Blaming the messenger

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http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/11/21/opinion/commentary/14_23_1711_20_04.txt

Blaming the messenger


By: DARRIN MORTENSON - Staff Writer

When I first read Monday that embedded reporter Kevin Sites had filmed a Marine killing an unarmed Iraqi man on the floor of a Fallujah mosque, I turned to photographer Hayne Palmour and said: "Kevin's the loneliest man in the world right now."

Palmour, a veteran staff photographer for the North County Times, and I had worked with Sites near Fallujah during the Marines' previous push on that city in April.

We, too, were embedded, and embedded deep like Sites was these last weeks ---- with a Marine infantry company in the heat of house-to-house fighting.

We could empathize with Sites because we knew him as a hardworking and diligent young journalist dedicated to the truth, and because we, too, had incurred the wrath of both the military and certain sectors of the public for reporting it.

Embeds bring it home

Over the last week or two, as more than 10,000 American and Iraqi troops stormed Fallujah, everybody relied on embedded reporters for nearly every image and report they received from the toughest and costliest battle of the war.

Reporters trudged through the streets with the troops in the same harrowing combat environment to bring home images of U.S. troops leveling the notorious city and hunting down homegrown insurgents and hardened terrorists.

And then the entire week of brutal fighting seemed to boil down to a single iconic image of a battle-weary Marine with a Marlboro hanging from his parched and broken lips.

It said it all: true grit.

The public cheered the image and no one complained about the wall-to-wall play the picture received around the world.

It was all Norman Rockwell and Greatest Generation and John Wayne, and it made everybody feel good about America and Americans.

"Study it," one prominent anchor said.

It reinforced our resolve and fit the narrative we all wanted to believe in.

And it was brought to us by ---- guess who? ---- an embedded reporter.

Best and the worst of people

But as soon as Sites' video aired Monday, many people were shouting to ban the embeds ---- or worse.

When I got to my Oceanside office Wednesday, the first phone message I retrieved was from an angry reader who said she was disturbed that ---- in a follow-up article on Sites' Fallujah report ---- I had called the slain Iraqi man a "fighter," and not a "chicken fighter."

More important, she called for an end to the military's embedding program, and demanded that Sites be arrested for "causing more problems" and charged with "sedition" and "treason."

She said the Marine who shot the Iraqi on the floor "should get a Medal of Honor," echoing several prominent radio commentators Wednesday.

That was kid stuff.

Others sounded like members of a lynch mob or a McCarthy hearing committee.

One columnist said that "Sites' broadcast makes him an accomplice to al-Qaida and Saddam," and that "Sites deserves to be shipped back to America in shackles and tried for treason."

Conservative bloggers with names like "The Crusader" said it was Sites, not the insurgent, who should have been shot.

"Kill all the reporters," one patriot said.

America right or wrong.

Double edge of embedding

As an embedded reporter, Sites was damned if he ran the tape and damned if he didn't.

Running it risked discrediting him with the Marines who trusted him and with sectors of the public who would rather not know what war is like.

Not running it would mean he could not be trusted with the responsibilities of a journalist by denying the rest of us some vital truth.

And, truth be told, Sites was not responsible for airing it. He merely sent a report back and NBC News had to grapple with whether to broadcast the report.

Like the Marine in the video, Sites was just doing his job.

Sites had earned the trust of the Marines over more than six months of the most difficult and dangerous kind of reporting, sharing the same risks and hardships that earn Marines the public's sympathy and respect.

For his efforts, he won a spot as the network pool reporter with one of the two Camp Pendleton Marine battalions that fought through the worst sections of Fallujah over the last week or so.

In order to stay in the saddle that long and get that privileged view, Sites had to follow the military's strict rules on not reporting casualties until authorized and not compromising security.

Any breach and he could have been yanked out immediately.

Sites also had to have lived up to the professional and ethical standards of journalism to be the pool reporter for NBC, trusted to dispatch images and reports to other mainstream media to use in their reports.

So Sites didn't get to where he was because the Marines didn't like him or because he wasn't up to the job.

He was, in fact, very popular, and his daily Internet battle-blog had become a life-link between the Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Regiment and their families.

His entries are replete with references to heroic, hardworking Marines ---- ordinary men doing extraordinary things in the most extreme environment.

The public blog discussions are loaded with praise and thanks.

Changing sands of war

But that only lasted as long as the news was good.

As soon as Sites' footage of the mosque shooting aired Monday, it seemed the world had turned against him.

Pundits and people everywhere were already blaming the messenger without even listening to the message.

They made excuses for the Marine before they even knew the facts, and condemned others for judging the Marine without the facts.

