Iran recently came under sharp criticism in the US for detaining journalist Roxanne Saberi on espionage charges.  Saberi was convicted, sentenced to 8 years imprisonment, and subsequently released  after an appeals court reduced her sentence to 3 months.  Some of the criticism of Iran centered on censorship of the press by the government.  Iran has detained several journalists in the recent past, although most have been expelled from the country rather than being detained.

Meanwhile the US has detained Reuters cameraman Ibrahim Jassam since last September, without lodging charges against him.  An Iraqi court ordered his release last November, but he continues to be held by US forces, citing him as a "high security threat".  Our war on the media coverage in the Iraq invasion has been unwritten policy since its' inception.  In retrospect the 'embedding' of the media with the troops, while offering first hand color commentary on the operations did little to shed light on the bigger picture of what was and is transpiring in country.  One thing that the ruling political class took to heart following the Vietnam War was to not let the press have access to 'off-message' media images.  So the war imagery has been heavily controlled from the battlefield to the returning caskets laden with the fruit of war.  But more than this passive manipulation of journalists and journalism, we're seeing for the first time, the strategic importance the government has placed on controlling the media, through the active constraint and even murder of journalists.  Al Jazeera, an international pro-Arab news agency was on the list of approved targets during the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Their facilities as well as Abu Dhabi TV's were attacked virtually simultaneously on the same day as an attack on The Palestine Hotel, in Baghdad, where many journalists were staying at the time of the invasion.   These attacks killed 3 journalists.   

In one incident, a U.S. tank fired an explosive shell at the Palestine Hotel, where most non-embedded international reporters in Baghdad are based. Two journalists, Taras Protsyuk of the British news agency Reuters and Jose Couso of the Spanish network Telecino, were killed; three other journalists were injured. The tank, which was parked nearby, appeared to carefully select its target, according to journalists in the hotel, raising and aiming its gun turret some two minutes before firing a single shell.

Journalists who witnessed the attack unequivocally rejected Pentagon claims that the tank had been fired on from the hotel. "I never heard a single shot coming from any of the area around here, certainly not from the hotel," David Chater of British Sky TV told Reuters (4/8/03). Footage shot by French TV recorded quiet in the area immediately before the attack (London Independent, 4/9/03).

Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana was shot by US forces near Abu Ghraib prison when his camera was allegedly mistaken for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The US listed as "justified" the killing of Al Arabiya TV's Mazen al-Tumeizi, blown apart by a US missile as he reported on a burning US armored vehicle on Baghdad's Haifa Street.

Nik Gowing of the BBC, contends that  "The U.S. military makes no effort to distinguish between legitimate satellite uplinks for broadcast news communications and the identifiable radio or satellite communications belonging to 'the enemy.'

But the Pentagon, while expressing regret over the loss of life, rejected the idea that its forces did anything wrong, and appeared to place blame on the press corps for being in Baghdad in the first place: "We've had conversations over the last couple of days, news organizations eager to get their people unilaterally into Baghdad," said Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke (Associated Press, 4/9/03). "We are saying it is not a safe place; you should not be there."

 

Therein lies the rub:  You should not be here.  There are some things that are better kept behind closed doors, unless you want your dirty laundry aired for all the world to see.  The problem is, that the 'theater of war' is too large to control everything, and stuff slips out.  It's not like the old days when these types of events transpired across a world that sometimes took months for news to arrive back home.  Today the effect is immediate and undiluted, unless you control the press coverage in the theater of operations.  So there's a psychological benefit to the killing and incarceration of the press for those attempting to control it.  Without a modicum of fear on the parts of the individual journalists, there would be even more reporting of counter productive, off topic, subjects by the media.  A little fear can go a long way.

During a panel discussion a CNN executive " reportedly said that the US military had targeted a dozen journalists who had been killed in Iraq".  After his controversial statements 'got legs' the executive publicly recanted his statements, and soon retired from a successful 23 year career with the cable giant, citing his desire to not have CNN "unfairly tarnished by the controversy".  The silence in the US on targeting media personnel is fairly deafening.  I suppose if they had shot Anderson Cooper there would have been an outpouring of outrage before we all returned to our cheetos and 'reality' shows, but as it turns out they took out mostly brown skinned people who were unknown to the American audience, so hey, no foul.  Right? 

Some will argue the expediency required by our military in Iraq and Afghanistan as cause for leniency in judging these 'events'.  What strikes me as bizarre is that these policies, targeted at restricting or murdering foreign correspondents, carry with them a more serious price tag for US foreign relations than if we had a more open approach to news coverage from the start.  In the end the US public has paid little attention to the active targeting of reporters, while these happenings are widely known in the part of the world where we most need to win hearts and minds.  It would be a welcome relief for our State Department to not have to ensure every foreign accolade we receive with an extraordinary financial gift... but perhaps that is expecting too much.  When the actions taken to restrict the press in the war zone have a more deleterious effect on our image abroad than we would have suffered had we left them alone in the first place, it might be time to revise these battle strategies.  If you couple this apparent policy to target the press, foreign, or otherwise, with the policy of indefinite detentions, I think we all have reason to worry.  Meanwhile Ibrahim Jassam is in limbo, not unlike some detainees we've been discussing here.  Not charged with any offense, unable to appeal for his release or right to trial.  I say that the US occupying forces in Iraq must charge him or set him free. 


"He who controls the media, controls the minds of the public."  -  Noam Chomsky