Reporters in the cross hairs.

• Author: Enders, David
• Position: Reports of torture by American soldiers

Baghdad has become a very dangerous place to be an Arab with a camera. One Iraqi cameraman and friend of mine has been arrested three times. The second time he was taken, in February 2004, I contacted the unit that had made the arrest. I was told by one of the officers, without hesitation, that my friend had been picked up with other men at the home of a "known resistance fighter." His wife told me he had been arrested in his own living room, so I pushed the matter. The unit also claimed he had filmed resistance attacks and that they had found tapes in his house, but they offered no evidence to back up that claim. After three days of my repeated phone calls to the unit, demanding to know what had really happened, as well as pressure by other journalists on the ground in Baghdad who visited the base, he was released.

He was arrested a third time during a Friday prayer service last November at the Abu Hanifa mosque in western Baghdad. In this raid, the U.S. military, operating jointly with Iraqi forces, killed five civilians.

"They arrested me when I was filming but one of the Iraqi soldiers gave me the camera back and asked me to hide it before the U.S. military saw it," he says. "I hid it under the carpet. A U.S. soldier found the camera and took the tape. My footage was when they opened fire and killed some people inside the mosque. This is not the first time they took my footage--it has happened three or four times in different places."

My friend, who has also been threatened by guerrillas for filming near the mosque, says he has been beaten and tortured while in U.S. custody: "One of the men who beat me said, 'We don't care if you are journalist or not.'"

"I think you're hearing the frustration of the soldiers," explains Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan, who is in charge of the U.S. military's Combined Press Information Center. "No one in the media can tell me they are telling a full and balanced story. It is a business, and good news doesn't always sell."

The hostile attitude toward the media starts at the top. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has criticized Al Jazeera on multiple occasions, famously last year for being "Johnny-on-the-spot a little too often for my taste." Rumsfeld reiterated the claims at a conference in Singapore in June of this year.

"When you have U.S. military officials and government officials making very aggressive statements against Al Jazeera, I think it sends a very worrying message to U.S. troops on the...