Conference investigates the atrocities by 'der Führer' Adolf Hitler!

Time for real investigating journalism and honest judges!

It really is about time the atrocities by 'der Führer' Adolf Hitler are investigated!

All our lives we daily hear - and have heard - via the mainstream media, radio, papers and especially TV all the time about what Hitler has done: now indeed is the time to show the proof of 'what this monster did to mankind'.

And make those who say 'he maybe was not all that wrong' ashamed of even thinking so. There also are some which say there are concentration camps in the United States! [http://tinyurl.com/ds37x] - Isn't this horrible?

And how dares Amnesty International be so right and speak about an American Gulag? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/852kv

A very good idea to put history's tyrants where they belong - based on facts of course - no fables nor whitewashing of the crimes which we have been told were committed by those horrible Nazis must be possible.

The investigation must be totally independent of the interests of nations or their multinationals, their industrial military machines, money, politics or religion.

Only facts which can be proved are valid: the rest is make-believe.

After for decades worldwide having seen dreadful stories and other forms of information on Hitler's atrocities, especially the Holocaust, one has the impression that evidence for all stories will be easily found and presented.

That will show those who think different - and strangely enough are jailed for their ideas? - whether they are right or wrong.

It's difficult to understand why I can say and write for instance that Jesus does not exist, while I may end up in jail when I wonder about the size of the Holocaust?

Are we all in danger of being punished by some kind of 'Thought Police', like Orwell described? Is that why there are people in jail who want just a question investigated?

It sure must make a hell lot of thinking people very suspicious!

Important is that the judges are internationally known honest people which have proved to be good judges of facts and certainly not politically involved.

People like prof. Jean Ziegler - [http://tinyurl.com/9pol4] - and prof. Hans Köchler - [http://hanskoechler.com/] - immediately come to mind: they have never sold themselves to the different rackets in power.

The problem remaining after the verdict is that if it is not in favor of the Holocaust believers, who will publish it in the media in the West?

Anyhow: here's the plan:

Stampa / IRAN: HOLOCAUST CONFERENCE SOON IN TEHRAN

Tehran, 5 Jan. (AKI) - Iran has decided to rewrite and revise the history of the Holocaust. Following the repeated declarations by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other senior government officials on the need to re-examine the history of the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War, the association of Islamic Journalists of Iran has been tasked with quickly putting together an international conference on the Holocaust.

"President Ahmadinejad has placed at the centre of international attention, a very important question on the truthfulness of the version that Europe and the Zionists have imposed on the world on the murder of Jews during the years of the great war, and therefore we are of the opinion that it is useful and necessary to organise an international conference on that theme, where all the historians and researchers, even those that do not believe in the official version, will be able to express themselves freely," Mehdi Afzali, spokesperson of the Association of Islamic Journalists told Adnkronos International (AKI).

"We want to offer a free and democratic platform to the historians to examine in-depth this myth, seeing that in different European countries there exist laws against democracy and freedom that to do not allow intellectuals who believe in a version distinct from that which is officially pronounced on the Holocaust," added Afzali.

[Why the conference and why the clampdown? - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/bympo]

"We will invite those who believe in the imposed version as well as all those who have spent years of their lives in the study of documents related to the Holocaust and have come to the conclusion that the history books in schools and universities do not correspond to the truth," said Afzali, who however refused to supply the names of the revisionist historians who have been contacted to appear in the conference in Tehran.

Revisionists are those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.*

In Iran, books by the English historian, David Irving, currently in custody in an Austrian jail after having been accused of denying the Holocaust, are very popular.

Among the names of possible guests at the conference are the Israeli journalist lsrael Shamir, a convert to Christianity, and Horst Mahler from Germany, a former member of the the terrorist group, the Red Army Faction. Other revisionist scholars, such as the French Robert Faurisson and the American Arthur Butz, are also some of the other possible participants of the conference in Tehran.

