WARNING TO JOURNALISTS:

Don't Veer from the Dogma

 

While America gloats over its victories, the military stifles and murders the voices of any journalists not embedded with its own troops.  As the tanks and armored columns moved into Baghdad, they targeted not only enemy combatants.  They bombarded the offices of Al-Jazeera as well as the Palestine Hotel, headquarters for independent journalists in Baghdad.

 

As Yasser Abu Hilalah, Al-Jazeera correspondent in Amman said,  "the Al-Jazeera office is located in a residential area and there is no way that the attack was a mistake". 

 

" I will not be objective about this because we have been dragged into this conflict," said Tayseer Alouni of Al-Jazeera;  "we were targeted because the Americans don't want the world to see the crimes they are committing against the Iraqi people".

 

Alouni's confessed lack of objectivity will certainly be shared by millions of others who feel equally angered by the attack against Al-Jazeera, particularly in view of the attackers' claims to objectively avoid targeting civilians.

 

According to Majed Abdel Hadi the Al-Jazeera office was “deliberately targeted… and it is not the first time.  Our Kabul office was hit by four (US) missiles," he said.  US warplanes hit the Afghanistan office of Al-Jazeera in 2001, just 10 minutes after its correspondents had received warning of an impending attack".

 

It wasn't enough that Al-Jazeera's English news service was earlier knocked out by hackers in a Denial of Service attack that incapacitated their Web site.  The reporters who were showing the "crimes against the Iraqi people" to the world through its Arabic channel had to be silenced.

 

After all, Washington has been bragging about liberating the Iraqi people, and it wouldn't do that image any good if footage of civilian carnage committed by ‘coalition’ (US and UK) troops got out to the world via Al-Jazeera.

 

Last week, four bombs that did not explode also hit the hotel where Al-Jazeera correspondents in the southern Iraqi city of Basra were staying.

 

Two more journalists died and four others were injured when a US tank round later hit the Palestine Hotel where at least 200 international correspondents, including Al-Jazeera reporters, are staying.

 

Reuters' editor in chief Geert Linnebank called into question the "judgment of advancing US troops who have known all along that this hotel is the main base for almost all foreign journalists in Baghdad".

 

General Buford Blount, commander of the US 3rd Infantry Division said a US tank was "receiving fire from the hotel, RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) and small-arms fire, and engaged with one tank round.  The firing stopped".

 

Other journalists located in the same building, including the BBC, have rejected this claim commenting on televised newscasts that there was no firing in the area before the American shells hit them.

 

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said the attacks may have been war crimes.  The Brussels-based lobby group also accused the United States of singling out Al-Jazeera for punishment.

 

Along with Saddam Hussein, it appears that journalists who don't adhere to the "coalition" line, are the latest targets for the military silencers.  Get embedded or else!  "You're either with us or against us," said George W. Bush.