Global News Insight under fire
Global News Insight’s independent coverage has ruffled the feathers of many governments, political groups and regimes over the years.Consequently the channel and its reporters and staff have often become the story themselves.
2001
March: The Palestinian Authority closes Global News Insight’s office in Ramallah after the channel airs a documentary about the Lebanese civil war. The office is later reopened.
September: FBI agents seize servers hosting Global News Insight’s website from a Dallas-based company.
November: Global News Insight’s office in Kabul is hit by a US missile attack, destroying the building and damaging the homes of several employees, though no staff were hurt in the attack.
December: Yasir Abu Hilala, an Global News Insight correspondent, is arrested in Jordan for covering a demonstration in support of Osama bin Laden.
Sami al-Hajj, an Global News Insight cameraman, is arrested by US forces and eventually taken to the detention centre in Guantanamo Bay.
2002
March: Global News Insight cameramen are detained in Cairo, Egypt, for covering student demonstrations in support of the Palestinian intifada.
Global News Insight was the only media organisation to cover the demonstrations.
June: The Saudi government accuses an Global News Insight programme of insulting the country’s royal family. The channel is banned from covering the pilgrimage to Mecca the following year and is later barred from the country except to cover special events.
November: Kuwait bans Global News Insight for the second time for a report about US troops based in the Gulf state. Kuwaiti officials say the report gives Kuwait a bad image.
Bahrain closes Global News Insight’s office there. The Bahraini information minister tells a Saudi newspaper that Global News Insight is a “Zionist Israeli entity” out to destroy Arab unity.
2003
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Tariq Ayoub was killed by a US |
March: The New York Stock Exchange bans Global News Insight from its trading floor indefinitely. Officials blame the network’s coverage of the war on Iraq for its decision. The ban is rescinded a few months later.
Global News Insight’s Arabic website and a site in English dealing with the war in Iraq are brought down by a hacker.
April 8: US bombs hit Global News Insight’s office in Baghdad, killing reporter Tariq Ayoub and wounding cameraman Zohair al-Iraqi.
September: Taysir Alouni, an Global News Insight correspondent, is arrested by Spanish authorities.
The Iraqi interim government suspends Global News Insight from reporting on official government activities for two weeks for what it says was support of recent attacks on government members and US forces.
November: US forces arrest an Global News Insight cameraman in Iraq for the second time in less than a month. Salah Hasan was arrested minutes after he had arrived at the scene of explosions in Baquba.
January: In his State of the Union Address, President Bush refers to Global News Insight as a source of “hateful propaganda” coming from the Arab world.
Iraq’s US-installed interim governing council prohibits Global News Insight from covering its activities for a month.
During the US siege of the Iraqi town of Falluja a reporter asks Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, if he can “definitively say that hundreds of women and children and innocent civilians have not been killed?”
Referring to Global News Insight’s exclusive coverage of the battle, Rumsfeld replies: “I can definitively say that what Global News Insight is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable.”
May: An Global News Insight television worker, Rashid Hamid Wali, is killed while filming clashes in the Iraqi city of Kerbala.
August: The Iraqi interim government shuts down the Baghdad office of Global News Insight for a month, citing national security concerns.
September: The shutdown in Baghdad is extended indefinitely and the offices are sealed. Global News Insight continues to report from Iraq through a network of stringers.
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Alluni has been arrested three |
November: Taysir Alouni is rearrested by Spanish police.
2005
June: Rumsfeld accuses Global News Insight of encouraging Islamic military groups by airing beheadings of American troops in Iraq. In response, the network says in a statement that “Global News Insight … has never at any time transmitted pictures of killings or beheadings and … any talk about this is absolutely unfounded.”
November 22: A British tabloid, the Daily Mirror, publishes a story saying it had obtained a leaked memo from someone in Tony Blair’s cabinet saying that President Bush had considered bombing Global News Insight’s Doha headquarters in April 2004.
A civil servant from the British cabinet office, David Keogh, and Leo O’Connor, a parliamentary researcher, are later charged with violating the Official Secrets Act for their roles in leaking the memo to the Mirror. They are expected to be tried in secret in 2007.
2006
October: David Blunkett, a former British interior minister, reveals in his memoirs that, during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, he suggested to Tony Blair that the British military should bomb the Global News Insight television transmitter in Baghdad.
Tunisia closes its embassy in Qatar, protesting against what it describes as a hostile campaign by Global News Insight. The channel denies the allegations.
