More on "WMD"

We'll have a discussion about some of the issues raised by Danny Schechter's documentary "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception" in class on Thursday, and possibly on Monday as well. (We're scheduled to have a guest speaker for part of our class on Thursday, so we may have to cut our "WMD" discussion short.)

Remember, if you were not in class today, you will be expected to find another way to see "WMD." The entire film is online here.

Although I think there's much of value in "WMD," there's no question that it's told from a certain point of view. Please be prepared to talk about whether you think the film is biased, and why. In particular, you were probably struck by the claims that the U.S. military may have deliberately fired on the media center at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. The Committee to Protect Journalists investigated that claim, and found it had no basis in fact. Here is an excerpt:

A Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) investigation into the incident — based on interviews with about a dozen reporters who were at the scene, including two embedded journalists who monitored the military radio traffic before and after the shelling occurred — suggests that attack on the journalists, while not deliberate, was avoidable. CPJ has learned that Pentagon officials, as well as commanders on the ground in Baghdad, knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of international journalists and were intent on not hitting it.

However, these senior officers apparently failed to convey their concern to the tank commander who fired on the hotel.

If you read the entire report, you will see that Jules Crittenden, an embedded reporter for the Boston Herald, had direct knowledge that the military had come under attack from rocket-propelled grenades, and that U.S. troops were attempting to take out a forward observer.

Since the tank commander apparently did not know that the Palestine Hotel was the headquarters for journalists, the result was a tragic accident.