American-based alternative news website YellowTimes.org was temporarily shut down for the second time this year and its publisher Erich Marquardt describes it as a ridiculous censorship campaign.

The website, which features articles highly critical of the US government especially regarding its Iraq campaign, met with a similar problem last month.

In a brief e-mail to malaysiakini this morning, Marquardt said his organisation was threatened with a shut down for publishing pictures of the US soldiers taken prisoners in Iraq.

"Your account has been suspended because (of) inappropriate graphic material," said a letter to the website but Marquardt did not specify who had sent the letter.

"This censorship campaign is ridiculous," he said. However the site is o­nline again.

According to a news item published o­n the site, YellowTimes was temporarily shut down o­n Sunday night but "after removing pictures of civilian Iraqi deaths and injuries, along with photos of American POWs, YellowTimes was allowed to print again".

Intense hacking

In the previous incident, intense hacking forced the website to temporarily cease operations and Marquardt had claimed then that it was politically motivated.

"In addition to e-mail spoof attacks, I think they are attempting to overload our servers through denial of service attacks, forcing our website to go offline. Similar incidents happened last time we released an article from Imad Khadduri," he had said.

Imadi, a former nuclear scientist who was instrumental in Iraq's nuclear weapons programme in the 1980s and early 1990s, had dismissed allegations concerning the competence and progress of the Iraqi nuclear weapons programme as baseless and untrue.

Malaysiakini

also regularly publishes articles from YellowTimes .