reporters are distrusted and shunned (actually, "despised" is the word I heard) by the soldiers they travel with.....for good reason.
"Iraqi police" and their "alleged treatment" of some "free lance" reporters and the response by a coalition press official below -embed or "get out" scenario- comes from CPJ :
Iraqi police openly threaten journalists at news events in an effort to block coverage. When Knight Ridder photographer Allison Long took pictures of police beating a suspect in August, she tells CPJ, a uniformed officer tried to wrench away her camera. When she resisted, a plainclothes officer came up from behind, drew and cocked his gun, and pointed it at her, saying he would kill her. A passing Iraqi government official had to intercede.
In June, I was chased and held at gunpoint after photographing Iraqi police and intelligence agents hitting prisoners. Police dragged me for several blocks before a commander finally ordered my release and apologized.
But the worst example of government attacks on the press happened during this summer's siege at the Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf. At 10:30 p.m. on August 25, dozens of armed police, many of them masked, stormed a Najaf hotel widely used by journalists. Firing warning shots in the lobby and beating down doors to rooms, police forcibly removed some 60 journalists from the Bahr Najaf Hotel and packed them into waiting trucks without explanation.
"After I was put into the truck, one policeman leaned down and told me in Arabic, ‘Now we are going to take you out and kill you. You will all die.' It was a clear attempt to terrify us," freelance photographer Thorne Anderson says.
After being driven in an open truck through a city where major street fighting was continuing, the reporters were herded into a coerced press conference where the chief of police complained about coverage by the Dubai-based news channel Al-Arabiya. The journalists were held for an hour without basis or charge.
The U.S.-led coalition does not counteract such intimidation. One coalition press official privately acknowledges that it wants journalists to embed ( Woodruff was embedded) with its forces or leave Iraq. Otherwise, journalists are on their own. "This is a dangerous combat zone," he says, "and we don't need or want you here."
At least three journalists were killed as a result of fire from U.S. forces, compared with six such deaths in 2004. U.S. forces' fire has killed 13 journalists between March 2003 and the end of 2005 writes CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper.
.....with good reason, we are fighting terrorists; therefore journalists who enter a war zone know what they are walking into..wrong place, wrong time, taking life and death risks..that's life in the fast lane..BEWARE! Our Coalition forces fight for Country; journalists for self, thrill, truth 'the Media way'. Plenty to read at http://www.cpj.org/ by Cooper and/or CPJ.
