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Last week, Iraqi journalists, publishers and press freedom advocates protested a new law which could impose censorship rules on the media. NPR's Deborah Amos was there. Amos explains the historical significance of censorship in Iraq and what the law says about the Iraqi prime minister.
"People were a little busy here over the last five years. Remember that there was a sectarian civil war, and the last thing on anybody’s mind was to think about press censorship..." Really? I seem to remember Al Jezera being expelled from Iraq in 2004. I also remember Muqtada al Sadr's newspaper being shutdown. I might also remind you of Paul Bremmer's crack down on the press (http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/22-exporting-censorship-to-iraq/), the bombing of Al Jezera's Iraq office, or the alleged plan to bomb their offices in Dubai.
It's bad enough to hear a journalist make such claims, but for them to go unchallenged on a program of media criticism is really troubling.
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