as you play. a. guitar sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear sees some other part of it and realize everything you thought. i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture. led mission and free accreditation free in-store charges free arrangement the free. three stooges free.

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the two thousand and three war in iraq was the bloodiest of the last decades almost one million soldiers and civilians were killed and four and a half million iraqis became refugees. a war trying thousands of journalists and media personal complete load with. a war that was broadcast live or around the globe. or complexity in the fust time tensely and insist that the put me again. after eighteen days of war u.s.

forces into baghdad without encountering any particular resistance more than one hundred journalists and media workers covering the war from the iraqi capital are staying at palestine hotel. the whole world had the feeling that the day would be an important day a critical day for the war in iraq. the marines and the u.s. army were so close to the hotel we could almost see their eyes still so hoarse. a medium i hear there on the local time i went out on the balcony and it was a very calm on and on and on shots were being had from a long distance away and that's why i was on that balcony because i realized i wasn't in any danger by being there on that balcony looking over the city so that you know. algebra a bridge just four hundred meters away from the hotel to american tanks are taken back a position since the. sergeant sean gibson scans with his binoculars the floors of

the hotel. he focuses on the fifteenth floor always spot someone moved. a reuters camera is filming from his rooms balcony the entrance of the u.s. army in baghdad. during that time i was receiving mortar rounds to try to make the bridge collapse so when i'm sitting down here and i got all these fires coming from all directions i don't think it could tell me is that somebody is looking for somebody else and then when i see the individual standing up on about what a pair of binoculars. and they were talking and he was pointing. i did not immediately engage that individual i did not do that i called it up and told him what i've seen. and it took about ten minutes later for them to call back as

a. firearm and that's what i do. every moment of the moment of the attack at deafening sound is that. we don't in sort of the for the i can't hear anything or hear the whole i feel is in internally slang. and. that's the last to a superpowerful that i felt like i was breaking inside the building nothing of my first thought was that i had some sort of internal bleeding him a couple grafter about ten seconds i saw the smoke rising from the upper floors of the palestine hotel. at that moment i realized that the hotel had been hit. also damaged the floor below where spanish cameraman. had been filming immediately off the blas his friend and colleague john. rushes to help. you get that whistling noise in your ears after an explosion occurs nearby believes you

somehow disoriented at the beginning to sort of see below. and then i heard the terrible screams of my driver shouting. and he said to me john john come quickly it's jose. i had to act fast. hit the floor and crawled along the road. among broken glass and debris to reach it looks like. confusion and panic spreads on the floor with the ukrainian born cameraman was still.

giggling as soon as i heard crying i grabbed my camera and friends fast to the core enjoy it look. at it get it out there were people bleedin outside the elevators. this were helping them to get in and go quickly downstairs. and we were the first ones to get into the room but we witnessed with total chaos with wounded colleagues everywhere you know that either specifically i remember the whole past well a producer or i was lying on the floor in a pool of blood asking for help. for me again. you know you're ok if you're here you're ok just give me ok and then there was terrace

prince yoke the camera model for that he was unlucky enough to be on the balcony about moments filming with his camera. he was bleeding all over he was barely breathing seems. to me i was shocked when i saw him. and i thought that he situation was critical of. the explosion kills. and severely wounds prosecutors. because you look at my belt from my trousers and tied it around his wounds to try and stop the bleeding. i was with them all the time and they remember whispering as we caused the hotel lobby of. course they read about jose i'll cover your face

you will feel like being suffocated you'll feel like the world will think that you can breathe but outside there are many television cameras doing what you and i would do if we were up there filming or been. there at the moment when people kept filming a small group of men carrying a wanted man wrapped in a white sheet he was in pretty bad shape there was a lot of blood. they were carrying him to a car i remember as ice because when i reached the window of the car i remember them looking at me as if they were asking me something ok did you hear that i was like why are you filming me what the hell is happening to me. but one bundle. going to me. when we arrived at the hospital we faced down to ask situation. less than a boy. had cars and taxis were coming from every direction

carrying wounded people's families with women and children with men who were injured as a result of the bombings you know doctors had to decide to whom they should give priority to could be saved and who could be not going to. suffer if i was having breakfast in my kitchen still in my pajamas. when i heard on the radio attack on the hotel palestine i began. at that moment my feet started tremblin and it was a shock and. what i'm told us in the beginning really told us that he might lose his leg and i was thinking i don't mind as long as he returns.

