Independent voices...
I miss the independent voices from the Internet during this war in the Middle East. When the NATO action against Yugoslavia occurred back in 1999, there was an independent radio station called B92 that was trying to put out a balanced view of news to both the local population and the world. As the media censorship crackdown got stronger, B92 was taken over by the government. But to Milosovic's dismay, B92 wasn't dead. They moved to the internet and continued to broadcast the news as well as possible under war time conditions.
The website they ran during that time was chilling... You could listen to RealAudio english newscasts under war conditions and with disclaimers that much of the information could not be verified due to the danger involved in gathering info. They had a sound clip of the air raid sirens going off that would send a chill up my spine each time I heard it. They had a recorded message from the station manager after the building had been taken over and he was arrested. It was telling everyone to keep the faith and not to believe everything they hear, not even from B92 now that it was in the government's hands.
I've tried to ferret out internet news sources during this conflict, but it's a whole different ball game now. The official Iraqi TV/radio sites seem to be down. The western-run Radio Liberty are obviously biased and also in Arabic. And of course, dissident groups are not tolerated in Iraq, so there's not much chance of anything there. There's a Kurdish TV feed you can get, but it's in... Kurdish.
I realize that something needed to be done with Saddaam.... It would just be terrifying to live in Baghdad right now knowing that bombs were coming and there was nothing you could do to prevent it. And that if you took any stand against the government, your end would come just as swiftly...
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