Pentagon ‘threatens to fire on reporters’

The Pentagon has threatened to fire on the satellite uplink positions of independent journalists in Iraq, according to veteran BBC war correspondent Kate Adie.

"I was told by a senior officer in the Pentagon," she said, "that if uplinks - that is the television signals out of... Baghdad, for example - were detected by any planes ... above Baghdad... they'd be fired down on. Even if they were journalists," she told The Sunday Show on Irish public radio network RTE. She said the source responded to her concern with "Who cares... They've been warned."

Recall for context that when the Al-Jazeera studio in Kabul was bombed it was suggested that the weapons had simply homed in on radio signals without caring who was transmitting.

Sources:

• Programme audio from RTE
• Transcript from something called gulufuture.com
• Story from The Register

Postscript 02 April:

No more came of this, yet. But the military's level of concern for independent reporters was, tragically, shown by the killing of ITN reporter Terry Lloyd and the dissapearance of cameraman Fred Nerac and translator Hussein Osman.