Targeting Journalists in Iraq is Pentagon Policy

Kurt Nimmo
Apr. 06, 2010

The Baghdad snuff video released by WikiLeaks has yet to receive much corporate media play. MSNBC, however, covered the video. In a discussion of the video, Brett McGurk of the Council on Foreign Relations and an NSC member for Bush and Obama, defended the mass murder episode. McGurk said the soldiers fired on journalists because they thought they saw an RPG launcher.

How is it trained soldiers mistook camera equipment for an RPG launcher?

In fact, part of the mission of the military in Iraq is to target journalists. This was admitted by Eason Jordan in 2005. Jordan at the time was the head of CNN’s news division. During a panel discussion in Davos, Switzerland, Jordan said “he knew of about 12 journalists who had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy.”

Prior to Jordan’s remarks, Pentagon publicist Victoria Clarke said that journalists who not vetted by the Pentagon were “putting themselves at risk.” In other words, they would be targeted.

Harvard University professor and columnist David Gergen — who serves as an apologist for the elite on CNN — told the neocon and concentration camp apologist Michelle Malkin he was “startled” by Jordan’s comments. “It’s contrary to history, which is so far the other way. Our troops have gone out of their way to protect and rescue journalists.” Gergen and Rep. Barney Frank were outraged by Jordan’s comments. Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd was also outraged, according to the New York Sun.

There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Gergen, Frank, and Dodd are not outraged by the murder of innocents. They are angry that the media reports it. In 2003, Kate Adie, former chief news correspondent for the BBC, told Radio One Ireland that media not “embedded” with the Pentagon in Iraq would be “targeted down.”

Emmy Award and Peabody Award winner Jordan was obliged to step down from CNN after making his comments. Telling the truth has consequences, especially for members of the Mockingbird corporate media.

U.S. troops deliberately slaughtered journalists at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad in 2003. Two journalists, Taras Protsyuk of the British news agency Reuters and Jose Couso of the Spanish network Telecino, were killed because they were not “embedded” with the Pentagon. On the same day, the Pentagon targeted the Baghdad offices of Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV, two Arabic-language news networks that have been broadcasting graphic footage. In both instances, the Pentagon claimed soldiers had come under fire.

In 2005, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was targeted. Sgrena had been held hostage for a month by a little known Islamic group before the incident. “If a high-profile journalist whose capture and release made the international headlines can be gunned down along with Italian intelligence agents by US troops, how many Iraqi men, women and children have suffered the same fate for failing to obey US military orders? Only a few of the worst instances have been reported in the international media,” Peter Symonds wrote on March 7, 2005.

In fact, over a million Iraqi men, women, and children have been killed since Bush invaded Iraq in early 2003. Bill Clinton killed 500,000 children before Bush. Bush Senior killed hundreds of thousands before Clinton. Obama is continuing this policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The establishment demands we honor the troops engaged in this sort of brutality and mass murder. Our support for the troops, however, means we support mass murder approaching the scale practiced by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Most Americans are completely ignorant or do not care that they are party to war crimes and mass murder.

The CIA and Pentagon have targeted WikiLeaks because they do not want the American people to know the truth — the United States, working at the behest of an international cartel of criminal bankers and corporatists, is assigned the task of taking down all who would resist their move toward world government and the imposition of a global slave labor plantation. The Muslim and much of the Arab world has been targeted because it continues to resist. The next target is Iran.