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By: Andrew Limburg Copyright 2003
November 19th, 2001 – The Guardian reported about the bomb that destroyed Al-Jazeera’s offices in Kabul, Afghanistan. The reports states, “Al-Jazeera certainly believes it was a target. Speaking on the telephone to News World from Qatar, its chief editor, Ibrahim Hilal, said he believed that it's Kabul office had been on the Pentagon's list of targets since the beginning of the conflict”.
The same report quotes spokesman, US Col. Brian Hoey as saying, "The US military does not and will not target media. We would not, as a policy, target news media organisations - it would not even begin to make sense."
February 7th, 2003 – The Washington Post reported,“President Bush has signed a secret directive ordering the government to develop, for the first time, national- level guidance for determining when and how the United States would launch cyber-attacks against enemy computer networks”.
February 12th, 2003 – USA Today reported, “If we attack Iraq, for instance, soldiers armed with PCs might fire hacker software bullets over the Net to shut down Iraq's electrical grid or overwhelm computers in Saddam's headquarters. The military might even get creative, sending code that launches a RealNetworks player on every Iraqi PC, then shows a digitally altered video of Saddam instructing everyone to surrender.”
March 10th, 2003 – The Guardian reported, “How the net will play a key role in this war”, and went on later to state, “The US government is getting in on the act as well. For the first time ever, the US military has engaged in an ‘information warfare campaign’ aimed at Iraqi email addresses with an onslaught of spam urging recipients to contact the United Nations if they want to defect.”The story also reported,“
April 2nd, 2003 – Newsday reported,“the Web site of Arab satellite news network Al-Jazeera was among the most sought-after on the Internet last week. The Web portal Lycos reported that ‘Al-Jazeera’ and variant spellings became its top search term last week, with three times more searches than ‘sex.’”, and Google stated, “’Al-Jazeera’ was the term that showed the greatest increase in the week ending March 31.”
March 23rd, 2003 – Newsfactor reports, “Someone made hacker history by knocking out Aljazeera.net, the Arabic satellite news channel's Web site, for most of last week. No one has ever sustained a crippling attack against a big Web site for so long.”The article further states, “The attack began Sunday morning, March 23, a few hours after Al-Jazeera broadcast graphic images of dead and captured U.S. soldiers.”
The same report states, “The FBI monitored the hack but could do little to trace or stop it.”
March 24th, 2003 – Al-Jazeera Launches Website in English
March 24th, 2003 – Newsfactor reports, that the hacking continues, “as Al-Jazeera introduced an English-language version of its Web pages, the barrage intensified.”
March 26th, 2003 – Reuters reports that Iraqi TV, was targeted and bombed. In addition it states, “The head of the world's biggest journalists' organization said a U.S. bomb and missile attack on Iraqi television on Wednesday was an attempt at censorship and may have breached the Geneva Conventions.”
’I think there should be a clear international investigation into whether or not this bombing violates the Geneva Conventions,’ Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), told Reuters. ‘We have every reason to believe this is an act of censorship against media that U.S. politicians and military strategists don't like,’ he said.”
“A U.S. official in Washington earlier said the raid had hit the main television station, a key telecommunications vault and Baghdad satellite communications, damaging the government's command and control capability. “
"Once again, we see military and political commanders from the democratic world targeting a television network simply because they don't like the message it gives out," Aidan White said.
March 28th, 2003 – The Guardian report, “Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war”, stated, “Last Tuesday, while western channels were celebrating a Basra ‘uprising’ which none of them could have witnessed since they don't have reporters in the city, our correspondent in the Sheraton there returned a rather flat verdict of ‘uneventful’ - a view confirmed shortly afterwards by a spokesman for the opposition Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream media had simply mirrored the Blair/Bush fantasy that the people who have been starved by UN sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium since 1991 will greet them as saviours.”
April 2nd, 2003 – The Guardian reports, “A hotel in Basra being used as a base by al-Jazeera's team of correspondents in the city was shelled this morning, the Arabic TV news channel has claimed. The Basra Sheraton, whose only guests are al-Jazeera journalists, received four direct hits this morning during a heavy artillery bombardment, according to the Qatar-based broadcaster.”
The same article later states, “Al-Jazeera had officially advised the Pentagon of all relevant details pertaining to its reporters covering the war on Iraq, as stipulated by relevant international practice and conventions governing reporting wars. The details included official HQs of all its reporters in Basra, Mosul and Baghdad."
And further, “The shelling of the Basra Sheraton mirrors a similar incident during the Afghan war, when al-Jazeera accused the US military of deliberately targeting its Kabul office, despite having told the Americans where its reporters were based.”
April 3rd, 2003 – The Guardian reports, "US central command policy is now actively restricting independent news gathering from southern Iraq," said Jean Stock, the EBU secretary general
"They have created a caste system with embedded journalists - usually from countries in the so-called coalition who can associate with the troops - and the truly unilateral broadcaster who is prevented from coming anywhere near the news."
We have independent information that broadcasters can work safely in many areas, so we do not understand why the military is putting so many obstacles in the path of journalists," said the head of news, Tony Naets.
April 8th, 2003 – Al Jazeera reports, "Al-Jazeera office is located in a residential area and there is no way that the attack was a mistake." said Yasser Abu Hilalah, Al-Jazeera correspondent. They were both standing on the roof getting ready for a live broadcast amid intensifying bombardment of the city when the building was hit by two missiles. Shortly afterwards, US warplanes returned to hit the neighbouring Abu Dhabi TV offices.
April 8th, 2003 – Reuters reports, "A U.S. tank fired on a Baghdad hotel packed with foreign journalists on Tuesday, killing two cameramen, one from Reuters, the other from Spanish television."
Lebanese-born Samia Nakhoul, Reuters' Gulf bureau chief based in Dubai, and Iraqi photographer Faleh Kheiber suffered facial and head wounds and concussion.
© Copyright 2003 FAIR USE NOTICE - ALL information on this website is for educational purposes ONLY
http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=2589&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported
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