wotiwrote

For an independent news agency, this is strong stuff:

The conduct of U.S. troops in Iraq, including increasing detention and accidental shootings of journalists, is preventing full coverage of the war reaching the American public, Reuters said on Wednesday.

In a letter to Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Reuters said U.S. forces were limiting the ability of independent journalists to operate.

No, really. 'Limiting the ability ... to operate.' You can feel the anger. And just how are US forces enforcing this limit? Well;

At least 66 journalists and media workers, most of them Iraqis, have been killed in the Iraq conflict since March 2003.

Reuters has been quite badly limited:

U.S. forces acknowledge killing three Reuters journalists, most recently soundman Waleed Khaled who was shot by American soldiers on Aug. 28 while on assignment in Baghdad. But the military say the soldiers were justified in opening fire.

Reuters believes a fourth journalist working for the agency, who died in Ramadi last year, was killed by a U.S. sniper.

Perhaps the most pertinent part of the letter (from Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger) is this:

It appears as though the U.S. forces in Iraq either completely misunderstand the role of professional journalists or do not know how to deal with journalists in a conflict zone, or both.

Well, I guess they're so used to their domestic press whooping along with Bush and the Shrubs that they can't see why anyone would care what they're really up to in Iraq.