There was also an extraordinary diversity of views about the war and the occupation: independent bloggers such as the excellent Arab-American writer Dahr Jamail operated alongside reporters from the New York Times, ITV and al-Jazeera. But as insecurity, violence and political instability became inexorably worse from the end of 2004, the media's ability to tell all sides of the story began to close down.

Read full article here

The Guardian
Stephen Moss
Thursday May 8 2008
To read article at the original source, with photo, click here

In the spring of 2003 Dahr Jamail, a fourth-generation Lebanese-American with a taste for adventure, was up a mountain in Alaska, climbing and earning a living by working as a guide. He was, though, following news of the invasion of Iraq, and what he read and heard made him so furious that he decided to leave the mountains - "my church", as he calls them - and head for that newly subjugated land, armed only with a laptop and a digital recorder.

"I wanted to report on where the silence was," he says. "There's this huge story going on and nobody's talking about it. How are Iraqis getting by, what's their daily life like?"

Jamail, a spruce 39-year-old who is the author of a new book, Beyond the Green Zone, says the supine nature of the US media encouraged him to act. "With a few exceptions, most of the US mainstream was just stenography for the state," he says. "It wasn't journalism; it was writing down what the Bush administration was telling them. I was amazed and outraged. I felt that the lack of clear information was the biggest problem I could see in the US, so I decided I should go over and write about it."

It took him until November 2003 to get the money together - $2,000, everything he had - and make some contacts, via the internet, in Iraq. He flew to Amman in Jordan, found a driver and an interpreter - he spoke no Arabic - and took a car to Baghdad, accompanied by a young couple from the UK who intended to spend a few days there "for the experience". The border was unguarded, US troops notable by their absence. The war had been fought at long range; now there was a vacuum.

Jamail visited hospitals and went to the town of Samarra, 50km north of Baghdad, to check out a "firefight" in which the US military said they had been attacked and had killed 54 Iraqi fighters. Jamail found the locals telling a different story: two Iraqi fighters had attacked a detachment of US troops guarding a delivery to a bank, and the soldiers had responded by firing indiscriminately, killing and wounding many civilians.

At first he had no intention of trying to compete with the mainstream media. "For the first two weeks [of a nine-week stay] I was just sending emails back home," he says. "I had a list of a little over a hundred friends, mostly in Alaska. I would go out in the day with an interpreter - I found someone to work with me who was really cheap because I didn't have much money - and interview people, take amateur photos, and then go back to the hotel and write it up. It was essentially blogging, but I didn't know what blogging was and I didn't have a blog, of course. I was just sending out two, three, four, five pages a night with a few photos attached to friends.

"After about two weeks someone suggested, 'Hey, you should post on this website electroniciraq.net.' They wanted posts from people on the ground. I did that for about a month and then towards the end of my trip, with about two weeks to go, I was contacted by the BBC to do a little bit of work with them. A start-up website in New York also contacted me to start doing some stories. I actually got paid to do some work, and that's when it became clear I could actually come back and work as a journalist."

I try to probe why Jamail should have made this extraordinary gesture: was there something in his make-up that led him to take this stand? Born and raised in Texas, the son of a grocery store owner, he says that there is a streak of unpredictability in his family. He is the youngest of three: his sister is a pilot, his brother is a police officer. "My parents have always had their hands full and were broken in a bit, so I guess they weren't completely shocked when I started to do my thing," he says. He means climbing, but what about Iraq? How did they and others close to him react? "Most people thought I was crazy. My closer friends supported it. They felt, 'If this is what you think, and you really want to do it, then all power to you.' I decided, wrong or right, not to worry my parents about it until I got in there, so I waited and wrote [to] them after I reached Baghdad. Fortunately they were open to it; they were shocked, but they were open to it."

Before he headed for Alaska in 1996, Jamail had worked as a chemical technician on Johnston Island, an atoll in the Pacific where the US military had dumped parts of its obsolete stockpile of chemical weapons - no problem here finding weapons of mass destruction. Jamail was there to check air quality in a pilot plant designed for decommissioning the weapons, but became disillusioned when he thought results were being rigged and leaks covered up.

It is tempting to see that disillusionment as the key to his later engagement, but he insists that it wasn't. He just packed in the job and went climbing - in Central America, South America and Pakistan, as well as Alaska. His journey to Iraq, he says, was born of anger and frustration; it was not a calculatedly political act. "I did it for more personal reasons," he explains. "I felt if I went and did this, I'd be able to come home and sleep a little bit better at night." He was wrong about that.

He had seen that first trip in the winter of 2003 as a one-off, but when he realised he could probably earn enough to live through his journalism he decided to go back. The fact that the security situation was deteriorating and that other journalists were pulling out increased the marketability of his on-the-spot reports, but also underlined the personal risks. Did he worry about the dangers? "By then I felt like I really wanted to stay in there and cover as much of the story as I could. You get into the story and you want to stay on it. It had its limits, though, and I didn't feel like I'd be able to stay in indefinitely."

He entered Iraq for the second time in April 2004, on the very day that Falluja, the town 70km west of Baghdad that became the focal point of the battle between US forces and Iraqi fighters, was being sealed off. "We immediately started hearing these horrible stories of what was happening there," he says. "I had a chance to go in and was really on the fence on whether I should do it or not, because I knew it was pretty crazy. But it seemed like we had a reasonable chance of going in safely, so I decided to take it. I ended up reporting for a couple of days from this makeshift clinic, and saw women, kids and some men being brought in who were all saying the same thing: the US pushed in [to Falluja] as far as they could and then just lined up snipers and started shooting into the city. There was no water, no electricity, medical workers were being targeted. It was a turning point for me."

By now, Jamail was filing his reports predominantly for the Inter Press Service, an agency based in Rome that sets out to "give a voice to the voiceless" and promote a new global order based on equality, democracy and justice. It is reporting, but reporting with a purpose, a clear agenda. So is it objective? Can someone who goes to Iraq convinced that the war is wrong and being fought for control of oil and strategic power offer unbiased reporting?

"Objective journalism is a myth," says Jamail. "Going into Iraq, I felt it was really important to read up on the history, find out what is the US security strategy, what is US foreign policy. Only then can you understand the facts and the nature of the US's historical involvement in Iraq. If I'm guilty of something, I was guilty of going into it looking at it through that lens, as opposed to those who were looking at it through the lens of anonymous briefings from Bush administration officials. Any journalist going into a war zone is going to be looking through a certain type of lens. It's a myth that you go in without opinions on the situation, or that you won't feel emotions and that nothing that happens is going to affect how you report on it. I don't buy that. I just don't think it's humanly possible."

He immediately qualifies that, however, by saying that he was not so blinkered that he made every fact and opinion he encountered fit his preconceived view. "When I came across Iraqis who were happy that Saddam was gone - and there were plenty, especially seven months into the occupation, before things had really started to degrade rapidly - I said so. I did run into things that challenged my preconceptions. I would from time to time run into a soldier who really believed in the mission. Early on, I met plenty of Iraqis who were glad the Americans were here, were still hopeful and wanted to give them some time, and I wrote about that."

In the introduction to his book, he quotes the story of an indigenous Canadian hunter who was called to give evidence at an inquiry into a planned dam that would flood his homeland and destroy his traditional way of life. The hunter was asked to swear on the Bible that he would tell the truth, but he had never seen a Bible and wondered how this miraculous truth-telling instrument worked. "He spoke with the translator at length," writes Jamail, "and finally the translator looked up at the judge. 'He does not know whether he can tell the truth. He says he can tell only what he knows.'"

