Global Policy Forum

By Rohan Jayasekera*

Iraq's all-powerful civilian chief L. Paul Bremer III will not tolerate 'hate speech' from Iraq's newly freed media. To prove it he has assigned himself absolute power over the Iraqi press. Freedom of expression is in his gift and only the 'responsible' may enjoy it.

To the average Iraqi, almost nothing the Americans do makes sense. Each one is a schizophrenic beast, as likely to smile and hand out a sweet to a child as it is liable to open fire on a street protest or club a careless driver. The contradiction is in the mission; the US military came to Iraq to win a war, not wage a peace. The majority of US troops believe they came to Iraq as liberators. The Iraqis tend to think differently. The US authorities think their problem is their failure to get their message across. The Iraqis already get too many messages from the Americans, and almost all of them are contradictory.

What kind of message did the US military send to the Iraqis when it seized "editorial control" of Mosul city's only TV station because of its "predominantly non-factual/unbalanced news coverage" - meaning the re-broadcasting of Qatari Arab satellite network al-Jazeera?

"We have every right as an occupying power to stop the broadcast of something that will incite violence," Major General David Petraeus told reporters after being alerted to the offending broadcasts. "Yes, what we are looking at is censorship but you can censor something that is intended to inflame passions."

According to a Wall Street Journal report, a US army major was relieved of her duties and removed from the base when she argued that the order contravened principles of free speech. After all, these are principles guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, which every US soldier must "solemnly swear" to "support and defend".

But these contradictions fly everywhere. Having invested $20 million dollars over three months in the rebuilding of Iraqi state TV & radio, renamed the Iraqi Media Network (IMN), the US officials in charge of the contract began balking at the new network's news output immediately it went on air. Managers were told to drop the readings from the Koran, the 'vox-pop' man-in-the-street interviews (usually critical of the US invasion) and even to run their content past the wife of a US-friendly Iraqi Kurdish leader for a pre-broadcast check. The station rejected the demands and dug in their heels. "As journalists we will not submit to censorship," Dan North, a Canadian documentary maker training Iraqis at the station, told Reuters.

US civilian administrator L. Paul Bremer III, in charge of the occupying powers' Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), was said to be infuriated by the conflicting strategies in place at the IMN, which has two TV stations, a brace of local and national radio stations and two newspapers under development. Even more annoyingly for the US chief, the country's Shi'a broadcasters had made much more use of much less extensive support from Iran to get their networks on air, for more hours with more news. Almost all of it was hostile to the US-British occupation forces.

A daily drip feed of increasingly embittered media coverage is turning into a flood, with every political faction in the new Iraq opening up new newspapers in Baghdad, and using them to voice popular frustration at the rising crime rate and failing public services on the Americans' watch. Every day brings new allegations and abuse. The papers representing political parties hostile to the US post unattributed reports of all kinds, accusing the western forces of gang rape, robbery and numerous 'insults to Islam'. One of Baghdad's scores of scrappy publications has begun printing clips from the so-called 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' - the anti-Semitic Russian Tzarist-era forgery that purports to reveal plans for Jewish world domination. But now the US authorities have declared 'enough'.

Bremer wants tough new rules governing the Iraqi media to sort the mess out. All Iraqi media must now be registered. Licences will be revoked and equipment confiscated from media sources that break the rules. Individual offenders "may be detained, arrested, prosecuted and, if convicted, sentenced by relevant authorities to up to one year in prison and a $1,000 fine". Appeal is to Bremer only, and his decision is final.

His nine point list of "Prohibited Activities" include incitement to racial, ethnic or religious hatred, advocating support for the banned pre-war Ba'ath party, and publishing material that "is patently false and is calculated to provoke opposition to the CPA or undermine legitimate processes towards self-government". Officials say the order is intended to stop 'hate speech' - the kind of hot language they say could trigger violence between Iraqis and westerners, or possibly Iraqi Sunni and Shi'a or Arab and Iraqi Kurd.

"There's no room for hateful and destabilising messages that will destroy the emerging Iraqi democracy," former IMN official Mike Furlong told the Associated Press in June. "All media outlets must be responsible."

This is a long way from the stand made by Furlong's IMN colleague Don North the month before. "This whole idea (IMN) was about starting the genesis of an open media," he said at the time, "so we will not accept an outside source scrutinising what we produce." No more. And Bremer's order was only the start. It also marks a transformation for the IMN - from independent broadcaster driven by First Amendment principles to something else again entirely. The IMN is to be transformed into a mini-ministry to replace the old Iraqi ministry of information, made world famous by wartime Saddam propagandist minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf.

Bremer will "reserve the power to advise" the IMN on any aspect of its performance, "including any matter of content" and the power to hire and fire IMN staff. Thus the man in absolute authority over the country's largest, richest and best equipped media network is also his own regulator and regulator of his rivals, with recourse to the US Army to enforce his rulings.

Under the direction of former Voice of America chief Robert Reilly, the IMN was created in April 2003 by US defence technology giant Scientific Applications International Corp (SAIC) under contract to the Pentagon. SAIC's relevant speciality is what it calls "Information Dominance/Command and Control" - a nine point programme, according to its website, that begins with 'Battlefield Control' and ends with 'Information Warfare/Information Operations'. This kind of seamless link between military command and media management was what the Pentagon had in mind when it issued the contract to SAIC. A successor to the fuzzy TV broadcasts from USAF EC-130E 'Commando Solo' psyops (psychological operations) planes and the radio broadcasts beamed from US army transmitters mounted on Humvee jeeps.

It was the Pentagon that objected loudest to the resignation of the politically conservative Reilly as the director of the Voice of America, and welcomed his appointment as chief of the Defense Department's media programme in Iraq. Reilly fell out with the VOA board of governors over his 'ideological' views on what he and the Defense Department thought was the VOA's duty, to tell America's story to the nations it opposed. He famously called the fighting in Afghanistan a "war of ideas," with the VOA "on one side in that war".

With Reilly gone the VOA joined a 'coalition of the unwilling' with the Pentagon in Iraq. "We are not in the psychological operation or propaganda business," VOA middle east chief Norm Pattiz told the Christian Science Monitor, citing the Pentagon initiatives. "Without the credibility of balanced, reliable, and truthful news, we would have no audience."

"Under the last regime, it was illegal to criticise the government," Bremer told Iraqi journalists. "Now you are free to criticise whoever, or whatever you want." But, he added, "with freedom comes responsibility". Reilly says he hopes IMN will evolve into a "PBS-style" responsible public broadcaster. Even the censorious paratrooper Petraeus told the Washington Post that Iraq needed "something akin" to the Communications Regulatory Agency set up in Bosnia "to establish standards and procedures for cases in which those standards are broken."

The issue is whether Reilly, and the IMN - a media network sired by Pentagon contract out of US Army psyops, soon to be Iraq's largest, most powerful and only truly national media corporation, topped by L. Paul Bremer III, a man with absolute power over its activities and its rivals - have taken the right route to these destinations. If Iraq needs media regulation, it should be independent. If it needs media at all, it should be more independent than this.

About the Author: Rohan Jayasekera visited Iraq in May as part of Index on Censorship's contribution to a combined survey of the Iraqi media, shortly to be published by its partner author groups. Index on Censorship is currently developing training programmes for the independent Iraqi media to run during 2003.

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