“Since the “war on terror” began, al-Jazeera has been a thorn in the side of the Pentagon. “My solution is to change the channel,” Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said this month in Baghdad, “to a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station. The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources.”” (Guardian)
So they have to lie to be ‘a legitimate, authoritative, honest news station’?
“Twenty other al-Jazeera journalists have been arrested and jailed by US forces in Iraq and one, Tariq Ayoub, was killed last April when a US tank fired a shell at the al-Jazeera offices in Baghdad’s Palestine hotel. It was an accident, the Pentagon said, even though al-Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad offices before the war began.”
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“The targeting of al-Jazeera is all the more remarkable, given that it is the only Arab TV network to routinely offer Israeli, US and British officials a platform to argue their case.”
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“Al-Jazeera has a track record of honest and accurate reporting, and has maintained a principled pluralism in the face of brutal and authoritarian regimes within the region, and increasingly from those without. This is why it has been vilified, criminalised and bombed. It is also why it should be defended by those who genuinely believe that successful societies depend upon an independent media.”