I take it that is how Jamail sees his own role: to give his view, to write down what he sees, to filter what he discovers at first hand through the knowledge he has gained from reading official documents; to tell what he knows rather than claim to be relaying some almost metaphysical "truth", arrived at by
being perfectly objective. He sees the war in Iraq as the direct consequence of the stated national security strategy of building a worldwide network of US military bases and "projecting power". Talk of withdrawal from Iraq, he says, is a case of "putting the cart before the horse"; the whole strategy has to be rethought first. Iraq, in his view, is just a symptom of an endemic illness.

What this role as an avowedly anti-war journalist means, however, is that Jamail's political opponents can write him off as a propagandist. American TV networks have largely ignored him and his book. Even as the public mood has turned against the war, the mainstream media have not been able to disengage themselves from their view that, in time of war, the commander-in-chief and the boys in the field should be supported.

"I certainly get accused of being an activist, but I don't consider myself an activist," he says. "I've never done any kind of activism or organising. My response to my critics is to say, 'Tell me which of my facts you dispute and I'll give you my sources.' I ask people, 'Be specific.' If you want to attack my personality that's fine, but if you want to attack my work and my information, then tell me which of my stories you have a problem with and I'll happily give you my sources. I give talks in the US and people accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, but I say, 'No, it's very rational, read these documents.'"

Jamail's Lebanese name doesn't help when he tries to argue that, while trying to fill the silence on the Iraqi side, he remains committed to reporting what he sees and telling what he knows. "One time I was on this rightwing radio programme, and the guy started out trying to describe me: 'Dahr Jamail, you're a Muslim, aren't you?' 'No. Would it matter if I was? But no, I'm not.' 'Where are you from, Dahr?' 'Anchorage, Alaska.' It didn't go real well for him. I didn't even have a Middle-Eastern accent."

Jamail made two further trips to Iraq, but hasn't been back since early 2005. The danger was now too great, and he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. "Having never reported in a war zone before, I was ignorant about PTSD," he says. "I assumed that journalists didn't get it. I thought you had to be a combat soldier to get it. When I got home after my fourth trip, I started having trouble sleeping. I was constantly thinking about Iraq, getting random visions of the times when I would go into morgues, and feeling guilty that I could leave the country but the friends I had made there couldn't. I just felt numb a lot of the time. All of that put together made me realise that this was not the same guy that went over there, and that I needed some help. I took counselling, and still do it off and on when necessary."

When he returned to the US after his fourth visit to Iraq, he decided it was time to digest his experiences. He attended a session of the World Tribunal on Iraq in Rome and, rather like the Canadian hunter, reported what he had seen in the eight months he had spent in the country. He told of Iraqis who had given him accounts of being tortured, of towns collectively punished by being deprived of electricity, water and essential medical supplies, and of ambulances being shot at by US soldiers. "With 70% unemployment, a growing resistance and an infrastructure in shambles," he concluded, "the future for Iraq remains bleak as long as the failed occupation persists."

Jamail also embarked on his book - part reportage, part catharsis - and this summer plans to write another, this time on resistance to the war within the US military, based on the stories of soldiers he has met who engaged in sabotage and fake patrols (called "search and avoid" missions) to hamper the war effort. Then he plans to return to the Middle East and maybe even to Iraq, if the security situation allows him at least some degree of freedom to report. The return to the mountains will have to wait; his heart now is in the desert.

· Beyond the Green Zone is published by Haymarket Books (£11.99).

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has just won a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism for 2007

The award letter says that Jamail's work "has shown the depth of suffering and 'collateral damage' not readily captured in corporate media" and praises his "remarkable contribution to social justice journalism."

The awards ceremony is 5:30 p.m., Monday, April 14 at Hunter College in New York City.

For more information about the Aronson Award, visit
http://filmmedia.hunter.cuny.edu/Aronson

* BusinessWeek for its "The Poverty Business," which shows corporations are creating new sources of profit by luring unsophisticated and low-income consumers into a thicket of debt. The work demonstrates that the sub-prime mortgage crisis is only part of a much bigger injustice.

* The quarterly City Limits, which portrayed the "everyday injustice" suffered by low-income people facing criminal charges when they confront bail amounts they cannot afford and suffer consequences to their employment, families, or ability to mount a proper legal defense.

* Jeremy Scahill for his reporting on growing role at home and abroad of the Blackwater private military company

ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards were established to bring increased attention from librarians and booksellers to the literary achievements of independent publishers and their authors.

2007 Award winners to be announced May 29

Read the press release and view the list here

This is the rhetoric being used to entice U.S. citizens to voluntarily provide their biometric information to the U.S. government.

The program, called "clear," is being installed at airports around the country now. For a little background on this, view a post at this website from September 2005, called Securitizing the Global Norm of Identity: Biometric Technologies in Domestic and Foreign Policy.

In Fallujah, the cataloging of human beings has been involuntary since the U.S. siege of that city in November 2004. Having retina scans, fingerprinting and bar-code IDs is mandatory there for Iraqis.

But now, in the "homeland" of the United States, you too can join the happy club of those giving their biometric data to the federal government. Just bring two forms of government issued identification to your local Clear airport or various downtown location, enroll, pay the $128 fee, wait 2-3 weeks, and then if you are accepted, step up to your nearest scanner, and try not to blink as your retina is scanned.

These kiosks are planned for airports in New York, Denver, Oakland, and many others.

So, no need to be intimidated by the government's desire to use biometric data to catalog U.S. citizens, (or Iraqis for that matter), as you can rest more peacefully knowing you are now more secure.

You can learn more about this safe, fast, and helpful way to get through airport security in four minutes or less, here.

by JEREMY SCAHILL

[posted online on February 8, 2008]

EDITOR'S NOTE: Dahr Jamail has spent more time reporting from Iraq than almost any other US journalist. His new book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, is a chronicle of his experiences there. He recently sat down with Nation correspondent Jeremy Scahill to talk about the supposed "success" of Bush's troop surge, what would happen if Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton wins the White House and why he believes an immediate withdrawal from Iraq is the only way to peace. Here's an edited transcript of that interview.

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have indicated that US troops are not going to be withdrawn in any significant manner in the first term of a presidency. What do you think would happen if the US did withdraw immediately from Iraq?

And I think it's easy to see that when the US does pull out completely, we would have a dramatic de-escalation in violence. We would have increased stability and it would be the first logical step for Iraqis to form their own government. This time, it would actually have popular support, unlike the current government, where less than 1 percent of Iraqis polled even support it or even find it legitimate at all.

Now, obviously, we have a situation in Iraq right now that's very different from the era of Saddam Hussein: Many pockets of power, various leaders who have their own armed factions, and a much more significant Iranian influence. How do you see that playing out in the absence of US troops? What do you think would happen among those various groups that are vying for power, and have a significant volume of weapons?

One of the key reasons Iran has the influence it does in Iraq right now is because the US itself appointed Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki. We have to remember that he was in no way, shape or form democratically elected. After the January 30, 2005 elections, one of the first tasks of the government was to choose its own prime minister. It chose Ibrahim Al-Jaafari. And then when he wasn't toeing the US-UK line enough, Condoleezza Rice and her UK counterpart, Jack Straw, flew to Baghdad. And right before they left from their trip, Jaafari was out, Maliki was in.

Maliki, head of the Dawa party, was in exile in Tehran for numerous years, and is basically a political figurehead of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), whose armed wing, the Badr Organization, has staunch Iranian support. It was basically formed in Iran and came into Iraq on the heels of the invasion forces. So I think, again, with [Maliki] out, and with other Iranian puppets in the government out, we would have more nationalist Iraqis who would certainly be able to start making moves toward reconciliation.

Who do you see emerging in a post-occupation Iraq if the US did leave? What are the major political forces in the country that could unify Iraq under one national flag?

