EVERY POS connected with this story should have his ticket pulled(almost said punched) and NEVER, EVER be allowed into or near Iraq or ANY Military personnel or briefings EVER AGAIN!!!
Posted on 07/28/2005 10:17:10 AM PDT by kristinn
One of the most remarkable stories of the Iraq war appears today at the online magazine Salon, written by its longtime foreign correspondent Phillip Robertson. Amazingly, he managed this month to track down the American sniper who apparently shot and killed Knight Ridder correspondent Yasser Salihee, 33, on June 24. The article, "The Victim and the Killer," chronicles this search, and lengthy exchanges between Robertson and the sniper, described only as "Joe."
E&P has covered the Salihee incident from the start, first with a news report, then a moving tribute to him written by Knight Ridder's Baghdad chief Hannah Allam, which drew wide reader response. Salihee, a physican who had worked for KR for more than a year, was accidentally shot, on his day off, while driving his car in what seemed like a haphazard manner, wrongly suspected by American soldiers of being a suicide bomber.
Robertson, who had met Salihee, decided to search for the unidentified sniper himself. This seemed like a long shot, at best, as the U.S. military won't comment on civilian casualties in general, let alone in particular, and certainly not put any journalist in contact with a suspected shooter. But this did not stop Robertson, who has filed dozens of stories from Iraq and Afghanistan for Salon since 2001.
Steve Butler, Knight Ridder's foreign editor, who said he read Salon story today "very carefully," told E&P: "We've been talking to the military in Baghdad and they are preparing an investigation. We would like the report of that investigation to be made public. It could be that this interview with the sniper is the only record we will have."
Just about all Robertson knew at the start was that at least four rounds had been fired at Salihee on June 24, some of them perhaps warning shots (though eyewitnesses dispute this), with one of them piercing his skull and killing him instantly. Salihee left behind a wife and 2-year-old daughter, as well as grieving colleagues at Knight Ridder.
To find the shooter, Robertson requested an embed slot in western Baghdad. (Butler, the Knight Ridder editor, told E&P that "it bothers me somewhat" that Robertson was "not being totally honest... embedding with the military with the purpose of doing his own investigation into this.") Two weeks later, he was able to find the unit, part of the 256th Brigade Combat Team, that took part in the fatal shooting.
Next, from a young specialist from Louisiana, he learned the names of two snipers with the unit. "The next night, the 13th of July," he writes, "I walked into the command post after dinner and recognized one of the men the young soldier had mentioned. The man was working on a notebook computer at a big table in the front room of the command post. We struck up a conversation."
The sniper, "a tall, good-looking man," started showing him pictures on his laptop, from back home and from Iraq. Eventually, he brought up a photo of what Robertson immediately recognized as the shooting scene: a white sedan with a single bullet hole in the driver's side of the windshield. Slumped behind the wheel was his friend, Yassir Salihee.
The sniper turned nervous, said, "I really hope he was a bad guy," and added that he wasn't sure that he was one who killed him, even though he admitted firing the shot through the windshield.
The next day, "Joe" agreed to answer questions, but asked the writer not to use his full name. "I don't want someone coming after me," he said. Robertson did not tell him he'd been trying to find him for two weeks, but when he interviewed him later he revealed that he knew the victim -- but Joe still agreed to talk.
Joe described for Robertson the events of the day leading up to Salihee approaching an intersection, then making an odd maneuver around a car that was turning around.
"I was shooting to disable when he swerved around the other car," Joe told him. "He was going more than 20 miles an hour. We aren't used to seeing someone drive that fast." Joe claimed that Salihee should have seen the soldiers and stopped, even before they allegedly fired warning shots, but he never even raised his hands off the wheel in surrender.
Robertson comments: "When Joe talked about his decision to fire at Salihee, he sounded anguished, but he kept coming back to the moment when Salihee passed the first car, the moment he decided that Salihee was a bomber attacking the U.S. position."
Then he quotes two Iraqi eyewitnesses who contradict Joe's account, one claiming that Salihee was stopped, with his hands up, when shot. In the police report, Robertson notes, a diagram shows that Salihee's car was indeed pulled over to the left side of the street. Proof of which version is correct is very murky, but Robertson reveals: "The evidence suggests that Salihee might have had his hands raised. Four fingers on Salihee's right hand were missing."
