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Comment by falk | Hacker News Reader

"I mean, Putin straight kills journalists."

So does the United States of America.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

The United States government wants to make an example out of Snowden. There's no way he would serve just two years in prison.

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Would it stretch your moral intellect too far to identify a key distinction there? Namely, intent matters: The U.S., as far as anyone has demonstrated, does not set out to kill journalists because what they write is inconvenient.

> The U.S., as far as anyone has demonstrated, does not set out to kill journalists because what they write is inconvenient.

I remember that prior to the invasion of Iraq, the US said that any journalist that is not embedded with US troops is fair game. That does sound like they didn't mind killing journalists they don't control.

This attitude also clearly shows in the bombing of the Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad, Bush's 2004 idea of bombing the Al Jazeera HQ in Qatar, or the attack on the Palestine Hotel.

The quote you're likely thinking of was from then-Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke literally as Baghdad was falling:

Pentagon spokeswoman Clarke said of Baghdad on Tuesday, "It is not a safe place. You should not be there." [1]

Whether journalists thought it would be a good idea to hang out in Baghdad while it was under coalition assault, the Bush administration clearly thought that would be an unsafe thing to do. That doesn't mean they "didn't mind killing journalists they don't control" or that they claimed anything about journalists being "fair game".

[1] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Baghdad-closer-to-collaps...

New York Times media correspondent David Carr: “If you add up the pulling of news organization phone records (The Associated Press), the tracking of individual reporters (Fox News), and the effort by the current administration to go after sources (seven instances and counting in which a government official has been criminally charged with leaking classified information to the news media), suggesting that there is a war on the press is less hyperbole than simple math.”

AP president Gary Pruitt: "Longtime sources have stopped talking to the Associated Press in response to the Obama administration’s secret seizure of the wire service’s phone records. This chilling effect is not just at AP, it’s happening at other news organizations as well. Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me it has intimidated sources from speaking to them."

Chief White House Correspondent for NBC News Chuck Todd: "You end up essentially criminalizing journalism when it comes to reporting on the federal government, particularly on national security. You know, I’ve had different conversations with people over the last week who are sitting there not quite comfortable having certain conversations on the phone."

Would it stretch your moral intellect to google any of the above? The US has successfully criminalized real journalism so there is no need to kill. Not a whole lot better.

Now you've moved the goal posts from claims the U.S. "straight kills journalists" to some chilling effects from a variety of leak prosecutions. One can think the latter are a bad thing without drawing a parallel to regimes that murder journalists they don't like!

The killing of journalists may be the most dramatic measure in the context of freedom of the press but it's hardly the only one, and it is absolutely fair to discuss the whole picture. For example, on this Freedom Of Press Index, Russia is far ahead of China which does not kill journalists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index#Rankings_an...

I would also like to address your "some chilling effects" comment. Investigative reporters are only as good as their sources and the sources have been silenced. That's a nuclear winter, not "some chilling effects".

Meta: is it really necessary to imply that whomever you are responding to is lacking in intellectual capacity? What's with all the "would it stretch your intellect to...", "one can think x without drawing a parallel to y..." and so on. If your arguments are strong, let them stand on their own.

The United States government traffics drugs such as heroin [1], has started wars under false pretenses to profit multi-national corporations [2] [3], backs death squads in Indonesia [4], tried to convince Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide [5], has conducted covert operations to dismantle and replace government structures across the world [6], has conducted experiments involving drugs like LSD on unwilling participants [7], is known to kidnap and torture people [8] [9], intercepts phone calls in the United States and collects every piece of information they can disregarding the constitution [10] [11] [12], performs drone strikes that kill innocent civilians [13], and kills American citizens without due process [14] [15]. Do you honestly believe they haven't killed any vocal opponents including journalists? If so, that is massively dangerous thinking.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_South...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_war

[4] http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/19/the_act_of_killing_new...

[5] http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/01/21/the-fbi-wrote-a-lette...

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_re...

[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_and_the_United_States

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_el-Masri

[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[13] http://dirtywars.org

[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

[15] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/us/us-acknowledges-killing...

Edit: Saw another comment and did some more digging. Found a great article which I'll quote some of. You can find a link to it below.

"On April 8, 2003, during the US-led invasion of Iraq, Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayoub was killed when a US warplane bombed Al Jazeera's headquarters in Baghdad."

"Disturbingly, more journalists were murdered in targeted killings in Iraq than died in combat-related circumstances, according to the group Committee to Protect Journalists."

""Between 2003 and 2010 more than 30 Iraqi journalists were detained and held in prisons in Iraq by the Americans," she explained. "All of these journalists were arbitrarily arrested by the Americans, just as they continue to be arrested by the Iraqi government today.""

http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/04/201348120278145...

This one's worth a save. Thanks!

Do you honestly believe they haven't killed any vocal opponents including journalists?

I certainly won't believe it until you give me a name of a journalist who was killed because the U.S. government didn't like his or her reporting. A giant wall of links to such 'evidence' as the Wikipedia page on the Iraq war doesn't impress me, nor does your later link, from which you decided to pull a quote about "targeted killings" without bothering to figure out that the people doing the "targeting" weren't Americans.

The name you seem to have trouble pronouncing is: Tareq Ayoub

Do you want me to write it again? Tareq Ayoub

And to stall your obvious response. No, he was not targeted directly but when you bomb a news organization's headquarters one of the things that is going to turn up in the rubble is dead journalists. What's that you say? They didn't mean to target a news organization? Wooopsies. I must have missed the heartfelt apology.

Why don't you try reading that page minus your reality distortion filter goggles? Here, I'll post the link again. http://www.aljazeera.com/humanrights/2013/04/201348120278145... This time, though, why don't you try to read what it says rather than inventing what it says.

How about the first sentence, "On April 8, 2003, during the US-led invasion of Iraq, Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayoub was killed when a US warplane bombed Al Jazeera's headquarters in Baghdad."

So what you're trying to say is that a US warplane is not an American warplane? Have I got that right? Does your head not get a bit sore what with all the cognitive dissonance going on up in there?

How about another couple of quotes? "CPJ research shows that 'at least 150 journalists and 54 media support workers were killed in Iraq from the US-led invasion in March 2003 to the declared end of the war in December 2011.'"

"'The media were not welcome by the US military,' Soazig Dollet, who runs the Middle East and North Africa desk of Reporters Without Borders told Al Jazeera. 'That is really obvious.'"

You may not want to believe it but it's true nonetheless.

I'm not trying to convince you. I'm pointing out atrocities and lies committed by the United States government. We aren't below killing journalists. I figured you would due some sort of due diligence by visiting the link and reading the sections about supposed WMDs.

Here's a great documentary and book on how we were lied into the Iraq war. It's called Hubris: Selling the Iraq War. Watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5FaMbnINwc

I did give you a name, Tareq Ayoub, a journalist that was killed by U.S. bombs when we bombed Al Jazeera's headquarters in Baghdad.

That isn't remotely the same thing.

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