Dahr Jamail rejects the fetters of embedded reporting to seek the truth about Iraq. What he finds squarely contradicts the mainstream media picture of insurgency and everyday life there, writes Amy Blyth.

DAHR JAMAIL’S Beyond the Green Zone offers a remarkable and terrifying insight into the lives of ordinary Iraqis struggling to survive in a war-ravaged country controlled by brutal American forces. Jamail reports from the other side of the occupation, the one we rarely glimpse from the mainstream media, the side of the Iraqi people – one that the reporters embedded within the relative safety of US army lines – for the most part rarely see, acknowledge or include in their discussions about the future of Iraq.

The book manages to reveal the injustice, the incompetence and the sheer bloodthirsty nature of the occupation. This is a war in which, Jamail reveals, over 65,000 Iraqis – mostly ordinary women, children and the elderly – have been killed, over 14,000 innocent men imprisoned and often tortured for imagined crimes, and snipers indiscriminately fire at old women hanging their washing out to dry on the roof. This is a war where, Jamail argues, unarmed crowds participating in peaceful protests are showered with bullets fired by US soldiers, one where Geneva conventions are ignored. Cluster bombs and depleted uranium litter the streets of Fallujah and ambulances that race to the scene are shot at and bombed. These are occurrences, Jamail points out, which are often denied by the military and left unreported by the mainstream media. These atrocities are part of a largely hidden war, which Beyond the Green Zone goes some way toward uncovering.

Jamail argues that above all else this is a war of misinformation, of propaganda and of suppression. While the occupying powers say they aim to install democracy, this claim, Jamail proposes, is fundamentally undermined by the lies, cover-ups, and biased official reports that the military feed to the mainstream media. Jamail reports that during the first four days of a siege in Fallujah, 300 Iraqis were killed and 500 wounded by US forces, many whilst trying to flee the city and then while being turned back at US checkpoints. These casualties were not reported in the mainstream news. What we saw instead were news stories derived from military sources who insisted that US soldiers were fighting to ‘liberate’ Fallujah. From talking to the residents trapped inside the city, Jamail finds out that what was actually being fought for by Iraqis was liberation from the American occupiers.

Jamail does however acknowledge that a small number of independent journalists and Arab media work tirelessly throughout the occupation to get alternative stories out of Iraq. He also acknowledges that some of the more critical sections of the Western press do question the military line, but he notes that these stories are almost impossible to hear amidst the all-encompassing mainstream media coverage. Largely responsible for this are the embedded reporters who take cover in US and British Humvees, who, in their bullet proof vests and hardhats enjoy the luxury of clean water and electricity in the Green Zone barracks. This media, far from acting as the fourth estate, the eyes and ears of the unknowing Western public, have instead become scared and lazy and have ensured that the full terrible truth of the Iraqi occupation is shielded from the public eye. Illustrating this, Jamail tells of arriving at an American checkpoint on the way out of Fallujah and encountering two embedded photographers. They inquire of him: “Did you see any bad guys in there?” To which Jamail replies: “No, I did not see any ‘bad guys’ inside the city. Perhaps you should have gone in to see for yourself.”

All but a few independent journalists, such as Jamail, dare to inhabit the Iraq outside of the Green Zone. Jamail states that his aim from the beginning of this mission was to create an alternative to the vast majority of US biased media. He says: “I chose to look for stories of real life and ‘embed’ myself with the Iraqi people. The US military side of the occupation is overly represented… I consciously decided to focus on the Iraqi side of the story”. However, Jamail recognises the complexity of media ‘truth’ telling and professes only to tell what he knows, which are some of the stories of the ordinary Iraqi people he meets. So, armed with camera, notepad and a deep-seated desire to let the voices of Iraqis be heard, he delivers reports of what everyday life is like in a country already suffering from the American attacks of 1991, the effects of years of extreme sanctions and Saddam’s brutal dictatorship.

Jamail set off from his home in Alaska to Iraq at the start of the occupation, frustrated and embarrassed by his country’s response to September 11th, the illegal war they had waged with Iraq and the pro-American propaganda which littered the mainstream news. What he found when he arrived were Iraqis pleased on the whole that Saddam’s regime was over and hopeful for the future. He describes talking to a group of young Iraqi boys by the roadside soon after his arrival; they are fascinated by Jamail’s tales of life in America. Over his subsequent months in Iraq, Jamail sees this innocent interest and sense of hope fade to bitterness and anger. A year after the occupation Jamail witnesses a similar group of boys aiming rocks at US tanks and shouting: “Down with America.” This shift in cultural attitudes toward the occupation hints at what many of us already suspect; that this war has merely increased animosity toward Western forces. What can be seen from Jamail’s observations of the Iraqi people is that violence breeds violence, and that for generations to come we will all reap the effects of this war.