up and i was horrified at the thought that he would come back amputated i was thinking how will he do his job as a cameraman that his professional career was finished. how stupid it. would be for the tragic thing is he survived the surgery. covered with bandages and under heavy sedation. i was the c.e.o. they let us go into his room so we could be with him a little bit more systemic or nearly. you ever. heard oh about like in the movies there's the subtle machine that shows the condition of the heart a lot like you need to believe the last hours of what i thought. started vibrating and beeping. and that line has started to decline i think is that i see it with us that go we must run or. we immediately called the doctors they came and

they started massacring his heart yes we were just normal so much that he got they put him on life support and so forth. if it are you we shot a turned out i don't know if he could hear us we were trying to get to a subconscious i want to be in prayer until a little machine stopped working like me. but the beeping kept getting fainter and fainter until in the end it was all over. something. i could never imagine that this tragedy could happen to me i could never have imagined it. they miss purpose of you're afraid when you know your son is in a war zone. but you never think that they'll bring him back to you in a coffin in a fright it all with his broken camera i don't know.

two cameramen two friends lost their lives doing what they love to do. especially for tired of us during his whole career showdown with death was constant . but it was a conversation we had with doris he told me that the dream of every professional camera man the culmination of their career would be to film his own death you know that he had it is not there was. there are people who find their profession but actually it's the profession that finds them which it wasn't for the professor at

the top of it is not with. you with this it would have been very difficult to imagine terrace without a camera cut off the best of being yeah to put that. he calls me i pick up the phone and to hear. this mom i always cry when he calls me don't cry mom i'm in cyprus not in that debt there's no fighting here the journalese stay here soon i'll come to see you with linda and little dennis it's like five days later they killed him. cause i'm not. what you can slip in our profession and you don't just see the death of a human being but also a mother's grief when they bring her son's dead body to or that. or maybe

a wife who has just lost her husband. to just a beltway your knowledge dealing with only the end of a human life but also with the consequences of doubt and. the two men killed in the palestine hotel were not the only journalists who lost their lives from american gunfire on that day. a few hours early a miss off an american fighter plane targets the office of al-jazeera channel in the center of baghdad. the palestinian journalist. gets killed on the spot. i see lights glowing in the sky i don't know if this is the beginning of an air raid or some random explosion is just. above the left eye coming over the roof five

six people were in the basement the camera was sending a live shot storage was it our building here in doha after the first rocket targeting the generator powered generator and the camera was moving people he had also become other men to come up and fix a faulty product i actually volunteered to go up with a commitment to fix a fault budget that i was filming here when suddenly i heard the sound of a missile or you meant to that it was powerful you know more are so close to the stove. look i was afraid to watch t.v. in case i saw him dead on screen after his death i could never watch anything and. it was not the first time that americans targeted al-jazeera offices they also

bombed donges their offices in kabul back in two thousand and one according to many london newspapers the us president george bush had suggested at some point to britain's prime minister tony blair to bomb around his ears head office in qatar which is her communicated it. coordinates longer cheating latitude to victoria clarke inside the pentagon so the americans knew exactly where the theory was and the bombs that killed the search analysts later that year landed exactly at the coordinates. that al-jazeera had given the president. his ear of the message is very very clear stop telling the truth. that's why they were targeted in baghdad and that's why they were targeted. al-jazeera almost revolutionize the reporting of wars. and incurred great anger.

in military establishments among government. some jealousy amongst their colleagues i have to say. a great deal of admiration. that's the message that was a message to them to all those the others in the palestine hotel. the people who died there it was a warning to all of this. when that tank pulled up outside the palestine hotel and said it was a warning. you will do as we tell you to do as journalists or else. why did journalist become a target. in order to answer this question we need to go back in time. don't know what's our mission we're about to embark on our mission today is to report down to the site of the ambush seventy miles south of here and attempt to

kill the b. c. one two three ball with the powerful but below the water cronkite a distinguished t.v. reporter and presenter expresses at the time the official conception regarding the war coverage in vietnam. a great way to go to war for the american media the conception that described the war as an exciting adventure gradually change the vietnam war turned out very bad for america. and after that was it news organizations in to some degree felt responsible. in a pit so shaded protests and i want to pulitzer prize for writing stories that attacked the u.s. military in the u.s. government the pictures that a.p. people took eddie adams a picture of the police executing him yet on the streets of saigon a nine hundred sixty eight nick but another a.p.

