"Nabras is hit! Nabras is hit!" The guards said they believed the compound was under attack from insurgents. "We never thought that people would be shooting at us from the Ministry of Justice," said Hussein Abdul Hassan, the guards' chief. "It's a government building. No one would expect it."
This time it's a Blackwater sniper, stationed on the roof of the Iraq Justice Department building, aiming at and killing a guard employed by the Iraq Media Network. That's what makes it spooky. The story take on special meaning when contract killers hired by the Bush/Cheney administration make victims of the guardians of the media. Is that a stretch? Maybe. Wait and see.
The bullet tore through the head of a 23-year-old guard for the state-funded Iraqi Media Network, who was standing on a balcony across an open traffic circle. Another guard rushed to his colleague's side and was fatally shot in the neck. A third guard was found dead more than an hour later on the same balcony.
Eight people who responded to the shootings -- including media network and Justice Ministry guards and an Iraqi army commander -- and five network officials in the compound said none of the slain guards had fired on the Justice Ministry, where a U.S. diplomat was in a meeting. An Iraqi police report described the shootings as "an act of terrorism" and said Blackwater "caused the incident." The media network concluded that the guards were killed "without any provocation."
The same old dance has begun, with the US government rushing to justify Blackwater's February 2007 shootings.
The Iraqi Media Network shootings were particularly sensitive because Blackwater fired from one Iraqi government compound into another. The network is a state-funded corporation modeled after theBBC and launched by the U.S. government. After the March 2003 invasion, the network replaced the state-run television system that once dispensed propaganda for the government of then-President Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi Media Network operates several newspapers, radio stations and a flagship TV network, al-Iraqiya.
"What really shocked us is that our colleagues were killed inside their workplace, in a place that was supposed to be secure," said Abbas A. Salim, the network's news director. "The IMN, its main job is to explain democracy to the people and support the new Iraq."
Time to remember another instance of journalists being under what appeared to be deliberate, unprovoked fire at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. We have to wonder whether "democracy" and its concomitant free press have anything to do with what the administration wants for Iraq.
