[Media-watch] Tell Donald Rumsfeld and Geoff Hoon That Journalists' Li

[Zahera Harb]

This is from NUJ UK.

------- Forwarded message follows -------
To:             	harbz1 at cardiff.ac.uk
From:           	palestinehotel at nuj.org.uk
Subject:        	Tell Donald Rumsfeld and Geoff Hoon That Journalists' Lives Matterr
Date sent:      	Wed, 07 Apr 2004 19:41:14 +0100


It has been a year today since journalists at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad 
came under fire from U.S. forces on April 8, 2003. Two journalists were killed 
and three others wounded. In all, seven journalists have perished in four separate 
incidents of so-called “friendly fire” by U.S. troops in Iraq since hostilities 
began in March 2003.
To date, the Pentagon's internal “investigation” of the Palestine Hotel tragedy, 
as well as other catastrophes involving media workers in Iraq, has remained classified. 
No details of these incidents have been released to their families, news organizations, 
or the public. 
The Pentagon, meanwhile, has ignored repeated calls by journalists and other 
organizations in the U.S. and around the world for a detailed, independent inquiry 
into these tragic events as well as the development of protocols to assure the 
safety of war correspondents.
Please add your name to the petition which the NUJ has launched on April 8th 
2004, the first anniversary of the attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. 
We are hoping to collect thousands of signatures from media workers and their 
supporters and deliver a message to US Secretary Donald Rumsfield and his UK 
counterpart Geoff Hoon that the lives of journalists matter.
If you work for a media organization in the UK, just click 'reply' in your email 
program, add the organsiation you work for into the subject field of your reply 
and send. Your name will automatically be added to the petition.
 
Jeremy Dear
General Secretary 
 NUJ
 
 
TEXT OF PETITION
  
It is now one year since the Palestine Hotel tragedy in Baghdad on April 8th 
2003 where 150 journalists came under fire from US forces. Two of our colleagues 
- Taras Protsiuk working for Reuters and José Couso a cameraman for Spanish network 
Telecinco - were killed and three others wounded. To this day, there has been 
no satisfactory explanation about why that attack took place. The US authorities 
have issued a whitewash report clearing their military of any responsibility 
- but they steadfastly refuse to make the report public
 
Since then, three other incidents in which Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana, ITN 
reporter Terry Lloyd and his colleagues Fred Nérac and Hussein Osman whose bodies 
are still missing, and Al-Jazeera's journalist Tareq Ayyoub were killed, have 
not been properly investigated and the information regarding their deaths remains 
classified. 
 
No details of these incidents have been released to their families, news organisations, 
or the public. The Pentagon has ignored repeated calls by the International Federation 
of Journalists, media staff and journalists' unions in the United States and 
other press freedom groups for a detailed, independent inquiry into these tragic 
events as well as the development of protocols to assure the safety of war correspondents. 

 
We, the undersigned have not forgotten the sacrifice of those who gave their 
lives to report on the Iraq war and its aftermath.
 
 We call upon the Pentagon to make public the results of its own investigations. 

 
We again call for an independent investigation of all so-called "friendly fire" 
incidents involving journalists and US troops.

We demand to know what steps, if any, have been taken by the US and UK governments 
to reduce the likelihood that tragedies such as the Palestine Hotel will not 
occur in other conflicts. 
 
These actions are necessary both to provide closure for the families and colleagues 
of those who died trying to tell the story in Iraq and to minimise the risk to 
media workers in the future.


 
 

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