Red Rag

A week into the war and I’m already sick of watching the news. But here are some interesting stories I’ve come across recently:

American troops don’t like journalists (part 1):

The BBC was anxious to find out how it was that its correspondent William Reeve, who had just re-opened the corporation’s studio in Kabul and was giving a live, down-the-line TV interview for BBC World, was suddenly blown out of his seat by an American smart missile. The studio was showered with shrapnel but he was not hurt.

Four hours later, a few blocks away, the office and residential compound of al-Jazeera, which had broadcast the Osama bin Laden tapes, was hit by two more American missiles. German ARD and ZDF, Turkish television, the ABC and Reuters had been using the al-Jazeera office to feed material back to their headquarters but fortunately no one was there at the time.

With the Bush administration already gearing up for war on Iraq, the BBC, al-Jazeera and the US Committee to Protect Journalists thought it prudent to find out from the Pentagon what had gone wrong and what steps they could take in the event of another war to protect their correspondents. What they learnt alarmed them.

Basically, nothing had gone wrong. It had been deliberate. The Pentagon explained that it was indifferent to media activity in territory controlled by the enemy, that it made no effort to distinguish between legitimate satellite uplinks for broadcast news communications and enemy radio or satellite communications.

American troops don’t like journalists (part 2):

US troops in southern Iraq detained and beat up two public RTP television journalists from Portugal travelling in the company of two Israeli colleagues after accusing the four of spying, the RTP news director said today.

… “The American soldiers said we were terrorists and spies and treated us as such … in spite of our explanations they threatened us for hours with their arms,” said Scemama.

The Americans can’t pretend they accidentally bombed a busy marketplace last week — they’ve done it again. It seems like minimising civilian casualties takes too long, so they’ve given up that approach:

At least 52 people were killed and dozens injured when a working class suburb of Baghdad was hit by an explosion last night. The blast appeared to be the result of a second American attack on a Baghdad marketplace since Wednesday when 14 people were killed…

America’s target in last night’s attack was not immediately clear. The Shawala neighbourhood, a collection of mean, one-storey houses, lies at the southern extremes of Baghdad, far removed from the security installations and grotesque palaces of Saddam Hussein that have been the primary targets of US bombs.

But in recent days, as the US has settled into a pattern of round-the-clock bombardments, it has increasingly targeted residential neighbourhoods of Baghdad, as well as the civilian infrastructure.

Penultimately, the Americans want a puppet government in Iraq, but they want somebody else to look after the human cost of the war:

The United States clearly wants to have political control over what happens in a new Iraq, experts say… [T]hey would like to see a government in Iraq friendly to American interests. At a recent briefing, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: “We didn’t take on this huge burden with our coalition partners not to be able to have a significant, dominating control over how it unfolds in the future.”

… The plan also calls for a U.N. coordinator for humanitarian aid.

The UN has thankfully put aside irresponsible French and Russian objections to recommence the oil-for-food program. But it also points out that America’s plan — to take political control of Iraq and let other people deal with the humanitarian problems — is illegal:

The UN Security Council has voted unanimously to resume a massive UN humanitarian program for Iraq once the US-led war subsides.

… While the oil-for-food program will remain a cornerstone of the humanitarian lifeline for Iraq, the resolution makes clear that under the Geneva Conventions “the occupying power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population”.

It seems the US has begun to ignore the people it claims to be fighting to liberate. It is up to us, the global citizenry, to remind them of their responsibilities.