Uncle Sam wants (to kill) you
A political screed misses the true threat to war correspondents
By Louise Roug (Columbia Journalism Review)

I traveled to Iraq for the first time in the winter of 2004. I was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, and had volunteered to help out at the Baghdad bureau over Christmas. It was a three-week assignment that ended up lasting nearly three years. Throughout that time, danger and fear were constant companions.

Along with a number of other journalists, I lived at the al-Hamra, a hotel in a residential neighborhood across the Tigris River from the Green Zone. In late 2005, suicide bombers detonated close to a ton of explosives near the entrance, killing at least six Iraqi civilians. Body parts were found floating in the hotel swimming pool.

I was not at the hotel that day. But bombings were part of my everyday calculus in Iraq, whether I was in the streets among civilians or traveling with the military. There was no safe place. And while bombings were scary because of their force and unpredictability, what scared me most was the threat of kidnapping. A few months before I arrived in Baghdad, an Italian reporter named Enzo Baldoni had been killed in front of rolling cameras, and during the time I spent in Iraq two journalists I knew were kidnapped. Thankfully, both survived.

Many others weren’t so fortunate, and Iraq remains the deadliest country for journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Given my experience in Iraq, I was eager to read Chris Paterson’s new book, War Reporters Under Threat. But Paterson, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds, isn’t interested in the actual threats that journalists faced in Iraq and Afghanistan—and continue to face in conflicts around the world. Instead, he argues that the real danger to reporters in war zones is winding up in the crosshairs of the United States government.

The book “sets out to tell a story which many others have only hinted at,” Paterson writes in the preface.

This is the story of a superpower drunk with power and willing, both through willful ignorance and through design, to sacrifice media workers and media independence to military adventures fuelled by a potent mix of Machiavellian strategy and paranoid fantasy, driven with remarkable success by a neoconservative cabal which has come to profoundly infect and affect US society and US foreign policy alike.

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