It's difficult to say at this point, but there are some political figures who do have popular support. There's a Shia cleric, Sheikh Jawad al-Khalasi, who has mass popular support. He's renowned for being able to bridge differences between Sunni and Shia political groups right now. There's Dr. Wamid Omar Nadhmi, a Sunni, who also has that same effect. He's relatively nonsectarian, compared to everyone else on the scene right now. They have started to form a shadow--I wouldn't say government, but certainly political organization--that is a coalition of many different groups. There's Al-Khalasi, there's Dr. Wamid Omar Nadhmi, there's Kurds, there's Christians, there's Turkomen, there's numerous groups represented in this political structure that they have right now. It's based primarily out of Syria, and sometimes they have meetings in Jordan, but this type of political structure would be able to come in and, I think, begin to fill what vacuum would be created.

You've spent a lot of time in Al-Anbar province and in Sunni areas of Iraq. And we've seen the United States and the commanders declare Anbar province a "victory." We've also seen some Sunni puppet figures who have allied themselves with the United States assassinated in recent months, most prominently Abu Risha. What happened in Al-Anbar province?

What's happening in Al-Anbar province today is akin to what the US did in Fallujah, when they were repelled out of the city during the April 04 siege. They essentially saved face by ceasing patrols and buying off the militants in the city. They put them on the payroll--mujahedeen basically started donning Iraqi police uniforms and Iraqi civil defense corps uniforms--and took over control of security of the city. When I interviewed them in May, they said this was the most peace they'd had in the city since before the invasion had ever taken place. They were quite happy with it, most people in the city were quite happy with that situation.

But essentially, the US plan ended up backfiring. Because they had to go back in the city in November, they didn't want it to remain the only liberated city in the country. That fighting was far more violent and took so many more deaths, on both sides of the conflict, than even the April siege did. And so we have now a macro version of that same policy in Al-Anbar, where various tribal sheikhs who are willing to collaborate have stepped up. They're taking millions and millions of dollars of US taxpayer money. They're basically being bought off to not fight against the Americans, while simultaneously the Americans, for the moment in Al-Anbar, are sticking closer to their bases, and relying more on airpower than ground troops if any fighting breaks out.

And so right now, that's why Al-Anbar is notably more quiet. But it's a ticking time bomb. Because this is a policy where even US soldiers on the ground right now in Al-Anbar are expressing concerns. They know all too well that they're now working with these people who, three days ago or three weeks ago, they were actually fighting. And some of these people are still lobbing mortars into their bases at night.

So we have tensions. We have the US military trying to ID all these people, so that when things become violent again, they'll know who these people are and where to go get them, while simultaneously, these same fighters are, of course, gathering very, very valuable intelligence by being able to work with the Americans and go around with them.

You've spent about eight months in Iraq unembedded. A lot of your time was spent with ordinary Iraqis, documenting the suffering, the deaths, the civilian injuries. You've also spent time in other countries talking to Iraqi refugees. One of the things that's lost in the mainstream coverage is the extent of the death that's happened in Iraq. In fact, there was an AP-Ipsos poll not too long ago that found that a majority of Americans believed that fewer than 10,000 Iraqis had died since the start of the invasion. Give a sense of the scope of the death that has taken place in Iraq.

This is a good example of why the media coverage is still so horribly skewed. Even though a lot of people tend to think, "Well, the media is coming around a little bit, that it is showing that the occupation is not going well, and that there's suffering." But really, contrast what you may see in some of the larger media outlets with some of these figures from the ground in Iraq.

We look at, for example, how many people have died, based on figures primarily produced by The Lancet report in October '06, which showed 655,000 Iraqis had been killed, or 2.5 percent of the total population of the country.

Another group, called Just Foreign Policy, has taken those figures and extrapolated from them based on more recent media reports, because that first survey, that Lancet survey, the legwork was carried out in July 2005. And so from that time until this time, with new data, it's now estimated by the group Just Foreign Policy that over 1,100,000 Iraqis have been killed. In addition to that, we can estimate that, very conservatively, another 3 million are wounded. According to the UN these figures are too low as well; I've been told this by a UN spokesperson myself when I was in Syria last summer.

Current figures: 2.5 million internally displaced Iraqis in their own country, another 2.5 million refugees outside of the country. In addition to that, another 4 million Iraqis are in dire need of emergency assistance, according to an Oxfam International report released last July. When we take into account the fact that Iraq's total population has fallen from 27 million, when the invasion was launched, to now roughly 23 million, when we add all those figures up, that means over half the total population of the entire country are either refugees--in or out of their country--wounded, in dire need of emergency aid, or dead.

In addition to that, we have the infrastructure, where on every measurable level, it's worse now than it was after nearly thirty years of Saddam Hussein's reign, and twelve years of genocidal sanctions. Even oil exports have not for one day been at or above pre-war levels--and this is where Iraq gets 90 percent of its income. Electricity: the average home has anywhere from zero hours of electricity per day to maybe six or seven hours on a really good day. Unemployment: It's between 60 or 70 percent, vacillating right now. During the sanctions, it was roughly 33 percent, which is about what it was here during the Great Depression. So 60 to 70 percent unemployment, on top of that, 70 percent inflation. We have 45 percent of Iraqis living in abject poverty on less than $1 per day. Seventy percent of Iraqis don't even have access to safe drinking water. So that gives you an idea of the magnitude of how horrific the suffering really has become. According to Refugees International, it's the fastest-growing refugee crisis on the planet.

You haven't been to Iraq for a number of months, but you are regularly in touch with Iraqis on the ground. In fact, a lot of the articles that you do you co-author with Iraqi colleagues still on the ground. Many of the journalists who do go to Iraq are trapped in the Green Zone-- or what an Iraqi friend of mine calls the Green Zoo. And so, in a way, you may be in a better position to analyze what's happening there, because of your regular contact with unembedded Iraqi journalists. Give us a couple of examples of news that's not making it out of Iraq.

I was recently working on a story about Fallujah because one of my Iraqi colleagues lives there. And again, contrast this with what maybe you've been hearing about Fallujah. In fact, it's even been held up by various Bush Administration officials over the last several months as a model city. Look, it's calmer, things are better now, the plan is working, the surge is working. Well in Fallujah, according to my friend who lives there, the security measures that were imposed around the city by the US military during the November '04 siege--the biometric data, the retina scans, the fingerprinting, the mandatory, bar-coded IDs for everyone trying to go in and out of the city. That remains, that has not changed at all. In addition to that, businesspeople estimate that there's approximately 80 percent unemployment in the city. There are entire neighborhoods that still do not have electricity or running water since the November '04 siege. There's still tens of thousands of refugees from the city from the April '04 siege, not even talking about November.

There's been a vehicle ban, to one degree or another, imposed on the city since May. So how do you live in a city of 350,000 people, when the majority of the time, you can't even drive a vehicle. Most people are either walking or literally using horse-drawn or donkey-drawn carts. And he quoted a man as saying, relatively recently, that yes, it is quieter in Fallujah today, but it's the same quiet as a dead body is quiet. That there's no normal life, that the hospital there doesn't get medicines and things that it needs, because of the corruption of the Ministry of Health in Baghdad, and the bias that's there. And just to give you an idea. That's life in Fallujah today, where there's literally no normal life.

And that's in a city that the US is holding up as a victory?

Exactly.

I know your expertise is not necessarily US domestic politics, but like all of us, you're following the presidential campaign. Do you see any marked difference for Iraqis in the event of a Hillary Clinton presidency or a Barack Obama presidency?

I don't. They've both already officially taken the idea of total unconditional withdrawal of all occupation forces out of Iraq off the table, until after their first term, if one of them is elected. So it's off the table already until 2013, even before one of them would come into power, if that is going to happen. In reality, they in no way are reflecting the will of the troops on the ground in Iraq, or the majority of Americans now who are opposed to the occupation. And certainly not respecting the will of the Iraqi people, where the most conservative polls I've found have shown that 85 percent, at a minimum now, of the total population of Iraq are completely opposed to the occupation and want it to end, right now.

