The war on al-Jazeera

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1055684,00.html

The US bombed al-Jazeera because it was angered by reports that did not confirm its one-sided picture of the war. For the past five years, al-Jazeera and other Arab stations have been gaining credibility and fame not only in the Arab countries but also in the west, competing with international networks such as the BBC and CNN. Al-Jazeera in particular became very popular during the American war on Afghanistan. The channel aired voice recordings of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders as well as the speeches of President Bush and allied leaders. This decision to broadcast both sides was in keeping with its motto - "The opinion and the counter-opinion" - but the Americans could not allow such freedom of expression to prevail.

The US sent its first warning to al-Jazeera in November 2001, bombing its Kabul office, destroying its equipment and forcing its journalists to flee. An al-Jazeera cameraman was sent to Guantanamo Bay as a war prisoner.

In Baghdad during the war, the coverage of al-Jazeera again focused mainly on the daily suffering and loss of ordinary people; and again the Americans wanted their crimes and atrocities to pass unnoticed. The two bombs they dropped on al-Jazeera's Baghdad office were the ones that killed my husband. Then the Americans opened fire on Abu Dhabi television, whose identity was spelled out in large blue letters on the roof. The next target was the Palestine hotel, the headquarters of world media representatives - an American tank fired a shell and two more journalists were killed. Thus the US tried to conceal evidence of its crimes from the world and kill the witnesses.

The US didn't take responsibility for the attacks, claiming that all three were mistakes and insisting that it did not know the whereabouts of journalists, apart from those "embedded" with its troops. Later, al-Jazeera's director confirmed that it had given the precise location of the station's Baghdad office to the Pentagon three months before the war. My husband and the others were killed in broad daylight, in locations known to the Pentagon as media sites.

[Manix]

1. The notion that the US wants a democracy here is a canard. They really..

only want a pro-US strongman who can keep the radical Islamists
in line. The democracy talk is for UN and domestic politcs. If Saddam had been pro-US he would still be there no matter what atrocities he committed nor what weapons he possessed.

[BBradley]

2. They did it in Afghanistan too?

The soldiers who fired and the officers who gave the orders should be arrested and tried as war criminals.