[andend] - Rah/Aki - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9mzao

Related:

* Amnesty International protesting the American Gulag - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/852kv

* GULAG: Russian 1970 Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzjenitsyn described the Soviet prison camp system in his best-selling book 'The Gulag Archipelago'. He has since 2000 been globally declared 'dead' by the people involved, when he published about 'the last taboo on Russia', naming the people he blames for the death of tens of millions of people - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/bkoz8

* Global Terror by Secret US Death Squads - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9pn37

* FPF - SS - 'Gott mit Uns' - God is with us/US' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9curl

* "People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget: they also strike back." - 2005 Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9cyeq

* Reference guide to the Geneva Conventions - Url.: http://www.genevaconventions.org

* Blow back - The CIA started Al Qaeda – The Database - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cqx69

* The 9/11 WTC drama was PNAC terror - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9np7d - It was an inside job - Google - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/7tj9d

* 'Anti-Semitism' - The Provocative Accusation - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/8z6gd

* Who's financing? - The 'Federal Reserve' and it's usurers is the absolute biggest crime against all humanity ever. - Url.: http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm

* NWO letter: ''we can cancel your credit or freeze your accounts'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cjo7l

* The infamous US 'Lie Factory' -  Url.: http://tinyurl.com/8ncal

* Help all the troops - of whatever nationality - to come back from abroad! - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE WERE FORCED TO PAY FOR BY TAXES - [http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm ] - We need them badly at home in many countries to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

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Abduction of American Reporter Jill Carroll in Iraq Blacked Out By U.S. News Outlets

By Joe Strupp

Published: January 09, 2006

NEW YORK The abduction of a Christian Science Monitor reporter in Iraq on Saturday was not disclosed by major U.S. media outlets for nearly two days after the Monitor requested that the incident, and the reporter's name and affiliation, be withheld. A translator was killed in the incident and the reporter, now identified by the Monitor as Jill Carroll, is still being held.

Numerous foreign news outlets and several leading wire services disclosed the incident -- and in a few cases, the reporter's name. Such stories did not appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other U.S. papers and their Web sites.

The Associated Press ran at least one story out of Baghdad, but without the newspaper or reporter's name, and it did not appear in any major newspapers Sunday or Monday. The AP held off all further reports at the request of the Monitor, which did not release the information until this afternoon. Jay Jostyn, a Monitor spokesman, told E&P it acted now -- sending an email to news organizations after 2:30 p.m. and with a story on its Web site at 3 P.M. -- because the story had by now circulated via 40 to 50 outlets abroad.

The Monitor revealed that the reporter, Carroll, is a stringer for the paper who has written many stories for the newspaper for about a year, the last four or five months reporting from Iraq.

"We have been advised that the less that is said, the better," Jostyn told E&P this morning, before a Monitor story about the abduction was posted. "We need to be sensitive to that."

Jostyn said the request for a news blackout was made in an effort to protect her safety. The Monitor's own story about the abduction, and a related editor's note, did not mention the news blackout. It mentioned that her family had urged her captors to release her. "We just felt it [the blackout] is not something we wanted to publicize," he added.

Several editors at major news outlets earlier today said they were glad to oblige and hoped their efforts would help win Carroll's release.

Marjorie Miller, foreign editor at the Los Angeles Times, said she was contacted on Saturday after one of her Baghdad correspondents was asked by the Monitor to hold off on a story about the abduction. She said she reviewed the matter with Managing Editor Doug Frantz and the story never ran. "If the feeling of the organization is that it will endanger the life of the victim, we don't want to do anything that will endanger the life of the victim," she told E&P. "They asked us not to do it for the purpose of negotiations."

"I am doing everything I possibly can not to endanger a reporter's life and we are trying to gauge what to do," said David Hoffman, assistant managing editor for foreign at the Washington Post, who declined to comment specifically on the requested blackout. "We are trying not to endanger a reporter."

A Google search reveals that USA Today's Web site apparently carried an AP story about the abduction on Saturday -- and then killed the link.

In a story that it moved after 3 p.m. today, the AP stated, "After initial reports of the kidnapping on Saturday, The Associated Press and other news organizations honored a request from the newspaper in Boston and a journalists' group in Baghdad for a news blackout. The request was made to give authorities an opportunity to resolve the incident during the early hours after the abduction."

Kathleen Carroll, the AP's executive editor, said the news service had posted a story about the kidnapping Saturday, which did not include the name of the reporter or her employer because they might not have been known at the time. (That story, and others, identified the victim as a female American.) The AP was then contacted through its Baghdad bureau and asked not to post any further stories.

