POV
Much has been made, both here and abroad, of Kevin Sites and the footage of the marine shooting a wounded insurgent in a mosque. Here in the States, discussion has veered toward calling Sites a traitor and an anti-war partisan. Here's a typical opinion piece that sums up many that I've seen, this from the News-Leader in Missouri, which have turned the focus of the incident into shooting the messenger:

Whether the Marine who shot the injured Iraqi was acting in self-defense or not will be investigated by our military. But the photographer, Kevin Sites of NBC, who filmed the incident, showed a great lack of patriotism and sense by publishing the video. He should be fired by NBC at the very least.

Our troops are acting in extremely difficult circumstances to do their jobs, which is to kill the enemy. If they can take the enemy alive without endangering themselves or other men in their unit, they may do so if it helps the war. But an injured, unarmed enemy is not necessarily nondangerous. Let the Marine decide whether his life is in jeopardy. He is acting in the best interest of his countrymen.

The photographer, however, did his country a disservice and gave aid to the enemy. He knew his video would be used by the enemy to support their cause.

If he did not consider this, then he is not wise enough to be allowed as an embedded reporter. If he considered this, then obviously he cared more about his job than his countrymen. And that makes him more of a criminal than the Marine.

Then there have been a handful of opinion that is more extreme, this from a comments section in the very Right Free Republic:

''Journalists'' like this should be treated as ''enemy combatants''.

But there's no denying the impact that this footage has made on the rest of the world. Here's commentary from Baghdad Burning, a blog written by an Iraqi who is living through this war on the front lines:

We sat, horrified, stunned with the horror of the scene that unfolded in front of our eyes. It's the third day of Eid and we were finally able to gather as a family- a cousin, his wife and their two daughters, two aunts, and an elderly uncle. E. and my cousin had been standing in line for two days to get fuel so we could go visit the elderly uncle on the final day of a very desolate Eid. The room was silent at the end of the scene, with only the voice of the news anchor and the sobs of my aunt. My little cousin flinched and dropped her spoon, face frozen with shock, eyes wide with disbelief, glued to the television screen, "Is he dead? Did they kill him?" I swallowed hard, trying to gulp away the lump lodged in my throat and watched as my cousin buried his face in his hands, ashamed to look at his daughter.

"What was I supposed to tell them?" He asked, an hour later, after we had sent his two daughters to help their grandmother in the kitchen. "What am I supposed to tell them- 'Yes darling, they killed him- the Americans killed a wounded man; they are occupying our country, killing people and we are sitting here eating, drinking and watching tv'?" He shook his head, "How much more do they have to see? What is left for them to see?"

This weekend, Kevin Sites wrote about the incident from his point of view, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing:

It's time for you to have the facts from me, in my own words, about what I saw -- without imposing on that Marine -- guilt or innocence or anything in between. I want you to read my account and make up your own minds about whether you think what I did was right or wrong. All the other armchair analysts don't mean a damn to me.

This whole thing isn't about a "gotcha" by a reporter, and ultimately it's not about the guilt or innocence of the Marine in question. It's about the whitewashing of the ugliness and horror of this war in the media. Should we really consider Kevin Sites a traitor for doing his job as a journalist and documenting what happens with our troops on the frontline? And why is Sites being singled out here? It was NBC that ultimately disseminated the footage. We're getting caught up in dangerous environment where any imagery or information that goes against the administration's viewpoint--i.e., a noble war that's bringing the march of freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people--is excoriated as traitorous or, as in the case of the recent battle over the showing of Saving Private Ryan, coarse and ugly and not worthy of viewing and discussion. Here's some commentary from Frank Rich's most recent NYTimes column about this incident:

Even without being threatened, American news media at first sanitized the current war, whether through carelessness or jingoism, proving too credulous about everything from weapons of mass destruction to "Saving Private Lynch" to "Mission Accomplished." During the early weeks of the invasion, carnage of any kind was kept off TV screens, as if war could be cost-free. Once the press did get its act together and exercised skepticism, it came under siege. News organizations that report facts challenging the administration's version of events risk being called traitors. As with "Saving Private Ryan," the aim of the news censors is to bleach out any ugliness or violence. But because the war in Iraq, unlike World War II, is increasingly unpopular and doesn't have an assured triumphant ending, it must also be scrubbed of any bad news that might undermine its support among the administration's base. Thus the censors argue that Abu Ghraib, and now a marine's shooting of a wounded Iraqi prisoner in a Falluja mosque, are vastly "overplayed" by the so-called elite media.