Deathtrap Iraq

BAGHDAD, March 30 -- American journalist Jill Carroll, abducted at gunpoint in January, was released Thursday after nearly three months of intensive efforts to free her and public pleas on her behalf from a worldwide chorus of relatives, politicians and religious leaders. "I was treated very well. That's important people know that," Carroll said in an interview broadcast on the TV station run by...

(March 28, 2006) -- Looking back at E&P’s extensive, and often critical, commentary on media coverage of the Iraq war three years ago, I was struck again by how Chris Hedges stands out as a kind of prophet. The longtime war reporter, who decided to sit this one out, was among the few who recognized that taking Baghdad would be the easy part. Let's contrast it with the criminal incompetence of the...

(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders has called for the immediate release of Ali Abdullah Fayad, journalist from the privately-owned tri-weekly "al Safir", who was kidnapped by an unknown group in Kut, south-east of Baghdad on 21 March 2006. "This kidnapping is part of a wave of abductions which have rapidly increased in these last three months," said Reporters Without Borders. After Jill...

DUBAI, March 25 (Reuters) - An Iraqi militant group which killed an Italian reporter in 2004 said it was watching foreign journalists but would only kill those it considers to be spies for its U.S.-led enemies. Al Jazeera television broadcast an interview on Saturday with a man it described as the spokesman of the Islamic Army in Iraq, who accused the United States of responsibility for the car...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The rescue of three Western aid workers in Iraq raised hopes among friends and family of kidnapped American journalist Jill Carroll, who has been missing for 11 weeks. "Although their case is unrelated to Jill's, their release gives us new hope that Jill, too, will soon be freed," Carroll's family told The Christian Science Monitor, the newspaper for which she was a...

BAGHDAD, Iraq – An Iraqi cameraman working for CBS News when he was wounded and detained by the U.S. military will be tried next month, CBS officials said Wednesday. Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein's trial was scheduled to begin Wednesday, but an Iraqi judge postponed the proceedings until April 5, said Larry Doyle, the CBS bureau chief in Baghdad. Charges against Hussein have not been made public...

WASHINGTON: An inquiry has found that an American public relations firm did not violate military policy by paying Iraqi news outlets to print positive articles, military officials said. The finding elevates to the Defense Department the decision on whether new rules are needed to govern such activities. The inquiry, which has not yet been made public, was ordered by General George Casey Jr., the...

BAGHDAD, March 20 (Reuters) - The U.S. military is offering new safeguards to journalists in Iraq to prevent a repeat of lengthy detentions suffered by several reporters last year. Abandoning a policy that denied journalists special status -- and under which three Reuters staff were jailed for up to eight months -- the general in charge of detentions said such arrests would now be treated as...

Murder has overtaken crossfire and other acts of war as the leading cause of work-related deaths among journalists and media support workers in Iraq, and local journalists are far and away the most vulnerable to attack, a new analysis by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has found. CPJ research, compiled for the third anniversary of the conflict, shows that 67 journalists and 24 media...

Gunmen assassinated the editor of an Iraqi weekly near his home in Baghdad, police and colleagues said on Tuesday, in the third killing of an Iraqi journalist in a week, Reuters has reported. ASSAULT UNABATED: Iraqis carry the coffin of Amjad Hameed, a senior Iraqi state television editor, during his funeral in Baghdad March 11, 2006. Gunmen assassinated Hameed, along with his driver, on Saturday...