Al-Jazeera faces U.S.-British fury, gains more audience

Additional Reporting by Mutiallah Tayeb, IOL Qatar Correspondent

DOHA, March 27 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – Blasted by Washington and London for its footages of dead U.S. and British soldiers and captured prisoners of war, the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite channel's website was downed by hackers since Tuesday, March 25.

The service was off line after broadcasting pictures of a number of U.S. soldiers captured or killed in Iraq, the Website's editor-in-chief Abdel Aziz Al-Mahmud told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Wednesday, March 26.

The POW footage, which had been taken from and were later shown on Iraqi state television, provoked fury from U.S. and British officials who said they were a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the Arabic-language television network was portraying the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in a negative light, exaggerating small military achievements of Saddam Hussein's regime and lacking objectivity in covering the war.

"Al-Jazeera has an editorial line and a way presenting news that appeals to the Arab public, … they watch it and they magnify the minor successes of the regime," said Powell in an interview with National Public Radio, aired just hours before he gave a live interview to Al-Jazeera.

"And they tend to portray our efforts in a negative light," Powell said, adding that he hoped the channel would report on U.S. efforts to improve the lives of the Iraqi people as the conflict continued and after it is over.

The New York Stock Exchange banned Al-Jazeera reporters from its trading floor, a move widely seen as retaliation for the channel's coverage of the war.

But many European television stations broadcast the images despite these criticisms.

Many analysts felt the wave of criticisms is unjustified as the U.S. media itself have shown pictures of Iraqi prisoners of war.

The international press organization Reporters Without Borders said it was up to journalists, not the U.S. army, to decide what could or could not be shown, according to the journalistic code of conduct.

During the time of war, the U.S. media is coming under water-tight constraints from the Bush administration, as was conclusively demonstrated when an alternative news site Yellowtimes.org was shut down by their Internet Service Provider (ISP) after publishing the photographs of the U.S. captives.

More Audience

Despite these official American and British attacks, Al-Jazeera said its number of viewers has jumped 10 percent since the war began.

An executive with the network told the Asharq al-Awsat paper that it has added four million new viewers to the 40 million it already had worldwide, adding that new subscriptions were especially strong in Europe.

The network has eight teams of reporters on the ground in Iraq and is the only channel to have been broadcasting from the southern city of Basra, scene of a furious battle between Iraqi and besieging U.S.-led invasion forces.

In addition to its pictures of the POWs, the station has provided groundbreaking coverage of the war and been widely picked up by Western media such as CNN, whose own correspondents were thrown out of Baghdad the day after the war started.

But it received another slap when Reuters news agency and America Online along with other American companies refused to publish an advertisement on the launch of its English website on Tuesday.

"Horror"

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Tony Blair reacted with "horror" at news on Wednesday that Al-Jazeera television had shown what it called video footage of two dead British soldiers in Iraq, his spokesman said.

"We were aware of the possibility of this when we were on the plane" from London for a two-day war summit at Camp David, Maryland with U.S. President George W. Bush, the spokesman said.

"When we touched down, we were told about the pictures on Al-Jazeera," he told reporters in Blair's entourage.

"The prime minister's reaction was, as you can imagine, horror both at the deaths and also at the fact that the pictures were shown" on the Arabic satellite station, he said.

In London, the Times newspaper, quoting British sources at Qatar where commanders of the U.S.-led invasion forces are headquartered, said the dead soldiers were the ones reported missing Sunday near Al Zubayr, near Basra.

British military officials had earlier said that the two soldiers, riding in a Land Rover vehicle, went missing when the convoy in which they were traveling came under fire.

In a separate footage, it also showed two live black men out of uniform, identified as British POWs, surrounded by men dressed in civilian clothes gesturing V for victory.