It is not hard to see why this transformation in Iraqi opinion has occurred when you read Jamail’s tales of the countless people he meets. Most have relatives or friends who were killed by occupation forces, most have lost or badly damaged homes, many live without clean drinking water and electricity, which is routinely cut by the Americans as a form of collective punishment. Half the population are unemployed and in a country rich in oil, fuel is scarce and the black market thrives. American patrols ransack houses in the middle of the night, shooting first, reasoning and (often not) apologising later.

It is also not hard to see, as one Iraqi tells Jamail, why ‘all of Iraq’ has joined the resistance against the Americans. Jamail problematises the official category of ‘terrorist’ in the anti-US insurgency movement, offering proof that Al Qaeda groups often blamed for these attacks are actually often ordinary Iraqis driven to extreme measures in an attempt to rid their country of foreign forces. This is illustrated by one resistance fighter Jamail interviews, a former portrait photographer, who was opposed to Saddam and rejoiced when US military first arrived. However, as he tells Jamail, he grew angry as he watched more and more Iraqis killed, humiliated and tortured by the occupiers every day. This prompted him to join a resistance group which has been responsible for 250 attacks on Americans, 70 of which he was directly involved in. He claims that the resistance is made up of a mix of Shia, Ba’athists, Sufus tribalists and Arab fighters, telling Jamail: “I have been fighting for a year now, and I have not seen one Al-Qaeda fighter, nor have I heard of one fighting in the resistance… As more Iraqis are provoked, more are joining the resistance… the Americans are the terrorists, their military has killed millions of people all round the world, I will stop fighting when the last American soldier leaves Iraq.” This interview represents a perspective that the Western media often find easier to ignore. It is simpler to blame such unthinkable atrocities as suicide bombings on fanatics like Al-Qaeda than to recognise such acts as partly a reaction to what the West has done to Iraq’s culture and people.

Jamail does not give up his fight to bring this vital information back to the Western world – he is a true investigative journalist in a world of corporate, biased media. Despite suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and extreme threats to his personal safety, Jamail is plagued by the guilt he feels at being able to leave Iraq for safety whilst so many have no such option. What he does do for the people of Iraq, however, is to carry their stories out of the country and into the ears of the Western public.

Amy Blyth can be reached at amy.interjunction@gmail.com

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Could the Iraq war have been prevented had the American media asked the right questions? How do conservative media commentators frame the actions of different religious communities? Does the media pay due attention to history?

INCREASINGLY FOCUSED ON competitiveness and profits, the mainstream American media is under pressure for its own survival. Indeed, it is at a critical juncture of having to choose between fulfilling its societal responsibility or succumbing to the political compulsions of our times. As a society we need to evaluate the importance of the media in our American system of governance. Does it still play the crucial role the founding fathers of our nation had envisioned for it?

Thomas Jefferson made a strong statement about the role of the media in a democracy when he noted, “If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Describing the role of the press, George A. Krimsky, the former head of news for the Associated Press’ World Services and co-author of Hold the Press, writes, “In the wake of America’s successful revolution, it was decided there should indeed be government, but only if it were accountable to the people. The people, in turn, could only hold the government accountable if they knew what it was doing and could intercede as necessary, using their ballot, for example. This role of public ‘watchdog’ was thus assumed by a citizen press, and as a consequence, the government in the United States has been kept out of the news business.”

Could one say that the government in the United States was kept out of the news business in the past, but not any more?

In the recent past, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams told host Howard Kurtz that the Bush administration had “the right” to pay a columnist to tout its views in his column. As this article notes, Kurtz spoke of the “Pentagon planting positive stories, in some cases paying for positive stories in Iraqi newspapers.” The administration also paid journalist Armstrong Williams to promote its No Child Left Behind education policy. The Government Accountability Office, however, determined that the Bush Administration was wrong in promoting its educational policy through Armstrong’s column.

The essence of democracy is the ability to question everything in fairness and without worrying about censure against such inquiry. How many journalists from the mainstream media have failed this test in recent times? Let us examine a few situations and see the specific failures of the American media in each case.