Meanwhile, without even hearing Sites' full report, they judged and condemned Sites himself.

Critics seemed to ignore the details of his report ---- how he explained that the shooting had occurred in the confusing context of the battle, that the Marine had been wounded, and that Sites never accused the Marine of any wrongdoing.

Instead, many blamed Sites for reporting the incident at all. Cover it up, they seemed to say.

Families of Marines still in Fallujah said Sites had "betrayed" them.

Officially, Marine officials have said Sites has not been removed from the field or censured in any way.

Unofficially, while Marine public affairs officers who worked with Sites in Iraq have expressed support and have said he was just doing his job, they admit his report was probably a crushing blow to the morale of the men who'd witnessed and participated in so much horror and so much heroism over the last two weeks.

Privately, many Marines said they knew Sites' relationship with the troops was doomed.

According to reports from the field, Sites was last seen at the base camp near Fallujah eating alone in the chow hall, shunned by the Marines around him.

I could see Sites sitting there in the mess tent at Camp Baharia ---- proud that he had upheld his duty as a reporter but feeling like he had somehow betrayed the men whom he had learned to like and respect, and who had let him into their lives and taken him under their wings.

In the hot seat

I could imagine it because, to some extent, Hayne and I sat in that same lonely seat when we covered the Marines in the spring.

After entering Fallujah with a Marine platoon in late March, we witnessed a Marine sniper kill an unarmed Iraqi man who was standing on his roof talking on a cell phone.

According to the Marines' rules of engagement that day, the troops could only shoot someone who was shooting at them. Even someone holding a rifle, if not raising it to fire, was off limits.

I reported the killing matter-of-factly, without judgment, and definitely without wanting to damage the Marines' morale or reputation.

It was war, I reasoned, and I included it as just one vignette in a story that otherwise detailed the Marines' courageous rush into battle.

Why I thought it was important enough to report was because of how the shooting ---- whether the man was a legitimate military target or just an unfortunate casualty of war ---- had turned the entire neighborhood against the Marines.

More than a hundred people had gathered outside the slain man's home. A nearby mosque blared condemnation and chants. Neighbors took up arms, and insurgents ended up chasing us out of town under fire.

Neighbors on the other side of town said the "tribe" would have to get revenge for that man and the more than 20 other Iraqis who were reportedly killed or wounded that day.

It was instructive: What we had witnessed and documented was how the insurgency grows ---- something the military and folks at home seemed very uncomfortable hearing about.

Embedding tested

I later included a reference to the incident in an analysis story I wrote shortly after four American contractors were slain in Fallujah.

The article was about how the Marines, just a week after taking over for the Army in Fallujah, had been swept up in the cycle of violence in that city of horrors.

And in one paragraph in a three-page story, I recounted what local residents might have seen during the first week of the Marines' stay, without the benefit of explanations.

Within a day, the article had made its way from the division commanding general in Ramadi down to the battalion commander in Fallujah.

Although everything I cited in the single paragraph I either witnessed myself or heard from multiple interviews with Marines whom we knew and trusted as sources, the command was outraged and threatened to kick us out.

Readers at home called for my return.

One Marine major, who acknowledged that everything was factually true but needed more explanation, said that one paragraph had done more damage to the Marines' "Information Operations" campaign than all the civilians they had killed or wounded in Fallujah.

Didn't I get it? he asked. It was a war of perceptions, he said, and the real battlefield was back in American living rooms, not in the streets of Fallujah.

We, the enemy?

Suddenly I was the enemy.

I was a threat to their mission, he said, and we both knew what happened to threats in Iraq ---- they were "taken out."

On the eve of the Marines' big assault on Fallujah days later, the Marine commanders said they wanted us out, but couldn't pull our plug until we answered the questions from a pesky "war crimes" team that had been dispatched from a higher command to investigate the sniper shooting and other troubling incidents that I had reported.

There we sat in Sites' hot seat ---- grilled, intimidated, threatened and scared.

Many Marines shunned us, whispered, scowled, and cast cold, deadly glances our way. They had been briefed by higher-ups that we were the "bad guys."

Spooky types ---- bearded and heavily armed CIA operatives, SEALs, Delta and Special Forces troops wearing civilian clothes and no name tags ---- eyed us with contempt.

They were accountable to no one in their mission to eliminate threats.

We were on the verge of leaving, fearing for our own safety, when we were eventually allowed to rejoin the battle where the Marines doing the fighting seemed to have changed their minds and now said they were happy to have their story told.

Getting the boot

We told their story from the front line for the next three weeks, but we were eventually run out after I quoted a young Marine who said Fallujah scared the hell out of him.

