Exporting Censorship to Iraq (SAIC)

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From the start, problems small and large plagued the Pentagon's media project in Iraq. The Iraqi Media Network (IMN), as it is known, is an American-run outfit contracted by the Pentagon to put out news after Saddam Hussein's fall. Its mission was twofold: to be both a PBS-style broadcaster and a means for the occupying authorities to communicate with Iraqis. But getting going wasn't easy. There were bombed-out facilities to reconstruct, transmitters to build, and a staff to hire and rehire when many left for better wages as interpreters or translators. Tapes didn't match with recording machines; recording machines didn't match with broadcasting equipment. There were power outages and battery shortages, and no money to buy new programming. "We were even using the videotape collection of Uday and Qusay," says Don North, a senior TV adviser to the IMN.

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The contradiction between encouraging democratic values and ruling by force was built into the IMN's very origins. Early this year, the Pentagon hired not a media outlet but a San Diego-based defense contractor, the Scientific Applications International Corp. (SAIC), to develop a multimedia operation in postwar Iraq. Although this new outfit was intended to become a kind of public broadcasting system, The SAIC's orientation was more toward information control: One of SAIC's specializations, for example, is "Information Dominance/Command and Control." The IMN was created in April, and it wasn't long before journalists hired by the SAIC realized their double role: The occupying authority told them to stop conducting man-on-the-street interviews because some were too critical of the American presence, and to stop including readings of the Koran as part of cultural programming. In the middle of the summer, against North's objections, the Americans forced IMN TV to run an hour-long program on recently issued occupying authority laws. The program was produced by the CPA-run interim justice ministry without journalists' participation and repeated much of the information presented in another hour-long segment on the subject that had been hosted by al-Rikabi. "It was an interest group massaging without a journalist being a host," says North. "A lot of Iraqis I know saw what a farce it was. That was the sort of thing that was degrading the quality of journalism at IMN and making it less credible."

http://www.prospect.org/print/V14/9/gourevitch-a.html