"When somebody approaches us and says we might be able to affect some change, we entertain the request and comply if we are able," she told E&P. "It has been not uncommon in the past for news organizations and other companies to make requests to hold off reporting for a short time if they think it would help recover a kidnapped individual."

The Los Angles Times' Miller also indicated such requests have occurred before, on an ad-hoc basis, and the paper is now "figuring out" a policy on how to respond.

A spokesperson at the New York Times did not immediately confirm or deny that the paper had been contacted, but was looking into the matter. Foreign editors at The Boston Globe, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal could not be reached Monday.

Jill Carroll's ties to a paper with "Christian" in the title was also a likely concern when dealing with Islamic fundamentalists, noted one editor who had agreed not to publish a story on the incident. "That could put her life more in danger," the editor said.

"Jill is an established journalist who has been reporting from the Middle East for Jordanian, Italian, and other news organizations over the past three years," the Monitor reported in a story to be published on Tuesday. "In recent months, The Monitor has tapped into her professionalism, energy, and fair reporting on the Iraq scene. It was her drive to gather direct and accurate views from political leaders that took her into western Baghdad's Adil neighborhood on Saturday morning."

E&P Online, not aware of any request to withhold coverage, on Sunday published online a story about the abduction, without mentioning the reporter's name or affiliation, based on accounts from AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP and several British newspapers.

***

The Monitor's story, published on its Web site today:

Jill Carroll, a freelance journalist currently on assignment for The Christian Science Monitor, was abducted by unknown gunmen in Baghdad Saturday morning. Her Iraqi interpreter was killed during the kidnapping.

"I saw a group of people coming as if they had come from the sky," recalled Ms. Carroll's driver, who survived the attack. "One guy attracted my attention. He jumped in front of me screaming, 'Stop! Stop! Stop!' with his left hand up and a pistol in his right hand."

One of the kidnappers pulled the driver from the car, jumped in, and drove away with several others huddled around Carroll and her interpreter, said the driver, who asked not to be identified. "They didn't give me any time to even put the car in neutral," he recounted.

The body of the interpreter, Allan Enwiyah, 32, was later found in the same neighborhood. He had been shot twice in the head, law enforcement officials said. There has been no word yet on Carroll's whereabouts.

The kidnapping occurred within 300 yards of the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, a prominent Sunni politician, whom Carroll had been intending to interview at 10 a.m. Saturday local time, the driver said.

Mr. Dulaimi, however, turned out not to be at his office, and after 25 minutes, Carroll and her interpreter left. Their car was stopped as she drove away. "It was very obvious this was by design," said the driver. "The whole operation took no more than a quarter of a minute. It was very highly organized. It was a setup, a perfect ambush."

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, which is under investigation by Iraqi and US officials.

Richard Bergenheim, editor of the Monitor, appealed to Carroll's abductors to let her go immediately. "Jill's ability to help others understand the issues facing all groups in Iraq has been invaluable. We are urgently seeking information about Ms. Carroll and are pursuing every avenue to secure her release," he said.

Carroll's relatives also pleaded for her release, urging her captors to "consider the work she has done to reveal the truth about the Iraq war."

Carroll, who has been working in Iraq since October 2003, has been contributing articles regularly since last February to The Christian Science Monitor, according to World News Editor David Clark Scott. "She has proved an insightful, resourceful, and courageous reporter," he said. "But Jill is not the kind of person to take undue risks."

When five or six men, including a large, mustachioed man with short hair waving a Glock handgun, stopped Carroll's car, the driver said he thought the men were from Dulaimi's security detail, so he slowed down.

On his knees on the ground, after having been pulled roughly from the driver's seat, he turned to see his car, a red Toyota Cressida, accelerating away "with a lot of heads inside." Carroll and Enwiyah were clearly alive at that point, he said.

One remaining kidnapper, standing calmly in the middle of the road as the others left, told him to "get away, bastard."

"He spoke to me as a father to a boy [but] in a very dirty way, like a traitor," the driver said.

It was then, he said, that the kidnapper shot once at him, the only time a firearm was used during the kidnapping. "When he shot at me [and missed], I understood this was an abduction. I jumped behind an electrical pole and then ran down an alley," he recalled, before seeking shelter at a joint Iraqi-US Army base.

