WASHINGTON - Two major international press watchdogs have denounced in strong terms Tuesday's U.S. military strikes in Baghdad that killed three journalists and wounded many more.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), U.S. air strikes severely damaged the Baghdad office of the Al-Jazeera satellite network, killing journalist Taraq Ayyoub and injuring camerman Zouhair al-Iraqi. Just moments later, another explosion, reportedly from U.S. artillery, damaged the offices of Abu Dhabi TV, less than one mile away, trapping as many as 30 journalists in the debris.

Amnesty International also expressed concerns about the attacks which, according to Pentagon spokesmen, came in response to "significant enemy fire."

Other reporters at two of the sites, however, said they had seen no shooting by Iraqi forces from the buildings that housed the journalists.

In another incident, a U.S. tank fired on the Palestine Hotel, which serves as the main base for international journalists covering the war from Baghdad, killing two journalists and wounding at least three others.

Pentagon officials insisted that they had not targeted any of the offices, but Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) called on Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld to provide evidence that none of the attacks were deliberate attempts to intimidate or retaliate against journalists covering the war.

"We are appalled at what happened because it was known that both (the Palestine Hotel and the Al-Jazeera office) contained journalists," said RSF Secretary-General Robert Menard. "We are concerned at the U.S. army's increasingly hostile attitude towards journalists, especially those non-embedded in its military units."

CPJ agreed that the incidents were "particularly troubling" because the location of both Arab television offices and the Palestine Hotel were widely known. In addition, even before hostilities broke out last month, both Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV provided specific coordinates of their Baghdad offices to Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, precisely so that no mistake would be made. It called on Rumsfeld to undertake an "immediate and thorough investigation" into the incidents.

"The attack against Al-Jazeera is of particular concern since the stations' offices were also hit in Kabul, Afghanistan in November 2001," CPJ said in a letter faxed to Rumsfeld late Tuesday. At that time the Pentagon insisted that the Al-Jazeera office in the Afghan capital was a "known Al-Qaeda facility," and that it did not know that Al-Jazeera operated from there.

Amnesty and CPJ said that the incidents appeared to be in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which provide that attacks must be "limited strictly to military objectives."

"Although the U.S. has claimed it is going to 'great lengths to minimize civilian casualties and damage to civilian facilities,'" Amnesty said, "it has declared Baghdad a 'combat zone' and has fired on media facilities. Challenged to explain attacks on buildings occupied by international media, U.S. authorities have offered shifting explanations."

"Unless the U.S. can demonstrate that the Palestine Hotel had been used for military purposes, it was a civilian object protected under international humanitarian law that should not have been attacked," Amnesty continued. "If it had demonstrably been used for military purposes, it should not have been attacked by a tank shell, clearly incapable of careful targeting in this case."

Journalists at the Palestine Hotel said they had neither seen nor heard any firing from the building before the attack, while CPJ said that, even if firing had taken place from the hotel, the response of U.S. forces was "disproportionate and thereby violated international humanitarian law."

Of particular concern to CPJ was the impression left by Pentagon spokesmen, such as Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks who said Tuesday that non-embedded journalists operate at their own risk and that U.S. forces bear no responsibility for protecting journalists operating independently in Iraq.

"We remind you," CPJ said, "that journalists are civilians and protected under international humanitarian law and cannot be deliberately targeted. While we recognize the important role of embedded reporters, the Geneva Conventions also contemplate the presence of non-embedded, or 'civilian,' journalists on the battlefield, and the U.S. military has an obligation to avoid harming them."

CPJ, RSF, the International Press Institute, and the International Federation of Journalists last week protested the U.S. bombing of the Iraqi state television headquarters in Baghdad which, according to the Pentagon, was being used as a command-and-control facility for the Iraqi armed forces. They also questioned March 29 and 30 bombings of the Information Ministry headquarters, where foreign news media are based.

In a related development, the San Francisco-based Association for Progressive Communications (APC) Tuesday protested the targeting of Al-Jazeera's website by hacker attacks, domain name hijacking, and the decision by one U.S. host service to cancel services to Al-Jazeera in the first weeks of the war.

"The computer hacks, online vandalism and the canceling of Al-Jazeera's web hosting contract all interfere with the UN-declared right to 'receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,'" APC said. It noted that the television network had launched its English-language website March 27, but that it has been virtually impossible since then to access the site due to "partriotic hackers." Instead, visitors to the site were re-directed to a pro-U.S. page that greeted them with the image of the U.S. flag and a message proclaiming "Let Freedom Ring."

London-based Index on Censorship last month awarded Al-Jazeera its free-expression prize for its "courage in circumventing censorship and contributing to the free exchange of information in the Arab world."

Copyright 2003 OneWorld.net

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