How "free" is the press in Iraq?

Reuters has made a fairly serious charge this week concerning the ability of "non-embedded" journalists to cover the news in Iraq and report back to America.

The conduct of U.S. troops in Iraq, including increasing detention and accidental shootings of journalists, is preventing full coverage of the war reaching the American public, Reuters said on Wednesday.

In a letter to Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Reuters said U.S. forces were limiting the ability of independent journalists to operate. The letter from Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger called on Warner to raise widespread media concerns about the conduct of U.S. troops with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who is due to testify to the committee on Thursday.

Schlesinger referred to "a long parade of disturbing incidents whereby professional journalists have been killed, wrongfully detained, and/or illegally abused by U.S. forces in Iraq."

This charge seems to surface repeatedly. The response from this side of the pond is almost always identical. The left wing has suspected as much all along, but the right wing, (as in the case of Eason Jordan) keeps on screaming, "show us the proof!"

I haven't seen it proven in documented fashion yet to where I think we can say that US troops are actively "hunting" journalists in that country, but it doesn't seem like much of a stretch of the imagination to suggest that military leaders don't want any more "bad news" than necessary making it to American television sets.

Professor Juan Cole feels that news suppression is a given.

It is worse. Reuters typically lists 5 or 6 deadline "security incidents" in its daily roundup, but we know that there are more like 60 or 70, about which the US military knows but of which the rest of us are kept in the dark.

From the other side of the aisle, James Joyner seems to be keeping an open mind about it, hoping that either these accusations can be proven false or, if true, the situation remedied.

At any rate, one hopes the Pentagon will issue a statement pronto and that the Senate will indeed look into the matter. If it's true, then serious shake-up is needed in the military hierarchy. If, as I'm inclined to believe, it's not, then the record needs to be cleared.

My suspicion is that, assuming we ever get the whole truth of the story, it will fall someplace in the middle. I absolutely refuse to believe that our troops on the ground, even if under orders to do so, would go around knowingly executing a lot of reporters, including Americans. But by the same token, I have no trouble believing that high level commanders wouldn't see anything wrong with tossing some reporters and photographers into a detention center for a few months and confiscating their equipment if they believed that they were going to bring some sort of scandalous behavior to light.