8.10

from In the Hot Zone

Kevin Sites

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Kevin Sites (b. 1963) is a freelance journalist who has spent his career covering wars around the world. His reporting includes video, photography, and traditional news reporting. His first book, In the Hot Zone, from which this excerpt is taken, is based on his experience in 2004 and 2005, when Sites visited and reported on twenty different armed conflicts in Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and other places.

KEY CONTEXT This selection, from the first chapter of In the Hot Zone, called “Shooting at the Mosque,” presents a difficult ethical dilemma. In 2004, nine months after the United States military began the invasion of Iraq, Sites was embedded as a reporter for NBC within a unit of marines trying to take the city of Fallujah, which at the time was an enemy stronghold. During the battle, Sites videotaped an alarming incident and was torn between his duties to “seek and report the truth” and to “minimize harm.”

Sunbeams

The carpet of the mosque is stained with blood and covered with fragments of concrete. Tank shells and machine-gun rounds have pitted the inside walls. The rotting, sweet smell of death hangs in the morning air. Gunsmoke-laced sunbeams illuminate the bodies of four Iraqi insurgents. A fifth lies next to a column, his entire body covered by a blanket.

I shudder. Something very wrong has happened here.

Yesterday I had seen these same five men being treated by American medics for superficial wounds received during an afternoon firefight. Ten other insurgents had been killed, their bodies still scattered around the main hall in the black bags into which the Marines had placed them.

I was told by the commander of the 3.1 Marines, Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, that these five wounded, captured enemy combatants would be transported to the rear. But now I can see that one of them appears dead and the three others are slowly bleeding to death from gunshots fired by one lance corporal, I will learn later, who used both his M-16 and his 9 mm pistol on them, just minutes before I arrived.

5 With my camera rolling, I walk toward the old man in the red kaffiyeh and kneel beside him. Because he was so old, maybe in his early sixties, and wearing the red headgear, he had stood out the most to me when I was videotaping the day before, after the battle.

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Now the old man is struggling to breathe. Oxygenated blood bubbles from his nose. Another man, stocky and dressed in a long gray shirt called a dishdasha, is slumped in the old man’s lap. While I’m taping, the old man is bleeding to death in front of my camera. I look up to see the lance corporal who had just shot all of them moments before, now walking up to the other two insurgents against the wall, twenty feet away. One is facedown, apparently already dead. The other, dressed in an Iraqi Police uniform, is faceup but motionless, aside from his breathing.

The lance corporal says, “Hey, this one’s still breathing.” Another agrees, “Yeah, he’s breathing.” There is tension in the room, but I continue to roll on the man in the red kaffiyeh.

“He’s f****** faking he’s dead,” the lance corporal says, now standing right in front of the man.

The Embed

As a freelance correspondent for NBC News, I embedded with the Third Battalion, First Marine (Regiment) for three weeks prior to the Battle of Falluja, or what the Americans code-named Operation Phantom Fury and what the Iraqi interim government called Operation Al Fajr, or “The Dawn.”

10 The mission has a clear but complicated objective; take back the restive city of Falluja from the insurgents who had been running the place for the last eight months.

In the time leading up to the battle, I have developed a good relationship with my unit. The Marines see that I’m a television reporter working solo — shooting, writing and transmitting my reports without a crew — and they tell me they like my self-reliance. I tell them it’s a necessity, because no one wants to work with me anymore. Television news is the ultimate collaborative medium, but by being recklessly aggressive, low on the network food chain (a producer turned reporter) and eager to go it alone to uncomfortable locations, it has not been difficult to convince news managers to let me do just that.

The Marines also like the fact that I write an independent war blog, which NBC allowed me to keep as a freelancer, where I post longer, more detailed and personal stories about my experiences.

Inspired by Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried, in which he describes the items, both literal and figurative, that each man in a U.S. Army platoon carried on a jungle march through Vietnam, I ask the Marines to show me the same. They pull out rosaries, Saint Christopher medals, photographs of their wives and children taped inside their Kevlar helmets.

