WAR ON IRAK

Muslimwakeup: US Media Covers Up Reports on American POWs and Casualties
All major US news networks are refusing to air footage of captured and killed US troops. The US Defense Department had intially denied the capture or killing of US troops but later confirmed the reports after the Al Jazeera network aired Iraqi television interviews with Americans POWs as well as images of dead American soldiers near the Iraqi city of Al Nasiriyya.

We offer some of the images broadcast on Al Jazeera below. This is not done in the spirit of glorifying war, but as an attempt to expose the coverup under way by the US corporate media regarding the real impact of this war.

Guardian: America shaken by images of PoWs
The last time American prisoners of war were paraded on television - when the corpses of soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 - US public opinion quickly came to view the conflict as a disastrous debacle, and troops left soon afterwards. Yesterday's footage caused outrage among politicians and the public, and threw media organisations into a panic about how to deal with it.
The CBS television network was the only major broadcaster to show the tape, and it did so while Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, was still in the studio.

Immediately afterwards, reportedly after being contacted by the Pentagon, the channel agreed to show it with the prisoners' faces blurred. Interviewed later on CNN, Mr Rumsfeld said: "Television networks that carry such pictures are, I would say, doing something that's unfortunate".

CNN itself did not show the video, choosing instead to carry repeatedly a single still photograph from the Arab-language news channel al-Jazeera, showing uniformed corpses lying on the floor, but without any identifying features. It warned viewers that the image was "disturbing".

Mr Rumsfeld said the Geneva convention "indicates that it's not permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war". The defence department has asked journalists not to show Iraqi prisoners identifiably either, but the faces of some Iraqis have been clearly visible in television footage.

"Die Amerikaner sind mal wieder so was von heuchlerisch. Gefangenen aus Afghanistan werden als "Enemy Combatants" in Guantanamo jegliche Rechte verweigert, einen Internationalen Strafgerichtshof wollen sie nicht aber wenn Al-Jazeera Amerikanische Kriegsgefangene zeigt wird rumgeheult und von Genfer Konvention gefaselt"