A senior enlisted Marine told us we were bad for the Marines' image, and ordered us to "pack your s - - - and get the f - - - out."

The Marines with whom we had stuck it out for weeks privately approached us to tell us they thought it was wrong that we were being ordered out, and said they were afraid their story would go untold.

On the day we left, they wrote messages on pieces of cardboard for their families back home. Their daily link to America was broken.

That's when we last saw Sites ---- in a tent at Camp Fallujah, where we were waiting for a ride out of Iraq.

We left the field feeling hated by some Marine commanders and fearing that we had somehow failed the grunts ---- many of whom had become our friends.

But we arrived home to stacks of letters and e-mails from families thanking us for our honest efforts.

Since then, many Marines have come forward to thank us for telling the truth.

They said the truth was initially tough to swallow, but said they were glad that, in the end, we had "told it like it was" despite the knee-jerk reactions from the brass and some well-intentioned folks at home.

Sites was guilty of 'being there'

I hope Sites weathers the storm the same, and looks down the road a piece.

The blame-the-messenger mentality, which is always a sign of weakness in a democracy, is contagious and miserable, but it's survivable.

When the news is good, everyone hails those hardworking reporters who live in the dirt and danger to accompany the troops, as long as their reports make us feel good.

But when the images make us uncomfortable or force us to ask questions, we blame the media.

It's war. It's ugly. Believe me.

War brings out the very best and the worst in men, especially when both sides claim they have God on their side and are therefore above reproach.

Without passing judgment on that one Marine, Sites' footage was important for us to see.

Marines quoted by The Boston Globe the day after the video aired said they had no trouble with the shooting in the blurred environment of Fallujah.

"I would have shot the insurgent, too," said one sergeant. "Two shots to the head.

"You can't trust these people," he said. "He did nothing wrong."

If so, then why should Sites be damned for showing it?

Where were the media?

If Marines are going around "double-tapping" wounded Iraqis in the head, maybe we'll come to understand that "these people" don't only hate us because we're free. And we should take the heat off that poor scared Marine and point our fingers up the food chain to commanders who ordered or condoned such behavior.

But if the Marines are not committing war crimes, and the Marine simply shot the man in self-defense, then at least maybe some of the armchair generals out there will see what kind of a war we are asking these young Americans to fight. And maybe then we will let them fight it without their arms tied behind their backs.

As reporters we see it, hear it and document it for what it is. The spin happens at home.

Part of me wants to call for all of my fellow embedded reporters to come home ---- pack up and forget about those hellish places where American troops serve and fight.

The American people don't want to hear about it.

Come home. It's not worth the risk. It's not worth a single hair on your noble and hardworking heads.

Let them fend for themselves with government propaganda on one side and Al Jazeera on the other.

Then ---- when the troops' sacrifices go untold, and we have no idea what's going on in the world and the military falls out of our gaze and to the bottom of the congressional budget ---- sit back in safety and listen to the armchair critics holler: "Where were the media?"

On the other hand ---- and I'm sure Sites will one day agree with me when all this is over ---- I can't wait for my next assignment.

At least the troops are still worth the effort, even if some of their so-called supporters may not be.

[Whois]

http://www.kevinsites.net/2004_11_21_archive.html#110107420331292115

Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1

By Kevin Sites

To Devil Dogs of the 3.1:

Since the shooting in the Mosque, I've been haunted that I have not been able to tell you directly what I saw or explain the process by which the world came to see it as well. As you know, I'm not some war zone tourist with a camera who doesn't understand that ugly things happen in combat. I've spent most of the last five years covering global conflict. But I have never in my career been a 'gotcha' reporter -- hoping for people to commit wrongdoings so I can catch them at it.

This week I've even been shocked to see myself painted as some kind of anti-war activist. Anyone who has seen my reporting on television or has read the dispatches on this website is fully aware of the lengths I've gone to play it straight down the middle -- not to become a tool of propaganda for the left or the right.

But I find myself a lightning rod for controversy in reporting what I saw occur in front of me, camera rolling.

It's time you to have the facts from me, in my own words, about what I saw -- without imposing on that Marine -- guilt or innocence or anything in between. I want you to read my account and make up your own minds about whether you think what I did was right or wrong. All the other armchair analysts don't mean a damn to me.

Here it goes.

It's Saturday morning and we're still at our strong point from the night before, a clearing between a set of buildings on the southern edge of the city. The advance has been swift, but pockets of resistance still exist. In fact, we're taking sniper fire from both the front and the rear.

