Terry Lloyd

Guardian media has an article by Stewart Purvis, who was ITN boss at the time, on the death of Terry Lloyd, which the coroner has just ruled an "unlawful killing". It is damning stuff. The American troops, he writes, appear to have made "no difference between military and civilian targets". The British and US military "did not want unilaterals around because in the new jargon of the war they wanted "to control all the information in the battle space...". The Ministry of Defence did not tell the bereaved families everything they knew about what happened and "were not keen for the full story of Lloyd's death to be told because it would be embarrassing to their American allies". The American military refused to attend the coroners court, instead they submitted witness statements which the coroner described as of "no evidential value whatsoever". Cameraman Fred Nerac is still missing after being bundled into a car and taken from the scene. The thought that occurs to Polititaholic is that is if this is how American troops behave when there is a television crew around (the two vehicles were clearly marked "TV") how do they behave when there are no journalists around?