Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Al Jazeera si difende

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,924469,00.html
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

saviours.
*LOL*
-Stefano