CENSORSHIP WITH BOMBS: "The Bush administration has long accused al-Jazeera's reporters of being propagandists for Muslim extremists. But 50 million people in the Arab world are watching al-Jazeera and it has become the Arab equivalent of the BBC in terms of depth and breadth of news coverage. Unlike the American media, al-Jazeera has shown the war for what it really is — a clumsy, ill-conceived and heavy-handed enterprise that is killing civilians and destroying cities indiscriminately.
The thought that Bush would censor al-Jazeera with bombs isn't surprising. Neither is the Blair government's overreaction to the leak of the memo. It's just the latest of a steady drip of embarrassing revelations about this war and the people that are running it.
It took weeks for the mainstream American press to pick up on the first batch of Downing Street Memos. It took weeks for American papers to pick on the reports of the use of white phosphorous and napalm on civilian targets in Iraq. It will probably take weeks for them to write about this latest incident. But I hope that there's someone in the British press that has the courage to stand up the Blair government and publish the memo in its entirety, even under the threat of imprisonment. "
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