The Independent UKWhen Rose met Cindy: The case against the war in Iraq
On both sides of the Atlantic, two mothers who lost sons in Iraq have launched campaigns to end the conflict. One camped outside George Bush's ranch. The other stood in the general election. This week, they came face to face for the first time. Andrew Buncombe reports. Published: 23 September 2005
Along the sunbaked sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue came the sound of singing. It was music from an earlier generation, but as relevant now as it ever was. "All we are saying is give peace a chance," chanted the group of demonstrators as they made their way to the north-west gates of the White House. "All we are saying is give peace chance."
At the head of the huddled group was Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose soldier son, Casey, was killed in Iraq last year and whose campaign to demand an explanation for the war from President George Bush took her to the gates of his Crawford ranch, made headlines around the world and - seemingly almost single-handedly - re-energised the US peace movement. At her side was Rose Gentle, a woman whose son, Gordon, was also killed in Iraq and who has launched a similarly relentless campaign to demand answers from Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"It's exciting to be here, to let George Bush know what we think about the war," Mrs Gentle said moments afterwards, standing at the junction with 17th Street, carrying a photograph of her son wearing his uniform of Royal Highland Fusiliers. Asked if she thought he would have approved of her campaign, she glanced at the photograph of the young man, 19 years old, and replied: "Gordon would have wanted this. His pals are still there [in Iraq] and he would have wanted them home safe. They still keep in touch."
She added: "Those young boys don't know who's with them or who's against them. People think we are against the troops but we are for them - we want them home safe. Once they're dead, the [authorities] don't want to know them. For a 19-year-old with just 24 weeks basic training to be sent to Iraq..."
Had the US and Britain not invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003 it is unlikely that Mrs Sheehan, 48, from Vacaville, California, and Mrs Gentle, 40, from the depressed Glasgow suburb of Pollok, would ever have had reason to know each other. As it is, they and many of the other demonstrators, who have this week made their way to the US capital after a tour that has taken them to 51 cities in 28 states, share a terrible bond.
Mrs Sheehan's 24-year-old son was killed in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City on 4 April when his unit, the 1st Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery Regiment, was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Gordon Gentle was killed by a roadside bomb in the southern city of Basra on 28 June last year, the day the US and Britain purportedly handed back control of the country to an Iraqi government.
"We have been in e-mail contact for months but this is the first time we have met," Mrs Sheehan said of Mrs Gentle as she later stood in the sunshine on the National Mall, helping set up a "Camp Casey" memorial within view of the Capitol Building. "It helps [meeting the other people who have lost loved ones]. They really are the only people who know what I'm going through."
Mrs Sheehan said she would like to accept Mrs Gentle's invitation to tour the UK and share her message with British audiences. It was important that the anti-war message was as loudly heard in Britain as the US because "they have troops in Iraq. They are part of it", she told The Independent.
The families' descent upon Washington to participate in three days of anti-war protests this weekend organised by the group United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ) comes at a time when public support in the US for the war stands at an all-time low. A recent poll conducted for The New York Times suggested that only 44 per cent of Americans now believe the invasion of Iraq was the correct thing to do. Around 80 per cent are concerned that the spiralling costs of the occupation are diverting resources needed in the US.
Mr Bush's own ratings have similarly sunk to record lows. A Gallup poll released this week suggested only 40 per cent approve of his performance, down from almost 90 per cent in the aftermath of 9/11.
Yesterday, Mr Bush showed no sign of changing tack. Speaking at the Pentagon where he had just received an update of the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, he claimed that withdrawing US forces would make the world more dangerous and allow terrorists "to claim an historic victory over the United States".
The President claimed that terrorists had been emboldened over the years by the hesitant US response to the hostage crisis with Iran, the bombing of US Marine barracks in Lebanon and the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre. "The terrorists concluded we lacked the courage and character to defend ourselves. The only way the terrorists can win is if we lose our nerve and abandon the mission. For the safety and security of the American people, that's not going to happen on my watch," he said.
Of Mrs Sheehan and the other protesters who will be gathering in Washington this weekend, he said: "I recognise their good intentions but their position is wrong. Withdrawing our troops would make the world more dangerous."
But veteran peace camp-aigners in America are confident they have reached a "turning point" - which they attribute to several factors. The war in Iraq, which may have been responsible for 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, has now taken the lives of more than 1,900 US and almost 100 British troops. The publication of the Downing Street memo appeared to suggest that Mr Bush had made up his mind to invade Iraq as early as the spring of 2002, whether the UN supported him or not. And on one single, shocking day this summer, 14 marines from the same Ohio town were killed in an attack on a convoy near the city of Haditha.
Bill Dodds, a UFPJ spokesman, said: "And then a few days [after the 14 marines were killed], at a Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas, someone got up and said: 'We've got to go to Crawford.' That was Cindy."
He added: "The momentum had been gathering and then, at the end of the summer, there was definitely a big boost with everything [that was happening in Crawford]. We saw some old faces return and some new ones joined ... We think this could be a turning point."
The day after the 8 August meeting, Mrs Sheehan and a small group of supporters headed for Crawford, where Mr Bush was spending his holiday. Though he repeatedly refused to meet with her in person and despite an attempt by some on the right to smear Mrs Sheehan, she was able to seize the opportunity of a bored White House press corps camped out with nothing much to do to win public support for her hitherto unnoticed campaign.
From across the country protesters arrived in Crawford, where a temporary memorial to Casey and the other US troops killed in Iraq had been established. Mrs Sheehan demanded that Mr Bush immediately withdraw US forces to prevent further loss of life.
In Washington, some suggested that Mrs Sheehan's campaign was counter-productive because it gave conservatives a target they could attack. She dismisses the charge. "Distracted attention? I think that I focused attention on the war," she said.
Mrs Gentle's attention on the war changed forever on the morning of 28 June last year. That morning, before she left home for her job as a cleaner, she had switched on the television and watched a report about the death of a British soldier in Basra. She watched the footage that showed the soldier's body, his face obscured by a sheet, and then left for work. A few hours later, two members of the Army came to where she was working and broke the news."They sat me in the back of a car and told me that Gordon had been killed," she said. "I realised it was Gordon I had seen lying on the floor ... It was 10 days before I could get him home."
Mrs Gentle, who ran against the Armed Forces minister, Adam Ingram, in the East Kilbride, Strathaven & Lesmahagow constituency at the general election last May, only joined the peace tour this week in Washington. She flew by herself from Glasgow, packing her favourite brand of cigarettes, and joined up with other family members and veterans. They have been staying in motels and hostels, sleeping on the sofas of friends, eating dinners cooked by other supporters.
For the group, including Bill Mitchell, whose son was killed in the same battle that Mrs Sheehan's son died in, it has been a packed week. On Wednesday they held a press conference on Capitol Hill, delivered a letter to the White House urging Mr Bush to withdraw the troops and then ended up with an emotional three-hour presentation in front of a packed audience at American University. Yesterday, the group had arranged to meet with Senators John Kerry, John McCain, Edward Kennedy and others before heading off for more public appearances.
