The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter –
Thomas JeffersonWith the selection of George W. Bush as President by a
5-4 decision of the United States Supreme Court on December 12th, 2000, our country began a descent into tyranny such as it has not experienced since its inception: King George unilaterally decided that with the mere stroke of his pen he could veto laws passed by Congress without giving Congress an opportunity to override his vetoes as provided in our Constitution – and he has
done just that over 800 times; he
repeatedly lied to Congress and to the American people in order to justify a preemptive war,
in violation of the United Nations Charter to which the United States is a signatory, and therefore in violation of the U.S. Constitution; he gave himself dictatorial powers to designate individuals as “
unlawful enemy combatants”, thereby subjecting them to indefinite detention and
repeated torture by our government without the right to challenge their detention, and thereby violating the Fifth, Sixth and Eight amendments to our Constitution; he initiated a systematic program of
warrantless spying on hundreds of thousands of American citizens, thereby violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (
FISA), as well as the Fourth amendment to our Constitution; he turned the United States Department of Justice into his own private political machine by
firing those who dared to object to his plan for disenfranchising millions of voters; and he put himself beyond the laws of the country that he vowed to serve in numerous other ways.
More directly relevant to the point of this post, George Bush made war upon the rights of the American people to a free press and free speech provided for by the First amendment to our Constitution. He did this by confining the free speech rights of American citizens to “
First amendment zones”, in order to mute their protests of his policies; by
denying access to journalists who proved insufficiently pliable to his tyrannical demands for good press coverage; by using
government propaganda disguised as independent journalism to promote his policies to the American people, using
their money; and, by
threatening criminal punishment against journalists who dared to print stories that criticized his actions.
Thomas Jefferson, recognizing that an independent press is absolutely essential for a functioning democracy, made sure that it was provided for in the
First amendment to our Constitution. Yet, the numerous attacks on our Constitution by the Bush/Cheney regime, and especially its attacks on our First amendment, in the face of our
Congress’s failure to hold them accountable for those actions, causes me to fear that our republic may be going the way of the Roman Empire.
Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are especially important with respect to matters of war and peace, since tyrants often use the excuse of war to consolidate their power. The Bush/Cheney regime is certainly no exception to that rule, as they lied us into war with Iraq with the aid of a compliant corporate news media, and they have gone to great lengths to hide from American citizens what has transpired in that war.
That is why I am very appreciative of and would like to say a few words about a foreign news organization that has challenged the Bush/Cheney regime by reporting events from that war that Bush and Cheney have sought to hide. That reporting constitutes a great service to the American people and to the world, since appropriate decisions by a democratic government can be made only when citizens are fully informed about the relevant facts.
The origins and rise of Al JazeeraAl Jazeera was
established in 1996 by the new Emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa bin Hamad al-Thani. The Emir’s motivation for the establishment of al Jazeera appears to have been the desire to introduce independent uncensored news to the Arab world, as
abolished Qatar’s Ministry of Information (See section 2.a. – Respect for civil liberties, including freedom of speech and press) in 1998 and tolerated criticism of his own government by al Jazeera without any attempt to censor it. The
demise of BBC Arabic TV later in 1996 provided the opportunity for al Jazeera to hire numerous well trained Arabic-speaking journalists.
A free press was not a familiar phenomenon for the countries of the Middle East. Therefore, since its inception al Jazeera reporting has been very controversial among many Middle Eastern countries. For example, it was
banned in Algeria for reporting on the massacres of Algerian dissidents,
in Bahrain for alleged bias against that country, and in several other Middle Eastern countries for hostile coverage of their governments.
Consequently, it received a good deal of
praise from the United States during the Clinton administration and elsewhere for the free speech that it brought to the Middle East.
Nonetheless, it was not very well known outside the Middle East until the September 11th attacks on the United States. Following those attacks, the Western world became much more familiar with al Jazeera when it broadcast
videos of Osama bin Laden justifying his actions. The Bush administration complained that those broadcasts provided propaganda for terrorists, though several U.S. stations broadcast them as well.
The Bush/Cheney regime moves against al Jazeera During the Afghanistan War, in the run-up to the Iraq War, and after the Iraq war began, the Bush/Cheney regime and the U.S. corporate media to a lesser extent has
sought to censure news coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq that has been critical of the U.S. government. The administration’s favorite method for accomplishing this has been to restrict access to reporters who are allowed to be “
embedded” in the U.S. military.
