By gagging a gadfly Arab TV news channel, Iraq's US-backed administration risks looking more like the regime of Saddam Hussein that America ousted than the democratic government Washington says it wants to install, media groups said on Tuesday.
Iraqi police raided and shut down the Baghdad offices of Dubai-based al Arabiya on Monday, shortly after the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council said it would take legal action against the channel for inciting violence by running an audio tape purportedly recorded by Saddam.
The raid on al Arabiya, a channel US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denounced last week as "violently anti-coalition," drew accusations from fellow media organizations and journalists' unions that free speech was being curtailed where Washington promises to let it flourish.
"It only reflects negatively on the Governing Council and the US administration in Iraq because at the end of the day, closing a channel flies in the face of the principles that America claims to stand for and to want to import to Iraq," said an official at al Jazeera, a competitor Arabic-language satellite news channel and itself a target of US ire.
"These tapes are news, part of the puzzle that people need to be aware of, and it's incumbent on the media to report that," the official said.
Rumsfeld, taking questions from journalists in Washington, agreed that the US military in Iraq had gathered "compelling evidence" showing that either al Jazeera or al Arabiya or both was cooperating with insurgents.
"The answer is `yes,'" he said. "I have seen scraps of information over a sustained period of time that need to be looked at in a responsible orderly way. And I am not in a position to make a final judgment on it, as I indicated earlier.
"I opined accurately that from time to time those stations [al Arabiya and al Jazeera] have found themselves in very close proximity to things that were happening against coalition forces before the event happened and during the event," he said.
"There are only so many events in the country and there is a relatively finite number of their people. So how it happens is for time to tell."
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said the Council's ban on al Arabiya was "playing into the hands of the enemies of democracy by imposing the sort of censorship that was a hallmark of Saddam's odious regime."
"This sort of thing will only encourage more rumor, speculation and uncertainty within a community already fearful about the future," IFJ Secretary General Aidan White said.
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