A camera or a gun?

"It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." -- Abraham Maslow

Last night, Wikileaks released an incredibly hard-to-watch video showing the US military killing two Reuters photographers and six other people as they walked down a Baghdad street two years ago. I won't link to it here, but its contents are described in most major news outlets this morning.

As a journalist, the most nauseating thing about it is how obvious it is, even from helicopter height, that the things that the photographers are carrying are cameras, not the AK-47s or RPGs that the soldiers mistake them for. Cameras hang a certain way, swing with a certain weight and require their carriers to adopt a certain gait that is so deeply familiar to anyone who has worked in this industry.

War reporting is dangerous; getting caught in the crossfire is always a risk. But this video shows something else entirely -- reporters killed not despite the fact they were reporters but because of it, attracting fire with the tools of their trade. As Wikileaks notes, 139 journalists have been killed since the start of the Iraq war.