26_September [Archives:2003/682/Press Review]

30 Oct.2003
Main headlines:
– President tours a number of Crater and Mualla suburbs in Aden
– PM lays foundation stone for interior ministry trading centre
– Canadian Nexen announces new oil discoveries
Columnist Faisal Jahlool discusses in an article the myth of the American ‘’free media’’ saying the American occupation administration in Iraq have carried out during the past weeks arrests of some correspondents and photojournalists of some TV satellite channels, radios and newspapers, including those of al-Jazeera and al-Arabia. The same administration had on the eve of the fall of Baghdad targeted with heavy weapons offices of al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi channels killing the journalist Tareq Ayoub and a foreign photojournalist in Palestine Hotel in addition to wounding others.
The columnist says developments of the war on Iraq, continuation of the occupation, American insistence on their stay, refusal of fixing a timetable for leaving this country and escalation of resistance have forced the Americans to change the terms of media game designed by the Pentagon extremists. Those are now demanding from media in general and the Arab in particular to play a role of an agent for the occupation and to adopt the following measures:
– media men should support occupation and play as informants to local police
– to abstain from publishing statements and demands of the resistance to make them appear as acts of terror without a political aim,
– concentration on the terrorist description of the resistance,
– hiding losses of the occupation forces and restrict them to the figures given by the American leadership,
– practicing intense pressure on American and western media so that not to report facts on the American dilemma in Iraq to prevent the American public pinion’s action,
– showing no objection to publishing statements of Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and consequently to link the Iraqi resistance to an all-out confrontation with America and to remove the Iraqi issue from the subject of occupation and resistance.
Thus it is clearly appears that the United States of America that till recently was presenting itself as a professor giving lessons in the free information looking for the truth, is now demanding its media and the media of others to efface the truth and to change to information serving the occupation.
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