the Coalition efforts in Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else (although James Baker did get an IOU), being too busy tending their own unilateral colonial ambitions in Ivory Coast, the Congo and Central African Republic.

Posted by Jennie Taliaferro 2004-1-5 11:47:46 PM|| [http://www.greatestjeneration.com] 2004-1-5 11:47:46 PM|| Front Page Top

#23 Jen, while I'm as unhappy with French behavior as the next rabid blogger, if not more so, I think we need to be concentrating on finding ways of deprogramming the French from their biased media (see here for more info) and propaganda rather than getting together to sink to their level and hold five minute hates of our own. I said what I said earlier about the reporters because I wanted them tried publically for their actions. I don't care if they're French, Dutch, or Americans. (Now I'm going to hit the 'post' button, as if anyone's still reading this thread...)

Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-1-6 12:10:13 AM|| [http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com] 2004-1-6 12:10:13 AM|| Front Page Top

#24 Thanks for your reasoned reply, Phil. And I agree.
My replies above were mainly for our Webmaster here whom I felt was unnecessarily taking me to task for my alleged Francophobia.
I like the French fine, but I'm not buying another Chanel bag or going back to "Gay Paree" anytime soon.
My "5-minute-hate" of France is based on lots of solid reasons, which I didn't go into in detail because our space here is limited and I assumed that most participants were fully conversant with those reasons themselves, given the tenor of newstories and comments on here (See Hijab story above for examples).
Courage, mon brave!
You're right about the collaborating journalists--aiding and abetting should be a war crime, if it gets our soldiers hurt or killed.

Posted by Jennie Taliaferro 2004-1-6 12:21:11 AM|| [http://www.greatestjeneration.com] 2004-1-6 12:21:11 AM|| Front Page Top

#25 Actually, if you're going to mention the recent regulations in France re: the hijab, I don't approve of it; I don't necessarily approve of the hijab itself either, but I am worried that it's a symbolic action they're taking to pretend they're actually doing something, when they're not. I've sent longer rants on the subject to other people, that I should probably turn into a 'blog post; if you want me to, I'll email it to you.

Posted by Phil Fraering 2004-1-6 12:52:21 AM|| [http://newsfromthefridge.typepad.com] 2004-1-6 12:52:21 AM|| Front Page Top

02:25 Anonymous
00:52 Phil Fraering
00:21 Jennie Taliaferro
00:10 Phil Fraering
23:47 Jennie Taliaferro
23:38 Anonymous
23:32 JenLArt
23:32 Lucky
23:28 Lucky
23:15 Lucky
23:11 Fred
23:04 El Id
23:03 War46
22:39 Steve White
22:25 Fred
22:20 Fred
22:13 Fred
22:04 Carl in NH
21:57 Alan Sullivan
21:57 Pedantic Carl in NH
21:54 Super Hose
21:50 Super Hose
21:48 RW2004
21:45 tu3031