Silenced in the name of freedom[Asia Times] American Paul Belden writes of his friend Tariq Ayyoub, the Al-Jazeera producer killed by a US missile strike on the Arabic news network's office in Baghdad.

No matter how the US government spins this, Ayyoub is a martyr. And trying to spin it just makes it look worse. Sure, it's possible that the Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV offices were mistaken for Iraqi communications centers. Sure, it's possible that the M1 crew thought snipers were firing from the Palestine Hotel. But when you kill a bunch of foriegn, “non-embedded” journalists, even by accident, in such a short period of time, it looks suspicious.

Forget the “truth”–the perception is what counts, just as in the perception of the US flag being put on the statue of Saddam in Baghdad (which, based on BBC reports, was the flag that flew over the Pentagon on 9/11) counts rather than the motive. Journalists are just as symbolic as the flag–they are the eyes of the world, and the death of Ayyoub was a gouge at the eyes of the Arab world.

Stand by for a bumpy decade, folks