Sunday, November 27, 2005

journalists & fallujah

* rawstory: "According to sources familiar with the case, it was the recent attack on Fallujah that had Bush concerned about what al-Jazeera might report."
and therefore Blinky wanted to bomb them... that's probably because of all the warcrimes committed in fallujah...

thats kinda funny, cos it reminded me of a couple of other episodes:

1. " Edelman also begged the (Turkish) prime minister to censor articles in the press by Robert Fisk, Naomi Klein, Dahr Jamail and presumably others. Apparently Edelman's main concern was Fallujah, or more accurately, the reporting on the war crimes" (link)

2. when giuliana sgrena was nearly murdered, it was widely suspected that it was because of her Fallujah reporting, here, for example, is an article of hers called "Napalm Raid on Falluja?"

4 comments:

mikevotes said...

The great irony to me is that the military was initially advising against attacking Fallujah, at least until they could get in a better situation to do so.

But Bush, reportedly, pushed the attack on Fallujah in a political response to the killing of the four Blackwater employees. So, he may have been told, "Mr. President, if you want us to do this now, you have to know that it's going to be very ugly."

And it's this "ugly," the result of his personal decision, that he wanted to keep from the world's view.

Oh, and I don't think this story is going to go away. The tighter they clamp down with prosecutions and gag orders, the bigger the push to get the source memo.

Anonymous said...

And then there is the killing of the Spanish reporter Jose Couso, who was filming a US tank machine gunning the Al-Jazeera offices in Bagdad. Disturbing that Bush reportedly expressed interest in that type of thing. Was it a mistake?

Anonymous said...

mikevotes - you are absolutely right. the assaults on fallujah made no sense militarily and both failed. its still not 'secure' - andmost of the population is still living in tent cities around the country. disaster. and they committed no shortage of warcrimes - the napalm, cutting of water and whatever other services, and not letting male citizens escape.

and yep - the memo will be released. soon hopefully.

Anonymous said...

tony - yeah - you are right too - the attack on the palestine hotel was another criminal episode. i cant believe some of the shit that these people try to get away with.