Three people contacted me regarding my March 7th Blog about Indian and Nepalese workers being forced to pay expensive illegal fees to obtain jobs with U.S. Defense Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first is an American, Tim Sweemer, living in Kansas, who served seven years as a U.S. Military Intelligence contractor. He confirms that the Al Jazeera story is true.

The second is a man, Jacinto Muasa, presently working in Afghanistan, who confirms that the story is true. The third is a British subject living in Mill Valley, California, who has worked both for BBC News and Al Jazeera in several Mid Eastern Countries. He also verifies that the Al Jazeera story is true. The Brit, Nigel Walker, highly praises Al Jazeera for the depth and breadth of its factual news reporting. He points out that one of the royal leaders from Katar, a small Mid Eastern oil rich country, is a key investor in Al Jazeera.

The Katar leader’s interest, according to Walker, is to create an unbiased news source of many excellent reporters who attempt to get to non-ideological, unbiased truths. My personal experience in daily viewing Al Jazeera is also that it has exemplary stories, well researched, and commonly reaching far deeper into unpleasant facts than U.S. news media.

Al Jazeera commonly deals with the same stories as BBC, NBC, CBS, Fox, etc., but goes much deeper, including the exploration of unpleasant facts commonly ignored by mainstream media of the U.S. and other countries. Al Jazeera America particularly deals in well-researched U.S. stories commonly ignored by our own Media. I suggest you start viewing Al Jazeera America to augment your present news sources. Judge for yourself.

So far I find no truth to the sometimes-touted view of some extremely Conservative voices that Al Jazeera is a news front for Muslim Jihadists. Shortly, I will meet personally with both the Kansas-based American and the Brit for personal talks in more depth. And will follow up. I have no way at this time of verifying the fellow Muasa, but in light of the comments of the others, I see no apparent reason to doubt his credibility.