Baghdad-based journalist Peter Arnett was yesterday fired by the two American news organisations he worked for, NBC News and National Geographic Explorer, after he gave an interview to state-run Iraqi television, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor.
Arnett, a veteran war correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam, apologised on NBC to his two employers and to the American people for his "misjudgement" in giving the interview, in which he said the US war plan had failed because of Iraqi resistance.
"I said in that interview essentially what we all know about the war," he said, but "I created a firestorm in the United States and for that I am truly sorry." NBC and its sister cable news channel MSNBC said yesterday it was wrong for the New Zealand-born reporter to give the interview to Iraqi state television, especially at time of war, "and it was wrong of him to discuss his personal observations in that interview".
The National Geographic Explorer said it did not authorise the interview and had it been consulted would not have allowed it.
Both organisations at first defended Arnett but retreated under a barrage of criticism over the interview, screened on Sunday, in which he said: "The first war plan has failed because of Iraqi resistance. Now they are trying to write another war plan."
Arnett went on: "Clearly, the American war plans misjudged the determination of the Iraqi forces" and "our reports about civilian casualties here, about the resistance of the Iraqi forces, are going back to the United States. It helps those who oppose the war when you challenge the policy to develop their arguments."
During the first Gulf War the correspondent became famous for reporting the bombing of Baghdad for CNN after most other reporters left. The first Bush administration was furious, especially when Arnett reported that the allies had bombed a baby milk factory in Baghdad which the US said was a biological weapons plant.
Arnett was let go by CNN five years ago after fronting a report - denied by Washington - that accused American forces of using sarin nerve gas on Laos in 1970 to kill US defectors. Two other CNN staff were fired.
He said he would try to leave Baghdad now, joking "there's a small island in the South Pacific that I've inhabited that I'll try to swim to". Another high profile American reporter, Geraldo Rivera of Fox News, was expelled from Iraq yesterday by the US military for giving away operational details during a live broadcast. Rivera drew a map in the sand indicating the position where the unit which he was embedded was located and where they were going.
Rivera was widely criticised by other journalists for carrying a gun in Afghanistan last year, and the former talk-show host was discredited when it was disclosed that he had claimed to be at a location in Afghanistan several hundred miles from where he was reporting.
Meanwhile, the deluge of violent images and stories of fighting that has swamped the US media has begun to give the Pentagon second thoughts about having embedded reporters in army units in Iraq.
Reports of setbacks were "giving the leadership fits", a defence official told the Washington Post.
Some reports have also shown the US troops in a bad light. In the New York Times a Marine described opening fire on an Iraqi soldier standing among civilians and watching a woman fall. "I'm sorry," the sergeant was quoted as saying. "But the chick was in the way."
The US media in the field reported that US troops shot up three taxis after a car bomb killed four soldiers and there have been graphic reports - including one in the conservative Wall Street Journal yesterday - of soldiers throwing belongings about in house searches.
Since Saturday, some army and Marine units have forbidden reporters to use a type of satellite phone, called a Thuraya, allegedly because the phone's signal would broadcast troop locations to the Iraqi military, but some reporters suspect they wanted to curtail reporting.