More on Kevin Sites

I’m a bit behind the curve here– but I found this interesting story about photog Kevin Sites in yesterday’s NYT. It quoted Sites as saying that:

    he had received hate mail and threats since the broadcast, in edited form, on the initial NBC News report. A comment section on a Web site he maintains has been shut down because of death threats.

Death threats?? Because of what? Because he was doing his job?
I certainly hope all the law enforcement agencies in the US and elsewhere are conducting extensive investigations into who made those terroristic threats, and that those people will be dealt with with all the power of the law.

    Update: They could start by checking out the authors of some of the comments posted here.

Robert F. Worth, the author of the NYT piece, adds: “Mr. Sites has maintained a low profile since emerging from the fighting in Falluja, avoiding the area where other reporters on the base are billeted.” I wonder what kind of solidarity–or possibly its opposite?– they have been offering him?
Kevin does have his own blog. He’s a freelancer, working on contract for NBC. The footage from the mosque was, of course, produced as part of a “pool report”, which meant that access to all of it had to be equal to all pool members.
His blog has written posts and photos. On Nov. 10th, he was already in (or near) Fallujah. He wrote ,

    The Marines are operating with liberal rules of engagement.
    “Everything to the west is weapons free,” radios Staff Sgt. Sam Mortimer of Seattle, Washington. Weapons Free means the marines can shoot whatever they see — it’s all considered hostile.

He also wrote:

    The Marines I’m embedded with are nearly ebullient. This looks to be a cakewalk.
    One jokes they’ll be sipping ‘Pina Coladas by the Euphrates River by fifteen-hundred.’
    … Almost to a man — the 3.1 Marines I’m embedded with have all lost friends in this protracted war of attrition. They are eager “to get some,” to pay “haji” back for the car bombs and IED’s (improvised explosive devices) that have killed or maimed so many of their brother “Devil Dogs.”
    They are extremely likeable — these young Marines — full of bravado and easygoing about the danger that surrounds them. Some thumb through Maxim Magazine, others the Bible while the wait patiently to reign down death and destruction on their enemies.
    “We’re going to let loose the dogs of war,” says Staff Sgt. Mortimer, “before the Falluja offensive begins. “It will be hell,” he says, smiling after.

The whole post has some really vivid reporting, and is well worth reading.
The bio page on his blog makes clear that he’s an accomplished multi-media journalist with an apparent near-addiction to war coverage (Kosovo, Chiapa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia)… It says:

    As a producer for NBC News, he received an Edward R. Murrow Award for coverage of the war in Kosovo and was nominated for a national Emmy Award for contributions to a series on landmines.
    During a two-year sabbatical, he served as Broadcast Lecturer in the Journalism Department of California Polytechnic State in San Luis Obispo and was named Distinguished Lecturer by the California Faculty Association for the 2000-2001 Academic Year. While there, he initiated a joint research project with Xybernaut Inc. to modify wearable computers for solo digital reporting. [Sounds interesting huh??]
    He has worked in local, cable and network news, including ABC’s This Week with David Brinkley and NBC’s Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. Additionally, he has published numerous articles in newspapers and magazines and was the author of a monthly media column for the New Times alternative weekly. Sites has a Master’s Degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

So if any of you hears news of FBI or other investigations into the death threats made against this talented journalist, let the rest of us know, huh?

11 thoughts on “More on Kevin Sites”

  1. I fail to see what is likeable about a bunch of goons who just can’t wait to kill and destroy. I wonder whether these are the same sub-humans who stole horses from poor Iraqis for their own cruel pleasure and didn’t give a damn whether they killed the beasts in the process – no doubt that would have added to their fun.
    This whole thing is making me sicker by the hour.

  2. Shirin,
    I’m don’t see the value in dehumanizing the perpetrators of these violent acts. Calling the marines “sub-humans” seems to be the same strategy as the marines themselves calling those who are shooting at them “animals” and the like. It is _vital_ to recognize that the people doing the shooting on _both_ sides are, fundamentally, human, and as such, are deserving of our empathy.

  3. It is defammatory and unfair to characterize soldiers as goons. Of course, they cannot do their gristly and dangerous job with cool detachment. It is especially hard to follow Convention Rules when your opponent deliberately disguises in police uniforms, recruits children, and uses schools and mosques as garrisons and arsenals. Yet nearly all abhor hurting civilians and most would not shoot at a wounded person, were they not continuously terrified of bobby traps and suicide attacks. Even the Marine who shot the wounded guy in the mosque, if not 100% exonerable, acted under fearsome circumstances that (let’s be honest) NONE of us could handle without making huge mistakes!
    http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=&article=13576&archive=true

  4. Is the issue the Marine’s action or is it the fact that he was filmed in the act? It seems to me, having gone to the freerepublic link Helena provides in her post, that for those folks the issue is the filming. They have no doubts about the action or about the young man who did it. They are simply and profoundly focussed on what they see as Sites’ betrayal of America and American soldiers. One commenter even suggests that Sites can be tried for “sedition”. This is pretty crazed.
    There is a lot of talk about ‘fragging’ him, getting even, letting the Marines “get justice”.
    The issue Helena is raising, I thought, isn’t about the Marine’s action or even about the filming of that. It’s about the fury of those who feel the film is a betrayal of something vital; these people are operating at a very primitive level, aren’t they. It really is ‘us versus them’ to these folks and Sites’ film violates the blind faith these people think we must all profess in order to save ourselves from ‘them’.
    Too late, I think. We’re Pogo’d for sure.

