His wife has been quoted as saying this was a deliberate shooting.

Well, she's seen so many deliberate targetings of her husband, so I can imagine she feels like that. And we won't know.

But having seen a comparison of his camera and what it was confused for, could she be right?

Of course I can't possibly know that, but I think the possibilities have to be examined, because it's such a strange and bizarre error to confuse those two things. It was daylight, and soldiers and tanks have excellent binoculars; they can see things in details at enormous distances. And if they were working on a lead from somebody that this person was dangerous, where did that lead come from? Why did they think this was a threat? I haven't read in anything I've seen why they thought this person was a threat. I know they thought he was carrying something, but, you know, I find it hard to believe. I can't even speculate what happened.

Do you think his being Palestinian had anything to do with it, that it separated him in some way for these soldiers?

No, I don't. He certainly didn't look Palestinian, if you passed him on the street in New York, he's fairly Western in how he looked. Other than maybe there was somebody there who wanted to ... I don't know, it's hard to know. Possibly they got a bad tip from somebody that was threatening. It's the only thing I can honestly think of because I can't imagine how it happened, that there was bad intelligence.

The Pentagon has called this a tragedy and a terrible mistake. Is this shooting an anomaly, or part of a broader pattern of GIs targeting journalists?

I don't know. I think the protection of journalists is at an all-time low, and what I saw in the Middle East was sickening. And to see it happen with U.S. soldiers ... and there are mistakes! This could be a legitimate mistake! But you have to investigate enough that mistakes don't happen, or rarely happen. Certainly less than we've seen.

But mistakes will always be made, right? Why shouldn't we just accept that in guerrilla warfare-type areas, of course journalists are going to be killed, just as other civilians in the area will be killed, and that they know the risks going in?

I'd have to debunk the idea that there are periods where things are very volatile and journalists know the risks, and most stay away, but others take the risks and they know that they could die -- during the early part of the war, that was true.

But when you get to this point in a war, the situation is very different from what you see on TV. Because of the way we show television, it feels like it's chaos all the time, but it just isn't. It's not chaos all the time, you only see the chaos on TV in those short clips, a minute-20 [second] news story.

I've shot for hours in the West Bank, and I only shoot when you can be safe.

I think we have a misperception that it's chaos at all times, and of course they're going to be shot. And right now in Iraq there's chaos, but it's not everywhere. Everybody has to get up in the morning and do their things and try to get food, and it's a life that's predictable, so when we go to shoot it, we know what we're shooting. And so when Mazen went to the prison, he knew it was calm and quiet. He didn't go in the middle of riots, he wasn't shot in the middle of riots.

It was a calm day, the U.S. patrolled that area, it's a U.S. prison, that's when journalists go in, and to have somebody suddenly start shooting is completely out of the blue. It's as if you were standing in a field and suddenly got shot at. And way too many times, when journalists are being shot, it isn't in the middle of war, it's not in the middle of fighting. It's actually during a fairly routine, predictable demonstration of some sort, and that's when the questions really have to be asked -- why would somebody then be shot?

The cases that we're questioning are the ones that were calm.

Which actually makes it all the more ominous and raises the question of how many parallels there might be between what you covered in Hebron and what's going on in Iraq now. Is this a general thing, do you think, that the military just don't like reporters?

Well, that's certainly the case in the Middle East. The Israeli military is not keen on reporters, though most of the time they treat us respectfully and give access to places, and most of the time we're perfectly safe. But there are occasional times when they're frustrated or aggravated or what, and it leads to these horrible shootings, but it's mostly Palestinians that have been shot at.

I would anticipate that U.S. soldiers are not as antagonistic to reporters but I haven't been to Iraq and I don't know well enough to say.

But the parallels really are that there hasn't been a good investigation or sincere answers about what happened in the earlier case [of the Palestine Hotel shooting].

Mazen would often say there has to be more public pressure to get this to stop. He and all the cameramen I knew in the West Bank would say, "Journalists are being shot here and no one seems to care, no one's doing anything, and maybe the U.S. can investigate it fairly and clearly." Somebody should be reprimanded or at least take steps that this type of thing doesn't happen again, and to make sure that people remember that journalists have to be on the scene, and to be on the scene we have to be afforded the protection of the military and the people around us.

How do you think this case will be dealt with?

I suspect almost nothing will happen. Today the U.N. headquarters was bombed, there's always another story, more people are hurt. And that's one of the tragedies of these things, that there's always the next story and it's easy to get lost. But I really pray that it's looked into, because it's so frightening for all journalists. We do everything we can possibly do to be safe, we take every precaution we can, and then to step out of your car and be shot in the chest is unconscionable.

I think, why not shoot a warning shot if there was some confusion? There had to have been some kind of confusion in the mind of whoever pulled the trigger.

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