I believe the international journalists, most of whom refused to be in bed with the Anglo American military forces, paid a high price for their attempts to report independently.

It is nigh on impossible to see an anti-press jihad conspiracy from Washington when looking at isolated instances of journalists being singled out and targeted by the US military. Fog of war on the ground makes for very good cover for the military's not so valiant tactics to control the propaganda war on the airwaves.

However, if you turn off your TV news and use only the print media to get your news, a very different picture emerges. That picture is pretty damning, in that it shows that targeting independent (or what the military referred to as "unilateral") journalists has been a deliberate strategy in Iraq.

I'm not buying the "a poor, frightened 18 year old boy reacted in panic" defense for the shelling of the Palestine Hotel, or for taking out the Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi journalists the first day in Baghdad. Uh uh. Too convenient. The network television pictures of the "jubilant Baghdadis" were too orchestrated (did no one notice whose tank was being used to pull that statue down?), too propagandist, to show what was truly happening.

It is truly frightening to see how desperate the Bush/Blair military is to beam those "liberation" propaganda images to the world. Let us hope that desperation has the positive result of the US genuinely returning to the international community now, and allowing the international community in to do their job of rebuilding Iraq.