  5. “It is especially hard to follow Convention Rules when your opponent… recruits children…” !? When some elements of the occupying forces are shooting the wounded and civilians, women and children, torturing the prisoners they ARE losing their humanity.

  6. Tarek, with all respect to you and your point of view, I have not dehumanized anyone. Their dehumanization is a fait accompli, and all I have done is to point it out.
    Someone who becomes ebullient at the prospect of reducing a city to a pile of rubble soaked with the blood of its men, women, children, infants and elderly has relinquished his humanity. Someone who celebrates the prospect of committing massive slaughter and destruction has relinquished his humanity. Someone who steals, for his own fun and enjoyment, the poor overworked, sickly beasts upon which poverty stricken Iraqis depend for their meagre livelihood, and procedes to joyfully abuse, terrorize and risk the lives of the defenseless creatures, has relinquished his humanity. Someone who kills his fellow human beings with whoops of joy and high fives has relinquished his humanity.
    And I do mean relinquished. Every one of those troops has free will. They have had choices to make all along the way, including the choice not to relinquish their humanity, including the choice to refuse to go to Iraq at all, to refuse to take part in war crimes. There is a price to be paid for refusal, but they have the choices.
    The Iraqis do not have those choices. They are trapped in a hell made for them in their own homes by brutal foreign invaders who came from half a world away, and who demand at gunpoint that they accept the imposition of foreign rule.
    Tarek, there is a huge difference between the Iraqi fighters and the Marines. The marines have come from half a world away to impose the will of the Bush administration on every man, woman, and child in Iraq, no matter how many they have to kill and maim, and no matter how many cities they have to flatten. The Iraqis, including an increasing number of Iraqi fighters, are innocent people trapped in a situation not of their making who are defending themselves, their families, their homes, their cities and their country’s integrity and independence from these brutal invaders. They have no choice in the matter.

  7. John, I might take you a tad more seriously if you had not demonstrated your egregious double standard so many times.

  8. Shirin, I reread John’s post after reading your comment. It’s very odd. It seems to be saying that if we cannot imagine the extreme details of the situation (and these are assumed, by John, to exist), then we must not judge the resultant action. Or we may be moved to judge but we must not blame. Or we may wish to blame but we should refrain from speaking the blame because to do so would be to set ourselves apart on the false basis of not having experienced the situation ourselves. The assumption which John states outright here is that if we were to experience this situation, we, too, would have shot the wounded prisoner.
    All of this seems to me to be a strange brew of bad faith and wilful cognitive dissonance.
    I don’t understand the premises here. Is it necessary to kill people to do good? That does seem to be a basic assumption of this invasion. And perhaps that might be the underlying nuttiness of the obsessive energies many people are devoting to defending this young soldier’s act. Well, really what someone like John is doing is trying desperately to immunize the soldier so we can all be held blameless. No can do. Cake’s already been walked.

  9. This certainly is a bad situation all the way around but I fail to see why the reporter should be held responsible. All he did was his job which was expected of him.
    Earlier in my Marine’s second tour in Iraq, one of his guys did something improper. I don’t know the exact details because my guy said it was going to be investigated so the less he said to anyone not directly involved the better. I was proud of him for turning the guy in when the easier thing to do would have been to just gloss it over. The Marine in question was removed from Iraq but I have yet to hear if any charges were filed in that case.
    Oddly enough when my guy asked his underling why he did what he did the answer was not what he expected. It wasn’t out of any ruthlessness but out of hopelessness of a second tour on stoploss with no end in sight. He honestly felt there was no other way out of his situation other than to do something wrong knowing his superior would turn him in, thus he would be sent home and most likely discharged. I’m not saying this was the case in the Marine shooting because I have no way of knowing what was going on in his head. Just saying that the true reason might not be the expected.

  10. Shirin,
    I agree that Marines in Iraq have been quite brutal, but I still think it sells them short to describe them as sub-human. That way leads (in the extreme) to equating them with animals, and that then absolves them of their responsibility.
    It is precisely _because_ they are human that they must be held to such high standards. I think I might be getting into semantics here, but I think it’s a valid point.

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