Journalism Under Attack: The Bush Administration's Policy of Information Suppression

Journalists Claim Bush Administration the Biggest Danger to Free Speech and Democracy in America and Worldwide

The release of three Reuters journalists from custody this week raises new questions concerning Bush administration and U.S. military policy that has allegedly led to the deliberate murder of at least thirteen journalists in Iraq by U.S. soldiers. Reuters cameraman Ali al-Mashhadani and reporter Majed Hameed, who also works for Al-Arabiya television, both from the western Iraqi city of Ramadi, were freed on January 15 after five and four months in U.S. military custody respectively. Samir Mohammed Noor, a freelance cameraman, was freed on January 22 after eight months in U.S. custody, including time spent at Abu Ghraib, notorious under both Saddam Hussein and U.S. military operation as a place of torture for political dissenters and terror suspects. All three were held without charges, and at least two more journalists, including a cameraman from Mosul who works for the U.S. television network CBS, are still being held.

The fact that a majority of those journalists allegedly targeted were cameramen has not been overlooked. Some journalists suggest that the attacks are made to suppress any footage that might have captured war crimes committed by U.S. troops. The three journalists the U.S. military admits to killing were all cameramen. Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and Jose Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network Tele 5, were killed on April 8, 2003 by an explosion at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad when a U.S. tank shelled it, allegedly in response to gunfire from the hotel. The hotel was a well known base for most of the foreign media in the Iraqi capital. Another cameraman, Al-Jazeera's Tarek Ayyoub was also killed the same day when two bombs dropped during a U.S. air raid hit the TV station's Baghdad offices.