Burying the Evidence

There's been a lot of crushing of dissent lately, particularly with respect to the military-industrial complex. When Gen. John Batiste spoke out in a VoteVets.org ad against the Iraq war, he lost his job at CBS, because apparently you can't advocate on television unless that advocacy lines up with the conservative agenda. MoveOn is mobilizing to do something about this.

It took CBS two weeks to fire Don Imus for racist and misogynistic comments, but it only took them two days to fire respected General John Batiste for speaking out against the president on the war.

It's censorship, pure and simple. We're aiming to get over 100,000 messages demanding that CBS re-hire Major General Batiste by the end of the week.

This isn't the only example of censorship with respect to Iraq. Just this week the Iraqi Interior Ministry (with no help from the US military, I'm sure) is barring journalists from bomb sites.

Iraq's interior ministry has decided to bar news photographers and camera operators from the scenes of bomb attacks, operations director Brigadier General Abdel Karim Khalaf said on Sunday (local time).

His announcement was the latest in a series of attempts to curtail press coverage of the ongoing conflict, which has already attracted criticism from international human rights bodies.

And the military is stopping the flow of information on the Internet, both outwardly from military bloggers, and inwardly by blocking sites like MySpace and YouTube to the troops. Clearly, as the occupation of Irq grows less and less popular, the powers that be are trying to restrict information at all levels so they can put forth their version of reality. The problem, of course, is that they have no credibility to do that anymore.