Mrs Gentle said while there were some people who clearly disagreed with their campaign, the overwhelming response from the people they had met was positive and supportive. The other family members had also been supportive, but being part of the group was not easy.
"Meeting with the other family members does make you feel sad," said Mrs Gentle, who is suing the Ministry of Defence, claiming that her son's vehicle should have been fitted with electronic jamming equipment. "No one here has done anything but shed tears ... People tell me it gets easier but how can it get easier when you turn on the TV and [some more soldiers are being killed]. Tony Blair and George Bush should be held responsible for this."
Along the sunbaked sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue came the sound of singing. It was music from an earlier generation, but as relevant now as it ever was. "All we are saying is give peace a chance," chanted the group of demonstrators as they made their way to the north-west gates of the White House. "All we are saying is give peace chance."
At the head of the huddled group was Cindy Sheehan, the woman whose soldier son, Casey, was killed in Iraq last year and whose campaign to demand an explanation for the war from President George Bush took her to the gates of his Crawford ranch, made headlines around the world and - seemingly almost single-handedly - re-energised the US peace movement. At her side was Rose Gentle, a woman whose son, Gordon, was also killed in Iraq and who has launched a similarly relentless campaign to demand answers from Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"It's exciting to be here, to let George Bush know what we think about the war," Mrs Gentle said moments afterwards, standing at the junction with 17th Street, carrying a photograph of her son wearing his uniform of Royal Highland Fusiliers. Asked if she thought he would have approved of her campaign, she glanced at the photograph of the young man, 19 years old, and replied: "Gordon would have wanted this. His pals are still there [in Iraq] and he would have wanted them home safe. They still keep in touch."
She added: "Those young boys don't know who's with them or who's against them. People think we are against the troops but we are for them - we want them home safe. Once they're dead, the [authorities] don't want to know them. For a 19-year-old with just 24 weeks basic training to be sent to Iraq..."
Had the US and Britain not invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003 it is unlikely that Mrs Sheehan, 48, from Vacaville, California, and Mrs Gentle, 40, from the depressed Glasgow suburb of Pollok, would ever have had reason to know each other. As it is, they and many of the other demonstrators, who have this week made their way to the US capital after a tour that has taken them to 51 cities in 28 states, share a terrible bond.
Mrs Sheehan's 24-year-old son was killed in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City on 4 April when his unit, the 1st Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery Regiment, was attacked with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Gordon Gentle was killed by a roadside bomb in the southern city of Basra on 28 June last year, the day the US and Britain purportedly handed back control of the country to an Iraqi government.
"We have been in e-mail contact for months but this is the first time we have met," Mrs Sheehan said of Mrs Gentle as she later stood in the sunshine on the National Mall, helping set up a "Camp Casey" memorial within view of the Capitol Building. "It helps [meeting the other people who have lost loved ones]. They really are the only people who know what I'm going through."
Mrs Sheehan said she would like to accept Mrs Gentle's invitation to tour the UK and share her message with British audiences. It was important that the anti-war message was as loudly heard in Britain as the US because "they have troops in Iraq. They are part of it", she told The Independent.
The families' descent upon Washington to participate in three days of anti-war protests this weekend organised by the group United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ) comes at a time when public support in the US for the war stands at an all-time low. A recent poll conducted for The New York Times suggested that only 44 per cent of Americans now believe the invasion of Iraq was the correct thing to do. Around 80 per cent are concerned that the spiralling costs of the occupation are diverting resources needed in the US.
Mr Bush's own ratings have similarly sunk to record lows. A Gallup poll released this week suggested only 40 per cent approve of his performance, down from almost 90 per cent in the aftermath of 9/11.
Yesterday, Mr Bush showed no sign of changing tack. Speaking at the Pentagon where he had just received an update of the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, he claimed that withdrawing US forces would make the world more dangerous and allow terrorists "to claim an historic victory over the United States".
The President claimed that terrorists had been emboldened over the years by the hesitant US response to the hostage crisis with Iran, the bombing of US Marine barracks in Lebanon and the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre. "The terrorists concluded we lacked the courage and character to defend ourselves. The only way the terrorists can win is if we lose our nerve and abandon the mission. For the safety and security of the American people, that's not going to happen on my watch," he said.
Of Mrs Sheehan and the other protesters who will be gathering in Washington this weekend, he said: "I recognise their good intentions but their position is wrong. Withdrawing our troops would make the world more dangerous."
But veteran peace camp-aigners in America are confident they have reached a "turning point" - which they attribute to several factors. The war in Iraq, which may have been responsible for 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, has now taken the lives of more than 1,900 US and almost 100 British troops. The publication of the Downing Street memo appeared to suggest that Mr Bush had made up his mind to invade Iraq as early as the spring of 2002, whether the UN supported him or not. And on one single, shocking day this summer, 14 marines from the same Ohio town were killed in an attack on a convoy near the city of Haditha.
Bill Dodds, a UFPJ spokesman, said: "And then a few days [after the 14 marines were killed], at a Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas, someone got up and said: 'We've got to go to Crawford.' That was Cindy."
He added: "The momentum had been gathering and then, at the end of the summer, there was definitely a big boost with everything [that was happening in Crawford]. We saw some old faces return and some new ones joined ... We think this could be a turning point."
The day after the 8 August meeting, Mrs Sheehan and a small group of supporters headed for Crawford, where Mr Bush was spending his holiday. Though he repeatedly refused to meet with her in person and despite an attempt by some on the right to smear Mrs Sheehan, she was able to seize the opportunity of a bored White House press corps camped out with nothing much to do to win public support for her hitherto unnoticed campaign.
From across the country protesters arrived in Crawford, where a temporary memorial to Casey and the other US troops killed in Iraq had been established. Mrs Sheehan demanded that Mr Bush immediately withdraw US forces to prevent further loss of life.
In Washington, some suggested that Mrs Sheehan's campaign was counter-productive because it gave conservatives a target they could attack. She dismisses the charge. "Distracted attention? I think that I focused attention on the war," she said.
Mrs Gentle's attention on the war changed forever on the morning of 28 June last year. That morning, before she left home for her job as a cleaner, she had switched on the television and watched a report about the death of a British soldier in Basra. She watched the footage that showed the soldier's body, his face obscured by a sheet, and then left for work. A few hours later, two members of the Army came to where she was working and broke the news."They sat me in the back of a car and told me that Gordon had been killed," she said. "I realised it was Gordon I had seen lying on the floor ... It was 10 days before I could get him home."
Mrs Gentle, who ran against the Armed Forces minister, Adam Ingram, in the East Kilbride, Strathaven & Lesmahagow constituency at the general election last May, only joined the peace tour this week in Washington. She flew by herself from Glasgow, packing her favourite brand of cigarettes, and joined up with other family members and veterans. They have been staying in motels and hostels, sleeping on the sofas of friends, eating dinners cooked by other supporters.
For the group, including Bill Mitchell, whose son was killed in the same battle that Mrs Sheehan's son died in, it has been a packed week. On Wednesday they held a press conference on Capitol Hill, delivered a letter to the White House urging Mr Bush to withdraw the troops and then ended up with an emotional three-hour presentation in front of a packed audience at American University. Yesterday, the group had arranged to meet with Senators John Kerry, John McCain, Edward Kennedy and others before heading off for more public appearances.
