Iraq the Casbah: US Military to Clampdown on Journalists and Bloggers in Iraq
Crossposted on Moving Ideas Network.
In celebration of World Press Freedom Day yesterday, the Bush Administration has made two policy decisions regarding media coverage of the Iraq war that fly squarely in the face of a free press. First, new military rules require soldiers to clear all content with superiors before posting them to their blogs and this rule may be applied to email, as well. Second, the Army’s 1st Information Operations Command new handbook lists journalists alongside al Qaeda as a threat. Add to these the fact that the US continues to hold two photojournalists prisoner without charge and we begin to see a picture of an Administration that is aggressively assaulting our rights to a free press.
If these developments seem hypocritical given our policy of spreading democracy throughout the Middle East and the world, it is because they are. Consistent with its long-standing philosophy of how to save things that are important to us, the Bush Administration feels that they have to destroy freedom in order to save it (they also think we have to burn forests to save them, occupy countries to free them, run up huge deficits to balance the budget, and destroy civil liberties to ensure our freedom).
The restrictions on military bloggers and emails apparently also cover soldiers’ families and military contractors, further expanding the Administration’s commitment to censorship. Many people are speculating that these rules could spell the end of military blogs, altogether.
This is a sad development, because to a large degree, military blogs and soldier emails have been the best source of unspun information coming from the war zone. The words of soldier bloggers not only give us a fairer assessment of the situation on the ground in Iraq than the military’s propaganda program, but they also create deeper bonds between the soldiers in combat and the people back home. If we really want to support our troops, this new policy is clearly a step in the wrong direction.
According to the new Army handbook, as Democracy Now reports, “soldiers should view the media as a threat alongside Al Qaeda, computer hackers, drug cartels, warlords and militias.” I suppose this new policy retroactively justifies the US’s shelling of journalists staying at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad in 2003, when a US tank killed a journalist filming from the top of the hotel. In fact, three locations hosting journalists in Baghdad were attacked on the same day, April 8, 2003.
And the US continues to hold two Muslim journalists prisoner without charge. Pulitzer Prize winning AP photographer Bilal Hussein has been held for 13 months in Iraq and Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj has been in Guantanamo since June 2002. While the Administration will claim these journalists are held for good cause, the reasons are suspect. These detentions put the US on a par with Egypt and other nations that imprison journalists that are deemed opponents to the state’s interests.
These policies and practices are hardly worthy of a nation that claims to be the champion of freedom and democracy. It is time that we recommit ourselves to practicing what we preach. Our global reputation depends on it and our citizens deserve it.