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

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 upon without warning by a U.S. tank crew. According to the eyewitness account of his soundman, Nael al-Shyoukhi, Dana stood clearly visible in the bright desert sun when a bullet tore through his chest. The last images Dana captured on tape depict a U.S. tank coming toward him firing several shots. Then his camera falls to the ground.

In the aftermath of the killing, the Pentagon acknowledged that its troops had "engaged" a Reuters cameraman, saying they thought his camera was a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. A "terrible tragedy," they called it, but wasn't it also an avoidable one?

The reasons for the deaths of three other journalists who died at the hands of U.S. troops have been equally insufficient. On April 8, a U.S. M1A1 Abrams tank fired a shell at the Palestine Hotel, well-known to the Pentagon to house the international press, killing Spanish journalist Jose Couso, of Telecinco, and Taras Protsyuk, another Reuters cameraman. The men died as they stood filming from their 15th-floor balconies. Earlier that morning, Tareq Ayyoub, a correspondent with the Qatar-based satellite network Al-Jazeera, died when a U.S. missile struck the station's Baghdad headquarters.

The U.S. Central Command claimed its forces were responding to hostile fire coming from both the Palestine Hotel and the Al-Jazeera office, charges that have been vigorously denied by journalists who were there. Is it sheer carelessness or, in some cases, deliberate? It's hard to ignore the fact that Al-Jazeera has been criticized by the Bush administration for airing footage it didn't like and that the network's office and camera crews had previously been shot at or shelled by U.S. and British forces in Iraq.

On Sept. 22, the Associated Press reported that the Pentagon's internal investigation into Dana's death concluded that the tank commander had "acted within the rules of engagement" when he fired at the cameraman. What those rules are, exactly, no one knows. According to CPJ, which has monitored the case, they've not been made public.

Ever since reading about his death, I've kept Mazen Dana's business card on my desk. It doesn't seem right to put it back in the Rolodex. A life lost cannot be so neatly filed away.

Dana could easily have been killed right there in his hometown, the city of lost hope. But he wasn't; he'd made it out alive. Instead, his own remarks from the awards ceremony two years earlier came true: "A picture maybe will cost you your life."

Mary Abowd is a freelance writer living in Chico, California.