Mrs Gentle said while there were some people who clearly disagreed with their campaign, the overwhelming response from the people they had met was positive and supportive. The other family members had also been supportive, but being part of the group was not easy.
"Meeting with the other family members does make you feel sad," said Mrs Gentle, who is suing the Ministry of Defence, claiming that her son's vehicle should have been fitted with electronic jamming equipment. "No one here has done anything but shed tears ... People tell me it gets easier but how can it get easier when you turn on the TV and [some more soldiers are being killed]. Tony Blair and George Bush should be held responsible for this."
The Independent UK
Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on Immediate WithdrawalNot long after Baghdad fell to American troops, it was already apparent
that the United States was part of the problem, not part of the solution, in Iraq; and that, as long as the American military occupied the country, matters would just get worse. Every passing month has only predictably confirmed that reality. There's no reason to believe that the next year of our military presence will be any less destabilizing than the last.
Of course, as is now notoriously well known, the Bush administration helped such predictions along their un-merry course in a particularly heavy-handed way. At least three crucial aspects of Bush policy created a fatal brew, insuring that the complex situation in Iraq in 2003 would devolve in quick-time into today's catastrophic tinderbox: First, there was the emphasis the President and his top officials put on the use of force as a primary response to global problems. (On this matter, they were fundamentalists.) Such an approach (when combined with the stripped-down, lean and mean U.S. military-lite Donald Rumsfeld was creating) acted as a recruiting agent for the insurgency that soon followed. Second, there was the deep-seated urge of Bush's nearest and dearest to plunder the world, which meant, in the case of Iraq, those no-bid, cost-plus contracts to crony corporations which led to an Iraqi "reconstruction" that, in its essential corruption, deconstructed the country. Finally, let's not forget their deepest urge of all, which was to occupy a key country smack in the middle of the oil heartlands of our planet and not depart. This guaranteed, as certainly as night follows day, both the insurgency that arose in Sunni areas and the angry feelings of Shiites toward their own "liberation."
It is now a commonplace in Washington to point out that the Bush administration had no exit strategy from Iraq, but to this day few bother to say the obvious: It had no exit strategy because its top officials never planned on or expected to leave that country. That this was so is easy enough to chart via one of the least well-covered subjects of the period, the Pentagon's determination to build huge, and hugely impressive, permanent military bases (called for a time "enduring camps") in that country. As we know from
a single New York Times front-page piece published just after Baghdad fell, the Pentagon was already planning four such permanent bases then. Among
the hundred or so bases, encampments, and outposts of every size constructed since, they have never stopped building and upgrading a small number of them for endless future occupancy, which tells you all you need to know about their present plans to "withdraw" or "draw down" our Iraqi presence.
On all the points above, matters simply continue down their hideous path.
The bases are still being built; the looting of Iraq, which never ended, has now extended in an open-armed way to the Iraqis under our tutelage. Just this week, Patrick Cockburn of the
British Independent reported that the Iraqi defense ministry is missing more than $1 billion, certainly one of the larger thefts in history, contracted out in a familiarly no-bid way for arms purchases from Poland and Pakistan. These arms were, of course, for the new Iraqi military on which the administration is counting so heavily, and the money is now simply gone. As for a policy of force, the U.S. military, which has just conducted an assault on the largely Turkmen city of Tal Afar, causing, it seems, great damage, is threatening to repeat such operations (modeled in a modest way on the destruction of Falluja last November) in urban areas elsewhere. (
"'You will see the same thing [as at Tal Afar] down along the Euphrates Valley to push back out and restore Iraqi control to the area around Qaim,' Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, said in an interview in Baghdad.") This is, of course, the American version of the infamous Roman Carthaginian solution, meant to bring the Sunni resistance to an intimidated halt. (Don't count on that.) And in the process, of course, more Americans died,
12 of them in recent days, sending the total of American dead over the 1,900 levee.
The results can be observed from Baghdad to
Basra in the Shiite south where the Brits are now in some trouble. Juan Cole at his Informed Comment website (the single must-visit Iraq stop on the Internet) reported recently
on the security situation ("sinking like the Titanic" in his phrase) in Baghdad where whole neighborhoods seem to have fallen into the hands of insurgents or Zarqawi followers. We're not talking here about Tal Afar, or Mosul, but about the Iraqi capital itself which "our" government inside the Green Zone simply does not control. What more do we need to know about how desperate the situation is. Should you want a sense of what that situation feels like up close and personal, check out
Baghdad Burning by Riverbend, the remarkable young woman blogger who has just come back on-line after a two-month hiatus, a "vacation" daily lacking in electricity, water, and the other amenities of life in a modern city.
But let's look on the bright side. A year ago, withdrawal was a subject that simply couldn't be brought up in a serious way in the mainstream American world. Now, it's a word everyone is bandying about. In the wake of Katrina, according to a recent
New York Times/CBS poll, "52% of people interviewed called for an immediate withdrawal, even if that means abandoning President Bush's goal of restoring stability to that country." (A Gallup poll reported that
"66 percent of respondents favored the immediate withdrawal of some or all of the U.S. troops in Iraq, a 10 percentage point jump in two weeks.") In this, they are far ahead of the politicians they've elected, whether Democrats or Republicans.
Below, Michael Schwartz makes the case, both simple and sophisticated, for withdrawing quickly from Iraq, but more than that for stopping thinking of ourselves as part of the solution –- a bulwark, for instance, against an onrushing civil war -- rather than part of the problem. With the antiwar demonstration in Washington DC this weekend, this is a moment to consider just what kinds of pressure for what kinds of solutions we want to bring to bear on this stumbling, if still utterly recalcitrant administration.
Tom Click here to read more of this dispatch.
Truthout.org Message: I Can't By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times (Select: Op-Ed) Wednesday 21 September 2005
The president won't be happy until he dons a yellow slicker and actually takes the place of Anderson Cooper, violently blown about by Rita as he talks into a camera lens lashed with water, hanging onto a mailbox as he's hit by a flying pig in a squall, sucked up by a waterspout in the eye of the storm over the Dry Tortugas.
Then maybe he'll go back to the White House and do his job instead of running down to the Gulf Coast for silly disaster-ops every other day.
There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch feign being in touch. On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he had spent some "quality time" at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the "can-do spirit."
"We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job," he said at a briefing in Gulfport, Miss., urging local officials to "think bold," while they still need to think mold.
Mr. Bush should stop posing in shirtsleeves and get back to the Oval Office. He has more hacks and cronies he's trying to put into important jobs, and he needs to ride herd on that.
The announcement that a veterinarian, Norris Alderson, who has no experience on women's health issues, would head the F.D.A.'s Office of Women's Health ran into so much flak from appalled women that the F.D.A. may have already reneged on it. No morning-after pill, thanks to the antediluvian administration, but there may be hope for a morning-after horse pill.
