Rumsfeld on the Case

Donald Rumsfeld has vowed that he'll get to the bottom of the high rates of journalists who have been shot, shot at, and detained by American forces in the war in Iraq:

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a commitment during a hearing on Capitol Hill last week to look into the increased number of detentions and shootings of journalists covering the occupation of Iraq. Reuters reports that Sen. John Warner (R) of Virginia, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, raised the issue with Mr. Rumsfeld after he had received letters and calls from "Reuters and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and a telephone call from Paul Steiger, CPJ chairman and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal."

Gen. George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, also promised action, saying once he got back to Baghdad he would meet with a few local journalists and work through their concerns.

Last week in a letter to Senator Warner, David Schlesinger, global managing editor for Reuters, said the US military's conduct toward journalists was spiraling "out of control" and preventing full coverage of the war from reaching the public.

The Reuters news service chief referred to "a long parade of disturbing incidents whereby professional journalists have been killed, wrongfully detained, and/or illegally abused by US forces in Iraq." ... He asked Mr. Warner to demand that Mr. Rumsfeld resolve these issues "in a way that best balances the legitimate security interests of the US forces in Iraq and the equally legitimate rights of journalists in conflict zones under international law".

US forces have admitted killing three Reuters journalists in Iraq, but said soldiers were justified in opening fire. Reuters also believes that a fourth journalist was killed by a US sniper. Mr. Schlesinger said the military had refused to conduct independent investigations into the journalists' deaths, instead relying on the word of soldiers' commanding officers, who exonerated them. And he noted that the military had failed to "implement recommendations by its own inquiry into the death of award-winning Palestinian cameraman Mazen Dana, who was shot dead while filming outside Abu Ghraib prison in August 2003."

I wish this story had a happy ending. Rumsfeld's vow, like Bush's, Frist's, DeLay's, or FEMA hack Michael Brown, is operatively as useful as OJ Simpson's. Maybe, instead of for killing journalists, we can put Rumsfeld on trial for stealing cable TV like the Juice...