I snap their pictures and post them on the site. Their families, eager for information about their loved ones, come to my blog in droves. They post responses, thanking me for allowing them to see the faces of their sons, husbands, brothers. Soon, however, those messages of gratitude will be replaced with hate mail and death threats. [. . .]

The Feints

15 Everyone knows the battle is coming, they just don’t know when. In the meantime the Marines conduct operations known as feints, bluffing maneuvers in which they charge up to the city’s edge with armor and infantry, both to fool the insurgents into thinking the real battle has begun and to draw them out of their urban hiding spots to kill them.

I am assigned to the CAAT (Combined Anti-Armor Team) Platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Ryan Sparks, a former enlisted man and member of the Marines’ elite Recon Unit, similar to Army Special Forces and Navy SEALs.

The CAAT team consists of Humvees mounted with heavy, squad-operated weapons such as TOW antitank missiles and Mark 19 grenade launchers that can fire belted 40 mm grenades at a rate of sixty rounds per minute.

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A week before Phantom Fury begins, Sparks’s team is assigned to an operational feint on the south end of the city, where commanders believe foreign fighters, possibly from Al Qaeda, are concentrated.

The units rehearse the operation in a “rock drill” in which rocks and, strangely, large children’s Lego blocks are arranged on the ground to approximate Falluja’s buildings. Water bottles stand in as minarets for the mosques. Each unit commander involved in the operation, from captains to squad leaders, explains, in chronological order of the event, their mission objective, entry into the operation and exit.

20 On the evening of the feint, I ride in Sparks’s Humvee. As we race across the desert, I shoot video out the front windshield, where my last name, along with those of the three crew members, is written in black marker along with our blood types.

There is a loud explosion as an insurgent mortar round lands a hundred yards behind us. Sparks orders his teams to find cover somewhere on the flat desert plains.

“There it is — right there, Johnson, eleven-thirty.” Sparks directs his Mark 19 gunner to a flash point in the city where he believes the mortar came from.

The radio crackles as Sparks listens to the field artillery unit triangulating the mortar’s firing grid more precisely. When another mortar lands nearby, Sparks no longer waits. He orders his squad and those in the other Humvees to return fire.

It is, on a small scale, what the Marines had hoped would happen — drawing insurgents out and then springing the trap. Though the insurgent response has been tepid so far — a couple of mortars and small-arms fire — the Marines ramp up the firepower.

25 Abrams M1A1 tanks fire their 120 mm main guns; Marine artillery units drop their own mortars; while the CAAT team shoots shoulder-launched Javelin and Humvee-mounted TOW missiles at the outlying houses.

Tow Backblast

I leave Sparks and run seventy-five yards across the open field to where another CAAT Humvee is shooting TOWs. After several firings, Lance Corporal Joe Runion loads another missile into the launcher; the gunner yells “Fire in the hole” and pulls the trigger. But there is no launch —only a clicking sound.

It’s a hang-fire. Runion waits for a full minute, Marine protocol in this situation, before climbing onto the Humvee to unload the faulty weapon. Just as he is about to reach for the tube, the missile fires, roaring to life at its target. The backblast concussion from the rear of the tube knocks Runion unconscious and he falls off the Humvee to the ground.

Others in his unit run to his aid, but, remarkably, he shakes it off, climbs back on the Humvee and reloads the weapon. I’ve recorded the entire sequence on my video camera.

“I’m glad you’re safe, dog,” says one of the Marines to Runion, whose head is still ringing from the explosion.

30 The moment is soon lost. Darkness falls and the fight continues. In my story I report the TOW malfunction and Runion’s stubborn perseverance after being knocked out. I also say that while no American lives were lost in the operation, it did cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in manpower and munitions.

The next day, after my piece has aired on NBC Nightly News, a few of the Marines from the CAAT team tell me they’re happy that I didn’t use the TOW backblast incident to make them look stupid.

