Not Just 'Idiots' Fret Over Deaths
Published on Friday, April 11, 2003 by the Madison Capital Times
"Not Just 'Idiots' Fret Over Deaths"
Editorial
Vice President Dick Cheney showed up at the American Society of Newspaper Editors
convention in New Orleans and treated the assembled journalists like a pack
of embedded reporters.
Cheney informed the editors that they should not be concerned about talk that U.S. forces and their coalition allies might be targeting working journalists in Iraq. "The suggestion that somehow the United States would have deliberately attacked journalists is obviously totally false," said Cheney, as he addressed the international outcry that has arisen over separate incidents this week in which three independent journalists were killed by U.S. fire in Baghdad.
"You'd have to be an idiot to believe that," the vice president said of suggestions that coalition forces might be attacking independent journalists who have not agreed to the constraints accepted by so-called "embedded" journalists.
It turns out that there are a lot of "idiots" in Dick Cheney's world.
Among the people Cheney puts in the "idiot" category are the editor-in-chief of the Reuters news agency, which lost a cameraman when an American tank fired on Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, the base for many media organizations. Geert Linnebank says the incident "raises questions about the judgment of the advancing U.S. troops who have known all along that this hotel is the main base for almost all foreign journalists in Baghdad."
The Committee to Protect Journalists, an international watchdog group that defends press freedoms, has dispatched a letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demanding an investigation. "We believe these attacks violate the Geneva Conventions," the letter said.
Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, who has condemned Iraqi abuses of journalists, is equally concerned about U.S. attacks on the Palestine Hotel and buildings housing two Arab television networks. "We are concerned that attacks on media and journalists, which appear to have been targeted attacks, are in our view crimes of war," he says. "They are violations, grave and serious violations, of international humanitarian law. We believe that they should be subject to proper, intensive, independent international investigation."
Another of Cheney's "idiots" is British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who says he is "very concerned" about the killing of journalists by coalition forces in Iraq. Straw says he is seeking a detailed account of how three specific journalists - two from Reuters and one from the al-Jazeera network - were killed in attacks by U.S. forces in Baghdad.
Dick Cheney says only "idiots" worry about the killing of independent journalists.
In fact, only idiots fail to take concerns about these incidents seriously.
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