photographer take your picture of a young girl with the clothes burned off by napalm running down a country road these were very negative images. u.s. media turned away from. reporting. from then on independent journalism was regarded as a collateral and a. after the terrorist attacks of september eleventh two thousand and one the bush administration took the chance on trying to control the media and manipulate american public opinion. i think the bush administration absolutely manipulated. the media in america at the time in hindsight of course their justifications for the war were more spurious and best and it just they were there were falsehoods one of the things that was most disturbing about the nuclear issue was that. in

november the inspectors went into iraq to look at whether there were weapons of mass destruction or programs. modeled darted put out reports that they were unable to find any trace and while it was not possible one hundred percent the thing that's going on it was a very very high likelihood that nothing was going on. and this got very little coverage following the government's conception a large number of the american media demonize saddam hussein and discredited all those who are against the war some american sadly not interested in victory and yet they want us to believe that their behavior is patriotic well it's not. for media organizations and it's people the war did not start with the invasion in iraq but from the very moment president bush demanded the withdrawal of all journalists from the area of operations. for their own safety off foreign nationals including journalists and inspectors should leave iraq immediately. the message was clear for

all reporters and media personnel who had come to baghdad from all around the world they did not want them to move around and report freely without being monitored. what goes on in a war you know is deeply unpleasant people violate other people's rights people act in very cruel and inhumane way the last thing that military leaders want is to have independent observers of those sorts of violations and that's one of the reasons why you find the journalists were targeted. on the other hand saddam's regime gave permission to many journalists to remain in baghdad they tried to control them very tightly and at the same time they kept giving them false information even hours before the american troops set foot in the iraqi capital. we want to stop at the mo good and bad that there would be here to talk the war correspondents

in baghdad where only the one side of the story but in that war there was another but journalists were embedded in the allied forces. what imbedded journalists could report it was in most cases predetermined severely limiting their point of view. this is if you like putting together a part of a jigsaw if we have relied just on embedded journalist just to report on their one hundred meters of desert then we would have been producing an incomplete picture of you right there that going well could be embedded reporters became much more difficult due to the growing dependency they developed with the soldiers who they were following but you do get very close to them but you have to remember and i remember before i embedded the advice one journalist gave me says write in your notebook every day i am not one of them i am not one of them i am not one of them and you have to remember you're not a soldier your audience your bosses your job is different from theirs they're there

to fight a war you're there to talk about that work report on that war to make sure the public that you're responsible to understands what's happening in that war there will be good things and there will be bad things will be here as i'm there will be atrocity. kevin sites was embedded with the american forces when he filmed such an atrocity in a mosque in poland. one specific marine went into that mosque. he saw the five insurgents in there and he began shooting them. again even though they were unarmed. began shooting them initially with his m.

sixteen rifle and then when his m. sixteen g.m.t. pulled out his nine millimeter beretta and gun he started firing at them when. i see this marine out of course i say he's faking he's dead he's faking he's dead. and at that point he raises m. sixteen and i raised my camera at the same time and he squeezed the trigger off and fires directly into the man's head and i remember it very specifically i've seen a lot of people killed in coverage before in my past wars but i've never seen what i thought was an execution i suggested to my network that maybe we don't show the video in its entirety we only show portions of it that we mitigate the impact of

the video by self censoring in some ways by not showing that videotape people were completely confused about what the intentions of the marine was at that moment they basically accepted he might have been in fear for his life they had no other way to judge his actions because i didn't give them another way to me that was the ultimate betrayal of of my trust that the public in general to me to do this particular job. inside the mosque there was another man wounded kevin sites speaks with him but having in mind how he should report his story he exits the mosque two years later he discovers something that haunts him still that man that i had been talking to had been shot twenty three times in the back. basically flipped over and you know just murdered so perhaps the more definitive murder that occurred that mosque was not even the one. captured on videotape but the one that i walked out there are not many journalists that can say that in the failure of doing their job

they cost a man or a wife i kid. you know and that's a powerful powerful thing. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.

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