I feel that I have gained a little trust — but also begin to see the deep-rooted mistrust they have for my profession.

Some of that perception, they tell me, started with their fathers, who served in Vietnam and told them when they were growing up that the media helped lose that war by reporting only the “bad stuff.”

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I think about telling them that the United States dropped more bombs in Vietnam than in both World Wars I and II combined and that it had a determined foe, one willing to live in underground tunnels and endure the death of millions. It was the enemy who won that conflict, and not news reporting that lost it. I decide it is probably better left unsaid. [. . .]

The Mosque Shooting

35 After hearing the lance corporal say, “He’s f****** faking he’s dead,” I raise my camera up from the bleeding old man to the Marine.

I see him in my viewfinder; he is raising his M-16 rifle and pointing it directly at the wounded insurgent’s head. He peers down at him through his laser scope.

I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I hope he’s just going to cover him while other Marines search him for weapons. But in this place, already filled with so much death, somehow, in this moment, I sense there will be more. The lance corporal squeezes the trigger, firing a 5.62 round into the man’s head, which I watch explode on my screen.

His skull and brains splatter against the dirty white wall he was lying against. After firing the shot, the Marine (whom I have chosen not to name) turns on his heels and walks away.

The name of the man he shot was revealed later in an identification card recovered from his body by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The card, ironically, had been issued to the man under the authority of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Falluja. His name was Officer Farhan Abd Mekelf, a member of the Iraqi Police.

40 I have seen people killed and wounded in combat, but never like this. Never at point-blank range. It stuns me to the point that instead of jumping up, I continue to videotape from my kneeling position. Maybe it was shock, but to this day, I still can’t understand why I completed the shot sequence, panning back to the old man with the red kaffiyeh after the lance corporal killed Mekelf.

After the shooting, the fifth insurgent, who had been completely covered by the blanket, slowly pulls it down, raising his bandaged hands as he does. Two other Marines in the mosque immediately point their weapons at him.

This snaps me out of my trance. Thinking they might shoot him, too, I get up and confront the Marine who had pulled the trigger.

“Why did you do that?” I asked him. “What’s going on? These were the same guys that were here yesterday. They were wounded.”

“I didn’t know, sir,” he said. “I didn’t know.” The voice that had seemed so confident just a few moments ago is now filled with unsettling realizations. And then he walks out of the mosque followed by the other Marines.

45 The insurgent under the blanket begins speaking to me in Arabic. He’s the only one of the five wounded who had not been shot a second time by the lance corporal, somehow escaping that fate by hiding under the blanket. Because of the wounds on his legs from the Friday afternoon firefight, he’s wearing only a blue-striped shirt and white underpants; his trousers are in a heap next to the mosque pillar.

He tries to talk to me, gesturing with his hands, but I can’t understand what he’s saying. He falls back on his upper arms, frustrated and scared.

It’s only later, after my video is translated, that I will find out what he was trying to tell me. But it will be more than two years later before I learn the fate of this man, Taleb Salem Nidal, and my complicity in it.

As I walk away from the mosque, I’m not thinking of Nidal, but only of the shooting I just witnessed. There is a vehicle going back to the battalion field headquarters. I jump in and ride back to the 3.1 Battalion’s field headquarters. I need to see Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl, tell him what has happened and show him the video.

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When I first met Buhl at the beginning of my embed, I liked him right away. He seemed like an easygoing, no-bullshit kind of guy. Small and stocky, he was a former wrestler and, like Lieutenant Ryan Sparks, had been an enlisted man who became an officer. Guys like that, who have been there and know the business from the ground up, generally command a lot of respect. Buhl was no exception. I had interviewed him prior to Phantom Fury and he had said something to me that now, in retrospect, seems both sadly ironic on one level and prophetically true on another.