Since arriving in Baghdad, Carroll has worked for the Italian news agency ANSA, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other US dailies, as well as the Monitor. She had previously worked as a reporter for The Jordan Times in Amman after graduating with a degree in journalism from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
 
Find this article at:

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001808253

Related: The US kills journalists - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/77wjz

Fwd. by:

FOREIGN PRESS FOUNDATION
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Editor: Henk Ruyssenaars
http://tinyurl.com/amn3q
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* MSNBC - Live Vote: Do you believe President Bush's actions justify impeachment? - Url.: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10562904/

* "Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful." - Henry Kissinger speaking at Evian, France, May 21, 1992 Bilderburgers meeting. Unbeknownst to Kissinger, his speech was taped by a Swiss delegate to the meeting.

* And global warcriminal Henry Kissinger and his ilk succeeded, but nobody apart from 'them' was 'grateful'. On the contrary: own US troops - even with tanks - appeared in the streets of Los Angeles: against anti-war protesters! - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/7qh65

* 'American Military Personnel - Know Why You're Being Sacrificed' - by Robert L. Johnson: "When I joined the United States Marines in September of 1973, I swore an oath..." - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/75pl3

* 'The war in Iraq is illegal' - BBC: video & text-interview of the United Nation's Secretary General Kofi Annan - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/5pl2v

* "People do not forget. They do not forget the death of their fellows, they do not forget torture and mutilation, they do not forget injustice, they do not forget oppression, they do not forget the terrorism of mighty powers. They not only don't forget: they also strike back." - 2005 Nobel Literature Prize winner Harold Pinter - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9cyeq

* Reference guide to the Geneva Conventions - Url.: http://www.genevaconventions.org

* Al Qaeda – The Database - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cqx69

* The 9/11 WTC drama was PNAC terror - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/9np7d - It was an inside job - Google - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/7tj9d

* 'Anti-Semitism' - The Provocative Accusation - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/8z6gd

* Who's financing? - The 'Federal Reserve' and it's usurers is the absolute biggest crime against all humanity ever. - Url.: http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm

* NWO letter: ''we can cancel your credit or freeze your accounts'' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/cjo7l

* The infamous US 'Lie Factory' -  Url.: http://tinyurl.com/8ncal

* Help all the troops - of whatever nationality - to come back from abroad! - AND WITH ALL THEIR WEAPONS, WHICH WE WERE FORCED TO PAY FOR BY TAXES - [http://www.apfn.org/apfn/reserve.htm ] - We need them badly at home in many countries to fight with us against our so called 'governments' and their malignant managers - Url.: http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/

FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

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English MPs leaked Bush plan to hit al-Jazeera

· Transcript of meeting with Blair passed to US contact

· Official and aide already charged over document

David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor

Monday January 9, 2006 - The Guardian

Two Labour MPs have defied the Official Secrets Act by passing on the contents of a secret British document revealing how President George Bush wanted to bomb the Arabic TV station, al-Jazeera.

The document, a transcript of a meeting between Mr Bush and Tony Blair in April 2004 when the prime minister expressed concern about US military tactics in Iraq, is already the subject of an unprecedented official secrets prosecution in Britain, against an aide to one of the MPs and another man.

David Keogh, a Cabinet Office employee, is charged with leaking information damaging to international relations to Leo O'Connor, researcher to Tony Clarke, former MP for Northampton South. The two are due to appear in court tomorrow for committal hearings.

The information was then acquired by Mr Clarke, who in turn consulted his parliamentary colleague, Peter Kilfoyle. The two politicians decided to pass on the information to a contact in the US.

Mr Kilfoyle, MP for Liverpool Walton and a former defence minister, said last night: "It's very odd we haven't been prosecuted. My colleague Tony Clarke is guilty of discussing it with me and I have discussed it with all and sundry."

Asked if he had broken the act in the same alleged way as Mr Clarke's aide who is facing charges, he said: "I don't know. But I'd be very pleased if Her Majesty's finest approached me about it."

The two MPs decided in October 2004 to reveal the contents of the transcript of the Blair-Bush meeting to John Latham, a Democrat supporter living in San Diego, California. They hoped to influence the impending 2004 US election, Mr Kilfoyle said.

