In Bed With the Pentagon

Charles Glass, of ABC News, wrote an article for Pat Buchanan's American Conservative ( 6-16-03). It is a shame that it is not online because it really is a shocking piece of work.

Here are some choice bits:

"It turns out, as the BBC showed recently, that her rescuers broke into a Nasiriya hospital firing blanks and video cameras at ... well, at no one apart from frightened hospital staff and patients."

"It is, I suppose, our fault. Most of us who covered the war for American and British media worked within the Pentagon's terms of reference. Our minds were embedded in its brand of patriotism long before our bodies were embedded with the troops. Correspondents of Quatar's al-Jazeera, Abu Dhabi Television , and France's TF-1 may have come to a place called Iraq, as we did. But they did not see triumph and glory. They saw something squalid and cruel."

"But the U.S. bombed al-Jazeera's Baghdad bureau on April 8, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub and wounding other staff. A half hour later, the U.S. dropped a bomb on Abu Dhabi TV in Baghdad. Later the same day, a U.S. tank blasted away the Reuters office in Baghdad's PalestineHotel, killing two journalists. American officers justified their actions with the claim that rockets and small arms were fired from the hotel. David Chater of Britain's Sky TV and other western reporters, all of whom had moved from the Rasheed Hotel after Pentagon warnings that it could be a U. S. target, said they neither saw nor heard any firing from the Palestine hotel."

"The Bush administration made it clear from the time it decided on war that reporters outside the embed system would not be safe in Iraq."
So here is one of ABC's top reporters who convincingly shows himself to be: ignorant and gullible for buying the BBC story about the special ops firing blanks; arrogant for thinking that US combat troops should take special care to note where unembedded journalists are so they don't hurt them; and vicerally anti-military since he agrees that "squalid and cruel" better describes the war in Iraq than "triumph and glory."

It really is no wonder so many Americans distrust and dislike journalists.