50 “We’re the good guys. We are Americans. We are fighting a gentleman’s war here — because we don’t behead people, we don’t come down to the same level of the people we’re combating,” he says during our interview at Camp Abu Ghraib. “And that’s a very difficult thing for a young eighteen-year-old Marine that’s been trained to locate, close with and destroy the enemy with fire and close combat, and that’s a very difficult thing for a forty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel with twenty-three years’ experience in the service who’s trained to do the same thing once upon a time and now has a thousand-plus men to lead, guide, coach, mentor and to ensure we are the good guys and keep the moral high ground.”

When I show Buhl the tape, he is not shocked so much as he is deflated. His comments are along the lines of “Ah, this is so bad.” I think he felt that all he had accomplished up to that moment could be taken away by a single image.

The Report

After I shoot the video, one of the first things I do is call the NBC News desk in New York and have them wake up the vice president of NBC News at the time, Bill Wheatley; the VP of foreign news, David Verdi; and the foreign news manager, Danny Noa.

Partly, this is a safety net for myself. If no one at NBC knows that I have the tape, I might be tempted to destroy it. It is the most soul-wrenching moral dilemma I have ever faced in my life. My professional code of ethics commands me to “seek and report the truth,” but it also, as few outside the profession know, instructs us to “minimize harm.” The Society of Professional Journalists’ code requires that the “ethical journalist treat sources, subject and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect.”

How, in this circumstance, can I possibly do both? I know that the videotape probably shows a violation of the Geneva Convention and Uniform Code of Military Justice regarding humane treatment of wounded enemy combatants.

55 And while that is the likely truth, I fear that releasing the video could have unintended consequences. The most obvious, it seems, is that once word of the video reaches insurgents, they might not be willing to surrender if they believe their fate is going to be similar to Farhan Abd Mekelf’s.

A further inflamed insurgency might also take retribution through more suicide bombings on civilian and military targets. In addition, there are already slim hopes for merciful and humane treatment of American, Iraqi government and coalition forces prisoners by insurgent fighters, and now there will almost certainly be summary executions.

Reporting the truth is my professional responsibility, but so is consideration of its potential harm. If my employers know about the video, I will not be alone in my decision making.

Kevin Burke, who was videotaping with another unit while I was in the mosque, meets up with me at battalion headquarters. I ask him to start making duplicates of the shooting video, just in case someone tries to take it from us.

No one ever does.

Ticking Clock

60 My belief is that we should hold the tape for seventy-two hours to give the Marines a chance to investigate.

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To their credit, they move quickly, pulling the lance corporal from the field and assigning Lieutenant Colonel Bob Miller from the judge advocate general’s office to begin questioning witnesses in the case.

But there are other complications. Even though I am working for NBC News, the network has made a video-sharing agreement called a “pool” with a consortium of other television media, including the other four American networks, three British networks (including the BBC), as well as Reuters TV and Associated Press Television News. This pretty much guarantees that whatever footage comes out of the Battle of Falluja will be seen around the world, including the Middle East through Al Jazeera.

Part of the pool agreement requires me to turn over my footage as soon as possible. But I know that if I do that before allowing the Marine Corps to respond, the story could spin out of control without proper context.

As the seriousness of the incident begins to reverberate, I begin meetings with Marine Corps brass that swiftly take me from the front lines to the desk of the commanding general of the entire First Marine Division and first Marine Expeditionary Force, Major General Richard Natonski.

65 At the same time, NBC News VP Bill Wheatley is pressuring me to release the tape to the pool in forty-eight hours — otherwise, he tells me, “we’ll look like we’re holding out on them.”

At Camp Falluja, the Marines billet Kevin Burke and me away from the other media so we can do our work quickly and quietly without stirring up questions about what I videotaped in the mosque.

Sunday, the day after the shooting, I’m sitting outside our quarters on a satellite phone with Danny Noa. I’m tired, frustrated and conflicted — and the pressure from Wheatley has pissed me off. I tell Danny that I’ve come to a decision.

“I’m not going to feed the tape, Danny.”

“What do you mean, you’re not going to feed the tape?”