Mr. Bush made a frownie over Brownie, but didn't learn much. He's once more trying to appoint a nothingburger to a position of real consequence in homeland security. The choice of Julie Myers, a 36-year-old lawyer with virtually no immigration, customs or law enforcement experience, to head the roiling Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency with its $4 billion budget and 22,000 staffers, has caused some alarm, according to The Washington Post.
Ms. Myers's main credentials seem to be that she worked briefly for the semidisgraced homeland security director, Michael Chertoff, when he was at the Justice Department. She just married Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff, John Wood, and she's the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
As a former associate for Ken Starr, the young woman does have impeachment experience, in case the forensic war on terrorism requires the analysis of stains on dresses.
Julie makes Brownie look like Giuliani. I'll sleep better tonight, knowing that when she gets back from her honeymoon, Julie will be patrolling the frontier.
As if the Veterinarian and the Niece were not bad enough, there was also the Accused. David Safavian, the White House procurement official involved in Katrina relief efforts, was arrested on Monday, accused by the F.B.I. of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into the seamy case of "Casino Jack" Abramoff, the Republican operative who has broken new ground in giving lobbying a bad name. Democrats say the fact that Mr. Safavian's wife is a top lawyer for the Republican congressman who's leading the whitewash of the White House blundering on Katrina does not give them confidence.
Just as he has stonewalled other inquiries, Mr. Bush is trying to paper over his Katrina mistakes by appointing his homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, to investigate how the feds fumbled the response.
Mr. Bush's "Who's Your Daddy?" bravura - blowing off the world on global warming and the allies on the Iraq invasion - has been slapped back by Mother Nature, which refuses to be fooled by spin.
When Donald Rumsfeld came out yesterday to castigate the gloom-and-doomers and talk about the inroads American forces had made against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could not so easily recast reality.
In Afghanistan, the U.S.'s handpicked puppet president is still battling warlords and a revivified Taliban, and the export of poppies for the heroin trade is once more thriving.
Iraq is worse, with more than 1,900 American troops killed. Five more died yesterday, as well as four security men connected to the U.S. embassy office in Mosul, all to fashion a theocratic-leaning regime aligned with Iran. In Basra, two journalists who have done work for The Times have been killed in the last two months.
The more the president echoes his dad's "Message: I care," the more the world hears "Message: I can't."
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Tomgram: Michael Klare on Iraq's Missing Sea of OilThe strangest aspect of media coverage of our invasion and occupation of Iraq involved that country's oil. Everyone, including the Bush administration, was well aware that Iraq sat on a sea of it. It was obvious that Middle Eastern oil was a global lifeline and an ever more valuable commodity; and yet, unless you were a faithful reader of the business pages, for days, weeks, even months on end, it was impossible to find serious discussion of Iraqi oil in the mainstream media. Forget the fact that a number of the major players in the Bush administration came out of the energy business; that Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, had had an oil tanker named after her (when she was still on Chevron's board of directors); that the neocons and their supporters evinced a special interest in the oil heartlands of our planet (a.k.a. "the arc of instability"); or that the Pentagon was staking those heartlands out, base by base.
Nonetheless, when it came to the punditocracy just about the only discussion of Iraqi oil was restricted to the dismissal of claims by the antiwar movement that oil was either the (or a) significant factor in the invasion, a position supposedly too simpleminded to be taken seriously. As I've written before, if Iraq's main export had been video games, the press would have been flooded with pieces of every sort about our children's entertainment future; and yet, until the Iraqi resistance began blowing up pipelines, reports on Iraqi oil were as few and far between as oases in a desert. Even today, with pump prices through the ceiling and global energy supplies tight, Iraqi oil -- or the lack of it -- is not exactly headline material. As Jonathan Schell said to me recently, speaking of media attitudes, "If the Bush administration is not supposed to be interested in oil in Iraq, why are they so interested in it in Alaska?"
In the prewar period, the President simply swore that we were religiously ready to respect and preserve what he referred to as Iraq's "patrimony" -- and, when it came to serious coverage, that was about that.
On the other hand, you had an antiwar movement, one part of which was focused almost solely on the issue of Iraqi oil. The iconic oil sign of the prewar protest period (sure to be found again at the big demonstration in Washington this Saturday) was: "NO BLOOD FOR OIL." But, with two years-plus of Iraqi experience under our belts, it should now be clear that this slogan was misconceived in at least one crucial way. It should have read: "BLOOD FOR NO OIL."
As Michael Klare, author of the indispensable
Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependence on Imported Petroleum, indicates below, this is perhaps the strangest, most instructive, and least written about aspect of the Iraqi invasion, occupation, and present chaos. We can be assured that, in the next few years, we're going to be hearing far more about "resource wars," tight energy supplies, and the need to nail down raw materials militarily. It may not be long before administration officials start telling us that we can't withdraw from Iraq exactly because of the world energy situation. Already, two days after Katrina hit, there was the President standing in front of the USS Ronald Reagan -- this administration's advance men have never seen an aircraft carrier they didn't want to turn into a photo op -- offering a new explanation for the war in Iraq:
"If Zarqawi and bin Laden gain control of Iraq, they would create a new training ground for future terrorist attacks; they'd seize oil fields to fund their ambitions..."
We're guaranteed to see more Pentagon planning and war gaming based on the control of world energy supplies, not to speak of more and ever better
military bases planted in far-flung, oil-rich areas of the world. So it's important, as Klare does, to take stock of what actually happened to Iraqi oil and the dreams of global dominance that went with it.
Energy is a strange thing to control militarily. As Iraq showed and Katrina reminded us recently, its flow is remarkably vulnerable, whether to insurgents, terrorists, or hurricanes. It's next to impossible to guard hundreds, not to say thousands, of miles of oil or natural gas pipelines. It's all very well to occupy a country, set up your "enduring camps," and imagine yourself controlling the key energy spigots of the globe, but doing so is another matter. (As the saying went in a previous military age, you can't mine coal with bayonets.) In the case of Iraq, one could simply say that the military conquest and occupation of the country essentially drove Iraq's oil deeper underground and beyond anyone's grasp. Hence, the signs should indeed say: "BLOOD FOR NO OIL." It's the perfect sorry slogan for a sad, brainless war; and even the Pentagon's resource-war planners might consider it a lesson worthy of further study as they think about our energy future.
Tom Click here to read more of this dispatch.
Iraqi Journalist Working With 'NYT' Killed Published: September 19, 2005 5:30 PM ET
Editor & PublisherBAGHDAD, Iraq (AP)- An Iraqi journalist working for The New York Times was killed after men claiming to be police officers abducted him from his home in the southern city of Basra, the newspaper announced Monday.
Fakher Haider, a 38-year-old reporter covering Basra, was found dead in a deserted area on the city's outskirts Monday morning after his abduction late Sunday night.
Relatives identified the body at the city morgue and said he appeared to have been shot more than once in the head. His back was bruised, suggesting he had been beaten, the Times said.
Haider, who had worked for the Times since the spring of 2003, also reported for other news organizations including Merbad TV, a local Basra station, as well as National Geographic and The Guardian, a London-based newspaper.
But his identification card listed him as a Times employee.
