The coverage of the WikiLeaks “collateral murder” video continues to send my blood pressure higher and higher. Here is a choice article from AlterNet, in which the author repeats the “This is a horrible war crime” nonsense. A choice quote:
This is definitely not Academy Award winner The Hurt Locker – where American soldiers are selfless heroes and Iraqis are faceless ghosts. This is real life – with American soldiers as video game killers and Iraqis as corpses. These are the kind of heroes who mistake a telephoto lens for an rocket-propelled grenade.
Of course, yet again, no mention in the article of the fact that the insurgents that these Reuters employees were prancing around Baghdad with had REAL RPGs or of the fact that after the grunts arrived on scene they started taking more fire from an abandoned building that had to be blown up. For the author of this article, those are simply inconvenient facts.
The video confirmed a dirty little secret about how the media has covered the Iraq War. Many major news organizations (Reuters, the AP, Time magazine, the networks, etc.) outsourced their reporting responsibilities to Iraqi journalists, many of whom were sympathetic to or actively involved in the insurgency. Does anybody really believe that if those two Iraqi Reuters employees weren’t in bed with an insurgent group that they wouldn’t have been on Al Jazeera begging for their lives or getting their heads chopped off? After the invasion, very few Western journalists embedded for long periods of time with American or other coalition units. If they did, it was only for a couple of weeks at the most. Most of the time, after their first firefight they would pop smoke and head back to the states thinking that they knew everything there was to know about Iraq. We all hear about people like Michael Yon, Michael Ware, and Pat Dollard who stayed in the fight for long periods of time and kept going back but unfortunately they are few and far between.
Most of the time your typical Western journalist would fly into BIAP and stay in the Greenzone or on some big FOB around Baghdad. They would get their stories mostly through Iraqi “fixers” who would bring them photographs, videos, and packaged stories. Probably the most famous example of this is the Time magazine article on the Haditha killings. Tim McGirk, the author of the article, was not in Haditha nor was he even in Anbar province at the time. Instead, he got the bulk of the info for the article from an Iraqi named Taher Thabet, who was part of a group called the Hammurabi Human Rights group. It would come out later that Thabet was a known AQI propagandist who even was suspected by the Marines of helping to film IED attacks on Americans. Did McGirk mention any of this in his article? No, another inconvenient fact for another lazy and bias lamestream media reporter. Of course, Mr. McGirk declined to testify in the hearings on the killings after the Marine Corps revealed these facts.
I believe strongly in a free and independent press and I believe the media has a right to cover American military operations without compromising the integrity of those operations. Sometimes the military makes mistakes and only bad press will make them correct those mistakes (i.e. the debacle with the SEALs in Fallujah). However, the way that many journalists have behaved in their reporting of the Iraq War has been borderline treasonous in my mind. Now before some people jump on me, let me explain what I mean. If you want to go to Iraq and come back and say the war is illegal, immoral or whatever, that is your right. But when you go to a warzone and actively abet an international terrorist group like Al Qaida by hiring its members to do YOUR JOB, that in my mind is treason.
I wonder what Ernie Pyle would think of all this…..
