"‘Did you just f***ing shoot the Palestinian [sic] Hotel?'"

Yesterday the Committee to Protect Journalists released its report on the April 8 U.S. attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, where more than 100 journalists were covering the war. Two journalists, Spanish cameraman Jose Couso, of Telecinco, and Taras Portsyuk, a Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters, were killed. Though the Pentagon has said the U.S. tank that fired on the hotel was "returning fire," there is no sound of any shooting in audio and video recordings of the period immediately before the shelling. The CPJ report concludes that the killings were not deliberate, but avoidable, and found that "There is simply no evidence to support the official U.S. position that U.S. forces were returning hostile fire from the Palestine Hotel. It conflicts with the eyewitness testimony of numerous journalists in the hotel." So far, 14 journalists have died covering the Iraq war, 9 of them in combat situations, including the attack on the Palestine Hotel. The quote in the headline above is from Lt. Col. Philip DeCamp, as quoted by Chris Tomlinson, an Associated Press reporter embedded with an infantry company that had just arrived in Baghdad.