Renewed interest in US journalist deaths

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Soldiers in US Army helicopters shot and killed two employees of the Reuters news agency in 2007. Now a leaked video of the incident is making the rounds on the internet and causing renewed interest in the case. Anchor Marco Werman finds out more from Matthew Baum, professor of Global Communications at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

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MARCO WERMAN:  Even when the rules of engagement are crystal clear things can go terribly wrong.  That’s what happened three years in Iraq.  A video of the event, a 2007 U.S. assault in Baghdad, is circulating on the internet.  It’s graphic and violent.  Soldiers in a U.S. Army helicopter shot and killed 12 people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.  Because of the video, the incident has received renewed attention in the past few days and has renewed questions about the shooting, both outside of and within the Pentagon.  And, of course, it’s being seen by many outside the U.S.  Matthew Baum is Kalb Professor of Global Communications at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  Baum says the video will be useful propaganda for terrorists, but he doesn’t believe it will cause a political firestorm.

MATTHEW BAUM:  It’s not as clear to me that this is going to have the sort of impact say that the Abu Ghraib images had which came out in much closer to real time, while the Iraq conflict was still quite hot and while global attention was focused much more heavily on Iraq than is the case today.  And certainly within the United States, while attention was much more focused on Iraq than it is today.

WERMAN: Well maybe you can elaborate on that because this video was shot in 2007.  Abu Ghraib the shots came out kind of almost in real time.  What’s the difference in the time delay?  Why wouldn’t this kind of have the same effect that Abu Ghraib had?

BAUM: It’s not the time delay per se, it’s that this is coming out a period where basically American opinion, American attention, world attention has pretty much moved on from Iraq.  Iraq is no longer the story that it once was in terms of salience.  It may still be very much in flux, in terms of how the situation in Iraq is ultimately going to play out, but it is clearly not the center of international attention that it was, say at the time of that the Abu Ghraib images came out.  So you just have a less receptive audience than you would have had at that time by virtue of the fact that people aren’t paying that much attention to Iraq anymore.

WERMAN: Do you see a kind of contextual difference between the images in this video, this leaked military video and some of the disturbing, humiliating images that came out of Abu Ghraib.

BAUM: Well, on the one hand, here we’re talking about death and there we were talking about humiliation.  I think that in terms of their effects on the attitudes of people that may not know what to think about Americans, in a vacuum they’re not fundamentally different.  They’re both sort of horrific.  In this case you have the added dimension of a seemingly, unrealistic Pentagon statement about what was going on in this situation which seems directly at odds with what the, or at least appears at first glance anyway to be directly at odds with the pictures in the video.  So on some level I guess I would say this is arguably worse because like I said, you’re talking about people being killed versus being humiliated.  But, if you take a step back from that and think about what does this really mean in terms of attitudes or people around the world towards America, towards the American military, attitudes of U.S. citizens about its military, the domestic political implications in general at a 30,000 foot kind of level, I don’t think they’re fundamentally different.  The biggest difference, to my mind is the fact that this is breaking at a time when it’s unlikely to have tremendous domestic political implications.  Even if it does have some significant ramifications within the Pentagon in terms of some people being punished and some policies being reviewed and maybe even a Congressional hearing, but it’s hard for me to see the domestic political implications being comparable.

WERMAN: Matthew Baum, Kalb Professor of Global Communications at Harvard’s Kennedy School, very good of you to join us, thanks.

BAUM: Sure, thanks for having me.

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