Recognizing that al Jazeera posed a threat to the Bush/Cheney regime’s blackout of hostile war coverage, it sent al Jazeera a number of warnings. The first warning came in the form of a
U.S. missile that destroyed al Jazeera offices in Kabul, Afghanistan, shortly after the U.S. invasion in November 2001; an al Jazeera cameraman, Sami Al-Haj, was arrested as an “enemy combatant” and sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he was
held without charges for several years; shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, U.S. tanks
shelled a hotel in Basra where al Jazeera journalists were the only guests; in April 2003, a U.S. missile
hit the al Jazeera office in Baghdad, killing one staffer and wounding another; and in November 2003, another al Jazeera cameraman, Salah Hassan, was
arrested, beaten and tortured by U.S. soldiers.
But al Jazeera refused to surrender to the Bush/Cheney demand for censorship of war coverage Al Jazeera was perhaps the only non-embedded news organization to provide coverage of the ferocious April 2004 battle for Fallujah, a battle for which the U.S. government claimed there were no civilian casualties. Here are some excerpts from an
interview conducted by Amy Goodman with an al Jazeera cameraman, Laith Mushtaq, regarding his experiences with that battle:
When we went to the hospital and reached the hospital, you cannot even imagine what my feeling was. First of all, I'm a human being. Second, I see corpses of children. I feel a responsibility, that a photographer or as a team, the only one here working, we are the only one who will write the history of what happened, and that's a great burden..
I'm sorry, after three days, it was the most difficult scene for me in my whole life… The planes bombed this house, as they did for the whole neighborhood, and they brought the corpses and bodies to the hospital. I went to the hospital. I could not see anything but like a sea of corpses of children and women, and mostly children…
The stadium of soccer became a graveyard, but at the same time, in Hay Nazzal… people also were buried in their own homes, in the gardens of their houses. A man would leave to take a sneak peek to see a safe place that he can go into, and the sniper shoots him, and he falls dead.
They had a press conference with some journalists from news agencies, Americans, Europeans and otherwise. So they were sitting, and he said literally, “We are making advances positively in the battlefield, and we accomplished victories to kill the terrorists and the fighters present in the city.”…so we asked him, “What about the civilians?” He said, “Oh, there isn't civilians. There's no civilians. The people whom you see their corpses on Al Jazeera TV and on the media, it is for fighters wearing civilian clothing.”
I could not handle myself, and I said, “What about the child? Is he a fighter disguised in civilian clothes?”
In response to al Jazeera’s hostile coverage of the battle for Fallujah, George Bush’s
first instinct was to bomb al Jazeera’s international headquarters in Qatar. After being dissuaded against doing that, the U.S. army asked al Jazeera to leave Fallujah,
threatening that there could be no peace in the city until they left. However, al Jazeera Director General, Wadah, Khanfar, refused to leave, declaring:
We try to be objective. The situation there bears a sign of humanitarian crisis. We just shed the light on this… We are not a political party in the crisis. We are just the media guys.
Nonetheless, in August 2004, the U.S.-backed Iraqi government
ordered Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau closed.
Final thoughts on the Bush/Cheney war against al JazeeraThe Bush/Cheney regime of course has done whatever it can to discredit al Jazeera, as it has done with anyone who dares to criticize it or provide any news coverage that sheds light on the fantasies that it tries to sell to the American people. In response to al Jazeera’s reporting on and pictures of the April 2004 slaughter in Fallujah, Donald Rumsfeld said “I can definitively say that what al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.” And Fox News, among others,
falsely claimed that al Jazeera has shown videos of masked terrorists beheading hostages.
Arthur Neslen, writing in the
Guardian, has put the story in perspective. In response to the numerous charges leveled against al Jazeera by the Bush/Cheney administration,
Neslen writes:
Millions of people in the Middle East disagree. Al-Jazeera has become the most popular TV network in the region - with a daily audience of 35 million - precisely because it has shown the human carnage that US military onslaughts leave in their wake. If it became a "legitimate, authoritative, honest news station" of the kind that routinely censors the realities of US military operations, it would lose its audience.
The al-Jazeera reports of US snipers firing at women and children in the streets of Fallujah have now been corroborated by international observers in the city. Perhaps it is natural that a military force should seek to suppress evidence that could be used against it in future war crimes trials. But it is equally natural that a free media should resist.
Democratizing the Middle East may have been the neo-cons' case for the conquest of Iraq. But on the ground, the US is acting against the flowering of Middle East media freedom, which al-Jazeera initiated.
I find this story fascinatingly ironic. My country, the United States of America, the birth place of modern democracy, invaded a country that posed no threat to it, first with the excuse that it was afraid of being attacked by that country's “weapons of mass destruction”, an excuse that later morphed into the excuse that we invaded that country in order to democratize it. Yet in its alleged attempt to do that, the Bush/Cheney regime ignored the whole legal foundation upon which our nation was created, while seeking to destroy an organization that is attempting to bring free speech to an area of the world that has no previous experience with democracy or free speech.
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