The editor-in-chief of the US-funded Iraqi newspaper quit and said yesterday he was taking almost his entire staff with him because of American interference in the publication. The newspaper, Al-Sabah, was installed, along with US-funded TV station Al-Iraqiya, soon after the fall of Hussein last year and is widely considered little more than a mouthpiece for the occuyping coalition forces by many Iraqis.
"We had a project to create a free media in Iraq," Ismail Zayer, the resigning editor-in-chief said of the founding of Al-Sabah. "They are trying to control us. We are being suffocated."
I doubt many Americans will see this as further proof of the great chasm in Iraq between the American bullshit GOP-spun rhetoric of "freeing" and "democratizing" the nation, and the very real horrible crimes that are being carried out on foreign soil by a US-led coalition. But if the democratizing agent of a free press can not exist in Iraq along with a military presence, what hope can we have about the nation as a whole while we continue to make war in its streets? And what does this event portray as the obvious position our government has on the value of free press in general, when it simply seeks to destroy or distort what it can not control.
Posted by John Loomis at May 4, 2004 10:48 AM