Death of a journalist: Mazen Dana was shot by U.S. troops while filming in Iraq.(framed!)

I read about his death in disbelief. Mazen Dana, 43, a cameraman for Reuters news agency, had been killed on assignment in Iraq. I pictured his ruddy, smiling face. Then I saw him crumpled in the dust. He was shot dead by U.S. troops in Baghdad, his camera apparently mistaken for a weapon.

Dana is the 12th journalist killed in action since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March. Several of those deaths were at the hands of U. S. troops, and the reasons for them go largely unanswered. For those journalists who were not "embedded" with the military--the independents who ventured into the war zone without official military control over information but also without its protection---covering the war was riskier than perhaps they ever imagined.

I met Dana during a year spent in the West Bank and came to admire his courage in covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--one of the most dangerous news beats in the world, especially for a Palestinian journalist. When I heard about his death, I went to my desk and took his business card from my Rolodex. Under the Reuters banner, his name appears in Arabic and in English and under it the title "correspondent and cameraman." If I called the mobile number who would answer?

As a journalist who lived and worked in the West Bank city of Hebron--where some 400 Jewish settlers have illegally taken up residence in the center of town--Dana was no stranger to the perils of covering a combat zone. During the Second Intifada, he'd been shot with live ammunition (In October 2000, he was hit in the same leg twice in two days), harassed and arrested by Israeli soldiers. Jewish settlers had attacked him with bottles and beaten him senseless. Israeli police had slammed his head in the rear door of an ambulance as he filmed a wounded Palestinian youth.

And when his job was done, Dana didn't hop into an SUV and hightail it to the relative calm of West Jerusalem like his counterparts in the foreign press corps. At the end of the day, he went home to his wife and four children, still a Palestinian under occupation, still an inhabitant of what he called "a city of lost hope."

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) took notice of Dana's work and kept a log of the abuse against him. In 2001, the group awarded Dana its prestigious International Press Freedom Award. "No one, nothing, can stop me from doing my work," he said in his acceptance speech.

But two years later, on Aug. 17, 2003, something did stop him. As Dana filmed outside Baghdad's Abu Ghraib Prison, he was fired ...