IN CASE YOU WERE RUNNING SHORT ON REASONS TO DESPISE THE NEW YORK TIMES

This is from an NYT OP/ED on the closing of a newspaper in Baghdad by the CPA.

One of the dispatches that led to the closing of Al Hawza was a February report claiming that an American missile, not a terrorist car bomb, had caused an explosion that killed more than 50 Iraqi police recruits. False charges like that have helped poison Iraqi opinion against American forces and made their difficult and dangerous job even more so. Yet it is possible to condemn such malicious rumor-mongering without endorsing the paper's shutdown, which, though ostensibly for 60 days, could prove permanent.

Newspapers like Al Hawza do not create the hostility Americans face in Iraq — they reflect it. Shutting them down, however satisfying it may feel to the Bush administration, is not a promising way to dissolve that hostility.

I would be willing to bet that the author of that piece doesn't have a loved one in uniform in Iraq. Why? Well, it seems he failed to mention this as reported by USA Today.

This week, a Baghdad newspaper run by followers of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was shut down after coalition officials said the publication incited violence against the U.S.-led force occupying Iraq. Military officials say the newspaper, Al-Hawza, called on readers to take up arms against U.S. forces.

"It's one thing to call us pigs," one coalition official says. "But when you call on people to take up a rifle or take up a knife to slit the throat of the American pigs, that crosses the line. If we let this go on unchecked, people will die."

Seems like a noteworthy omission to me. Probably should to most folks who'd prefer all our soldiers come home alive.