When this government doesn't like what a media organization has to say, it will bomb its offices. It throws journalists in prison and holds them without charges.

You would think that as a matter of self-interest, of self-protection, our media would be howling. They are silent. Or, if someone did protest, his management would back him up. But when a top executive did, he was gone. Proving that it's best never to say that America does bad things.

Does that sound over-the-top? Here are the facts:

On November 14, 2001, the Northern Alliance took the city of Kabul from the Taliban. While the people poured into the streets to celebrate, long and loud, a US warplane dropped two 500-pound bombs on the offices of Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera was the first nongovernmental, truly independent news organization in the Arab world. It modeled itself on the BBC and CNN. When it first appeared the United States applauded.

We here in the United States know from American television and newspapers, that all our bombs are smart. They only hit military targets selected by Donald Rumsfeld, who as a guest of PBS's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on March 21, 2003, gushed, "Ah, the humanity of it," in reference to the bombing. Hardly anyone dies. Certainly not civilians.

But across the Arabic-speaking world, where Al Jazeera is the news source of choice, they have a different impression. During the Afghanistan invasion, Al Jazeera showed footage of the effects of American bombs, including the corpses of children burned to death in Jalalabad.

Al Jazeera also played tapes from Osama bin Laden. That may have served his propaganda purposes, but it also informed viewers of what he actually said. Al Jazeera also broadcasts what George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice say.

Al Jazeera is based in Qatar. Colin Powell, who was then secretary of state, went to the Emir of Qatar and asked him to shut Al Jazeera up. Powell was not the first. Jordan, Bahrain, and Morocco had all complained and even shut down the network's local offices. The emir told Powell that he had refused their complaints and that he kept a hands-off policy because democracy "requires you have free and credible media and that is what we are trying to do."

According to Ron Suskind, in The One Percent Doctrine, the CIA found that unsatisfactory. At the CIA, they said, "Well, let's talk to them in a way they understand."  The Kabul, Afghanistan, offices of Al Jazeera were in the middle of a residential district. They had given the coordinates to the US military so that there would be no mistakes. Nonetheless, as the Taliban was driven out of Kabul the bombs fell exactly there. "Inside the CIA and the White House," reports Suskind, "there was satisfaction that a message had been sent to Al Jazeera." 

The New York Times did not mention the bombing of Al Jazeera in Kabul.

I found a mention of it in the Washington Post, four years later. It was in a column by Howard Kurtz: "Yes, I know the US bombed Al Jazeera's Kabul office during the 2001 war, but I have no reason to disbelieve the explanation that it was an accident." He was referring to it in reference to discounting a story that still another Downing Street memo had George W. Bush talking about bombing Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar and Tony Blair talking him out of it. That memo has never actually been published. But the man who leaked it was prosecuted under the UK's Official Secrets Act and the Daily Mirror has been ordered not to publish any further details about it, according to the paper's November 22, 2005, edition.

It wasn't on NBC, ABC, Fox News or CNN.

On April 8, 2003, two US missiles were fired at Al Jazeera's Baghdad offices.

Tarek Ayoub, in the middle of taping his broadcast, was killed. His cameraman was wounded. Once again, Al Jazeera had carefully informed the US military where its offices were. For its employees' own protection, it was thought.

Although it was reported by the BBC and mainstream British newspapers, The New York Times gave the story a pass. A web search does not reveal any stories about it from any of the other mainstream media sources in the United States.

The three years of the Iraq war have been tough on journalists. Eighty-six have been killed. In 20 years in Vietnam, only 63 journalists were killed.

Thirteen of the journalists in Iraq were killed by US forces.

According to the Boston Globe, "In August 2003, US troops shot Mazen Dana, an award-winning Palestinian cameraman for the Reuters news agency, after he had received US permission to film outside of Abu Ghraib. A military investigation said the soldier who shot him acted reasonably, noting that the soldier saw a man with 'dark skin and dark hair' and mistook his camera for a grenade launcher."

Reporters Without Borders notes that in Vietnam, as in most previous wars, journalists were killed by accident, but in Iraq they are being targeted. They do not specifically accuse the United States armed forces of doing so. In every case the American military has ruled such killings to be accidents, inevitable in the fog of war, and determined that the American servicemen involved have acted correctly. Who is to say otherwise, barring a smoking gun?

Someone did. Or he at least raised the question.

Jordan Eason was chief news executive at CNN. He'd been there since 1986. He is credited with many of CNN's successes in becoming a worldwide news organization. In November 2004, at a conference in Portugal, he said that US forces were arresting and torturing non-coalition journalists. Especially Arabic ones.  Reuters reported on March 20 that several journalists were taken by US troops, stripped, beaten, threatened with rape, and forced to do humiliating things like putting their fingers in their own anuses and then being made to put them in their mouths.

Eight journalists are on record as being detained. Three were released. Five are still being held without charges. Shipped off to the black hole of Guantanamo Bay.

On January 27, 2005, Eason gave a talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In off-the-record remarks, he is reported to have said that US troops were targeting journalists in Iraq.

That was reported on a blog at the political website www.truthout.org.

Eason tried to backtrack. He said he never meant to say that the troops were doing such things deliberately. Nonetheless, the pressure was relentless. Two weeks later, after nearly 20 years as one of CNN's best, he had to resign.

Thomas Jefferson believed in the power of the press and said many things like, "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure."

Jefferson was also aware of how a despotic government could use the press to manipulate the people; "that government always kept a kind of standing army of newswriters who without any regard to truth, or to what should be like truth, invented and put into the papers whatever might serve the minister. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper."

Which country do we live in? The one Mr. Jefferson was trying to invent, or the one that he rebelled against?