Weapons Company uses its 81's (mortars) where they spot muzzle flashes. The tanks do some blasting of their own. By mid-morning, we're told we're moving north again. We'll be back clearing some of the area we passed yesterday. There are also reports that the mosque, where ten insurgents were killed and five wounded on Friday may have been re-occupied overnight.

I decide to leave you guys and pick up with one of the infantry squads as they move house-to-house back toward the mosque. (For their own privacy and protection I will not name or identify in any way, any of those I was traveling with during this incident.)

Many of the structures are empty of people -- but full of weapons. Outside one residence, a member of the squad lobs a frag grenade over the wall. Everyone piles in, including me.

While the Marines go into the house, I follow the flames caused by the grenade into the courtyard. When the smoke clears, I can see through my viewfinder that the fire is burning beside a large pile of anti-aircraft rounds.


I yell to the lieutenant that we need to move. Almost immediately after clearing out of the house, small explosions begin as the rounds cook off in the fire.

At that point, we hear the tanks firing their 240-machine guns into the mosque. There's radio chatter that insurgents inside could be shooting back. The tanks cease-fire and we file through a breach in the outer wall.

We hear gunshots from what seems to be coming from inside the mosque. A Marine from my squad yells, "Are there Marines in here?"

When we arrive at the front entrance, we see that another squad has already entered before us.

The lieutenant asks them, "Are there people inside?"

One of the Marines raises his hand signaling five.

"Did you shoot them," the lieutenant asks?

"Roger that, sir, " the same Marine responds.

"Were they armed?" The Marine just shrugs and we all move inside.

Immediately after going in, I see the same black plastic body bags spread around the mosque. The dead from the day before. But more surprising, I see the same five men that were wounded from Friday as well. It appears that one of them is now dead and three are bleeding to death from new gunshot wounds. The fifth is partially covered by a blanket and is in the same place and condition he was in on Friday, near a column. He has not been shot again. I look closely at both the dead and the wounded. There don't appear to be any weapons anywhere.

"These were the same wounded from yesterday," I say to the lieutenant. He takes a look around and goes outside the mosque with his radio operator to call in the situation to Battalion Forward HQ.

I see an old man in a red kaffiyeh lying against the back wall. Another is face down next to him, his hand on the old man's lap -- as if he were trying to take cover. I squat beside them, inches away and begin to videotape them. Then I notice that the blood coming from the old man's nose is bubbling. A sign he is still breathing. So is the man next to him.

While I continue to tape, a Marine walks up to the other two bodies about fifteen feet away, but also lying against the same back wall.

Then I hear him say this about one of the men:

"He's fucking faking he's dead -- he's faking he's fucking dead."

Through my viewfinder I can see him raise the muzzle of his rifle in the direction of the wounded Iraqi. There are no sudden movements, no reaching or lunging.

However, the Marine could legitimately believe the man poses some kind of danger. Maybe he's going to cover him while another Marine searches for weapons.

Instead, he pulls the trigger. There is a small splatter against the back wall and the man's leg slumps down.

"Well he's dead now," says another Marine in the background.

I am still rolling. I feel the deep pit of my stomach. The Marine then abruptly turns away and strides away, right past the fifth wounded insurgent lying next to a column. He is very much alive and peering from his blanket. He is moving, even trying to talk. But for some reason, it seems he did not pose the same apparent "danger" as the other man -- though he may have been more capable of hiding a weapon or explosive beneath his blanket.

But then two other marines in the room raise their weapons as the man tries to talk.

For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.

At that point the Marine who fired the shot became aware that I was in the room. He came up to me and said, "I didn't know sir-I didn't know." The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.

The wounded man then tries again to talk to me in Arabic.

He says, "Yesterday I was shot... please... yesterday I was shot over there -- and talked to all of you on camera -- I am one of the guys from this whole group. I gave you information. Do you speak Arabic? I want to give you information." (This man has since reportedly been located by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service which is handling the case.)

In the aftermath, the first question that came to mind was why had these wounded men been left in the mosque?

It was answered by staff judge advocate Lieutenant Colonel Bob Miller -- who interviewed the Marines involved following the incident. After being treated for their wounds on Friday by Navy Corpsman (I personally saw their bandages) the insurgents were going to be transported to the rear when time and circumstances allowed.

The area, however, was still hot. And there were American casualties to be moved first.

Also, the squad that entered the mosque on Saturday was different than the one that had led the attack on Friday.

It's reasonable to presume they may not have known that these insurgents had already been engaged and subdued a day earlier.
Yet when this new squad engaged the wounded insurgents on Saturday, perhaps really believing they had been fighting or somehow posed a threat -- those Marines inside knew from their training to check the insurgents for weapons and explosives after disabling them, instead of leaving them where they were and waiting outside the mosque for the squad I was following to arrive.

