CNN IRAQ CORRESPONDENT SUFFERING COMBAT STRESS DISORDER

Australian journalist Michael Ware, who spent four years reporting on the war in Iraq for CNN, says he is now grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder. (He reportedly left the cable news network last April after it turned down his request for time off.” In an interview with Kate Dennehy of the Brisbane Times, Ware suggested that one of the incidents that he witnessed and filmed in 2007 may have contributed to his condition. He claims that in an Iraqi village controlled by insurgents, a teenager, who was carrying a weapon to protect himself, approached the house where Ware and U.S. soldiers were located. “One of them put a bullet right in the back of his head. Unfortunately it didn’t kill him [immediately]. … We all spent the next 20 minutes listening to his tortured breath as he died.” CNN, he alleges, refused to air the footage, insisting it was too graphic. But Ware told Dennehy, “It’s my firm belief that we need to constantly jar the sensitivities of the people back home.” On Tuesday, a CNN spokesperson told the Huffington Post: “CNN often has to make calls about which disturbing images are necessary to tell a story, and which are too graphic. These are always challenging, and the subject of reasoned editorial debate. On this occasion we decided to not show an Iraqi insurgent dying with fatal wounds.”