[Reader-list] more media war stuff (al jazeera)

[Ravi Sundaram]

Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war
My station is a threat to American media control - and they know it
Faisal Bodi

Friday March 28, 2003
The Guardian

Last month, when it became clear that the US-led drive to war was 
irreversible, I - like many other British journalists - relocated to Qatar 
for a ringside seat. But I am an Islamist journalist, so while the others 
bedded down at the £1m media centre at US central command in As-Sayliyah, I 
found a more humble berth in the capital Doha, working for the internet arm 
of al-Jazeera.

And yet, only a week into the war, I find myself working for the most 
sought-after news resource in the world. On March 23, the night the channel 
screened the first footage of captured US PoW's, al-Jazeera was the most 
searched item on the internet portal, Lycos, registering three times as 
many hits as the next item.

I do not mean to brag - people are turning to us simply because the western 
media coverage has been so poor. For although Doha is just a 15-minute 
drive from central command, the view of events from here could not be more 
different. Of all the major global networks, al-Jazeera has been alone in 
proceeding from the premise that this war should be viewed as an illegal 
enterprise. It has broadcast the horror of the bombing campaign, the 
blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements, the screaming infants and 
the corpses. Its team of on-the-ground, unembedded correspondents has 
provided a corrective to the official line that the campaign is, barring 
occasional resistance, going to plan.

Last Tuesday, while western channels were celebrating a Basra "uprising" 
which none of them could have witnessed since they don't have reporters in 
the city, our correspondent in the Sheraton there returned a rather flat 
verdict of "uneventful" - a view confirmed shortly afterwards by a 
spokesman for the opposition Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in 
Iraq. By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream media had simply 
mirrored the Blair/Bush fantasy that the people who have been starved by UN 
sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium since 1991 will greet them as 
saviours.

Only hours before the Basra non-event, one of Iraq's most esteemed Shia 
authorities, Ayatollah Sistani, had dented coalition hopes of a southern 
uprising by reiterating a fatwa calling on all Muslims to resist the US-led 
forces. This real, and highly significant, event went unreported in the west.

Earlier in the week Arab viewers had seen the gruesome aftermath of the 
coalition bombing of "Ansar al-Islam" positions in the north-east of the 
country. All but two of the 35 killed were civilians in an area controlled 
by a neutral Islamist group, a fact passed over with undue haste in western 
reports. And before that, on the second day of the war, most of the western 
media reported verbatim central command statements that Umm Qasr was under 
"coalition" control - it was not until Wednesday that al-Jazeera could 
confirm all resistance there had been pacified.

Throughout the past week, armed peoples in the west and south have been 
attacking the exposed rearguard of coalition positions, while all the time 
- despite debilitating sandstorms - western TV audiences have seen litte 
except their steady advance towards Baghdad. This is not truthful reporting.

There is also a marked difference when reporting the anger the invasion has 
unleashed on the Muslim street. The view from here is that any vestige of 
goodwill towards the US has evaporated with this latest aggression, and 
that Britain has now joined the US and Israel as a target of this rage.

The British media has condemned al-Jazeera's decision to screen a 30-second 
video clip of two dead British soldiers. This is simple hypocrisy. From the 
outset of the war, the British media has not balked at showing images of 
Iraqi soliders either dead or captured and humiliated.

Amid the battle for hearts and minds in the most information-controlled war 
in history, one measure of the importance of those American PoW pictures 
and the images of the dead British soldiers is surely the sustained "shock 
and awe" hacking campaign directed at aljazeera.net since the start of the 
war. As I write, the al-Jazeera website has been down for three days and 
few here doubt that the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon. 
Meanwhile, our hosting company, the US-based DataPipe, has terminated our 
contract after lobbying by other clients whose websites have been brought 
down by the hacking.
It's too early for me to say when, or indeed if, I will return to my 
homeland. So far this war has progressed according to a near worst-case 
scenario. Iraqis have not turned against their tormentor. The southern Shia 
regard the invasion force as the greater Satan. Opposition in surrounding 
countries is shaking their regimes. I fear there remains much work to be done.

· Faisal Bodi is a senior editor for aljazeera.net