During the course of these events, there was plenty of mitigating circumstances like the ones just mentioned and which I reported in my story. The Marine who fired the shot had reportedly been shot in the face himself the day before.

I'm also well aware from many years as a war reporter that there have been times, especially in this conflict, when dead and wounded insurgents have been booby-trapped, even supposedly including an incident that happened just a block away from the mosque in which one Marine was killed and five others wounded. Again, a detail that was clearly stated in my television report.

No one, especially someone like me who has lived in a war zone with you, would deny that a solider or Marine could legitimately err on the side of caution under those circumstances. War is about killing your enemy before he kills you.

In the particular circumstance I was reporting, it bothered me that the Marine didn't seem to consider the other insurgents a threat -- the one very obviously moving under the blanket, or even the two next to me that were still breathing.

I can't know what was in the mind of that Marine. He is the only one who does.

But observing all of this as an experienced war reporter who always bore in mind the dark perils of this conflict, even knowing the possibilities of mitigating circumstances -- it appeared to me very plainly that something was not right. According to Lt. Col Bob Miller, the rules of engagement in Falluja required soldiers or Marines to determine hostile intent before using deadly force. I was not watching from a hundred feet away. I was in the same room. Aside from breathing, I did not observe any movement at all.

Making sure you know the basis for my choices after the incident is as important to me as knowing how the incident went down. I did not in any way feel like I had captured some kind of "prize" video. In fact, I was heartsick. Immediately after the mosque incident, I told the unit's commanding officer what had happened. I shared the video with him, and its impact rippled all the way up the chain of command. Marine commanders immediately pledged their cooperation.

We all knew it was a complicated story, and if not handled responsibly, could have the potential to further inflame the volatile region. I offered to hold the tape until they had time to look into incident and begin an investigation -- providing me with information that would fill in some of the blanks.

For those who don't practice journalism as a profession, it may be difficult to understand why we must report stories like this at all -- especially if they seem to be aberrations, and not representative of the behavior or character of an organization as a whole.

The answer is not an easy one.

In war, as in life, there are plenty of opportunities to see the full spectrum of good and evil that people are capable of. As journalists, it is our job is to report both -- though neither may be fully representative of those people on whom we're reporting. For example, acts of selfless heroism are likely to be as unique to a group as the darker deeds. But our coverage of these unique events, combined with the larger perspective - will allow the truth of that situation, in all of its complexities, to begin to emerge. That doesn't make the decision to report events like this one any easier. It has, for me, led to an agonizing struggle -- the proverbial long, dark night of the soul.

I knew NBC would be responsible with the footage. But there were complications. We were part of a video "pool" in Falluja, and that obligated us to share all of our footage with other networks. I had no idea how our other "pool" partners might use the footage. I considered not feeding the tape to the pool -- or even, for a moment, destroying it. But that thought created the same pit in my stomach that witnessing the shooting had. It felt wrong. Hiding this wouldn't make it go away. There were other people in that room. What happened in that mosque would eventually come out. I would be faced with the fact that I had betrayed truth as well as a life supposedly spent in pursuit of it.

When NBC aired the story 48-hours later, we did so in a way that attempted to highlight every possible mitigating issue for that Marine's actions. We wanted viewers to have a very clear understanding of the circumstances surrounding the fighting on that frontline. Many of our colleagues were just as responsible. Other foreign networks made different decisions, and because of that, I have become the conflicted conduit who has brought this to the world.

The Marines have built their proud reputation on fighting for freedoms like the one that allows me to do my job, a job that in some cases may appear to discredit them. But both the leaders and the grunts in the field like you understand that if you lower your standards, if you accept less, than less is what you'll become.

There are people in our own country that would weaken your institution and our nation –by telling you it's okay to betray our guiding principles by not making the tough decisions, by letting difficult circumstances turns us into victims or worse…villains.

I interviewed your Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, before the battle for Falluja began. He said something very powerful at the time-something that now seems prophetic. It was this:

"We're the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman's war here -- because we don't behead people, we don't come down to the same level of the people we're combating. That's a very difficult thing for a young 18-year-old Marine who's been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat. That's a very difficult thing for a 42-year-old lieutenant colonel with 23 years experience in the service who was trained to do the same thing once upon a time, and who now has a thousand-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor -- and ensure we remain the good guys and keep the moral high ground."

I listened carefully when he said those words. I believed them.

So here, ultimately, is how it all plays out: when the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera -- the story of his death became my responsibility.

The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.

[Ali]

kind of like the photographs of US bodybags