Iraqis are willing to take the risk of what might happen if that much-discussed "power vacuum" is created. And the reality is that the only real first step to a solution in Iraq is full, immediate, unconditional withdrawal, while simultaneously re-funding all the reconstruction projects and turning them over to Iraqi concerns. So this idea of, "You break it, you buy it." Well, there's no buying happening. There's nothing being done by Western contractors on the ground to improve the basic life necessities of any Iraqi in that country right now.

And the other factor is, which candidate is talking about compensation for the Iraqi people? Every Iraqi person who's suffered from this situation deserves full compensation from this government. Because this is the government that perpetrated the war and continues on in this illegal occupation. So, I don't see any of these mainstream candidates talking about any of these things, which are really essential if we're going to talk about a solution to this catastrophe in Iraq.

Book experts, AlterNet staff and readers weighed in. Here are the groundbreakers that stood out from the crowd.

By Don Hazen, AlterNet
Posted on January 31, 2008

1. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
2. Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill
3. Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq
by Dahr Jamail
Haymarket Books

One of the few unaffiliated journalists in Iraq, journalist Jamail went to see the conditions for himself, and the compelling, heartbreaking stories he sent back over his eight-month stay were carried in publications worldwide: from family houses destroyed with their inhabitants to mosques full of people held under siege to the ill-equipped medical facilities and security forces meant to deal with them. (Publishers Weekly)

---

Beyond the Green Zone is a Number 1 staff pick at Powell's Books

Adam S.
1. Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq by Dahr Jamail

George Orwell once said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." No one has captured that revolutionary spirit more than Dahr Jamail. Jamail, like all of us, heard the lies the media was spewing to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq and decided to go there "to counter what they were doing by showing the real situation on the ground." This book collects a number of his essays from the eight months he spent in Iraq and provides the reader a rare opportunity to hear about the war from the vantage point of the people of the Middle East.

Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq

Author: Dahr Jamail

Upcoming Schedule

Sunday, January 13, at 6:00 AM
Sunday, January 13, at 2:00 PM
Sunday, January 13, at 10:00 PM

About the Program

Dahr Jamail talks about his experiences working as an unembedded journalist in Iraq and discusses what life is like for Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. The talk was held at the Unitarian Universalist Church in San Diego.

About the Author

Along with Iraq, Dahr Jamail has reported from Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. He is a special correspondent for KPFA's "Flashpoints" and has appeared on Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now!". For more, visit dahrjamailiraq.com.

Read the full posting at Tom Engelhardt's TomDispatch.com

Thursday 03 January 2008

We were a minority, but still, there were many of us to whom it was as plain as the nose on our own face, in the fall of 2002 when the great "marketing campaign" for the Iraq war was rolled out, that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and no connection whatsoever to 9/11, that the war was an illegal act of aggression that could only hearten enemies of the United States. Some of us turned out for the great global "focus group" of February 15, 2003; some of us wrote to the editor, argued with family members and neighbors, were horrified by the mainstream media's pornographic endorsement of "Shock and Awe," but Dahr Jamail came down from his job as a Park Service rescue ranger on Mt. Denali in Alaska, and, armed with $2,000, a laptop, digital camera, and some indie media listserve advice about how to get there, set off for Baghdad. What he has described as "an act of desperation" provoked by his sense of complicity as an American is also, in a very real sense, an ultimate act of patriotism, an assertion that Americans are better than what we have done in Iraq, a faith he still champions that:

"If the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended ... If people in my country could hear the stories of life under occupation and put themselves in Iraqis' stories, they would understand. I hold that hope because the stories of Iraq are our story now."

Jamail's conviction that telling the Iraqis' stories is a path to personal and perhaps national redemption provides his book with a focus, perspective and objective very different from the so-called "objectivity" of the "professional" journalist. Perhaps, because he is aware of his absence of "professional" credentials, this citizen journalist makes it clear he verifies his stories, checks his sources, and generally applies the standards "professional" journalism contents itself with paying lip service to. By adopting the standpoint of the occupied, he is forced to violate one of the most fundamental tropes of mainstream media reporting: the sacrosanct virtue, integrity and wholesomeness of US military personnel.

Americans may not be able - or willing - to put themselves "into Iraqis' stories," but Jamail reproduces Iraqi voices:

Quite soon after his arrival, he observes US troops fanning out in the street from a balcony where he stands with Iraqi interpreter and driver Hamoudi. Jamail describes one soldier twitching, jerking and swiveling as he walks backward. Hamoudi leans over and says, "Look at that poor bastard. It's clear to anyone with eyes that he has mental problems from being here doing this shit job."

Dr. Aisha Abdulla in the supply room at Yarmouk Hospital rages against the occupiers:

"They've destroyed the foundations of Iraq - what do you think we can do without foundations? Even if the Americans stay here 15 years, there will be no security ... Anything they do or build is superficial, not fundamental. Abu Ghraib attacked the dignity of the Iraqi people. Did America not become barbarians from killing Indians, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Afghanis, and bombing us and our young children, who now have psychological scars? If these did not reveal the true barbarian nature of America, then Abu Ghraib did. I never liked Saddam, nor did I support him, but at least under the dictator there was order and some basic services. Now, there is no order, no electricity, no fundamental stability."

One detainee released in the spring of 2004, tells Jamail, "The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house."

An Iraqi policeman comments on the case of an Iraqi driving home from work who was gunned down by US troops, "This is the usual policy of the Americans. They always shoot first, because there is nobody to punish them for their mistakes."

And Jamail shows how US brutality and heedlessness, the military having "all the power and no accountability," radicalized ordinary Iraqis from the outset, as their sense of justice and honor was repeatedly outraged. Without even making an explicit argument, the book wholly refutes the notion that a continuation of the occupation in any form could promote stability: By the time Jamail arrived in November 2003, all trust and any sense of joint purpose between occupier and occupied had already been exhausted.

"Beyond the Green Zone" details what it's like to be on the receiving end of troops searching a boy's high school for boys who took part in a pro-Saddam demonstration and threw rocks, of house searches that end in murder and destruction, of arrests that end in torture and death, of "reconstruction" that leaves people drinking sewage - but only during the hour in the day the electricity is running - of assassination attempts on independent journalists, and, most notably, of the two sieges of Fallujah.

The coverage of war crimes in Fallujah: the use of cluster munitions and white phosphorous against civilians; the targeting of hospitals, clinics and ambulances; snipers hitting women and children is more vivid because he introduces the people of Fallujah, whom he met prior to either siege; describes how the city turned from moderately cooperative with the occupation to totally opposed to it; how its people gloried in self-government between the April and November 2004 sieges; how virtually everything the US military did there boomeranged.

The stories of Iraqis' resourcefulness, hospitality, sense of humor and warmth; Jamail's descriptions of shared meals and experiences that are spread throughout the book, are other angles, missed - in every sense of the word - by embedded reporters for whom the Iraqis are always "the other." Jamail, instead, conveys Iraqis' shock - because it has become his own - at the apparently wanton bulldozing of a grove of date palm trees that belonged to his interlocutors' fathers' fathers' fathers, at a friend's inability to get home from a shopping trip because she lost her American-issued biometric ID card, at the vastly inflated turn-out numbers in the Iraqi elections reported by the US media.

Jamail's immediate and intense identification with the Iraqis he encountered and his ability to convey their experience makes for matchless reportage. His book is also very strong on deconstructing propaganda: This is what happened; this is what the US media, the Pentagon or the CPA reported. Jamail may have been reporting too close in to provide an outside perspective on how Iraqi society works: He ascribes sectarian violence largely to US troublemaking, but the basis and trends of Iraqi allegiance is not clear. One fixer describes an Iraqi policeman as a "US spy"; Jamail refers to "militants," and certainly describes how they are created, but the patterns of loyalty, rivalry and leadership are no clearer from his unembedded perspective than they are in the mainstream media vocabulary of "insurgents," "foreign fighters," "Shia factions," Sunni tribesmen" etc.