Taking a broader look, however, he concludes: "The details may be murky, but in retrospect it is fairly clear what happened... The soldiers were on edge, but they seem to have followed their rules of engagement. It was a typical misunderstanding, of the sort that happens all the time in Iraq." No disciplinary action is likely. Robertson points out that a spokesman for the coalition forces told the Los Angeles Times that he did not know of a single soldier who had been punished for shooting a civilian in a traffic incident or at a checkpoint.
Robertson's story closes: "Before I left Joe at his company headquarters at Camp Victory, he said he wanted to tell the Salihee family he was sorry and that he'd never had to fire to stop a car before the 24th of June. 'If I'd seen his hands up, no way would I have fired a shot. We didn't murder him. No way was it murder,' Joe said. But there was desperation in his voice, as if he wasn't sure."
As for the media, they're more interested in avenging one of their own than in tracking down bad guys like Zarqawi.
Preying on that soldier is just sickening.
Sounds like the dead reporter in question was a complete idiot whose stupidity caught up with him. Anyone who doesn't take the U.S. TCPs (traffic control points) deadly serious is just begging to get shot.
Trust me. I'm a journalist.
S%^t happens in war zones. If reporters are too stupid to understand that then they have no one to blame but themselves.
It was a Salon.com reporter. Little to no differentiation from being a domestic terrorist.
I suspect the "broader look" won't appear in the inevitable movie about this.
People make bad decisions at checkpoints and our guys have a split second to determine if the driver is a bad guy. Reporters operating in a war zone should know better than the average citizen how not to make themselves a target.
That is truly an asinine comment.
You got that right.
There's a joke in here, with the punchline "A good start."
Not unlike British cops on the subway--a split second to decide if they guy they are pursuing is a suicide bomber or an innocent commuter. Make the wrong decision, and scores of civilians could be killed. Make a wrong decision the other way, and an innocent commuter is killed. Truly no easy answer. I don't envy guys who have to make those decisions everyday.
Sniper Joe shot the wrong reporter.
If one shot killed him with a shot to the head and four fingers of his right hand were also missing (presumed to have been shot off by the single bullet), then that would indicate to me that he was holding his hand up in front of his face or forehead perhaps to shield his eyes from the glareor to reach for something on the dash or over the visor.
bump
THEY ARE ON THE OTHER SIDE.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that anyone in the military would trust a reporter enough to discuss operational details with him.
I, for one, haven't heard anything about this particular incident. I know some of the looney left are claiming that journalists are being targeted (and, depending upon the journalist, I can't really see what the problem is - I'd like to target a few myself). But these reporters had better remember that if they are in a combat zone, they had must behave within the bounds of the rules given to them. Sounds like this guy either wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing or maybe he really was a suicide bomber?
This is why the Laws of Warfare and Geneva Convention require combatants to wear uniforms. It is to protect the civilian population. It is way past time for summary executions of illegal combatants.
You don't have an agenda, though. The reporter WANTS to punish the shooter. If he can't get legal action, he will settle for mentally torturing him.
Thanks. Be sure and comment on the rest of my posts and let me know how I can be more pleasing to you.
Even though they don't reveal "Joe's" real name and unit in this piece, I'll bet that some "insurgent" cell in Iraq does have this information, along with a recent photo of "Joe." ("Gee, we have no idea how that happened! We'll look into that at once!"). The military may need to bring this guy home.
That's as it should be. It's an unfortunate side effect of the terrorists continued attacks.
As for the drama at the end of the piece, I think it is admirable, and speaks to the humanity of a soldier, that they feel anguish over the death of any innocent civilians. Even though such deaths are inevitable in such situations.
Someone needs to send them an email that the Old York Times has ruined "unidentified sources" for the next 100 years.
The LA Times is trying to create a controversy with with the CA Nat Guard too...using "unidentified sources"
May one of Us should go and "track down" that sneaky, lying Creep ourselves.
His bias is clear in this statement right here, he investigated his friends death and planted the seed of doubt that the sniper will carry for the rest of his life. He humanized that death by talking about his wife and kid, playing with the soldiers pride and turning it into guilt. Slimy b&st&rd.
Amen, I couldn't have put it better. The journalists of this generation are as vile a group traitors as the journalists were during Vietnam, perhaps worse. And their intent is the same.
