Iraqi journalists charged under Iraqi law for speech against govt.

[cynatnite]

Under a broad new set of laws criminalizing speech that ridicules the government or its officials, some resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein’s penal code, roughly a dozen Iraqi journalists have been charged with offending public officials in the past year.

Currently, three journalists for a small newspaper in southeastern Iraq are being tried here for articles last year that accused a provincial governor, local judges and police officials of corruption. The journalists were accused of violating Paragraph 226 of the penal code, which makes anyone who “publicly insults” the government or public officials subject to up to seven years in prison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/world/middleeast/29media.html?hp&ex=1159502400&en=38c9900bc0642a2b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[silverweb]

1. Coming soon to our dictatorship.

Just wait and see.

[Erika]

2. W would love to declare Faux/Bushco as the media voice

Tony Snow would be leading the charge, and the majority of Republicans would vote in such a bill. Calling it National Security.

People, for God's sakes, we only had 4 planes hit us! You want to give up our freedoms for 4 planes?

W has turned this country into a group of cluckers that the original King George would be proud of as he fought against our independence.

[Frustratedlady]

3. Isn't freedom of speech part of what we've been paying for in..

..lives and dollars? Some things never change.

[soothsayer]

4. If you write a negative story you can be executed; avg sentence is

30 years i think

[TahitiNut]

5. Not only an infringement on freedom of the press ...

... it's an infringement on the MOST important free speech .. political dissent! How many of America's young are dying to perpetuate this hypocritical facade of a neocolonial government? Despicable! :puke:

[ninkasi]

6. Bush can't wait

to get laws here changed to outlaw freedom of speech. According to him, "Everything changed on 9-11". He says this in every speech, sometimes more than once. It is amazing to me that our country was able to write a Constitution, win a revolution against the might of the British army, win the war against North and South and preserve our union, join in the battles of WWI and WWII, all without trashing our Constitutional rights.

The only difference is that now, Bush is in office, and he considers anything HE faces to be far, far worse than any president before him. This is behavior typical of a man so spoiled, and so out of touch with the realities of life, that we is not qualified to make any decisions affection millions of people.

His megalomania will not permit him to place the danger our country faces now up to any objective sense of proportion. For him, the war, the fate of our country, and the fate of the world only exist in the context of how each thing will affect him. He should never be allowed to have any office of power, much less the presidency. He is the worst this country has to offer, and we must win back the Congress in November, in order to stop our slide into being a fascist country.

[bigtree]

7. torture repression suppression

some liberation