GLOBAL COLUMN©
BY TED CORDOVA
A press casualty
of war
Peter Arnett,
recognized as the best American Correspondent stationed in Baghdad,
was sacked by NBC because he was just telling the plain truth:
Something was going wrong with the angloamerican invasion of Iraq.
It was not
precisely a "blitz", as some Pentagon experts expected.
Nor the"invasors' were received a "liberators"
of the people from a ferocious ditatorship.
Arnett, a New Zealand native and naturalized U.S. citizen, said
in the Sunday interview that Washington's "first war plan
has just failed because of Iraqi resistance. ... Clearly, the
American war planners misjudged the determination of the Iraqi
forces."
In the interview
he criticized the American military invasion and praised the cooperation
of the Iraqi Information ministry. It was wrong and naive. The
U.S. Constitution says that giving "aid and comfort"
to a wartime enemy can lead to a charge of treason.
In an article
inThe NY Times, the foremost veteran of War correspondents, Walter
Cronkite recalled a classic concept of Journalism, a reporter
is only as good as his sources.
And added:
"Clearly in granting the interview was cozying to sources
he depended on for, first, their tolerance of him in Baghdad an,
second, any information he could get about Iraq's military posture,
its claims of combat successes and techniques and the morale of
its people".
NBC and its
related network, for which the longtime war reporter had been
covering the conflict from Baghdad, dismissed Arnett despite his
apologies Monday. Later the same day, London's anti-war Daily
Mirror hired him. In Arnett's first report for that paper, he
retracted his apology.
Arnett is
not only a quite seaoned reporter, as a war correspondent. He
covered Vietnam for Associated Press and for his work there, filing
dispatches as a war correspondent, he won a Pulitzer prize, the
highest distintion in U.S. Journalism.
With him gone
from the airwaves, Cronkite wrote, Americans have lost an eye
on Baghdad that had proved valuable addition to our knowledge
of a mysterious enemy.
In fact, I
suppose, an important press casualty of a war very few in theWorld
seem to understand, lest to applaud.
BIP
