USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011129.1243 (On Screen): It's bad that a bunch of journalists in Afghanistan were kidnapped and murdered. I think that was a terrible crime. I'm very sorry it happened. But there is something about this first person report which strikes me as decidedly strange, for it dwells on the fact that reporters "no longer have immunity."

Where did this reporter get the idea that reporters ever had immunity in the first place? Bombs respect no-one's profession, nor do land mines. In a firefight, people do not ask others about what they do for a living before shooting at them. (Hey, are you a reporter? No. OK; blam!) And Taliban bandits on the road in Afghanistan were looking for westerners on which to take revenge and didn't care who they were. I commented a while back that somehow it seemed strange to me that the press was more horrified by the deaths of reporters than of any other people -- and this again confirms that observation. Reporters seem to be thinking that they can go anywhere, do anything, and yet still be outside of it all, close observers who cannot be affected by what is within arm's reach.

We raced back to Jalalabad. Confused, scared, no one spoke. We tried to attach some sort of logic, some reason why such a terrible thing could have happened. We came up with nothing. My fear had turned to anger. I was angry that I had been shocked into fear. I was angry that I hadn't been more attuned to the treachery of my travel. I was angry that they, whoever they were, had killed journalists.

That is a dangerous fantasy, and it seems to have cost some of them their lives. Even there, on the front line, surrounded by the carnage, this guy seems to not have gotten the message: in a war, people die. If you go on a joy-ride in a combat zone, what the hell did you expect to happen?

Dick Cheney made a speech in which he said that this may be the first war in which the US loses more civilians than soldiers. It's also beginning to look like the first one in which we lose more reporters than soldiers. Maybe that's because soldiers know that they're not invulnerable and don't take stupid risks. (discuss)