This is nothing new. Radio and TV stations and other "unauthorized" sources of information are always first on the target list whenever the US starts a war.
At the beginning of Part I of this war they showed the smart bomb or cruise missile
or whatever blowing up the Baghdad phone company building.
As someone who works for the phone company, I have to say this pissed me off :-)
I think the Pentagon spokeshomo put it this way. "Propaganda outlets ARE military targets." Propaganda being anything not released by the Pentagon, of course.
Peter Trei wrote: > Stopping useful information on *ongoing* operations > from reaching the enemy has been a normal, unremarkable part of > waging war for over 150 years.
During the initial bombing campaign in Part I, Ramsay Clark and some journalists did a week-long couple-thousand-mile drive around Iraq filming the damage being done. One of the important parts was showing downtown Baghdad apartment buildings being bombed because they were near bridges or the water system or other strategic targets and interviewing the people who lived there. In spite of all the commercials for smart bombs and cruise missiles, most of the armament dropped on Iraq back then was dumb iron bombs; one group of people were starting to think about blowing up their own bridge so that the Yankees would stop bombing their apartments when they missed.
If this part of the war starts, civilian areas in downtown are much more likely to be part of the target space than before, because it's about Regime Change, not repelling invading armies.