"This murder of a respected colleague leaves us angry and horrified," Bill Keller, the newspaper's executive editor, said in a statement. "Fahker was an invaluable part of our coverage for more than two years. His depth of knowledge, his devotion to the story and his integrity were much admired by the reporters who worked with him."
Haider is survived by a wife, Isra, and three children, ages 5, 7, and 9.
According to Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, he is the 68th journalist killed in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003 and the 19th this year.
He is also the second journalist affiliated with the Times killed in Basra over the past two months. On Aug. 2, New York freelance journalist Steven Vincent and his female Iraqi translator were abducted at gunpoint. His body was discovered that night on the side of the highway south of Basra. The translator, Nour Weidi, was seriously wounded.
That killing came shortly after Vincent wrote a column published in the Times accusing Basra police of being infiltrated by Shiite militiamen.
But a senior British official said Islamic militants -- and not Iraqi police -- probably killed Vincent. British forces in Iraq are based in Basra and responsible for the city's security.
Editor & PublisherBush, and Satchmo, in New OrleansIt seemed almost a sacrilege for the president to stand in the jazz-mad French Quarter, using the St. Louis Cathedral and statue of Andrew Jackson as a Disney-like backdrop, and announce that now he is going to do something, after the death and destruction are done.By Greg Mitchell
(September 15, 2005) -- President Bush closed his comeback speech in New Orleans on Thursday night, standing not far from where Louis Armstrong grew up and Preservation Hall still (somehow) stands, with a reference to the local tradition of jazz funerals, which begin as dirges and end with the joyful "second-line."
With that, Satchmo must have rolled over in his grave. But at least he has a grave, unlike the hundreds or perhaps thousands of fellow African-Americans who were killed by, among other things, federal indifference to the flood threat before it happened, and criminal negligence after it struck.
Armstrong, of course, sang it best in his 1930 classic “Black and Blue”:
How will it end? Ain’t got a friend
My only sin, is in my skin
What did I do? To be so black and blue
It seemed almost a sacrilege for the president to stand in the jazz-mad French Quarter, using the St. Louis Cathedral and statue of Andrew Jackson as a Disney-like backdrop, and announce that now he is going to do something, after the death and destruction are done, leaving the taxpayers with a $200 billion bill (much of which will go straight into the already Iraq-packed pockets of his friends at Halliburton and Bechtel and the like). His speech came on the very day The New York Times published an article about the many jazz and blues musicians from the Big Easy now forced to live in Cajun country and beyond, perhaps never to return to their homes and livelihoods.
In the White House pool report just before the speech, the president's men boasted that they had thrown extra light on the cathedral backdrop. One aide said of the fake illumination: "Oh, it's heated up. It's going to print loud.''
Somewhat late in life, I have come to love the city, people, food, and music of New Orleans, site of many recent newspaper industry conventions (including one of our own), not to mention the beloved JazzFest. In fact, I spent many hours, while chronicling the disaster two weeks ago here at E&P Online, searching for news of local musicians. On various days, I reported that Fats Domino, Pete Fountain, and "Gatesmouth" Brown were missing, then lost, then found (though Gates later passed away after evacuating to Texas).
The New York Times carried word earlier this week that many members of Preservation Hall bands had gotten out in time, now scattered with the tide, some as far away as New York City. One older trumpet player I caught at the Hall just this past June -- John Brunious, from a famed line of musicians -- was discovered in Arkansas. But I know nothing of his brother Wendell Brunious, who I’d seen the previous night at the funky club Donna’s. Wendell was playing that night with drummer Bob French, someone else I haven’t located.
And what of Henry Butler, who sat in with Michelle Shocked at a free outdoor concert in the rain, also in June? And Jon Cleary (not to mention his Absolute Monster Gentlemen)?
Then there’s one of my real favorites, a clarinetist/sax player with an extraordinary face named Jacques Gauthe. One memorable day, I came across him, quite by accident, in three different venues -- in a street festival, at the Hall, and then even later at night at a club. Haven’t heard a word about him.
One shouldn’t assume that any or all of them, because they are fairly well known in NOLA music circles, had enough dough to live on higher ground or owned cars in which to escape. Most are black and barely making do. They earn enough to live on, and when you love music as much as they do, and live in New Orleans, that is just enough. Even Fats Domino, who has made millions, still chose to remain (until the flood) in the downtrodden and flood-wrecked Ninth Ward.
Last week, when I wrote about the amazing story of Charmaine Neville, another Ninth Warder, and her battle to survive through high water, rape, and gunshots, several readers wrote to suggest that her story could not possibly be true. As part of the famous Neville family, and a semi-successful singer herself, surely she had enough money to live, or get, out of town? But, sad to say, like so many others, she just made scufflin’ money, and has, as she put it, "few resources."
So perhaps I’m a bit touchy about our president using the French Quarter to try to bring what seems, this month, like the death, and burial, of his presidency to an end, hoping for a swinging "second-line" tribute to his glory days -- before he squandered it all, and then some, on a foolish war and a bumbling rescue mission in New Orleans. One thing those two tragedies have in common: Americans dying needlessly.
Somewhere Satchmo is not singing “What a Wonderful World.”
***
If you wish to share any particular New Orleans memories, or concerns, write me at: gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greg Mitchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor of E&P and a frequent visitor to New Orleans.
Links referenced within this article:
gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com Find this article at:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001138119
The Blood of the Righteous By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective Monday 19 September 2005
During the Vietnam war, a number of anti-war activists were prosecuted and jailed for taking direct action against recruiting stations and draft board offices. Files were burned and blood was poured on records. Few activists during this time were as dedicated, or as prosecuted, as the brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan. In 1967, Philip Berrigan poured his own blood on Selective Service records in Baltimore, and handed out Bibles while waiting to be arrested. In 1969, Berrigan used home-made napalm to incinerate 378 draft files in Catsonville, Maryland. In 1980, the Berrigan brothers entered a General Electric nuclear missile factory in Pennsylvania, hammered on the nose cones, again poured their own blood, and again were arrested.
In every instance, the Berrigan protest actions were grounded in their Christian beliefs. Both brothers were Roman Catholic priests. After the 1969 Catsonville action, Philip Berrigan said, "We confront the Catholic Church, other Christian bodies, and the synagogues of America with their silence and cowardice in the face of our country's crimes. We are convinced that the religious bureaucracy in this country is racist, is an accomplice in this war, and is hostile to the poor."
As the American people grew more and more hostile towards the Vietnam war, actions of conscience taken by people like the Berrigan brothers became more and more threatening to those in government who wished to see the war continue. Punishments became harsher, threats became more dire, all in an effort to derail a popular wave of resistance against the war, and against those who pushed the war.
The wheel has come around again.
Today in New York, a Federal trial has begun against four anti-war activists who went into an Ithaca recruiting office on St. Patrick's Day in 2003 and poured their own blood on the walls, windows and the American flag. The protesters - Daniel J. Burns, 45; Clare T. Grady, 46; her sister, Teresa B. Grady, 40; and Peter J. De Mott, 58 - believed the young would-be recruits in the office had been seduced by video games and government propaganda videos, and wanted to remind them what war was really about. All four opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq. All four are members of the Catholic Worker movement, and model their activism after their heroes, the Berrigan brothers.
