Monday, March 29, 2004

This was Saturday:

Iraq's U.S. administrator has set up an independent regulator for a burgeoning telecoms and media sector to encourage investment and deter state meddling.

The Iraq Communications and Media Commission established by Paul Bremer this month will be "an independent body, not a new information ministry", an adviser in the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) told reporters on Saturday....

Print media may operate without a licence, though the commission would work with the Iraqi press that would be self-regulated.

"We want to prevent the introduction of repressive press laws," the adviser said....


--Reuters

Today, we get a sense of what "work with the Iraqi press community" means:

American soldiers shut down a popular Baghdad newspaper on Sunday and tightened chains across the doors after the occupation authorities accused it of printing lies that incited violence.

Thousands of outraged Iraqis protested the closing as an act of American hypocrisy, laying bare the hostility many feel toward the United States a year after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein....

The letter ordering the paper closed, signed by L. Paul Bremer III, the top administrator in Iraq, cited what the American authorities called several examples of false reports in Al Hawza, including a February dispatch that said the cause of an explosion that killed more than 50 Iraqi police recruits was not a car bomb, as occupation officials had said, but an American missile....

But the letter outlining the reasons for taking action against Al Hawza did not cite any material that directly advocated violence....


--New York Times

Operation Iraqi Freedom....

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