70 “I didn’t make this pool agreement and I have no idea how the other networks are going to use it and we don’t have any control over it. I’ll messenger it to our bureau in Baghdad but I’m not going to feed this tape to the pool.”

Noa is understandably shocked and puzzled to the point that he hardly knows what to say. He and I had come up through the ranks as producers at NBC. No is not a word producers use or accept if they are going to have any kind of career. He pushes, pleads and finally lets me know just what kind of grave territory I have entered. When I still refuse to budge, he says he needs to get David Verdi on the phone when he’s done with a meeting. He asks me to call back in a half hour.

When Verdi gets on the phone, he is calm and deliberate.

“I can understand how hard this is, Kevin,” he tells me, “but we’ve already told the pool what we have and if you don’t feed the tape it’s going to look like we’re trying to hide the truth or something — like we’re collaborating with the government to bury this thing.” [. . .]

He pauses, then pushes a button that he knows will affect me. “It could become an even bigger incident. There will be a buildup and the demand for the video will turn into an outcry. When it’s finally released, it could create an even more volatile situation than if we give it to them now and provide the context of what happened through your report.”

75 It’s exactly what I don’t want to happen, for everything to spin out of control. I didn’t want to be responsible for a massive wave of violence and bloodshed. By the end of the phone call, I relent. We decide the video will be released in two versions: the entire tape, then a second feed where I pause the video after the Marine raises his M-16 at the insurgent’s head. The gunshot will be heard, but the image of the actual shooting won’t be seen. The other networks can use their own discretion on which version they want to air.

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Simultaneously, I will complete my packaged story for NBC Nightly News with a video interview of the JAG investigator, Bob Miller, responding to the facts of the case.

The process of putting together the script is painstaking, requiring multiple levels of oversight from news management, NBC lawyers, executive and senior producers. [. . .]

By the time we’re finished, the script is a Frankenstein’s monster of caution and qualifications that violates the most basic rule of journalistic writing — tell the most important thing that happened first; do not bury your lede.

Also, we choose to censor ourselves and show the version with the paused image in the report. We justify it by saying it’s too graphic for our viewers.

80 This is a decision that I not only support but push for. In hindsight, I know it was the wrong decision. We didn’t trust the American public enough to let them see the video in its entire context. Instead we added to their confusion about the incident by toploading the story with all the mitigating factors such as insurgents using mosques to fight from and booby-trapping dead bodies — while not honestly evaluating the visual evidence that this shooting was both cavalier and without provocation.

Because they didn’t get the whole story, viewers filled their lack of understanding with their own conclusions, based on personal perceptions, political beliefs and emotional reactions — almost anything but factual detail. The very thing we held back on.

On this basis, many viewers decided the Marine was justified. When the hate mail and the death threats started pouring into my email accounts, many people accused me of omitting the mitigating factors with which we actually began our report.

The Aftermath

Since I haven’t seen the actual broadcast, I don’t learn until the next day what has happened. NBC anchor Brian Williams, in an incredibly generous gesture to me and the burgeoning blog movement, mentioned, at the end of my mosque shooting report, that I also keep an independent blog. He then read the Internet address on air to his ten million viewers, inadvertently sending thousands of rabid right-wingers to my electronic front door. I’m certain they could have found it anyway, but this kept them from having to search (his on-air promotion will actually help me reach millions a week later, when I write my Open Letter and post it on the site).

But the morning after the broadcast, when I wake up at Camp Falluja and connect my satellite modem to check my email, I have more than six hundred waiting for me. In a prolonged and ill-advised display of masochism, I sit on a concrete barrier smoking cigarettes and reading at least the first couple of lines of every one of them. [. . .] While there are a lot of messages of support, the negative, more inherently dramatic responses tend to monopolize my attention.

85 After a while, they run together in a tone of hateful — even threatening — rhetoric:

You better sleep with one eye open, you anti-war a******! You f*** with one Marine, you f *** with all of us Marines, d********! Semper Fi and sleep tight, you piece of s***!