That is both the weakness and the strength of choosing the perspective from the ground, of ordinary Iraqis still reeling from their world being turned upside down, trying to survive and to protect their families, still testing narratives that can make sense of their lived experience.

And by bringing us their voices, their experience, trying to project us into the lives of ordinary Iraqis, the ones who could be you or me, were we willing to exercise our imagination and put ourselves into their stories. Dahr Jamail continues to try and rescue his fellow citizens from obliviousness, folly, hubris, from the consequences of their heedlessness, just as surely and courageously as he did on the slopes of Denali.

An Interview With Dahr Jamail
Leslie Thatcher Interviews Dahr Jamail
t r u t h o u t | Interview

Thursday 03 January 2008

Leslie Thatcher for Truthout: First of all, Dahr Jamail, thank you for your book and for bringing us the voices and experiences of ordinary Iraqis. Thanks also for taking the stories of Americans who oppose the invasion and occupation to them.

It was clear from your book that your periods in the US, in between trips to Iraq, took on a surreal character, that "the American dream" took on a completely new meaning after the intensity and harsh realities of war. Do you ever regret your decision to go to Iraq?

Dahr Jamail: Not for one instant. It is critical for me, and I believe other US citizens, to have a full knowledge of the situation in Iraq.

How do you personally adjust to being unable to return to Iraq for the moment?

Of course, it is extremely frustrating. I would return in an instant if I felt I could report unembedded without jeopardizing the life of any Iraqi who worked with me, but that's just not possible now. Fortunately, I'm in a position to be able to continue reporting by working with several Iraqi colleagues who remain in their country; so, in this way, I have been able to remain closely connected to the situation even though I have not been back inside Iraq for two years.

And how should we reconcile your inability to return because of the danger to yourself, and especially the danger to your Iraqi colleagues, with the statistics General Petraeus offered this past weekend suggesting Iraq has become a safer place?

The rhetoric and propaganda about the occupation from hacks like Petraeus and Bush administration officials would make Orwell proud. If we simply look at the facts on the ground: over five million refugees, over four million in need of emergency aid, over three million wounded, and over one million dead - how could any rational person ever define that as good? Or safer? Or improving? The reality is that since the so-called surge began, the number of displaced Iraqis has quadrupled, tens of thousands more have been killed, and the deepening political crisis within the Iraqi government has increased in severity.

Finally, the fact that Muqtada al-Sadr has his militia, the largest in the country, on stand-down orders, while the US military is arming and backing various Sunni militias and former resistance fighters has led to a sharp, albeit temporary, decrease in the number of US soldiers being killed. But I wouldn't necessary classify this ticking time bomb as an "improvement."

One problem for Americans trying to understand what is happening in Iraq is trying sort out the country's various political characters and factions. For example, until I read your book, I had believed that Muqtada al-Sadr was generally considered responsible for the April 2003 assassination of Ayatollah Abdul Majid al-Khoei in Najaf. But you write that Sadr had disproved his involvement in the killing. How did he do that? Who is al-Sadr "really"? And whom do Iraqis or do you consider responsible for al-Khoei's assassination?

An Iraqi court had already found Sadr innocent of that accusation, long before Bremer decided to blame him for it and use it as an excuse to begin military operations against Sadr and his militia.

Sadr is a young, fiery, anti-occupation Shia cleric who inherited his position of power via familial ties. He has excellent advisers and has played his position, politically, quite well throughout the occupation. He has expressed loyalty to Iran, when less than two years ago during one of the louder instances of bellicose Bush administration rhetoric against Iran, Sadr announced, from Tehran, that any attack on Iran would be an attack against himself and his followers and he would respond appropriately. He has already called for two uprisings against the US military, and, in time, will likely do so again. For now, his militia controls most of Baghdad, and much of the south.

Who do Iraqis consider responsible for al-Khoei's assassination?

That would depend on whom you ask and what their politics are. A great number blame the Americans, which is common now in Iraq - for the occupation forces to be blamed for anything bad that occurs.

Do you have a sense of what the group dynamics are today, whether there is genuine sectarian civil war or some elements of that with other forces at work? What are those forces?

When we discuss sectarianism in Iraq, we mustn't underestimate the role the US has played in fostering it. From the beginning, including the US-installed Iraqi Governing Council, which was structured to appoint positions of power strictly along sectarian and ethnic lines, the US has been playing the game of divide and rule.

The most important element of this, I believe, is the US role in establishing sectarian based death squads in Iraq. I discuss this at length in my book; but, in sum, Negroponte and Steele, two men who did the same in Central America in the 1980s, played crucial roles in organizing and facilitating these death squads.

These death squads, along with sectarian-based militias, have split Baghdad up into sectarian neighborhoods; and, today, we're looking at the end-game of this process where the capital is now nearly completely segregated.

Of course, there is also the element of power struggles within various groups, political and otherwise, within Iraq as well, in addition to the fact that every single country in the region, literally, has a hand in Iraq.

In the book, you make some flat statements about US motives: "Bremer's real reason for delaying the election was to allow sufficient time to install a 'stable' pro-American puppet government in Baghdad ... A legitimately elected Iraqi government would have demanded an immediate timetable for withdrawal of the occupying forces. It was to avoid this fate that the US government wanted to postpone the elections and to create conditions of bloody sectarian chaos that would irreversible fragment the country," suggesting that there was a malicious plan to foment sectarian strife rather than "mere" ineptitude at work. Are these the views also generally held by the Iraqis you know?

Most Iraqis I know and spoke with about this felt similarly. Carrying on with the example of sectarianism - it's not a coincidence that, prior to the invasion and occupation, there were mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, and had never been sectarian based civil war.

Insert the occupation, and the policies of the US government, and we have violent sectarian civil war, sectarian cleansed Baghdad, sectarian based death squads backed by the US, and marriages between Sunni and Shia which are being split up. It's not a complex equation to figure out, particularly when you have the details of US policy, which I also address in my book.

Have you any additional evidence for US training and backing of sectarian death squads? Your book quotes a Kucinich letter to Rumsfeld of which I had been unaware. Certainly, the way the war has been funded and the reappearance of Iran contra personalities suggests the means are there.

I discuss retired Col. James Steele as well, along with how these squads were run via the Ministry of Interior, which was, of course, being funded and overseen by the US and a US "adviser."

I also mention in the book the fact that Rumsfeld publicly discussed the "Salvador option" in Iraq, as a means of attempting to tame the "insurgency," as it continued to spread and grow in lethality after the second US attack on Fallujah.

Your contention that democracy was never an objective is certainly supported by the illegal Maliki-Bush deal to keep US troops in Iraq, although the Iraqi parliament does not support it, and by US support for Turkey bombing Kurdistan, the one semi-functional area of the country. What do you believe the US administration is striving for now?

Permanent occupation, as they have been from the beginning. As I wrote in an article for Truthout in Spring 2006, all one needs to do is read the US National Security Strategy and make up their own mind what they think the US is up to in the Middle East. In addition, look at the "embassy" and types of mega-bases which are being constructed in Iraq. The Bush administration itself has told reporters, within the last year, to think of the occupation along a timeline of the US bases in South Korea. I would add, ask yourself how long the US has had bases in Germany, in Japan. But those have never been referred to as permanent either.

This administration, and future administrations like that of a Hillary Clinton or Rudy Giuliani for example, will likely push for decreasing troop numbers to 50,000 or so, and keep them on the bases and embassy. That's the plan, and thus far, they are heading in that direction.

You spoke eloquently on "Democracy Now" about how Iraq became an "atrocity-creating situation", which explains, if not excuses, US soldiers' brutality; but who/what do you believe is responsible for US soldiers' ignorance? Has five years of occupation made the troops any more culturally aware, as far as you know?