The qualities of a commander-in-chief

As we speak, the airwaves are saturated with coverage of the presidential nominees in both parties. Why aren’t journalists questioning the rhetoric from McCain and Clinton that they are fit to be the commander-in-chief of the nation? We are a democracy, and it is not essential that our government should be run by a military expert. That was not the intent of our system.

I do not expect my president to be an expert in nuclear, biological, botanical, or other sciences and certainly not a military expert. I want a judicious person who can call on real experts as the situation demands and make the right decision in each case.

Journalists can still ask the candidates this question. Will they?

Precedent and patterns in the Rev. Wright controversy

The second week of March 2008 witnessed relentless coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, “God Damn America,” in the American media. It was all one could hear on the cable channels. The pundits were suggesting that this might indicate the end of presidential candiate Barack Obama’s political aspirations, given that Wright was Obama’s pastor.

In the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Ralph Luker pointed out that “the quotation comes not from Wright, but from the Rev Martin Luther King Jr’s first address to the Montgomery Improvement Association on December 5, 1955. Both African-American preachers have understood prophetic biblical preaching far better than those who feign shock at and condemn Wright’s words.”

“Obama’s Minister ‘Hates America’ But When My Father Said the Same Sort of Things He Became a Hero To The Republicans”  wrote Frank Schaeffer in the OpEdNews. Schaeffer quoted his father, religious right leader, Francis Schaeffer, expressing similar sentiments. “Take Dad’s words” Frank Schaeffer went on to say, “and put them in the mouth of Obama’s preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet, when we the white Religious Right denounced America, the white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words ‘godly’ and ‘prophetic’ and a ‘call to repentance.’”

The mainstream media largely failed to investigate if there was a precedent, if some one else had used this kind of language, if the reaction had been different, and why that might have been the case.

The burning of the US embassy in Kosovo

While driving around on Friday, February 22 earlier this year, I listened to every news channel. Our embassy was torched in Kosovo by radicals on that day. The media did not describe the violence as religiously motivated nor name any religious community as the culprit. I believe that was the right approach on the part of the media.

But I wondered: had those radicals been Muslims, what kind of demonization would mainstream conservative commentators like O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh have engaged in?

The war in Iraq

As the Bill Moyers Journal’s special edition program, “Buying the War,” compellingly demonstrated, the mainstream American media uncritically accepted the administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s ambition to acquire nuclear weapons and his links to Al-Qaeda. The five chapter report speaks for itself.

Had the media stood their ground, perhaps our administration would not have engaged in policies that have resulted in the deaths of over half a million Iraqis as per the figures provided by the medical journal Lancet estimate, 4,000 of our men and women, and a cost of anywhere from 1 to 2 trillion dollars.

Was their inability to ask the right questions of the administration not a colossal blunder on the part of the mainstream media?

Mike Ghouse is a writer and activist based in Dallas. He runs the blogs Foundation for Pluralism and World Muslim Congress.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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Greg Mitchell lays bare the psychology of the ongoing self-censorship in the American media. There was not so much a conspiracy of silence about the war as an ideological refusal by the media to listen, see, and ask, writes Rohit Chopra.

GREG MITCHELL’S So Wrong for So Long is an immensely significant work, for reasons beyond the apparent. The book is a record of the life of the Iraq war in the American media from the time it was a neocon idea gathering force in January 2003 to the imbroglio of the second half of 2007. It is a compendium of the complicities of the mainstream American media in creating a narrative about the inexorable need for going to war. It is an examination of the appropriate relationship between the media and the state and a provocative questioning of the meaning of journalistic autonomy during the exceptional conditions of war. Each of these aspects of the work in itself justifies the value of the book. Cumulatively, they amount to a powerful statement and inquiry about the very meaning of freedom and voice in a democracy.

So Wrong for So Long consists of more than 75 columns written for Editor & Publisher — which Mitchell edits — from January 2003 through October 2007, adapted for the book. Each chapter brings together one more columns from a particular month during this time period. These columns are prefaced by Mitchell’s reflections on the main war-related events of that month in Iraq and / or in the US and the actions, decisions, and products of American media organizations about these events. The structure of the book compellingly juxtaposes past and present. Mitchell has framed these columns with the lightest and surest of editorial touches, providing an apposite amount of contextual information and letting the columns speak for themselves.

