Democracy Now! April 10, 2003

8:00-8:01 Billboard 8:10-8:11 Headlines 8:11-8:12 One Minute Music Break 8:15-8:30: Looting is surging and buildings have been set on fire in Baghdad today as fighting continues in some parts of the city. US troops have come under fire throughout the day. Fighters attacked a convoy of US marines and special forces at dawn on the banks of the Tigris River near a mosque. One US soldier was killed and over a dozen wounded. The BBC is reporting Saddam Hussein may have been hiding in the mosque. US troops are now searching the mosque. US warplanes bombed non-Iraqi Arab fighters on the west bank of river. Reuters reports the fighters appear to be in control of several districts in the West of the city. They are controlling checkpoints and US troops were nowhere to be seen. British war correspondent Robert Fisk visited a group of the fighters yesterday and reports they are from Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine. One of them told Fisk: "We left our wives and children and came here to die for these people and then they told us to go. Yesterday, top US officer Brigadier-General John Kelly told the Sidney Morning Herald that hundreds of non-Iraqi Muslim fighters are putting up a stronger fight for Baghdad than Iraq's Republican Guard. He said: They run into our machine guns and we shoot them down like the morons they are." Meanwhile, the capital has plunged into lawlessless. Tens of thousands of people are roaming the city looking for plunder. Iraqis are targeting government buildings, embassies, and banks. They are taking air conditioners, radios, furniture, and money. US troops are making little or no effort to stop them and in some cases are joining them. On Monday, troops from the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division stormed one of Iraq's presidential palaces. They took ashtrays, gold-painted glassware and other souvenirs. U.S. troops are occupying the Oil Ministry. The Pentagon reports over 100 US soldiers have been killed in the invasion and around 400 injured. * May Ying Welsh, independent reporter in Baghdad 8:20-8:21 One Minute Music Break 8:30-8:40: Spanish Journalists protested the death of a Spanish TV cameraman killed by a U.S. tank shell in Baghdad yesterday by putting their cameras, microphones and notebooks on the floor as Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar arrived at the Senate. Aznar found the floor outside the chamber covered with equipment and 30 to 40 journalists standing in stony silence. In a further display of anger, about 20 Spanish journalists walked out of a news conference with British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and his Spanish counterpart, Ana Palacio, after just one question. * Maria Carrion, filmmaker and former Democracy Now! producer 8:40-8:41 One Minute Music Break 8:41-8:58: The lives of Michael Kelly and David Bloom have become widely known across the country over the past week. They are the two U.S. journalists who died while covering the invasion of Iraq. Kelly, an editor of Atlantic Monthly, was killed on Friday and Bloom, an NBC TV host, died on Saturday. But receiving less attention have been the many international reporters who have died since the attack began. They include Al Jazeera reporter Tariq Ayoub; Reuters TV cameraman Taras Protsyuk; Jose Couso, a Spanish cameraman for Madrid-based TeleCinco; reporter Julio Anguita Parrado of the Spanish daily El Mundo; German reporter Christian Liebig of the weekly Focus magazine; BBC translator Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed; ITV news correspondent Terry Lloyd; Paul Moran, a free-lance cameraman for Australia s ABC News. And finally there was Pulitzer Prize winning cameraman Kaveh Golestan who died after stepping on a landmine. Yesterday we talked to Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi, to talk about Golestan, an Iranian cameraman. We talked to Fassihi shortly after the statue of Saddam Hussein had fallen in Baghdad. * Farnaz Fassihi, Middle East correspondent of the Wall Street Journal 8:58-8:59 Outro and Credits Democracy Now! is produced by Kris Abrams, Mike Burke, Angie Karran, Ana Nogueira and Elizabeth Press with help Sharif Kouddous and Noah Reibel. Mike Di Filippo is our music maestro and engineer.