I stopped reading right there!
"Seemed like a haphazard manner"?
LOL!
This [ deleted ] nailed down all facts to a certainty, except the one arguably the most important. I see ..."rightfully suspected resulting in the accidental death..."
A prewritten article desperately in search of supporting facts...
See Michael Yon's latest reports from Mosul about how talkative some terorists detained by the Iraqi police became after one of them was "shot while trying to escape".
By now, everyone in Iraq should know better. We've been there for several years now, and TCPs and outer cordons should be well-recognized and expected at any place at any time. Yet these idiot reporters and Iraqis still routinely try to run them. Then they wonder why such a terrible thing could have happened! My Soldiers want to go there, kick butt, and get home alive. The last part means not taking stupid chances such as, "Is this guy really a suicide bomber or just someone who doesn't know what a TCP looks like?" There are escalation-of-force SOPs out there and they are used constantly, but, somehow they still go unheeded, and innocent (very stupid) people get killed. I honestly can't feel sorry for any of 'em.
I agree...I've come to despise many journalists..they hide their egomania behind this "The Story" altruism.
EVERY POS connected with this story should have his ticket pulled(almost said punched) and NEVER, EVER be allowed into or near Iraq or ANY Military personnel or briefings EVER AGAIN!!!
My sentiments exactly. Why don't these sphincters expend such energy and creativity finding the REAL bad guys?????
They disgust me.
I don't trust these anti-war so-called correspondents.
It's way to easy to embellish the story or make one up outright using those ever-popular 'unnamed sources'.
That's why I don't favor Congress' proposed media shield law where sources don't have to be verified. Like judges, we don't need activist legislators interpreting the Constitution.
I bet this whole story is BS - made up out of thin air - MSM-style.
I think that's an accurate description. The sniper was the killer and the guy he shot was a victim.
Disgusting, dishonest behavior on the part of journalists.
Is this an accurate description?
"The Idiot and the Soldier"
Let me know if you trouble assigning the roles...
I would offer that there are 10's of thousands of other stories more remarkable than this one having to do with our troops in Iraq and not necessarily having to do with fighting.
Situation the reporter is in, the personal can easily affect the professional here.
The author appears to correct some of his misguided logic in conducting the investigation, but shows his suspicions and the "evidence" for them, which he later can't back up.
A lot of the time the mistake has been not shooting at a car that doesn't stop at a checkpoint. This has gotten a lot of soldiers and Iraqi civilians killed. Seems with a number of incidents have demanded that the driver of such a car not obeying directions there be shot.
So if someone is passing another car at a checkpoint....
A police officer in the US would shoot you and me, or at least me, if we didn't act properly when stopped.
This journalist doesn't have broader rights being in a danger zone in Iraq.
How would the Salon reporter have any idea whether the hands of his associate were raised or not at the time of the shooting from looking at the dead body?
Did he consult Quincy or does he watch too much CSI?
Missing fingers doesn't mean anything as to whether the hands were raised.
Reporter seems to suggest the may have gotten out of the car and raised his hands and then gotten shot. If so how would that result in missing fingers, the soldier wouldn't have tried to shoot the fingers there, if he wanted to kill he would have shot him any place except the fingers raised in the air.
Lastly just because he is a Salon reporter and he knew the guy doesn't mean the guy wasn't a sleeper or a convert to the enemy.
All in all sounds like he has succeeded in meeting a soldier who did his job.
If I could give the author the benefit of the doubt here and agree that he probably had an idea that this other reporter wasn't a bad guy then perhaps I am being a little harsh on the author here.
Whatever the case, though I won't agree with the author's opinion or methods here have to give him a little credit for conducting an investigation of what he perceived as injustice. Credit for bravery here and for looking into things. If he broke rules in doing this that doesn't mean exemption from penalty, though I can't see what rules he may have broken and don't know the rules enough to judge.
You are assuming that the guy who was shot was an idiot. Maybe. But, maybe, he simply wasn't paying attention to what was going on or he got distracted at the wrong moment.
The sniper here probably didn't do anything wrong. The same can probably be said about the guy who got shot. This is one of those cases in war where nobody was really at fault but someone still died.
Over 200 years of American soldiers would disagree with you.
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