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porters for a justification for the U.S. bombing of A1 Jazeera's Baghdad office,
former Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke explained to reporters that
American troops had done nothing wrong by "exercise[ing] their inherent right
to self-defense. . . Baghdad is not a safe place, you should not be there."'37
Assertions that reporters should not be covering conflicts from outside U.S.
military censorship and protection are discouraging for those who value unem-
bedded reporting during times of war, as it reveals the Bush administration's
discomfort with unilateral reporters' challenges to the occupation of Iraq. Such
discomfort inevitably has a chilling effect on unilateral reporters, as they realize
that the U.S. has not made protection of unembedded journalists in Iraq a real
priority. Indeed, the bombings of A1 Jazeera throw into question the entire as-
sumption that it is possible to separate civilian targets from military ones, or that
the Bush administration and military planners have much of an interest in doing
so in the first place. The lack of seriousness of the U.S. military's investigation
into the attack on the Palestine Hotel demonstrates this reality clearly.138 A1
Jazeera's journalists are also under great danger of being detained without
charge by coalition forces in retaliation for their independent reporting. As
David Enders explains in his book, The Baghdad Bulletin "Working as an inde-
pendent journalist [in Iraq] is dangerous. . . . Journalists from A1 Jazeera are
arrested more often than employees of any other agency, generally after they
show their press
Many media analysts believe that the bombings of A1 Jazeera and other
media offices during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were meant to deter inde-
pendent reporters from covering U.S. initiated conflicts. Scholar and media
critic Philip Knightley argues that "those [reporters] who try to follow an objec-
tive, independent path [in Iraq] will be shunned" by the Bush administration,
"and those who report from the enemy side will risk being shot. . . the Pentagon
is determined that there will be no more reporting from the enemy side ... and
that a few deaths among correspondents who do so will deter others."140 Mo-
hammed Burini, A1 Jazeera's correspondent in Mosul attested to this perceived
problem after the station's Baghdad office was hit: "after hitting our office, eve-
rybody was scared. They [Iraqis] didn't want to receive us, because they said,
'you are targeted, so if you start your machines here the American airplanes will
target The message to unembedded reporters is this: either embed
yourselves under the control of the U.S. military or work at your own peril and
risk being killed by U.S. or resistance groups. This message poses a serious
challenge to reporters looking to provide adversarial, independent reporting in
the Iraq war, while concurrently challenging government statements.
The U.S. also tried to discipline A1 Jazeera by pressuring the government of
Qatar to put the channel up for sale to a private buyer.142 The logic behind the
sale of A1 Jazeera is clear enough: subject the station to market discipline in
order to assimilate it within the U.S.-led neoliberal framework of corporate
globalization, of which the invasion of Iraq is a major part. Private ownership of
A1 Jazeera would place great pressure on the news outlet to curtail its opposition
to U.S. policy in the Middle East in two ways: 1. by threatening the station's
funding should corporate advertisers decide to boycott A1 Jazeera in retaliation