Journalism Under Attack: The Bush Administration's Policy of Information Suppression

The release of three Reuters journalists from custody this week raises new questions concerning Bush administration and U.S. military policy that has allegedly led to the deliberate murder of at least thirteen journalists in Iraq by U.S. soldiers. Reuters cameraman Ali al-Mashhadani and reporter Majed Hameed, who also works for Al-Arabiya television, both from the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, were freed on January 15 after five and four months in U.S. military custody respectively. Samir Mohammed Noor, a freelance cameraman, was freed on January 22 after eight months in U.S. custody, including time spent at Abu Ghraib, notorious under both Saddam Hussein and U.S. military operation as a place of torture for political dissenters and terror suspects. All three were held without charges, and at least two more journalists, including a cameraman from Mosul who works for the U.S. television network CBS, are still being held.

The fact that a majority of those journalists allegedly targeted were cameramen has not been overlooked. Some journalists suggest that the attacks are made to suppress any footage that might have captured war crimes committed by U.S. troops. The three journalists the U.S. military admits to killing were all cameramen. Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network Tele 5, were killed on April 8, 2003 by an explosion at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad when a U.S. tank shelled it, allegedly in response to gunfire from the hotel. The hotel was a well known base for most of the foreign media in the Iraqi capital. Another cameraman, Al-Jazeera's Tarek Ayyoub was also killed the same day when two bombs dropped during a U.S. air raid hit the TV station's Baghdad offices.

The attack on the Al-Jazeera offices drew outrage from a variety of international organizations, especially after it was alleged in Britain's Daily Mirror that British Prime Minister Tony Blair talked president Bush out of a plan to bomb Al-Jazeera headquarters in Doha, Qatar, in the infamous top secret Downing Street Memo that contains a transcript of the Bush-Blair conversation of April 16, 2004. The Pentagon was unapologetic when it discussed the deaths of the three journalists, simply ominously stating that a war zone is a "very dangerous place for journalists." It also offered conflicting stories concerning the attack on the Palestine Hotel, claiming initially that U.S. troops were fired on by insurgents with small arms from within the hotel lobby, but later claiming that Iraqis in front of the hotel fired rocket-propelled grenades across the Tigris River, after which U.S. soldiers fired back with a tank round after seeing enemy "binoculars." Journalists said they heard no gunfire coming from the hotel or its immediate environs. They had been watching two U.S. tanks shooting across the al-Jumhuriya bridge when one of the tanks rotated its turret toward the hotel and fired.

In early February of 2005, The head of CNN's news division, Eason Jordan, caused a stir when he told a panel at a World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, that the American military had targeted journalists during operations in Iraq. Mr. Jordan, speaking in a panel discussion titled "Will Democracy Survive the Media?" said "he knew of about 12 journalists who had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy," said Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who was on the panel with Mr. Jordan. Other independent journalists have complained of harassment by U.S. troops, claiming the military only tolerates the embedded journalists in their units, who depend on the troops for their survival and therefore are disinclined to report negatively on any U.S. actions or atrocities committed by troops. Some journalists allege that U.S. soldiers have confiscated their film and issued threats against them.

Journalists and media professionals around the world have spoken out against the Bush administration's policy of media suppression. They claim that it is a concerted effort by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, under orders from the President and his Republican party associates, to suppress news which might be critical of U.S. actions in the occupied nation, especially after the administration was embarrassed by photos of torture committed by troops at Abu Ghraib. It is perhaps telling that so few American news media have mentioned the alleged government sanctioned killings, and reporters who dare speak about it, like Eason Jordan, find themselves without a job. Some say this is due to the media corporate ownership and their support of the Republican party, which has always put corporate interests over those of Americans and even the ethics of its own membership. If even a handful of these claims are true, then it is yet another mark against a man that has been called by over eighty political experts the "worst president in U.S. history," and further proof of the claim by some that the president and his administration, along with others who constitute the extreme right of the Republican party, seek nothing less than to form a fascist government with the eventual goal of a world-spanning American empire.