Attack On Palestine Hotel
On the same day as the destruction of the Baghdad bureau of Al Jazeera, a U.S. tank fired a HEAT round at what the U.S. military later claimed was a suspected Iraqi forward artillery observer. Due to what the U.S. states was a communications error, the tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, where approximately 100 international reporters in Baghdad were based, instead of the correct building, killing two journalists, Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Cousa of the Spanish network Telecinco and wounding three other correspondents.
After interviewing "about a dozen reporters who were at the scene, including two embedded journalists who monitored the military radio traffic before and after the shelling occurred" the Committee to Protect Journalists said the facts suggested "that attack on the journalists, while not deliberate, was avoidable." The Committee to Protect Journalists went on to say that "Pentagon officials, as well as commanders on the ground in Baghdad, knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of international journalists and were intent on not hitting it". It is not clear that orders not to fire upon the hotel had actually made it to the tank level. Reporters Without Borders demanded proof from Donald Rumsfeld that incidents "were not deliberate attempts to dissuade the media from reporting." Amnesty International demanded independent investigation.
- see April 8, 2003 journalist deaths by U.S. fire for more detail.
Read more about this topic: Media Coverage Of The Iraq War
Famous quotes containing the words attack on, attack, palestine and/or hotel:
“A great deal of unnecessary worry is indulged in by theatregoers trying to understand what Bernard Shaw means. They are not satisfied to listen to a pleasantly written scene in which three or four clever people say clever things, but they need to purse their lips and scowl a little and debate as to whether Shaw meant the lines to be an attack on monogamy as an institution or a plea for manual training in the public school system.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it; otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
—A.J. (Arthur James)
“...what a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fete, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)