Mark

We know where you live. We know what you drive. We know who your friends are. And we’ll be waiting for you when you get back home. You made a big mistake.

SMS

May your entire family contract AIDS or die a painful death from cancer.

Anonymous

I imagine you didn’t give a thought to the danger you put your family in, did you? Well, some whacko is probably fashioning a six pack of Molitov [sic] cocktails to deliver to them, but hey, lookit the money and fame you got at someone else’s expense. You’re dirt schmuck and I don’t think there is anything too horrible that could happen to you.

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Jim

We would love to be able to give thanks this Thanksgiving that you were killed by one of your Arab friends. When you get killed every American will dance in the streets. YOU ARE THE ENEMY! WE HATE YOU!!!

Annie

Hey Kev,

Waiting for the picture with your head laying on your back. So when do you suppose we will see that?

Bill

Sigh . . .

I wonder why the units who have imbedded [sic] journalists who rat them out do not frag them. There is absolutely no place for f****** reporters in a combat zone. Plain and simple.

A Grandmother in Houston

If you were shadowing my unit in the field, I would personally put a round in the back of your head myself. . . . I am praying that some good Americans find out where you live and teach you a lesson or two about betraying your country.

Anonymous

O’Reilly and North

The emails will continue at the rate of about three hundred per day for the next year. The numbers will rise or fall depending on who has decided to fan the flames: right-wing bloggers or conservative Fox News Channel talk-show hosts such as Bill O’Reilly and ex-Marine and ’80s Iran-Contra scandal figure Oliver North.

Fox was a part of the pool, so both men have had a chance to watch the entire video. They either misinterpreted the events or decided the facts were too inconvenient.

In either case, instead of reminding viewers that as citizens of a democracy, we are all responsible for what our military does in our name in a time of war, both bad and good, O’Reilly and North attack as unpatriotic anyone who believes we should live up to our national ideals of seeing truth revealed and justice served.

In his own blog post on November 28, 2004, O’Reilly makes several errors that create misconceptions that ripple through cyberspace and mobilize an army of chronically misinformed ideologues to come out swinging with erroneous emails and half-baked accusations.

90 O’Reilly writes (identifying the Marine as a soldier), “On the tape you can see the insurgent move before the soldier pulls the trigger.

I was closer to the insurgent than Bill O’Reilly ever could be — the insurgent never even twitched. His mistake, as one Marine said on tape: “Yeah, he’s breathing.”

O’Reilly continues, “If that young Marine had homicide on his mind, he would have entered the Mosque shooting. But he did not.

The truth is, regardless of his intentions, the Marine did enter the mosque and begin shooting. According to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation, the same lance corporal admitted to shooting three of the wounded Iraqis when he entered the compound before me. He used his 9 mm pistol after first firing with his M-16, which jammed. I recorded on video the sound of the distinctive small-arm reports while waiting to go inside the mosque.

The shots were fired in a slow and methodical manner, not the frantic pattern of combat when the enemy is shooting back. A Marine Corps statement issued on May 4, 2005, five months after the incident, states: “During the assault, the corporal entered the building and shot 3 AIF [U.S. military parlance for anti-Iraqi forces or insurgents], one of whom was recorded on videotape by reporter Kevin Sites. The Marine admits in his sworn statements that he shot the 3 AIF in self-defense believing they posed a threat to him and his fellow Marines.”

95 The report continues, “The ballistic reports indicate the projectiles removed from the bodies of three AIF were attributable to the corporal’s weapon (M-16).”

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O’Reilly concludes, “The Pentagon is not releasing the name of the Marine, and is investigating. Both of these things are fair. But this case is not complicated, and anyone condemning that soldier should himself be condemned.

The truth is that out of fairness to the Marine during the investigation I didn’t release his name — nor have I now, after its conclusion. More importantly, the case is complicated, both in the small facts and intentions relating to the individual Marine and the larger facts and intentions relating to our military and nation as a whole.

