Interesting article I found,.. I suggest reading the entire piece as a whole.
Anyway, part of the article raises the question as to 'Is the Iraqi war actually over ?, as the 'information war has now been won by the pentegaon, so perhaps it has used this to present an 'earlier' finish of the war, by claiming "clean up operations" as the "military conflict" still taking place...
Quote:
I couldn't help noticing that American war correspondents, just like American soldiers, never die from hostile fire. Sometimes they drown. And sometimes they just drop dead from pulmonary embolisms. And sometimes they do that in rapid succession when they are working in the same area of operations.
A funny thing happened a couple of weeks ago. On Thursday night, a reporter 'embedded' with the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division near Baghdad's international airport, Michael Kelly, reportedly drowned when the Humvee he was riding in took a detour into a river. Two nights later, another reporter 'embedded' with the U.S. Army's Third Infantry Division near Baghdad's international airport, David Bloom, reportedly died suddenly from a blood clot.
Now that's a really good story and all, but I'm not necessarily buying it.
Strangely enough, just two days after Bloom's death, two 'embedded' European journalists, working in roughly the same area of operations, were killed when an Iraqi missile slammed into a command center. Unlike with Bloom and Kelly, the deaths of the two were acknowledged to have been attributable to hostile fire. However, since they weren't 'our' journalists, and no one here noticed their absence, the incident was all but ignored by the U.S. media.
Doesn't anyone in the American media establishment find it unusual that four 'embedded' western reporters were killed in a four-day-period while traveling with 'coalition' forces "on the outskirts of Baghdad'? Why has no one questioned Kelly's drowning, or Bloom's bizarrely timed embolism?
At the time that the four journalists died, the U.S. was claiming that the airport and surrounding areas were firmly in coalition hands. Iraq's Minister of Information, however, amidst guffaws of laughter, was claiming that Iraqi forces were engaged in heated battle with U.S. forces. Some independent reporters agreed.
It occurs to me that, while it is relatively easy to cover up U.S. military casualties, at least in the short term, it isn't so easy to cover up the death of someone who suddenly stops delivering reports from the field. Such deaths have to be acknowledged, though the causes can be misrepresented.
There are reportedly about 600 journalists 'embedded' with 'coalition' troops in Iraq, and approximately 120,000 troops deployed in the country, producing a ratio of approximately 200 soldiers to each journalist. Therefore, if four journalists in the same general theater of operations were killed in action within a four day period, it would tend to indicate that the 'coalition' troops fighting in that area were taking heavy casualties.
In order to cover up that fact, it would be necessary to misrepresent the nature of deaths that cannot be denied.
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the following section contains heaps of links (definetly refer the original article here !!) because I didnt include any ! Quote:
Even before April 8, when the Pentagon decided to expand the 'War on Terrorism' into the 'War on Terrorism and Journalism,' Iraq was a decidedly hostile environment for independent reporters to work in. According to a BBC correspondent, before the war even started, the Pentagon threatened to kill independent reporters.
After the war began, stories surfaced of independent reporters being illegally detained, beaten and starved.
* * insert many links * *
As for the non-independent, 'embedded' reporters, they are firmly under the Pentagon's control. and as an interesting side-note, a Florida appeals court ruled, just a few weeks before the war began, that there was nothing illegal about major news organizations flagrantly lying. The cable news channels seem to have taken that ruling to heart.
At least 11 journalists were killed in the first three weeks of this war. That tally does not, as near as I can tell, include Bloom, since his death is claimed to have been due to natural causes. It also does not include two journalists who have been missing since their vehicles came under fire by 'coalition' forces near Basra in the first week of the war. There were then as many as 14 journalists killed in just three weeks.
Some commentators have tried to explain this away by noting that journalists have always died covering wars. A CNN analyst, for example, attempted to equate this war with Vietnam, where he claimed that 65 journalists lost their lives. Unfortunately, his commentary failed to explain how 65 deaths in a war that spanned a decade is comparable to 11-14 deaths in just 21 days.
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Source:
The Centre for an Informed America - NEWSLETTER #36 April 14, 2003 (War Briefs)