Mr. Zerbisias is very offended!!! ;^)
Nobody drafted these journalists. They weren't ordered by legal authority to go to Iraq. They weren't even recruited with promises of college money. They, more than anyone over there, volunteered. They must, or at least should, have known the dangers of reporting from a war zone.
And I look askance at that number; everyone knows not every journalist reports solely to a newspaper or news channel. If we could determine which ones were enemy agents trying to stage and film propaganda, I'm sure the number would go down.
Never mind that, according to David Gergen, the Harvard professor and former presidential adviser, who moderated the Davos panel on which Jordan made his statements, Jordan was merely refuting the idea that the dead journalists were actually "collateral damage."
He was trying to refute the idea and replace it with ... what? I think we all know. At least, the video knows, and that's not being released.
Consider that Sgrena's car, reportedly 700 metres from the airport, had already cleared other U.S. military checkpoints.
Does Mr. Zerbisias think that once a vehicle passes a checkpoint, it's marked with some kind of invisible ink that soldiers at other checkpoints can see so they just wave it through without searching it again? Ignoring the fact that the contents of the vehicle can change between checkpoints, or previous searches may have missed something? Preposterous.
Although exactly how many bullets remains a mystery since, at last report, when the Associated Press asked to see the car — in which Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari was killed and another official injured — the U.S. military said it didn't know where the thing was.
Yeah, right. No one in the entire US Military knows where the vehicle is. And I bet they actually asked everyone, too. I bet they didn't just ask some flustered 2LT PAO, then spin his answer of, "I don't know at this time," into "No one in the military knows."
A few months later, Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana — a Palestinian who had survived beatings by West Bank settlers and the Israeli army — filmed his own death by U.S. tank. That happened just moments after he had checked in with the troops, providing his coordinates.
No comment on the Palestinian surviving the Israelis. As to "providing his coordinates" moments ago, again ... does Mr. Zerbisias think that the Army has some kind of telepathic chain of command, so that if you provide your coordinates to a headquarters, suddenly every unit, crew, and soldier in the theater knows instantaneously and exactly where you are and adjusts fire to avoid you?
And where can I get this video?
Now I am not suggesting for a second that the U.S. was out to hit Sgrena and the officials who saved her from her kidnappers. But who knows?
I am not suggesting that Mr. Zerbisias is an idiot of the highest order and probably smells bad. But who knows?