Our Failing

For me, the problems following the incident are predictable. In the United States there is a loud outcry against me and against NBC and, to a lesser degree, the media overall for the perception of having betrayed the troops in a time of war.

All the other American networks follow NBC’s lead in not showing the actual shooting on the mosque video, while in Europe at least one network in each country does. However, in the Middle East, nearly everyone is seeing the entire segment — over and over again. During the week following the release of the video, Al Jazeera airs it nearly once every hour.

100 Later, I would consider how sadly we failed the public in our responsibility to them, that it was not our government or military that censored us in this story; we, the American media, did it ourselves.

Everyone in the world had the potential to see one of the most important and controversial stories to come out of the war — except the citizens of the nation whose own military was directly involved. [. . .]

From my cot in Camp Falluja I stop looking at the hundreds of hate emails and hunker down to write what I title “Open Letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1.” It is to be a full account of events leading up to, during and after the mosque shooting. In it I will explain not only what I witnessed but what I felt, as well as what my responsibilities were as a journalist and why it was not just the right choice but the only moral and ethical choice.

I have addressed it to the Marines, but it’s also meant for the world. In an email, I ask my sister Shawn if she knows a lawyer who could look at the letter. With so much heated debate around the incident, I want to protect myself. In some ways, I look at the article as a kind of self-deposition.

Shawn contacts her former boss at Dick Clark Productions, Trudi Behr, who is married to the prominent Los Angeles attorney Joel Behr. According to my sister, Joel and Trudi are fans of my blog, and I had met them for dinner at their house once, prior to this trip to Iraq.

105 Both of them take me on as a kind of crisis communication project, helping me to think out what the article needs to accomplish — telling what I saw, what it meant and why as a journalist I had to tell the story.

In the meantime, a right-wing Web site called WorldNetDaily.com is claiming I am an antiwar activist. Citing this one “shred of evidence,” an antiwar German Web site had, without my permission, taken photographs from my blog and posted them.

Shawn and Xeni Jardin contact the site and threaten legal action if the photos aren’t removed.

Open Letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1

On Sunday, November 21, 2004, I post the open letter on my blog. It is eight days after the actual incident. As a courtesy, I send a copy to NBC and MSNBC. (Neal Shapiro has advised me earlier not to write a response — or, if I am determined, to let them make suggestions. I decide it is best for me to do this on my own — with a little help from my friends.)

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The original article is 2,600 words long with several photographs — but since we don’t have a way to post the video, only the text is posted.

110 I conclude it with the following paragraph, which I believed sums up our differing roles:

So here, ultimately, is how it plays out: When the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued, he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera, the story of his death became my responsibility.

The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us.

The response to the article is overwhelming. Media outlets from around the world publish excerpts, or in some cases, such as Britain’s Guardian newspaper and Marine Corps Times, carry nearly the entire piece.

According to user statistics on kevinsites.net, readership skyrockets from just 37,600 hits early in the month to more than two million the day after the letter is posted.

Anecdotally, at least, the impact it has on the perceptions of the American public about the story seems even more remarkable. While the hate mail and the death threats do not disappear, I am able to see the trend of hate shift either to begrudging understanding of my actions or outright support now that more information is available.

With a few exceptions, even my own industry, which had been mostly ambivalent in its support and defense of my journalistic integrity, now seems to enthusiastically welcome me back into the fold. Wired magazine will give me its first-ever Rave Award for blogging, specifically concerning the mosque shooting, and the University of Oregon will honor me with its Payne Award for Ethics for both my television and blog coverage of the incident.

Eddie Adams

115 At Camp Falluja, I’m too exhausted to feel vindicated and my difficulties are not over yet. When I leave and get back to NBC’s Baghdad Bureau, I learn that the famous Vietnam photojournalist Eddie Adams has died. He was the one who snapped the incredible Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a Viet Cong fighter being summarily executed by a South Vietnamese general. Adams captured it just as the trigger was pulled and the man was beginning to grimace.

