Under US Control, Press Freedom Falls Short in Iraq

Under US Control, Press Freedom Falls Short in Iraq
by Robert Fisk

Freedom of the press is beginning to smell a little rotten in the new Iraq. A couple of weeks ago, the Arabic Al-Jazeera television channel received a phone call from one of U.S. Proconsul Paul Bremer's flunkies at the presidential palace compound. The station had to answer a series of questions in 24 hours, its reporters were told.

"They insisted that if we didn't go to them, they'd come for us," one of Al-Jazeera's reporters told The Independent. And come they did - to drive the station's employees to the palace, where they were handed a sheet of paper asking if they had been given advance notice of "terrorist attacks" or had paid "terrorists" for information.

Al-Jazeera - along with its rival channel, Al-Arabiya - had already been denounced by the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, currently led by the convicted fraudster Ahmed Chalabi, and punished for allegedly provocative programs by being banned from the council's press conferences for two weeks.

Then the same council - obviously on Bremer's instructions - listed a series of "do's" and "don'ts" for all the media, ranging from a prohibition on inciting violence all the way to a ban on reporting on the rebirth of the Baath Party or speeches by Saddam. As columnist Hassan Fattah remarked about the council's punishment of the two Arab channels, "the council and the interim council will be silent for two weeks, throughout much of the Arab world, including Iraq itself. The resistance and the terrorists, meanwhile, will still be able to say what they want. What a perfect opportunity to pour their footage onto the airwaves and capture the hearts and minds of Iraqis desperate for stability and some leadership."

Things are no better in the American-run television and radio stations in Baghdad. The 357 journalists working from the Bremer palace grounds have twice gone on strike for more pay and have complained of censorship. According to one of the reporters, they were told by John Sandrock - head of the private American company SAIC, which runs the television station - that "either you accept what we offer or you resign; there are plenty of candidates for your jobs."

Needless to say, the television "news" is a miserable affair that often fails to make any mention of the growing violence and anti-American attacks in Iraq that every foreign journalist - and most Iraqi newspapers - report.

When a bomb blew up in part of a mosque in Fallujah last month, for example - killing at least three men - local residents claimed the building had been hit by a rocket from an American jet. The Americans denied this. But no mention of the incident was made on the American-controlled media in Baghdad. Asked for an explanation, newsreader Fadl Hatta Al-Timini replied: "I don't know the answer to that - I'm here to read the news that's brought to me from the Convention Palace (the American headquarters that also houses the station's offices), that's all."

As Patrice Claude of Le Monde noted in his paper, all the American-run media refer to the authorities as "the forces of liberation," even though the foreign press - including the New York Times - refer to them as "occupation forces." The United States has supposedly already spent just over 21 million pounds sterling on Iraq's new audiovisual output, but the Iraqi staff say they've not seen the money. When Le Monde's man in Baghdad asked Sandrock for an explanation, he declined to respond...

In other words:

Iraqi People: Democracy begins with freedom of information, does it not?

US: We'll get to it when we get to it! For now you are FREE to INFORM us if anybody's got anything planned near any oil wells...

 

Re: Re: Under US Control, Press Freedom Falls Short in Iraq

I disagree. You can't elect freely if you don't have info distribution channels that are free enough to tell you the truth (or facilitate you at least gleaning it) about candidates...