As the title of the book suggests, Mitchell addresses the role of various actors, including the media, experts, political authorities, and the American people, in contributing to the American failure to establish a viable Iraqi state after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. However, the main focus of the book is on the many ways in which the mainstream media fell short of its obligations before and through the war.

Patterns clearly emerge from the story that Mitchell tells us about the media coverage of the war. He highlights the incredible consensus among the media that Colin Powell’s speech at the UN on February 5, 2003 had incontrovertibly secured the case for war, and shows the eagerness with which the media accepted the claim of ‘mission accomplished.’ With due acknowledgment of the fact that certain restrictions may apply to covering a war situation, Mitchell draws attention to the politics of embeddedness, and the problematic implications of the conventions by which the media have covered the dead and wounded, military and civilian, coalition force or Iraqi.

Mitchell notes the double standards applied by the media in evaluating the claims of pro-war and anti-war sources. He comments on the gentle self-recriminations of the New York Times and the Washington Post for their earlier failings in reporting the war, which, Mitchell argues, did not go far enough. He chronicles the stubborness of prominent media columnists in refusing to budge from the essential premise that the war was justified. The book addresses the anxieties about appearing non-patriotic and the fear of a backlash from the public that have haunted media coverage of the war from its inception.

But we also find that it is not the case that there were no skeptical voices in the media and the political arena. Mitchell provides us several examples of these voices. Daniel Ellsberg, famous for leaking the Pentagon papers, is one such figure who was unconvinced by the administration’s case for invading Iraq. Described by Mitchell as “one of the most important figures in the history of American journalism,” even though not a journalist, Ellsberg was also critical of the media for failing to do their job. Bill Moyers of PBS emerges as another dissenting voice, interviewing Mitchell for his PBS program NOW in April 2003. Four years later, in April 2007, Moyers also presented a 90-minute PBS broadcast “Buying the War” that offered a blunt, hard look at the responsibility of the media in contributing to the climate that made the war possible. In Moyers’ own words, quoted in an April 21, 2007 E & P column reproduced in the book, “the press has yet to come to terms with its role in enabling the Bush administration to go to war on false pretenses” (p. 237). Mitchell’s book chronicles how, as the war has progressed, more columnists, conservatives and liberals alike, have advocated a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. Politicians such as Representative John Murtha and Senator Chuck Hagel have also recommended a withdrawal in light of the situation in Iraq.

And yet, as Mitchell notes, the editorial columns of major newspapers have continued to stay mum or have equivocated on a host of glaring issues related to the war. We read through E & P columns in chronological order, accompanied by a constant sense of déjà vu, knowing more or less what is to follow.

The book thus hints at an intriguing phenomenon, one that deserves close attention from journalists, mediapersons, and scholars alike. It demonstrates that that there was not so much a conspiracy of silence as an ideological refusal by the media and others to listen, ask, see, and believe. It shows us the pyschology of self-censorship in operation and the ongoing construction of a self-willed amnesia on the part of the American media in its coverage of the Iraq war. What we see is memory — or rather a particular memory and narrative of a war, a society, a time — in the making. Where and why, one might, inquire, do these imperatives come from? What are their historical and sociological roots?

The book also causes us to look at the politics of differential access to information. It is one of the cliches of our times that in our information age and networked society, flows of information can cross national boundaries in the twinkling of an eye, across national boundaries and beyond the grasp of national governments. Global media and communication technologies such as the internet, with the forms of hyper-literacy and global discourse communities that they have engendered, are often adduced as proof of this new informational economy. But Mitchell’s book is a sobering reminder that such flows of information cannot be understand independently of the structures of political power, the stark inequalities that characterize international relations, the calculations of corporate organizations, and the pressures that all of these factors bring to bear on individual voices, journalistic or otherwise.

Mitchell begins the Introduction to the book with the words, “If only this were merely a book of history. Sadly, the war in Iraq is still very much with us, which makes this a current affairs volume as well. More than anything, however, I hope it serves as a warning for the future” (1). One may disagree respectfully with his distinction between history and current affairs. Current affairs are, after all, predicated on history or histories. The value of the book too, one may observe, is as much as documentary record, a four year history of how the media in the world’s only superpower covered that superpower’s decision to go to war and its aftermath, as political commentary about the present or political critique. And, in the words of NBC reporter Kevin Sites who is quoted in the book, it is an urgent and poignant reminder that the “burdens of war…are unforgiving for all of us” (p. 107).

Rohit Chopra is Editor, Interjunction and Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Babson College, Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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