Censorship at work in Baghdad

Caesar Ahmad and Tina Susman write about censorship at work in Iraq for the LA Times Babylon and Beyond blog. The duo describe what happened when a bomb exploded on Sunday near the Baghdad bureau of the Los Angeles Times and the photographers headed to the scene,

It was about a three-minute walk to the scene, but if you don’t see many photographs of the bomb’s aftermath, which killed at least two people and wounded seven, that’s because Iraqi soldiers seized photographers’ camera equipment. They got their camera bodies back, but the Iraqi officials refused to give up the memory cards inside them… Here is photographer Saad Khalaf’s description of what happened: “An Iraqi soldier came toward me as I was taking pictures. He screamed, ‘Give me your camera!’ So I gave it to him to avoid his anger. I thought he was about to break it if I didn’t.” link