Big question - but I think it's a number of factors. The education system in the US is a joke, the fact that most people serving in the military have not had the privilege of traveling abroad to experience different cultures, ignorance, prejudice, fear and racism are all critical factors.

Being a journalist, I blame the media, particularly the establishment media in the US. With few exceptions, the media has, from the very beginning, dehumanized Iraqis and Arab culture, and done well to instill fear, ignorance and loathing into American homes regarding the situation in the Middle East. Let alone US historical involvement, and answering some of the questions about why there is anti-American sentiment in the region to begin with.

You make clear that "embeds" cannot see what you saw, such as the Iraqis who celebrated after the departure of US troops in April 2004 with a parade and victory celebration, that Western non-embeds like yourself can no longer report in-country, and that independent Iraqi journalists run huge risks such as the assassination attempt on journalist Ismail Zayer or AP photographer Bilal Hussein's 18 month plus detention and upcoming rigged trial. What sources can Americans trust to provide actual news of what's happening in Iraq now?

This web site consistently does a fine job of posting important news stories about Iraq. I also suggest finding English translations of Arab news outlets. Today in Iraq, the only reporters going around unembedded are Iraqis and Arabs from other countries in the Middle East. Al-Jazeera Arabic is a good source, if you can get it translated, among others. I also suggest the Mosaic program with Link TV, which is translated news, and MidEastWire.com, a critical source of translated news from throughout the Middle East. But with few exceptions, most of the news produced about Iraq in establishment media outlets in the US is akin to that from state-run media outlets.

When, in your book, the translator Harb suggests the Iraqi policeman apparently helping you to investigate an incident is actually a US spy, I, as a reader, was immediately plunged into a "spy vs. spy" world. Did you as a reporter ever feel it was difficult to tell black from white?

Yes. It was quite confusing at times, and often was difficult to not be overly paranoid. But such is reporting from any war zone. The key for me was finding Harb, and a few of the other translators I mentioned in my book, people I could really trust, and work with them consistently. That way we had experiences to build on, and after awhile, came to be able to look at each other and know what the other was thinking, which came in handy in tight situations.

I had a policy of always interviewing different people, at different times, in different locations, about events. That way, I didn't open myself up to being taken advantage of, or to being used to spread rumors or propaganda.

Some stories now coming out of the US (I'm thinking, for example, of Robin Fox's "Kindness of Strangers" or Sunday's New York Times's article, "Feed the Hand that Bit You") suggest that Iraqis have no sense of larger society because they can't get beyond family and tribal allegiances, or that Iraqis lost their initiative and ability to get things done under the dictatorship. That was certainly not the sense of Iraqi society I got from your book?

No, because Iraqis are an advanced culture, civilization, and the area is the historic location of where and how the west obtained much of its math and science. The articles you mention, particularly the Times piece, are a fine example of what I mentioned earlier - of how establishment media plays a critical role in dehumanizing Iraqis, of showing them as the "other" and/or less-than you or I. That type of propaganda then becomes useful for an administration which envisions a long-term presence in Iraq, as it serves to portray Iraqis as a people unable to take care of themselves, or worse, unwilling, all of which is nonsense.

That type of thinking is not new for Empires - Throughout history this type of mindset, and that type of propaganda, has been used by empires as they invade countries, plunder their resources and commit acts of savagery upon other people.

Finally, Dahr Jamail, you write, "If the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended ... If people in my country could hear the stories of life under occupation and put themselves in Iraqis' stories, they would understand. I hold that hope because the stories of Iraq are our story now." Can you still maintain that hope, knowing as you do, that ten years of sanctions before, the occupation had already broken lives and damaged infrastructure and that it has only gotten worse?

I do still believe that if people had the facts, and are willing to use their imagination in order to put themselves in the shoes of Iraqis today who are suffering greatly under US occupation, that things would look differently. Do I hope for that? I guess I cannot really say that I do. But I think it is imperative that people have the information available so they can, perhaps one day, know the truth about what the US is doing, and has done in Iraq.

Sometimes, I fall back on something the journalist Robert Fisk, who writes for the Independent in the UK, wrote. He said that at the end of the day, as wars continue to be fought and atrocities continue to be carried out, and people ask why and how this can continue, one thing they won't be able to say is, "But nobody ever told us this was happening."

It is our job as journalists to make sure that remains the case, particularly in regard to the catastrophic US occupation of Iraq.

Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

December 19, 2007

[by Scott Thill]

Dahr Jamail is that rarity in today's journalism: An intrepid truth-teller who enters the line of fire unprotected by the planet's greatest superpower. He may be unembedded, but his award-winning work, out now in the form of an amazing book called Beyond the Green Zone, is bulletproof with truth. And we need that more than ever nowadays, as the Iraqmire spirals into oblivion and the American empire falters. With an election on tap and no incentive for the Democrats to change course if they win in 2008, we could be looking at the last days of the United States as we know it. And we saw it coming the whole time.

Morphizm: Do you find it somewhat ironic that you are a journalist, wanting to get the truth out?

Morphizm: You didn't expect it?
DJ: I assumed, perhaps naively, that millions of other Americans were equally offended. So after the invasion was launched, I decided one thing I could do was go see the occupation for myself and write about it for a few folks back in Alaska, and that's what I did. Once I started writing about what was happening during the occupation, how rapidly it was spiraling out of control -- my first trip brought me to Baghdad in November 2003 -- the obvious need for independent journalism from Iraq was glaring, so I opted to stay with it.

Morphizm: Did you have any idea is was going to be the clusterfuck it turned into?
DJ: I had low expectations. I'd been reading enough Arab, independent, and alternative news sources to know that things weren't going swimmingly for the occupiers, even just seven months into it. I knew going in that there were going to be scant signs of the promised reconstruction, and that there was already a budding armed resistance, which was growing at a rapid rate. Nevertheless, when I arrived in Baghdad, the chaos, frustration and obvious disintegration of society amazed me. I was shocked that everything was coming apart at the seams as rapidly as it was. Nothing was working. Instead of things slowly improving, as one would have expected to see at least some evidence of something positive happening, there was nothing but strife. Of course, it hit overdrive in spring 2004 with the first Sadr intifada, which coincided with the first U.S.-led assault on Fallujah. By then, it was over. The occupation was lost. Throw in the Abu Ghraib photos, the total destruction of Fallujah in November 2004, and a few Hadithas for good measure later on, and we can safely say history will remember the beginning of the end of the U.S. empire project occurring in Iraq.

Morphizm: What do you think is the chief discrepancy between the armchair journalists who opine on the occupation, and those who have actually gone there?
DJ: I think it is more the difference between those of us who choose not to embed and those who agree to work as hacks for the Pentagon by embedding. Let us not forget, the embedded reporter program that we have today was constructed by the Pentagon to use as a means of information control, and information management. First implemented during the senior Bush's attack on Iraq in 1991, it has been greatly augmented into what we see today. Journalists who choose not to work as hacks for the Pentagon get to see what the occupation is like from the other side of the gun. We go out and talk to Iraqis firsthand, and understand what it's like to live with no potable water, no job, no government, no security, and the constant threat of death. Basically, we get to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell what it's like to live under a brutal, failed occupation that has no end in sight, and report on it, as opposed to going around with a military unit and reporting what it's like to occupy someone else's country.