In San Diego, Mr Latham, 71, a retired electrical engineer and a "contributing member" to the Democrat National Committee, told the Guardian that the MPs also wanted him to send letters with the information to newspapers in Los Angeles and New York. At a meeting at the House of Commons, he had been introduced to Mr Clarke by Mr Kilfoyle. Mr Latham, a British expatriate, and Mr Kilfoyle had attended the same school.

Mr Latham said he had never met Mr Clarke before. He added: "He mentioned that the document was a transcript of a meeting in Washington DC between Bush and Blair. There had been a proposal to take military action against al-Jazeera at their headquarters in Qatar. This was defused by Colin Powell, US secretary of state, and Tony Blair."

Mr Latham decided not to write to US newspapers at the time, in October 2004. As a result, details of the Washington meeting between Mr Bush and Mr Blair remained secret for more than a year. Within days of the charges being brought against Mr Keogh and Mr O'Connor, the contents of the memo were, however, passed on again, this time to the Daily Mirror, which put them on its front page.

Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, unsuccessfully threatened other newspapers with the Official Secrets Act if they re-published the contents of the document.

Mr Kilfoyle told the Guardian that in May 2004, Mr Clarke - still a Labour MP - consulted him after he had received the transcript of the Bush-Blair meeting revealing Mr Bush's wish to bomb al-Jazeera.

"He told me what was in it," said Mr Kilfoyle. "He agonised and was very nervous. He decided the right thing to do was to return it." It was only after police arrested Mr O'Connor - Mr Clarke's aide - that the two politicians decided they should try to reveal the memo's contents in the US.

The Bush-Blair meeting took place when Whitehall officials, intelligence officers, and British military commanders were expressing outrage at the scale of the US assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja, in which up to 1,000 civilians are feared to have died. Pictures of the attack shown on al-Jazeera had infuriated US generals. London was also arguing with Washington about the number of extra British troops to be sent to Iraq.

A second, Foreign Office document, separately leaked in May 2004, exposed misgivings within the British government over America's "heavy-handed" behaviour and tactics in Iraq. That memo said: "Heavy-handed US military tactics in Falluja and Najaf some weeks ago have fuelled both Sunni and Shi'ite opposition to the coalition, and lost us much public support inside Iraq."

[andend] - Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 - Story Url.: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1682258,00.html?gusrc=rss

Google - FPF/Jazeera - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/8xu94

RELATED: Killing Journalists? - "Don't Bomb Us"!

According to former 'BBC Chief News correspondent' Kate Adie - (fired because she was honest) - who twelve years ago also covered the last Gulf War, the Pentagon attitude is: "entirely hostile to the the free spread of information." - Of course the US kills journalists - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/bkzum

****************************************************************************

WAR ON THE MEDIA: "DON'T BOMB US"
By Danny Schechter - Editor Mediachannel.org
For some time, Mediachannel.org and other outlets have been reporting on the Bush Administration's contempt for the media and its attempts to manage and spin coverage.

Writing in this week's Nation, John Nichols and Robert McChesney catalogue the various strategies that have been deployed, charging, "with its unprecedented campaign to undermine and, where possible, eliminate independent journalism, the Bush Administration has demonstrated astonishing contempt for the Constitution and considerable fear of an informed public."

But would it actually attempt to "take-out" media institutions and kill or otherwise silence journalists? Would it bomb a TV station? How far will this government go?

We know that other governments have shown little restraint. An Indonesian and a Russian journalist were poisoned on airplanes in high profile cases. Others have been "disappeared," killed, jailed and tortured. Groups like Reporters Without Borders and the International Federation of reporters compile the cases and regularly call for justice.

WHY IS THE US MEDIA SO SILENT?

In our country, the Committee to Protect Journalists has played that role well with important documentation and action alerts. Each year, usually at a fancy hotel in New York, they also have a pricey fundraising dinner hosted by network anchors in tuxedos who give prestigious awards to gutsy journalists and freedom of the press advocates. All the big media companies buy tables and pat themselves on the back for upholding the first amendment. They make videos honoring the courage of media messengers. Unfortunately, those videos and their stories rarely get on the air on their networks. In my book The More You Watch The Less You Know, I derided the annual feel-good affair as "human rights for a night."

Why aren't these companies speaking out when other media organizations like Al Jazeera are threatened and attacked? What are they doing to demand independent inquiries into the killings of journalists and media staff? The toll in Iraq now stands at 93, and the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad says the US military poses a bigger threat to newsgathering than the insurgents. (Reuters has bravely challenged the Pentagon to tell the truth!)

