LONDON, 26 November 2004 — I hope Kevin Sites is watching his back. Blogs that have appeared on the Internet since the freelance cameraman filmed a US Marine shooting and killing a wounded and prostrate Iraqi in Fallujah do not make comfortable reading. While Sites has many supporters, it is his detractors who are most chillingly eye-catching, suggesting they would like to do to him what the Marine he filmed did to the injured Iraqi. “The Marines should have shot that goat-tee ****** Kevin Sites,” said one message posted last week, while a second ventured: “Kevin Sites should have a bullet in his ******* face.”

Suddenly, the freelance cameraman, veteran of Kosovo, Afghanistan and now Iraq, has found himself in the middle of a controversy that he did not invite and could not avoid — facing a petition of 24,000 names supporting the Marine who pulled the trigger and damning Sites to boot. Since he was thrust into the limelight by his pool report from Fallujah, Sites has kept a low profile, declining to comment on the circumstances of the incident and being shielded by his client NBC.

Sites’s footage, shot at the height of the battle for Fallujah, raises important questions about what the media does in war zones, what it is appropriate to show, and — more seriously — whether it is morally defensible to censor or self-censor.

What is critical in this case is that Sites chose to disclose an apparent criminal act committed by his own country’s troops while embedded with their unit. It was a brave act. For embedding, too often, is a pact made with the devil, where the freedom to report on any aspect of what you are seeing is partially surrendered in exchange for access to the battlefield. It is not only that, often you have to explicitly sign away your freedom and report through a military censor. What is more insidious is the expectation that, by embedding, you join common cause with the unit and accept the values of the people you are with.

I experienced this late last year when I found myself in Fallujah interviewing both insurgents and US troops. During that assignment, I came across the office of a local businessman and tribal sheikh that had been vandalized by US soldiers. His pictures had been smashed, his sofas had been ripped open with a combat knife and “**** You” had been carved on his door. When, a few days later, I embedded for a few days with the same unit that had smashed up the office, I was invited to attend the welcome talk for new paratroopers joining the unit. Its colonel mentioned that some “stickies” — incidents of inappropriate behavior — had been committed by his troops. When I asked later whether he meant the vandalism I had seen, he asked me not to write about it.

And it is not just after episodes of potentially criminal wrongdoing that journalists are confronted with attempts at censorship. Around the same time I was with the Airborne, two photographer friends were embedded with a US medical evacuation helicopter when an American Chinook was shot down close to Fallujah with heavy loss of life. When the photographers attempted to record the incident, they were pushed around and threatened and a camera was smashed. It is perhaps surprising that Sites was able to successfully broadcast his footage at all. What is reassuring is that the Sites episode has not been unique. The reporting of Iraq has seen notable examples of journalists — embedded and otherwise — exposing abuses by the US military.

It was Mark Franchetti of the London Sunday Times, embedded with US Marines during the invasion itself, who exposed the killing of Iraqi civilians in the south by trigger-happy troops. It was US journalists — including the indefatigable Seymour Hersh, who first broke news of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam — who exposed the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. And it has been NBC, again, that has dug most deeply into the allegations of wrongdoing by the Pentagon contractor Halliburton.

Indeed, as the conflict has changed character, the relationship between journalists on the ground and the military and civilian authorities in Iraq has become ever more strained, as the media have exposed the huge gaps between reality and the wishful thinking that has passed for press briefings. At a briefing I attended with a group of British journalists and senior military officers over lunch in Baghdad, tempers became so frayed that one brigadier accused the press of coming to the meeting with a “shared” and “hostile” agenda. It culminated in a heated exchange over attempts to establish the idea that the insurgents were “anti-Iraqi forces” — a bizarre idea, as most of the fighters, as the combat in Fallujah has demonstrated, are Iraqis.

But it is clear, after an examination of the copy that has come out of Fallujah, that too often the reporters accompanying troops tend to succumb to a language of identification with the soldiers whose experiences they are sharing, and use a military language that defines the opposition as “other” and dehumanizes the experiences of those outside that tightly corralled point of view. We should be grateful that Kevin Sites has served us a reminder of what war entails.