Freedom of the Press?

Well, it's already happening as we see more and more of the press silenced through either direct government intervention or via the misguided activities of the general citizenry. The worst victim so far has to be Al-Jazeera, the Arabic version of CNN that's been virtually banned from Wall Street and who's English language version of its site didn't even last a day before being hacked into submission. (You can actually see what the site looked like right here courtesy of The Memory Hole.)

This is unfortunate on a number of levels the primary one of course being that you don't gain the trust of the Arab world by shutting their primary news source out! The government was livid that they broadcast images of US dead and PoWs but I think it can be argued that they themselves weren't violating the Genva Conventions...especially since the media is not beholden to the conventions! How many Western media images do we see of Iraqi soldiers tied up and sitting in rows on top of the desert sand or mangled Iraqi corpses twisted into that exact same sand? Clearly Al-Jazeera is the subject of a terrible double standard here that's primarily driven by their audacity in questioning the American motives in the Iraq conflict. Jeez...half the periodicals in both the US and England are questioning the exact same things! Some are paying (sorry about that Peter Arnett) but most get away with it as the White House grows more and more frustrated by public reaction to the whole situation.

Personally I'm of the opinion that since now we're there we shouldn't really leave until we finish the job...if for no other reason that if we leave the Iraqi people out to hang again it's just going to damage the West's image even more. I just don't think that the best way of improving upon that image in the current situation is by shutting out dissenting Arabic media views. We're supposedly going in to sow the seeds of democracy but our loutish behavior thus far isn't really helping our case, now is it?