"Unfriendly Fire" Excerpts from the April 11, 2003 Editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer©2003 www.inq7.net all rights reserved For voicing out his honest opinion about the way the US-led war against Iraq was going, veteran war correspondent Peter Arnett lost his job -- two jobs, in fact. The winner of journalism's most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize, for his reportage on the Vietnam War was sacked by both MSNBC and ABC for saying on Iraqi TV that the United States might have underestimated the determination of Iraqi forces.

At least a dozen other journalists of various nationalities were not as lucky. They died while covering the three-week-old war -- some by accident, like Gaby Rado of British TC channel 4 who fell from the roof of his hotel, others by "friendly" and not-so-friendly fire.

The three deaths resulting from what looked like a direct attack on journalists came at the hands of American forces. In the first attack, a US air-to-surface missile struck the offices of Al-Jazeera in Baghdad Tuesday, killing reporter Tareq Ayub and wounding a cameraman. In the second attack, a US tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, killing correspondent Jose Couso of Spanish TV and cameraman Taras Protsyuk of Reuters.

US military spokesmen, who are fond of showing the precision of US missile attacks, have not explained how one of their smart bombs landed on the offices of Al-Jazeera. But the Abu Dhabi-based network has earned some renown or notoriety (depending on which side one is on) by playing tapes of Osama bin Laden and more recently the civilian casualties of America's war. Did this emphasis or bias make the network an enemy and therefore a legitimate target in the eyes of US decision-makers?

Granted the Jazeera bombing was an accident, there is very little doubt that journalists were the targets of the attack on the Palestine Hotel. The place is known even to readers of US newsmagazines as the base of most journalists covering the war from Baghdad. It's impossible for US military intelligence not to have known that.

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