General Brock(sp?) parried the thrust relatively passively, of course. What he should have said was that the U.S. armed forces constitutes the Committee for the Protection of Civilians, of whom journalists are a mere subset.
The journalists who remained in Baghdad to get the other side were courting the same treatment Saddam had accorded schools, mosques, and sacred sites all over Iraq. Their behavior was presumptious, very like the "human shields" who went to Iraq to oppose the coalition. Their presence in a place known a priori to be a target of invasion was an imposition on the ability of coalition soldiers' willingness to place protection of civilians above self-preservation on the battlefield. Their behaivor was a disgrace.