Iraq claims another AP photojournalist

Reader JM informs me that the civil war in Iraq has claimed another journalist. A twenty-eight-year-old AP cameraman was found shot in the head today:

The body of an Associated Press employee was found shot in the back of the head Friday, six days after he was last seen by his family leaving for work. Ahmed Hadi Naji, 28, was the fourth AP staffer to die violently in the Iraq war and the second AP employee killed in less than a month. He had been a messenger and occasional cameraman for the AP for 2 1/2 years.

"All of us at AP share the pain and grief being felt by Ahmed's family and friends," said AP President and CEO Tom Curley.

The circumstances of Naji's death were unclear. Dozens of Iraqis are found slain almost every day in Baghdad, many believed to be victims of sectarian death squads. [Yahoo]

All honor to Ahmed Hadi Naji. I hope that when Michelle Malkin goes to Iraq she comes to appreciate the sacrifice of the many working journalists she has been assailing over the years.

Comments

[PR]

I hope she comes back in a body bag.

[cfrost]

Malkin will be a clueless dilettante in a free-fire zone. Hopefully none of the grownups protecting her will get clipped.
It would be nice if the scales fall from Ms. Malkin’s eyes in Iraq and she realizes that real journalism is not just a scam perpetrated by leftist propagandists. Before that happens though, I’ll probably eat bacon from the pigs shot flying over my house.

[The Xsociate]

Condolences to the family of Mr. Naji. No doubt his work did an invaluable service in showing how truly ugly this war, and those who continue to support it, have become.

[Amanda Marcotte]

Question: are the assassinations of journalists being performed by people sympathetic to BushCo?

[Paul Hooson]

Lindsay, I certainly agree on the dangers and sacrifices of the press and reporters. Ever since the days of war reporter, Ernie Pyle who lost his hife to a Japanese sniper in WWII, war reporting has been a very dangerous profession.

What really irks me is someone like "Curt" over at Flopping Aces, too much of a coward to even sign his real name to his opinions, with this coward and Michelle Malkin the two main proponents of the smear campaign against AP. War reporting is deeply dangerous in Iraq, where reports from informants such as the police Captain Hussein and others is vitally important in areas that reporters cannot get into right away because of serious security problems.

In a really ignorant and arrogant remark on Malkin's website, Flopping Ace's "Curt" claimed that just because the Captain Hussein has been found in Iraq changes nothing for him. Yet his entire absurd premise was built on the ignorant and selfdeceptive claim that AP made up both the source of Captain Hussein and the attack on six Sunni citizens after over 400 Shiites were injured or killed by car bombings in the Sadr City slum area. "Curt" is simply a dishonest and cowardly right wing blogger, with no credibility whatsoever after days of his false smears on AP. The coward won't even offer a retraction or apology for his smears on AP. Malkin at least offered one retraction recently on December 16, when she admitted to using wrong information related to the Hussein story, although that's barely even adequate.

Reporting in violent areas is very difficult for reporters.I once lived in a city with a violent race riot right in the neighborhood I lived in. Iraq is far worse, with 40 armed organizations running around, and some including police and the government ready to silence reporters any way that they can.

The public, especially including those that have loved ones in Iraq need to know how bad this situation really is in order to help guide our Iraq War policy there and shape a public opinion on whether this mission is right or not, and whether American troops should be brought home or not.

I have many more features on my blog at www.progressivevalues.blogspot,com for any interested readers to check out including the Hussein/AP affair and Iraqi repression of the freedom of the press. These can be searched out in my archives.

The political right is so convinced that the alcohol and cocaine impaired George Bush version of the world is the correct one, that they make absurd selfdeluded conspiracy theories in which they actually believe that AP and other news outlets make up the news and reality cannot possiby be right. This bizarre cult of Bush supporters should get a grip on reality and come to accept that the world is really much like it is really reported as. AP and other news outlets hire reporters, not fiction writers like the right wing blogs do.

[Cass]

"... are the assasinations of journalists being performed by people sympathetic to BushCo?"

They're certainly capable of shooting the messengers: remember the Palestine Hotel, and those wayward precision-guided bombs that happened to hit the al-Jazeera offices in both Kabul and Baghdad. On the other hand, there are so many different factions in Iraq today killing so many people, often for little or no reason, that tracking down the perpetrators of individual murders almost begins to seem academic (not to mention impossible).

[Cass]

Not, of course, that its academic at all to the people left behind.