BOB GARFIELD: During some of the heaviest ground fighting of the Iraq war, the Palestine Hotel, temporary home to dozens of western journalists and, at 17 stories, one of the tallest buildings in Baghdad, was shelled by a U.S. tank. Two reporters were killed, three injured amid explanations by the Pentagon that did not square with reports from other journalists present. The Committee to Protect Journalists called for an investigation, and this week the results of its own internal investigation were released. CPJ's deputy director Joel Simon joins me once again to go through the details. Joel, welcome back to the show.

JOEL SIMON: Thank you, Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: Is there any reason to believe, based on your investigation, that the commander who ordered that tank fire knew that the building he was firing on housed foreign journalists?

JOEL SIMON: Well there's a number of key incidents that suggest that certainly the commanders in Baghdad were aware that the Palestine Hotel was out there and was full of western journalists. We know this because one of the commanders, Colonel David Perkins, on the morning of this major battle had gone to an AP reporter, Chris Tomlinson, and said we are under fire; we're thinking of calling in an air strike. We know the Palestine Hotel is out there, and we need your help locating it. Tomlinson got on the phone to his bureau in Doha, Qatar, and asked them to make a call to the Palestine Hotel and asked them to hang bed sheets out the window in order to help soldiers on the ground identify the building.

BOB GARFIELD: So that they would know what not to fire upon

JOEL SIMON:Exactly. And while this exercise was going on, the tank on the bridge fired. Immediately after the hotel was hit, another commander came on the radio and said "Who the hell just hit the Palestine Hotel?" After some time, Captain Philip Wolford who was the commander of the tank unit came on and said "Well, I did." And the colonel was extremely angry and said that this was a serious matter and the hotel was not to be hit. So our indications are that superior officers - the colonel and the lieutenant colonel who were overseeing the battle were aware that the hotel was out there; they were making efforts to avoid that the hotel might be hit. Apparently that concern was not conveyed to the commander of this tank.

BOB GARFIELD:In your report you say that the shelling, however accidental, was itself disproportionate; that even if there were sniper fire coming from the Palestine Hotel as the Pentagon asserts, that tank fire into the hotel is a disproportionate response. Is that your position?

JOEL SIMON: Well, look - there's, there's a debate about this. But the point is, sniper fire simply is not a threat to a tank. And if you know that a building is full of civilians -- certainly something you need to take into account. But the point is right now we don't believe that explanation! We don't believe that they were firing at a sniper. Based on the information that's been provided to us by journalists who were there, there was no sniper, there was no fire and the only explanation that makes sense to us is that they had located a, a spotter or what they -- a person they believed to be a spotter which in all likelihood was a journalist who was observing this battle.

BOB GARFIELD:How do you explain the Pentagon's repeated assertions that, against all the evidence that you've been able to gather, that there was fire coming from the Palestine Hotel? Is it a question of that's our story and we're sticking with it?

JOEL SIMON: That could be one explanation; the other could be that the failure of communication was significant! And perhaps that's not something that the Pentagon wants to acknowledge publicly! And in fact that's why we continue to insist that this incident must be fully and publicly investigated. We do not have any clear indication that that kind of investigation is taking place. We certainly hope it will, not only to clarify what happened in this particular incident, but to ensure that similar incidents do not occur in the future.

BOB GARFIELD:And one final thing. You are with the Committee to Protect Journalists and this is a show called On the Media, so-- I guess we don't need to apologize for making the journalists the center of this story. But in the larger picture, did the media pay too much attention to two casualties at the Palestine Hotel because the two men who had been killed happened to be journalists at a time when men and women in uniform and Iraqi civilians were dying every day?

JOEL SIMON: Perhaps. But the one thing about reporting is you report on what you know and what you observe, and this was one of the few incidents during the entire war in which there were so many witnesses. So we are able by talking to those witnesses to reconstruct what happened, and I think in some ways it's emblematic of probably many, many moments on the battlefield.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Joel. Well, thank you very much.

JOEL SIMON: Thank you!

BOB GARFIELD:Joel Simon is the deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. We'll link to the CPJ report, Permission to Fire, on our web site onthemedia.org. [MUSIC]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Coming up, a talk with an alleged New York Times transgressor, and the legacy of Janet Cooke.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from NPR.
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