It was a poignant moment for Adams, who would later write, regretful of the photo, “the General killed the Viet Cong; I killed the General with my camera.”

It seems relevant that Adams would die some thirty years after Vietnam and during a time when the challenges of telling the truth in war were revealing themselves again.

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seeing connections

Sites ends his piece with a reference to Eddie Adams, the photographer behind one of the most famous war photographs of all time, Saigon Execution. In this photograph, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the South Vietnamese chief of police, executes a member of the Vietcong (Communist guerrilla soldiers who fought against South Vietnam and the United States during the Vietnam War). Even though Adams won a Pulitzer Prize for the photograph, he eventually regretted what he had done, years later saying, “The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn’t say was, ‘What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?’”

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Compare the situation Adams faced and the conclusions he drew with the situation Sites faced and the decision he made.

Understanding and Interpreting

  1. Sites includes a lengthy description of one of the marines’ feints and a near-accident that occurred before the shooting in the mosque. What conclusion is the reader expected to draw from this section about the relationship between reporters and the military in general, and about Sites in particular?

  2. Look back at the section called “The Mosque Shooting.” Trace Sites’s actions throughout the sequence. How and why does his role change from observer to participant?

  3. Summarize the ethical conflict Sites encounters once he realizes what he has filmed (pars. 52–58). Be sure to consider it from all of the angles: his professional code of ethics, his relationship with the marines, and the effects the video could have on the enemy and the allies, as well as Sites’s role as a “pool reporter” required to share everything he has recorded with other networks.

  4. Using evidence from throughout the piece for support, including the portion of the Open Letter, explain why Sites ultimately makes the decision he does.

  5. According to Sites, what is wrong with the final version of the story of the shooting in the mosque, and what is the result of the decisions he and the producers made?

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Analyzing Language, Style, and Structure

  1. How does the section called “The Embed” serve to establish Sites’s ethos? Why do you think Sites chooses to include this section early in the piece? How does it influence your understanding of what happens later?

  2. How does Sites foreshadow the events in the mosque? Be sure to consider how he structures the piece, as well as any specific language choices he makes prior to his mention of the actual shooting.

  3. Look back through the piece and identify places that reflect Sites’s shifting tone toward the marines. What words and phrases indicate this shift and what does it reveal about Sites and his situation?

  4. Reread the interview with Lieutenant Colonel Willy Buhl (par. 50). Though he had conducted this interview weeks earlier, why does Sites include Buhl’s responses at this point in the narrative, after the shooting?

  5. In the section called “The Report,” Sites mentions that he made duplicates of the tape in case someone tried to take it. He ends with the one-sentence paragraph “No one ever does.” What is Sites implying with this sentence, and why might he have chosen to make it a separate paragraph?

  6. Why do you think Sites includes the excerpts from the emails he received? What does he achieve by including them?

Connecting, Arguing, and Extending

  1. Did Sites do the right thing by airing the footage? Why or why not? How could he have handled the situation differently?

  2. One of the abusive emails that Sites received in the aftermath of his report mentions that reporters should not be allowed in combat zones, “[p]lain and simple.” Is the writer of that email right or wrong about whether reporters should be allowed to report from the battlefield? Write an argument in which you agree, disagree, or present a middle ground. Be sure to use examples from Sites’s piece to support your argument or as a counterargument.

  3. Sites notes that the full video he filmed, which included the actual shooting, was not aired by any of the American networks, though some TV stations in European countries and most of the ones in the Middle East chose to broadcast it. Sites calls this a failure of the American media’s responsibility to the public. If you were the news director of a television network, would you have chosen to air the whole footage? Why or why not?

  4. The entire Open Letter that Sites wrote to the marines with whom he was embedded is available online. Read it closely and analyze the rhetorical choices he makes in trying to explain his position to the marines. What word choices and examples are included in this letter that are specific to Sites’s purpose and audience?