The Daily Background

How dare anybody criticize the Iraqi government:

Under a broad new set of laws criminalizing speech that ridicules the government or its officials, some resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein’s penal code, roughly a dozen Iraqi journalists have been charged with offending public officials in the past year.

Currently, three journalists for a small newspaper in southeastern Iraq are being tried here for articles last year that accused a provincial governor, local judges and police officials of corruption. The journalists are accused of violating Paragraph 226 of the penal code, which makes anyone who “publicly insults” the government or public officials subject to up to seven years in prison.

This sounds a lot like the American Alien & Sedition acts of 1798. They essentially criminalized dissent for three short years before they were finally recognized as wholly unconstitutional and were scrapped.

How can you possibly have a free press which isn’t allowed to criticize the government or talk about corruption? Sectors of the Iraqi government (the Ministry of the Interior in particular) and many local Iraqi governments are widely seen as corrupt. How dare anybody report about that! How dare anybody criticize the new “Democratic” Iraqi government! (And the United States government as well for that matter).

On a more American point however, this is the type of government that thousands of American soldiers have given their lives for? This is the type of government that we are spending two hundred million dollars to support– every single day? We are pouring money into another country’s civil war for what? So that Iraqis can be imrpisoned for criticizing their government?

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog