I realize that.

American servicemen are prosecuted when they commit murder.

Very weak example of “targeting journalists.” In fact, it’s invalid. Guiliana Sgrena was kidnapped by insurgents, not the coalition. If you check the Wikipedia entry on her, the confusion surrounding Sgrena being shot in the shoulder is a classic case of he said/she said, except it involves nations instead of a married couple. Don’t speed towards roadblocks while in Iraq is the lesson I would take from the story. Instead, you walk away convinced that you have some sort of smoking gun that the U.S. is evil. Amazing how the neural paths in a human brain can misfire, isn’t it?

You haven’t given any clear examples of journalists being murdered by coalition forces because there aren’t any. If there were, the troops responsible would be in jail, not held up as heros.

Your rhetoric is growing tiresome.

Now as far as the cited BBC news-bite is concerned, it is difficult to accept at face value the testimony of an avowed communist whose personal history is decidedly anti-Coalition. It is also hard to accept BBC as a factual source, given their impartiality in the war on terror. Now I realize that it is difficult to find stand-alone and factually correct accounts, but at the same time, you simply cannot argue effectively if you persist on gathering “garbage” produced by the MSM and offering that up as proof of your contention. And by the way, there are journalists who are reporting the truth from Iraq, much of it available on the internet — but these sources can only be located by people who have not already taken an unyielding position. I suspect, quite frankly, that you are less interested in the truth than you are in perpetuating the propaganda.

Finally, in a region that is by now well known to be inherently dangerous, what is to be said about journalists who place themselves in harms way and then bemoan the fact that some of them are killed or seriously injured? Like the insurgents, journalists take their chances . . . and they do so voluntarily.