Morphizm: You argue that this was obviously a war over oil, but do you think it was a war to commandeer it or to stifle its production to enrich connected business interests of Bush and Cheney?
DJ: It was a war about oil and the geostrategic positioning of the U.S. military. They go hand in hand. It wasn't about going in and having Halliburton drop the pumps and start bringing all of Iraq's oil into American's SUVs right away. It was about getting to that oil first, before Russia and/or China could. Now, if or when the U.S. begins to bomb Iran, and attempts to install another puppet regime there, the U.S. government will be in a position to determine, or at least heavily influence, the the price of oil and natural gas, as well as rendering OPEC a sideshow. The other factor is the privatization and contracts granted to western corporations, of which there are now over 680, operating inside Iraq. One of the more blatant examples, Halliburton, provides the most glaring case of a corporation driving U.S. Middle East policy. I outline clearly in my book how Cheney, from back in 1992 when he was Secretary of Defense, managed the privatization of much of the U.S. military. We are looking at the results of his diligent work, where Halliburton, which the Vice President still has financial ties to, has the contract to supply, service and maintain all of the U.S. military bases around the globe, of which the DOD admits to 725. That's a lot of work, and a lot of money to made, particularly when they are the permanent type of bases which we have in Iraq today.

Morphizm: Are we ever going to leave? Has global warming and peak oil certified our permanence in the region?
DJ: It does not appear as though the U.S. has any intention of leaving until all of the oil in Iraq is gone. There are several documents that show us what the plan is. Rather than quoting them at length, I'll list them so folks can read them for themselves:

U.S. National Security Strategy, updated March 2006
Quadrennial Defense Review Report
Project for the New American Century.

On top of those, we have all the physical evidence we need on the ground in Iraq: An "embassy" the size of the Vatican City, some of the largest U.S. bases in the world, complete with first-run movie theaters, rental car agencies, Starbucks, Burger Kings, Subway sandwich shops, swimming pools, yoga studios, and shopping complexes. The U.S. is lengthening most of the existing runways at the air bases, fortifying the walls and blast barriers, and really digging in. There is not one single indicator to lead people to think the U.S. has any plans whatsoever of total withdrawal. Even the leading so-called Democratic Presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama and John Edwards, have all taken the idea of total withdrawal from Iraq off the table until after their first term in office, if one of them is to come into power.

Morphizm: I read an article describing the building of a U.S. military base directly on top of a oil rig. Did you see such a blatant takeover during your stay?
DJ: Absolutely, from Camp Victory at the airport to the so-called Green Zone which takes up the middle of Baghdad to many of the bases -- like Camp Anaconda at Balad -- they are massive, being augmented as we speak. The trend of running fewer patrols and keeping more troops on the bases is ongoing. If you want an idea of what the occupation of Iraq might look like in a couple of years, look at the occupation of Afghanistan. It's two years older, and that's what we see there now -- fewer patrols, turning the country over to various warlords, staying in the bases, and a more heavy use of air power.

Morphizm: How much of this is resource war, and how much of it is cultural imperialism?
DJ: I do. This is not a "clash of civilizations" or a war of "good vs. evil" or any of that mindless nonsense. This is about controlling dwindling resources. The world runs on oil, and whoever controls the price and access of that resource will, largely, dominate the world, and that is the U.S. agenda. Again, read the three documents I mentioned above. It really could not be any clearer what the U.S. agenda in the Middle East, let alone the world, is at this point. The rhetoric about the clash between Christianity and Islam is just propaganda. A method of scaring people and playing to peoples emotions, and as you aptly describe it, a smokescreen to hide the true agenda -- global domination by one country. It's lunacy, and the U.S. has set itself up for quite a fall, which we're already starting to see with the value of the dollar plummeting, total loss of respect of the country around the globe, anti-American sentiment at never-before-seen levels, a military that has shone the world how inept and weak it really is in the battlefield, a completely immoral administration/senate/congress , I could go on and on...and I haven't even mentioned debt, the U.S. basically waging wars on the credit card, who owns the brunt of our debt, etc...this country is in it deep, and it's about to be get deeper.

Morphizm: How extensive was your exposure to Blackwater, and what are your thoughts on the privatization of war?
DJ: Early on I saw the mercenary companies (not just Blackwater) racing around in their armored white SUV's, guns bristling out the windows, often shooting at cars whilst trying to make their way through the horrible traffic of Baghdad. When I showed up in November 2003, Blackwater had already earned the hatred of Iraqis, because of conducting so many random killings, usually just because cars got to close to their convoys. They love their little Kiowa helicopters also-the two seater types where they have a gunner hanging out one of the side doors. They use them heavily, oftentimes as air cover for a convoy when they are transporting an ambassador, diplomat, or one of the Iraqi puppets in the government. It was common to see them running around doing their own thing -- whether it was running around the streets of Baghdad firing their weapons in the air, or at civilians, or going into neighborhoods to kidnap people, or doing their own home raids. They operated completely on their own much of the time, and of course, as we all see now, with complete immunity to any law.

Morphizm: Is it a future trend we can stop?
DJ: That depends on if we're able to scrap this totally corrupted government and start over with something resembling democracy. Otherwise, all aspects of the government, whether we're talking the military, the CIA, disaster response teams, public schools, go on down the line, are headed towards total privatization. Blackwater, horrible as it is, is but a symptom of a very deep cancer.

Morphizm: Do you feel a Democratic administration can handle the extrication of American influence from Iraq? Or do you feel they're sold on staying there as well?
DJ: They are as much in bed with this plutocracy or corporatocracy as the Republicans. Some have called the Democrats
the B-Team of the corporate capitalists, and I think that is right on. Take Iraq as a shining example: This has been a bipartisan war that has spanned decades. We can go back to the 1950s and find the CIA giving the Baath Party the names of communists and dissidents. In the 60s, they helped Saddam Hussein into a position of power, supported him in the 70s, supported both Iraq and Iran during the brutal eight-year war in the '80s, and in particular supported Hussein during some of his worst atrocities. Then of course we have Bush Sr.'s assault on Iraq in '91, followed by the harshest eight years of the genocidal economic sanctions, which were overseen by Clinton while he conducted the longest sustained bombing campaign against any country since Vietnam. Then we have little Bush and the current situation, and people like Pelosi too fearful for her political life to file the articles of impeachment. Same with Conyers, same with most of them. They're all in bed with the system, and have no motive to get out. All of them are feeding at the same trough. Any real change will only come from a popular uprising here. I just keep wondering what more it is going to take to mobilize people so that they begin to act as responsible citizens of a democracy, as we drift deeper into a fascist police state each day.

A grim picture of young American soldiers acting violently against an often-invisible threat.

Author: Dahr Jamail
Genre: Society/Politics
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Pages: 313
RRP: $39.95

Nearly five years since the start of the Iraq war, we still know remarkably little about the conflict and its effect on the Iraqi people. A recent study by British polling agency ORB found that more than 1 million Iraqis had been killed since 2003 and the UN reports that more than 4 million internal and external refugees now struggle for safety.

Dahr Jamail, an independent American journalist, was a mountain guide in Alaska before the 2003 invasion. He had no formal journalism training and was simply a concerned citizen who found himself increasingly frustrated with the corporate media's enabling of the Bush Administration's war. He took a laptop and small digital camera and headed to Iraq, initially just reporting his observations via email to a small group of friends.

Soon his work was picked up by independent news services and his brutally honest dispatches revealed American torture, home raids across the country and the use of white phosphorous in Fallujah. His compelling book dispenses with the false concept of journalistic objectivity and focuses on the ways in which the Iraqi victims of "our" war have been forgotten.

Beyond The Green Zone compiles Jamail's writings and paints a grim picture of young American soldiers acting violently and out of control against an often-invisible threat. Leading investigative reporter Seymour Hersh commented a few years ago that US soldiers were committing war crimes in Iraq on a daily basis and Jamail witnesses foreign forces using Iraqi civilians as human shields, firing indiscriminately into crowds of unarmed children and withholding medical treatment in cities.