"War is bloody," said the four protesters in a statement they read after their action in Ithaca. "The blood we brought to the recruiting station was a sign of the blood inherent in the business of the recruiting station. Blood is a sign of life, which we hold to be precious, and a sign of redemption and conversion, which we seek as people of this nation. The young men and women who join the military, via that recruiting station, are people whose lives are precious. We are obligated, as citizens of a democracy, to sound an alarm when we see our young people being sent into harm's way for a cause that is wholly unjust and criminal. Blood is a potent symbol of life and death."
"Blood is the sacred substance of life," they continued, "yet it is shed wantonly in war. As Catholics, when we receive the Eucharist, we acknowledge our oneness with God and the entire human family. We went to the recruiting center using what we have - our bodies, our blood, our words, and our spirits - to implore, beg, and order our country away from the tragedy of war and toward God's reign of peace and justice."
This trial is not the first time the St. Patrick's Four have faced prosecution for their 2003 action. Initially, they were tried in Tompkins County for felony criminal mischief in April of 2004. All four were offered a plea bargain to avoid trial, and all four refused. The trial itself, to the dismay of the local prosecutor, became a forum on the Iraq war. The four plaintiffs represented themselves. After hearing at length the motivations and life stories of the protesters, the jury in the trial deadlocked, with nine members voting for acquittal.
The prosecutor knew he could not win a re-trial, and referred the case to Federal authorities. Today, the protesters face a variety of serious charges including damaging government property and conspiracy to impede an officer of the United States. If convicted, the four face up to six years in prison and fines of $250,000. Many fear that if the St. Patrick's Four are successfully prosecuted, it will set a national precedent which would allow non-violent protesters to be charged with conspiracy in Federal courts.
So many aspects of this situation are compelling. One cannot help but be moved by four people who went beyond protest marches, pamphleteering and writing letters to the editor, and decided to take direct non-violent action. One cannot help but be gladdened that these four, representing themselves, convinced a jury that their actions were not worthy of prison time. One cannot help but be terrified by the implications of a potential Federal conviction of these four, which would further marginalize the citizen right of protest in a time when more actions, not fewer, are desperately needed.
Yet perhaps the most significant aspect of all this is the simple fact that these four protesters are working to take back the mantle of Christianity from the brigands and radicals who have hijacked and polluted it. When men like Pat Robertson and George W. Bush are allowed to stand as avatars for all things Christian, when hate and fear replaces love and tolerance and violence becomes the chief focus of the so-called faithful, it is all too clear that the words and teachings of Jesus Christ have been subsumed by low people who have more in common with the Taliban than with the fellow called the Prince of Peace.
"Herein lies a riddle," said Philip Berrigan about the very people who have stolen Christianity and perverted it for their own ends. "How can a people so gifted by God become so seduced by naked power, so greedy for money, so addicted to violence, so slavish before mediocre and treacherous leadership, so paranoid, deluded, lunatic?"
One day, perhaps, we will have a solution to that riddle and a cure for the disease which birthed it. In the meantime, four Catholic peacemakers stare down the barrel of a prosecutorial gun today in New York. If you stand against the war, if you stand against the so-called Christians who have so perverted both that religion and our nation entire, if you happen to be the praying type, now would be a good time to put in a word on their behalf.
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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books:
War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and
The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
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www.cnn.comLONDON, England (Reuters) -- Large-scale corruption in Iraq's ministries, particularly the defense ministry, has led to one of the biggest thefts in history with more than $1 billion going missing, Iraq's finance minister said in an interview."Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal," Finance Minister Ali Allawi told British newspaper The Independent in a report published on Monday. "It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history."
Corruption, both in the bidding for and the awarding of contracts, and in the administration of public offices, is one of the most frequent accusations made by Iraqis against their government and foreign firms operating in the country.
Some of the worst allegations of impropriety concern the purchasing of military equipment by the defense ministry under the previous government, including more than $230 million spent on 28-year-old second-hand Polish helicopters.
"If you compare the amount that was allegedly stolen of about $1 billion compared with the budget of the ministry of defense, it is nearly 100 percent of the ministry's (procurement) budget that has gone (missing)," Allawi said.
Most of the questionable contracts are said to have been signed under the previous government, headed by Iyad Allawi, which served from June 28, 2004 until late February this year.
The former defense minister, Hazim Shaalan, is now living as a private citizen in Jordan. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Allawi, the finance minister, was also quoted by the newspaper as saying $500-$600 million had vanished from the electricity, transport, interior and other ministries.
The newspaper reported that the total amount missing from all the ministries could be as much as $2 billion.
Iraq's Board of Supreme Audit, set up in 2004 by the U.S. administration then running the country, said in February it would investigate all government contracts signed since the 2003 war after repeated allegations of corruption. It gave a report to the government in May.
Parts of the board's findings were quoted last month by Knight Ridder newspapers as showing that upwards of $1 billion had gone missing or was unaccounted for.
Knight Ridder said that in some cases contracts had been signed on scrap pieces of paper with unnamed intermediaries and that it was not always clear what products were supposed to be supplied for the vast sums of money quoted.
The Independent said that one contract involved purchasing armored cars that were so poorly made that their armor could be pierced by a single shot from an AK-47 assault rifle.
An Iraqi politician on Sunday accused the ministries of mass corruption and incompetence and quoted from the Board of Supreme Audit's report, which has not been made public.
"Our funds are under the control of ignorant people," Hadi al-Amiri, the head of parliament's integrity commission, told lawmakers in an angry address.
"There have been many violations of the bidding process that have led to huge losses of public funds. Many bids weren't properly conducted and were awarded by ministers without any input from committees set up to assess the bids," he said.
Church of England offers to meet Muslim leaders to apologize for Iraq war Mon Sep 19, 5:25 AM ET Agence France Presse via
Yahoo News The Church of England offered to take the lead in reconciling with Muslims by apologizing to their leaders for the US-led war in Iraq if the British government fails to do so.The proposal was contained in a report, entitled "Countering Terrorism: Power, Violence and Democracy Post-9/11" which written by a working group of the Church of England's House of Bishops.
"We do believe that the church has a visionary role for reconciliation, beyond that of any government," the Bishop of Oxford, Right Reverend Richard Harris, told BBC radio.
"The Christian church in particular has a mandate to work for reconciliation," he said Monday.
The report suggests that a "truth and reconciliation" meeting between Christian and Muslim leaders would be an opportunity to apologize for the way the West has contributed to the tragedy in Iraq, including the March 2003 invasion led by the United States and Britain.
The Church of England, which lies at the heart of the worldwide Anglican communion, has been openly critical of the war in Iraq, claiming the invasion failed to meet the criteria of a "just war".
The meeting is offered as a solution to the moral dilemma that members of the church who opposed the war find themselves in.
The bishops say to pull out of Iraq without a stable democracy being in place would be irresponsible and compound the misery of the Iraqi people. But to stay suggests collusion with a "gravely mistaken" war.
If collusion is a necessary evil, the report says, there needs to be a degree of public recognition of the West's responsibility for the predicament.