INVESTIGATE BOMB THREATS

And where is the ongoing investigation of the recently leaked information about President Bush's alleged desire to bomb Al Jazeera headquarters in Qatar? Al Jazeera offices had been attacked before in Afghanistan and Baghdad. One of their journalists has been killed and others jailed. Their staff and some media groups have protested but many media outlets are not following up or expressing outrage.
Did major media outlets tune out of the story because the White House dismissed it as "outlandish?

Jeremy Schahill writes: "Is the allegation "outlandish," as the White House claims? Or was it a deadly serious option? Until a news organization or British official defies the Official Secrets Act and publishes the five-page memo, we have no way of knowing. But what we do know is that at the time of Bush's White House meeting with Blair, the Bush Administration was in the throes of a very public, high-level temper tantrum directed against Al Jazeera. The Bush-Blair summit took place on April 16, at the peak of the first US siege of Falluja, and Al Jazeera was there to witness the assault and the fierce resistance.

"A day before Bush's meeting with Blair, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld slammed Al Jazeera in distinctly undiplomatic terms:

REPORTER: Can you definitively say that hundreds of women and children and innocent civilians have not been killed?

RUMSFELD: I can definitively say that what Al Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.

REPORTER: Do you have a civilian casualty count?

RUMSFELD: Of course not, we're not in the city. But you know what our forces do; they don't go around killing hundreds of civilians. That's just outrageous nonsense. It's disgraceful what that station is doing.

"What Al Jazeera was doing in Falluja is exactly what it was doing when the United States bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001 and when US forces killed Al Jazeera's Baghdad correspondent, Tareq Ayoub, during the April 2003 occupation of Baghdad. Al Jazeera was witnessing and reporting on events Washington did not want the world to see."

APPEAL FROM AL JAZEEERA STAFFERS

Al Jazeera staffers now have a blog called "Don't bomb Us." - Url.: http://dontbomb.blogspot.com/

One staffer Yousef Al-Shouly writes: "My mother (78 years old) used to tell me before going to work "my son take care", but yesterday she asked me "is it true that they want to bomb your TV station? Don't go to work."
He did. Here are some pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23885066@N00/

Their staff staged a symbolic protest. They are aware that the Clinton Administration bombed the TV station in Belgrade and the Bush Administration did the same to the Iraq TV Headquarters in Baghdad. Al Jazeera demands that the British government disclose its secret document and confirm or deny the truth of the allegations. The Bush Administration must do the same.

In the USA, more subtle means are used to stop aggressive reporting. Bill Moyers describes the pressure that came down on his PBS show NOW in the new issue of Broadcasting & Cable. He is asked about bias, responding: "We were biased, all right-in favor of uncovering the news that powerful people wanted to keep hidden."

In the past, we know that low-powered radio stations in the US were shut down by the FCC until the agency changed its mind on the issue. We also know that our government runs TV stations to put out propaganda packaged as news. BBC has just launched an Arabic service with British government funds to compete with Al Jazeera.

TELL THE TRUTH CAMPAIGN

The time has come for the world media to denounce threats and actions by governments and media companies who squelch truth-telling. Truth is often a casualty of war and that's why we need the Mediachannel's "Tell The Truth About The War Campaign."

http://mediachannel.org/blog/node/1555

Please respond to this simple appeal posed by a journalist at Al Jazeera who with his colleagues has had to face down threats, incitement, putdowns, and indifference. Yousef Al-Shouly says powerfully:

"My colleagues and I need your support. So do Tayseer, Sami, Tareq, and Rashid's kids - we want to know the truth. Simply because we are men and women who bring you the news."

Danny Schechter is "blogger-in-chief" of Mediachannel.org. His new books "The Death of Media" and "When News Lies" explore media complicity in the Iraq War. See: http:www.newsdissector.org/store. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
Full story above - Url.: http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/11/con05452.html

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FPF-COPYRIGHT NOTICE - In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. Section 107 - any copyrighted work in this message is distributed by the Foreign Press Foundation under fair use, without profit or payment, to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the information. Url.: http://liimirror.warwick.ac.uk/uscode/17/107.html

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