As in Vietnam, many mainstream journalists don't tell their audiences what is going on, haven't seen it because they're embedded and attached to the military or label such actions the work of a few "bad apples". Jamail reveals the delusion of this position. He is honest about his contempt for the Western mission in Iraq but remains shocked at the lack of care for the citizens being "liberated".

Jamail's reporting from inside Fallujah during the infamous 2004 siege is most revealing. He arrived in the ravaged town with a group of activists and human rights workers, determined to distribute much-needed medicine to dilapidated hospitals. He sees countless men, women and children shot by American snipers, dying without adequate care and family members railing against a policy that deems it legitimate to shoot ambulances ferrying the injured.

When Jamail returns to Baghdad, he's astounded to see CNN and The New York Times reporting that a ceasefire in the city is "holding". "Their reporters [were] happily embedded with troops", he observes, "obediently regurgitating the military press releases for US audiences."

War boosters constantly talk about the presence of al-Qaeda in Iraq but Jamail explains the majority of the resistance to foreign occupation comes from ordinary Iraqis with no extremist links, determined to see their nation truly liberated. He meets many of them and acknowledges that although some initially welcomed the Americans they soon realised that Washington's true aims were subjugation of the country's people and resources.

Presented to Dahr Jamail

Journalist, embedded in the truth

In recognition of his courageous decision to report the real stories of the Iraqi people under United States invasion and then occupation; his unique ability to cover “sustained atrocities,” a reportage that leaves indelible marks on one’s conscience and memories, weaving a disturbing tapestry of horrific, indiscriminate civilian injuries, diseases, humiliations and deaths (650,000 as of 2006); his depiction of the brutality of American military forces yet understanding the predicament of many soldiers arising out of failed policies, surrounded by endemic corruption of the war contractors who bilked with impunity the United States treasury; his outrage at the government’s unchecked power and a compliant corporate media that misled the American people; and his luminous humanity, seeking nothing but the truth for the whole story.

It’s a remarkable person who can leave a comfortable life in Alaska, as a mountain tour guide and volunteer rescuer, travel 8,000 miles into certain danger, armed simply with a laptop computer and small digital camera, return numerous times at great personal risk to continue work on his own, and come out with so much truth as to embarrass many journalists by showing what their standards for excellence should be, and to accomplish this without any formal training, first reporting to friends back home and then to a widening circle of outlets.

Dahr Jamail made an extraordinary jump into the fray, this hell on earth, in defense of the truth. His gripping book Beyond the Green Zone bears witness to the suffering of the Iraqi people, channeling their voices and words to the outside world, interviewing them about life under occupation, and their resistance, a proud people with an ancient civilization.

Described by Jeremy Scahill as “the conscience of American war reporting,” and “the quintessential unembedded reporter,” Dahr Jamail has raised the banner for journalists everywhere and for citizen action towards a free press and a truly informed public. He has demonstrated the power of one citizen to make a difference. We are all beneficiaries.

December 13, 2007
Carnegie Institution Building
Washington, D.C.

Editor: Erik Leaver

Foreign Policy In Focus

Editors Note: The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007).

In 2002, while winter began to settle across the United States, the drumbeat for war became deafening. Living in Anchorage, Alaska, I spent much of my free time reading the news from abroad or getting it via alternative online outlets such as Media Lens, Democracy Now!, and Media Channel. The cheerleading for war feebly disguised as "journalism" that corporate media television stations and newspapers in the United States spewed was intolerable. The overwhelming evidence was already available. There were not and had not been "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq for years. The make-believe link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 was a chimera. The excuse given later, that of "liberating" the people of Iraq, held even less truth.

The worldwide protests of February 15, 2003--the largest in human history--Bush brushed aside as a "focus group." Watching this occur enraged me, particularly since after 9/11 the one paper in Anchorage, Alaska, which I had been freelancing for, fired its editor because our content had become "too political." My mind was a pressure cooker. I wondered, what could be done to stop an illegal war of aggression against a country that had been suffering more than twelve years of economic sanctions that had already killed over one million people?

Nothing.

The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003.Coverage by most of the mainstream media worsened. Rather than showing the true face of war, television coverage more closely resembled a weapons manufacturer's show, complete with brilliant graphics of fighter jets, missiles, attack helicopters, and interactive maps of Iraq that could have been taken straight from a video game.

The news I followed from the media of other countries, such as the Independent and the Guardian newspapers in the U.K., Le monde diplomatique in France, Al-Jazeera in Qatar, and outlets in Greece and Italy, portrayed a different reality. While shown for the propaganda stunt it was in many foreign media outlets, the stage-managed toppling of one of Saddam Hussein's statues in central Baghdad captivated uninformed Americans watching news, which by then closely resembled the state-controlled media of an authoritarian regime. The disparity in reportage between many foreign outlets and those in the United States was nothing less than news reporting on the one hand and flag-waving on the other. The occupation began and quickly lurched toward chaos, violence, and suffering.

Rather than being explored and explained by most media in the United States, the mayhem of war was portrayed as one dimensional, and described with slogans like "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and other rhetoric so familiar to the peoples of the Third World. Formerly repressed currents of Iraqi religious, political, and social strata emerged and began to breathe life back into the complex patterns of the social fabric of Iraq after the dictator was removed. The multilayered quilt of tribal and religious societies resurfaced.

I spent the summer of 2003 volunteering as a rescue ranger for the National Park Service on the highest mountain in Alaska, Denali, climbing, pondering, and listening to radio reports at night in my tent. I listened as Iraqis were quickly pulled into the undertow of a violent upheaval against an occupation they had not sought.

While climbing on icy slopes during the day, I wondered what I might do to bring the information I found reported in other countries back to the uninformed, horribly misled population of my own country.

I would like to say that I decided to go to Iraq for philosophical reasons, because I believe that an informed citizenry is the bedrock of any healthy democracy. But I went to Iraq for personal reasons. I was tormented by the fact that the government of my country illegally invaded and then occupied a country that it had bombed in 1991. Because the government of my country had asphyxiated Iraq with more than a decade's worth of "genocidal" sanctions (in the words of former United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday). The government of my country then told lies, which were obediently repeated by an unquestioning media in order to justify the invasion and occupation. I felt that I had blood on my hands because the government had been left unchecked.

My going to Iraq was an act of desperation that has since transformed itself into a bond to that country and so many of her people. There were stories there that begged to be heard and told again. We are defined by story. Our history, our memory, our perceptions of the future, are all built and held within stories. As a U.S. citizen complicit in the devastation of Iraq, I was already bound up in the story of that country. I decided to go to learn what that story really was.

While the vast majority of the reporting of Iraq was provided by journalists availing themselves of the Pentagon-sponsored "embed" program, I chose to look for stories of real life and "embed" myself with the Iraqi people. The U.S. military side of the occupation is overly represented by most mainstream outlets. I consciously decided to focus on the Iraqi side of the story.

The story of the many oppressed peoples of the world is rarely recorded by the few who oppress. We are taught that the truth is objective fact as written down by the conquerors.

Truth is more than fact. Before his testimony against the flooding of his traditional life and homeland in James Bay by Hydro-Quebec (for power shipped to the United States), François Mainscum, a Mistassini Cree hunter, was asked to place his hand on the Bible. He had left his bush camp only a few days before he appeared in court. "When I was told to touch the book, my first reaction was to wonder what this book is for," he said, "Until I was told to touch it, the book, so that I could speak the 'truth.'"

He spoke with his translator at length, and finally the translator looked up at the judge. "He does not know whether he can tell the truth. He says he can tell only what he knows."

There are roughly 27 million people in Iraq. Each of them has his or her own story about what has happened in Iraq during the U.S. occupation. Their stories define them, and us. They belong in our history, our memory, our perceptions of the future.

This book contains some of those stories.

Dahr Jamail has reported from inside Iraq and is the author of Beyond the Green Zone. He writes for Inter Press Service, The Asia Times, and is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.