The report highlights a "long litany of errors" in the West's handling of Iraq which includes its support of Saddam Hussein over many years as a strategic ally against Iran, its willingness to sell him weapons and the suffering caused to the Iraqi people by sanctions.
It goes on to say that the recent invasion appeared to be "as much for reasons of American national interest as it was for the well-being of the Iraqi people".
As Prime Minister Tony Blair's government is unlikely to offer an apology, a meeting of religious leaders would provide a "public act of institutional repentance," it said.
From:
Truthout.org Memory's Revenge By JoAnn Wypijewski
Mother Jones September/October 2005 Issue
The planners of Operation Iraqi Freedom forgot another thing on the road to Baghdad: how veterans would affect their ability to get new boots on the ground. Think about ya life, the choices you make. Recruiters out to get you, don't make a mistake. Is obvious, right, they target the 'hood. Take a homeboy and write, what's wrong and what's good. My words are truth, heal like medicine. Don't believe me? Man, holla at a veteran. Rayniel, a New York City teenager, rapper, serious Catholic, had been talking to veterans for years by the time he became a senior at West Side High School, an alternative public school where the lived history of men in war has become a regular part of the conversation and curriculum. Rayniel himself never considered the military a career option, but as recruiting and counter-recruiting became all the word around inner-city high schools late last spring, he picked up a flyer from the American Friends Service Committee (a.k.a. Quakers) and added his own riff on its "Ten Points to Consider Before You Sign a Military Enlistment Agreement." Points one through three advise young people to "not make a quick decision," to "take a witness when speaking with a recruiter," and to "talk with veterans." Or, in Rayniel's translation, "Think about ya life...."
Jim Murphy wasn't thinking about much as a high school student near Rochester, New York, in the early 1960s. A kid with all the others sitting in the back row-the ones without a plan, sullen and indifferent, on whom their teachers had by then given up-he was, he says now, "really dead in the water. College, I blew it off. I was so far in the back row I had my hand up for the bathroom, the easiest fresh meat right there." He signed up for Vietnam and has been thinking about it ever since, the leeches and rashes and flamable boredom, the obsidian memory of death and horror purchased with lies.
Murphy is an administrator at West Side High today, and just before graduation Rayniel made him a gift of the customized "Ten Points" to give to students when he talks to them about war this fall. The two, Rayniel and Murphy, represent the U.S. military's deepest desire and greatest fear-youth and experience, except the one is not so young as to be unacquainted with cynicism nor the other so experienced as to have drowned in it. Recruiters know not to waste time with the Rayniels, and because they won't roam schools without a welcoming administration, they stay away from West Side High. But Murphy and a team of veterans will go where the recruiters go, making the rounds of New York's front-line high schools as they did last year, presenting themselves as primary sources in a district where Tim O'Brien's testament to war and narrative remembering, The Things They Carried, is on the official reading list for senior year. They'll address themselves most to those kids in the back row, the recruiters' softest targets, answering again the simple, searing question about Vietnam that they always get: "How did it change you?"
The Pentagon's recruitment crisis is only the latest evidence that the authors of Operation Iraqi Freedom forgot something on the way to war: the adamant memory of Vietnam, and not in the usual sense. There's a truism among military strategists that "the war before" colors the one you're fighting. World War II corporatized the military, in everything from management style to procurement to the seemingly permanent draft, even as it helped make the middle class and valorized combat experience as the ultimate manly credential. The Vietnam War was born of all that and then convulsed on it, transforming the draft into political dynamite and restructuring the Army to make wars like the one in Iraq unthinkable, or so almost everyone on up to Colin Powell once thought. Now retired Army officers will say openly that there's no precedent for running a full-scale war with a volunteer army; they will cite the Powell Doctrine-prescribing war only on condition of mass public support, swift and overwhelming force, and a clear exit strategy-as the lost lesson of the war before, the thing that Bush and Cheney, with no experience of Vietnam, were mindless of, and that Powell, whether too weak, too ambitious, or too loyal, failed to impress upon them.
Such critiques miss the fundamental lesson, which is that soldiers forced to become criminals for old men's ambitions won't all come home quietly. After Jim Murphy returned from Vietnam in 1969 he became part of the most rocking, because least expected, movement against the Vietnam War, the GI rebellion. He doesn't describe this in his presentation to high schoolers-in 40 minutes it's all that he and his fellow vets can do to convey the reality of war, the nature of military commitment beyond a recruiter's promises, and alternative sources of scholarships, jobs, or adventure-but it forms the essential context.
By Christmas 1971, when Murphy was among a band of Vietnam Veterans Against the War who seized the Statue of Liberty for three days, many thousands of GIs had participated in antiwar protests in American cities and at many major U.S. military bases in the world, including Saigon. They produced more than 100 underground GI newspapers, listened to underground GI radio, put their heads together at dozens of GI coffeehouses established by soldiers and activists in U.S. military towns, and formed a subset of the counterculture that took a playful whack at the Army's early-'60s recruiting promise of "fun, travel, adventure," FTA, appropriating the acronym for an unvarnished answer back: "Fuck the Army." By the hundreds they were jailed, by the thousands exiled. Their coffeehouses were attacked by the Klan in Texas, firebombed in Idaho and South Carolina, harassed by police and local officials everywhere. Riots burst out in nearly every U.S. military prison in the world, and in the field officers were being fragged. In 1971 the Pentagon totalled up 503,926 "incidents of desertion" since 1966, and concluded that more than half of U.S. ground forces in Vietnam openly opposed the war. Mutiny then spread to sailors and airmen.
Those veterans are someone's father or uncle or teacher or coach today, someone's grandfather or neighbor or coworker or family friend. They are among those whom military recruiters call "influencers." That the Pentagon has been caught off guard by the elders discouraging youths from enlisting indicates not only how captured it is by its own propaganda (the war as a heavily armed school-building, sewer-digging, democracy-spreading program) but also how completely it has been gulled by the revisionist machinery that for decades has manufactured a story of Vietnam veterans and antiwar protesters as two camps, distinct and hostile.
A spanner is about to be thrown into that revisionist machinery. Sir! No Sir!, a shattering documentary by David Zeiger expected to be in theaters by year's end, provides many of the statistics of Vietnam-era GI resistance cited above. More, it discloses the soul of soldiers, in story after story, who thought about their life, about everything they'd believed about fair play and honor and being a man and saw it negated, cynically; who realized, as former Air Force linguist Tom Bernard says in the film, that "the lies were so stark it challenged your own dignity, it challenged your own loyalty, it challenged your own humanity."
