Ibrahim Jasim

THE U.S. has bombed media outlets, killed reporters and imprisoned journalists without charge for years at Guantánamo and elsewhere, writes Jeremy Scahill.

Last week, we reported on how retired U.S. Army Colonel Ralph Peters penned an essay for a leading neocon group calling for future U.S. military attacks on media outlets and journalists. Writing for the journal of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Col. Peters wrote:

[F]uture wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media… a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom. The point of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win.

Of course, what Col. Peters is advocating is not new, nor does he need to propose it as a policy for “future wars.” It is already a de facto U.S. policy to target journalists. The U.S. has consistently attacked journalists and media organizations in modern wars. In the 1999 U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, General Wesley Clark, then the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, ordered an airstrike on Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers, including make-up artists and technical staff, an action Amnesty International labeled a “war crime.” Richard Holbrooke, who is currently Obama’s point man on Afghanistan and Pakistan, praised that bombing at the time.

 

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By Noah Shachtman

U.S. and Iraqi forces have arrested two journalists in separate raids, IraqSlogger reports. They are the latest in a long string of reporters, cameramen, and photographers who have been detained in Iraq.

Ibrahim Jasim, an Iraqi cameraman working with the Reuters news agency, was taken from his home in Babil Province by a joint American-Iraqi unit, IraqSlogger says.

Ayman Jasim, the sister of Ibrahim, told the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO) that the joint force raided their home… after midnight Monday night… [She] added that an American officer who was leading the joint force asked her brother Ibrahim about his work, and when he learned that the Iraqi worked as a news cameraman for Reuters, “he immediately ordered that he be arrested and confiscated four of his cameras, smashed his personal computer, and confiscated his mobile phone.”



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