Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 18:46:55 -0500
Subject: Al-Jazeera tells the truth about war My station is a threat to
From: cs <christina.sharpe-AT-tufts.edu>




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 



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