No longer reporting live

Today "coalition forces" — the U.S. military, in this case armed with a tank — directly targeted the offices of Reuters News Agency on the 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq: a location known to all parties in the conflict as the Baghdad bureau of more than 30 news organizations. Someone among those forces thought there might be a sniper on top of the hotel, although several networks were broadcasting live video not only at the time of the attack, but for at least 30 minutes before, and no sound of any gunshots, shells, or other weapons turned up on any of those networks' recordings, until the Reuters bureau was hit.

It was the third U.S. attack on international journalists in Baghdad in less than 24 hours. Our forces previously attacked the offices of the independent Arab network Al Jazeera, and Abu Dhabi Television.

Tariq Ayoub, a Jordanian citizen working for Al Jazeera, was killed.
Taras Protsyuk, a Ukrainian citizen working for Reuters, was killed.
Jose Couso, a Spanish citizen working for Telecinco, was killed.
Many others working for various news organizations were injured.

The International Federation of Journalists, the European Union, and a growing list of others have strongly condemned the attacks.

Yesterday, two other journalists, Christian Liebig of the German magazine Focus and Julio Anguita Parrado of the Spanish newspaper El Mundo, both embedded with the 2nd Brigade of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division, were killed by an Iraqi missile along with two U.S. soldiers. Parrado normally worked in the newspaper's New York office, and covered the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

On Sunday, Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed, a translator working with BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson in northern Iraq, was killed along with Kurdish freedom fighters and U.S. Special Forces by a U.S. "friendly fire" attack. Simpson continued the live broadcast that was under way at the time, despite a ruptured eardrum and a small piece of shrapnel in his leg.

On April 2, Kaveh Golestan, a freelancer working as a cameraman for the BBC in northern Iraq, died when he stepped on a land mine.

U.S. journalists Michael Kelly and David Bloom both died while covering the invasion of Iraq earlier this month, Kelly in an accident and Bloom from a pulmonary embolism. 

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Paul Moran and British television reporters Terry Lloyd and Gaby Rado, both covering the war for ITN, were killed March 22.

The Poynter Institute is maintaining an online roster of journalists lost in Iraq.

<<"No story is worth dying for," Major Chris Hughes, United States Marine Corps. >>

Christian Liebig used that quote in one of the last dispatches of his life, as many news organizations are reporting today.

Meanwhile, two non-embedded Polish journalists who were being held captive by Iraqis escaped unharmed and continue their independent reporting.

At midnight Baghdad time, the surviving members of the Baghdad foreign press corps held a candlelight vigil outside the hotel, despite the battle going on around them and the possibility that those tiny flames might draw additional fire, friendly or otherwise.