Recent events have stirred memories of a brush with death I had in Albania six years ago. A rocket, presumably Serb, whizzed past my ear, just as two of my colleagues were being blown off their feet by Nato bombers a few miles away. The missile was apparently meant for the Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers who were using the village hospital to treat their wounded and seemed to have a base somewhere nearby, judging by the open-backed trucks filled with bedraggled recruits we saw rattling past in the dust.
The Nato jets were bound for Serb forces in Kosovo. But somehow, two dropped their payloads within hours of each other on a field packed with journalists in Albania. My colleagues were observing the arrival of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees, expelled in droves from their homes by men loyal to Slobodan Milosevic.
The concrete bunkers, put up in their hundreds of thousands by the ultra-paranoid Enver Hoxha, were unmistakably Albanian. Locals reproduced them in ashtray form and sold them as souvenirs. I used to keep one on my mantelpiece. Journalists used the bunkers to take cover from the sun and Serb bullets from across the border. I was pretty sure that the pilots could see the bunkers.
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Still, I put the near misses down to the screw-up theory of life. It was probably some spotty defence department technocrat, I thought, who had foolishly drawn a cross in the wrong place. How could Nato possibly invite such a PR catastrophe, when local civilians, refugees and aid workers were the only other people hanging out there? I scoffed at a colleague’s conspiracy theory, enunciated as we munched on meat expertly barbecued by a friend who was celebrating his survival. Of course it wasn’t deliberate, I said.
Who cares about a few journalists? If they wanted to scare us away so they could have a clearer shot at the Serbs, there were easier ways. Few things happened deliberately in a war zone, I argued. I didn’t care if I sounded naïve. I just couldn’t believe a well-trained pilot would do that on purpose. I just wasn’t that cynical. Anyone who has been reading blogs lately will know where I’m headed – to the case of Eason Jordan, the CNN executive who reportedly suggested that American soldiers had deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq.
I confess that I did not join the posse of writers that attacked him for his remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos. I am still scratching my head about his comments. However wrong bad or stupid they were, he may have been speaking out of emotion at the death toll among his colleagues in Iraq. At least nine journalists and two media support staff have been killed there as a result of US fire in the last 23 months, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Mr Jordan tried to defend himself by saying that he only meant to point out that there was a difference between people killed entirely by accident – collateral damage – and people who were actually targeted, journalists or otherwise. But by then it was too late. He sounded like he was accusing American patriots of being murderous vampires thirsty for virgin journalist blood. The bloggers had him for breakfast, and the conservative media had him for lunch and dinner.
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He was toast the minute the word “target” passed his lips. Of course I cannot be absolutely certain of any of this, because the organizers have refused to issue a transcript on grounds the event was supposed to be “off-the-record.” Unfortunately for Mr Jordan, bloggers, like the general populace, probably don’t care what that means. For many bloggers, off-the-record is as passé as a typewriter. In case anyone is interested, it is generally used to allow government officials to speak frankly without fear of being identified or quoted later.
Police sometimes hold off-the-record briefings to get the facts straight about a crime that cannot yet be reported for fear of jeopardizing an investigation. Other times interviewees use it to vent. For example: “On the record, he is an excellent diplomat. Off-the-record, he’s a jerk.” It is rare to find journalists using the concept themselves, because it is of such limited use. I would advise everyone to remember that speaking off-the-record in a roomful of strangers is probably not a good idea unless you hope to see it in print later.
The journalists who profit least from off the record, funnily enough, are also the ones who are first to get killed. They are the cameramen like my friend Taras, who was shot by an American tank as he filmed from the balcony of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. He needed pictures of the tanks to tell his story. You can’t take pictures of off the record.
Everyone on the ground knew the hotel was populated overwhelmingly by journalists, so you can imagine the conspiracy theories after Taras was killed. I doubt he would have joined them, had he survived. He was too busy doing his job, rather brilliantly, as it happens, to be conspiracy minded. But I’m pretty certain he would have wanted to know why the gunner opened fire, just as I would have liked to know who was responsible for those Nato bombs falling in the wrong country.
I have never met Eason Jordan. We’ve all said things we regret later and I suspect he is in that unhappy place now. But I really don’t get the people who think that American soldiers would never, ever, hell no, lose their cool or make a mistake in the battlefield. Soldiers have committed atrocities in every war since time began. Fighting under the Stars and Stripes doesn’t make you immune, as we have seen in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
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There are journalists in Iraq who have delivered sickeningly specific accounts of abuse in American detention. They are startlingly similar to the accounts delivered by Iraqi suspects. Two of them worked for Reuters, the international news agency. In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I worked there for ten years. That’s how I met Taras, and how I ended up on the Kosovo border in the spring of 1999. It’s also how I learned that war brings out the best and the worst of humanity, and that applies to civilians, journalists and soldiers, too. I think it would be a distinctly American exercise to find out why.
American soup: you can email the author here