Iraq veterans are coming home with some of the same conclusions and nightmares. Few talk about this publicly, but a caution to a young brother or sister, an unaccustomed silence or strange anger, and word travels. Murphy says that 50 to 70 percent of the kids he addresses say they know someone who's in the military, in Iraq, or just returned. A Jamaican kid named Conrad ("just Conrad") tells me about a student he met whose father is a recruiter. Recruiters don't necessarily choose the job; they're assigned because they're good talkers, good looking, and this father "comes home so angry and stressed out all the time because he's lying to these kids." Whatever their dream, he's got to pitch the Army as the highway to it. And then Conrad remembers something a returned soldier told him. There was this Iraqi whom everyone in the platoon knew, and knew his name, but "they call him hadji, and everyone in Iraq is hadji." In Vietnam, "they called them gooks," Conrad says, recalling what his history teacher, a vet, had told him. "And I was like-wow-that's a racist name, there's no moral attachment so you can just kill them," which is what that teacher has been carrying for 30-some years. When I met Conrad, he was with a citywide group called the YA-YA Network (for Youth Activists, Youth Allies), which runs counter-recruitment workshops for teenagers and won the legal right to leaflet outside schools. YA-YA doesn't lecture about hegemony; it explains the job of the soldier at this time and place. "That's where it starts," says Dave Cline, reviewing his own trajectory from grunt in Vietnam to war protester to president of Veterans for Peace.
And so the Pentagon's crisis spreads-without streets abuzz or ablaze, without galvanizing sit-ins, sit-downs, occupations, or other such events that have come too narrowly to define protest politics. Desperate for blood, bodies, boots on the ground, the Army is soliciting dropouts, the out-of-shape, and the underachieving. Beginning September 24, the antiwar coalition United for Peace and Justice will put on three days of disruption in Washington, D.C., the first such mass action in more than a year. Over that long silence, the generation that has been targeted by the police, targeted by the military, left stranded by the economy, abandoned by politicians has begun to learn what it took Jim Murphy four years in Vietnam to learn: how to say no. This fall Rayniel will be in college. Murphy hopes more Iraq veterans and military families will join the school tours. On the flyer he carries, the one hip-hopified by his former student, the Quakers' final three points-that any enlistment promise can be broken by the military and any job switched arbitrarily, that all individual liberties can be restricted, that there are alternatives to enlistment-contain a new day's change on FTA:
Now do you wanna R.I.P., Rayniel from N.Y.C. telling you there's no guarantee... J.O.B. You have no clue. This is for the ones who keep it real in the military, you can't be you. So think, listen and see. Is a puppet to America really "all you can be"? -------------
JoAnn Wypijewski is a former senior editor of The Nation. -------
Tomgram: The Presidency Shines
The Can-do Bush Administration Does...
and the Presidency Shines (for twenty-six minutes)By Tom Engelhardt
Don't say they can't. They can -- and they did. Despite every calumny, it turns out that the Bush administration can put together an effective, well-coordinated rescue team and get crucial supplies to militarily occupied, devastated New Orleans on demand, in time, and just where they are most needed. Last Thursday, in a spectacular rescue operation, the administration team delivered just such supplies without a hitch to one of the city's neediest visitors, who had been trapped in hell-hole surroundings for almost three weeks by Hurricane Katrina. I'm speaking, of course, of George W. Bush.
That night, he gave his 26-minute "FDR" speech in a blue work shirt (meant assumedly to catch something of the White House work ethic) in floodlit Jackson Square, whose brilliantly lit cathedral had the look of Versailles amid a son-et-lumière spectacle. It was -- however briefly -- a triumph of the White House rescue team, headed, naturally, by Karl Rove, and seconded by the evangelical Christian, first-term speechwriter, Michael Gerson (once upon a pre-steroidal time known in the press as "the Mark McGwire of speechwriting"). He was brought back from White House domestic advisor-hood to shove a passel of religious imagery and Iraq-War-style catch phrases into the gaping hole Katrina had punched in the administration's political levees. Add to those two the White House's chief lighting designer, former NBC cameraman Bob DeServi, and the man long in charge of "visuals," former ABC producer Scott Sforza. The key designer of the quarter-million dollar stage set that, during the invasion of Iraq, passed for the United States Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, Sforza had with DeServi helped produce the infamous Top-Gun-style, color-coordinated Presidential landing on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln ("Mission Accomplished!") on May 1, 2003. Both men went to Jackson Square, according to New York Times White House correspondent Elizabeth Bumiller (in a pre-speech press-pool report from New Orleans) to handle "last minute details of the stagecraft," including the "warm tungsten lighting" that was to give the President his empathetic -- or, depending on how you look at the man, his sci-fi -- glow in that utterly deserted setting.
As for those crucial supplies: Without a single mishap, the rescue team delivered to central New Orleans its own generators, lights (not just the warm-glow ones for the President but the HMI movie lights to set the cathedral in the background ablaze), the camouflage netting that was needed to hide from viewers any sign of the surrounding devastation, and even its own communications equipment. And then there was the matter of crowd control -- okay, maybe not exactly crowds in depopulated New Orleans, but soldiers from the 82nd Airborne were effectively deployed, just in case, "to keep regular citizens several blocks back."
Even more impressively, as NBC news anchor Bryan Williams reported at his blog, they managed to get the lights turned on along the President's route into Jackson Square "no more than 30 minutes before POTUS drove through," so that looted mini-malls and abandoned gas pumps leapt into sight. Of course, an hour after he was done and gone -- rescues of this sort being limited affairs -- the area was "plunged into total darkness again, to audible groans." (As Williams concluded, "It's enough to make some of the folks here who witnessed it... jump to certain conclusions.")
It may be true that, for a week or more, this administration couldn't get a bottle of water to a diabetic grandmother, but when something was actually at stake -- what reporters far and wide referred to as the "rebuilding" not of New Orleans but of a presidency, or simply of the presidential "image" -- efficiency, coordination, and togetherness were the by-words of the day.
As for the speech, there were some genuine can-do steps forward in it as well. Though many in the media focused on the major financial commitments the President seemed to make to the New Orleans area and Katrina evacuees, more striking was his progress in accepting "responsibility" for administration error. When he first stunned reporters on September 13th by speaking such words while standing side by side with the Iraqi president at a White House welcoming ceremony ("...to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility."), he seemed a good deal less than comfortable. In fact, despite that wonderful little "to-the-extent" loophole phrase, he looked, as a Western pal of mine commented, like he had just swallowed a grasshopper and was feeling the legs go down. In New Orleans, similar words slipped down more like a smooth shot of single-malt scotch as did that toll-free number for those needing help (which has evidently hardly worked ever since), not to speak of all sorts of hardly noticed charmers right out of the Bush administration's non-Katrina wish-book. Take, for instance, this reminder that we are ever less a civilian society capable of saving ourselves in a civil fashion: "It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment's notice."
Click here to read more of this dispatch.---
Subject: Iraq Dispatches: Project Censored cites Dahr Jamail in the #2 and #7 biggest stories the mainstream media ignored ** Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches **
**
www.dahrjamailiraq.com **
September 18, 2005
Project Censored is a media research group that tracks the news
published in independent journals and newsletters and annually compiles
a list of 25 news stories of social significance that have been
overlooked, under-reported or self-censored by the country's major
national news media. The list is published in an annual book.
This year's book entitled “Censored 2006” features the work of Dahr
Jamail as contributing to the #2
(Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah
and the Civilian Death Toll) and #7
(Journalists Face Unprecedented
Dangers to Life and Livelihood) biggest stories the mainstream media
ignored over the past year.
The annual Project Censored top ten list is published widely across the
globe. For the contributing journalists, to be included in the top ten
constitutes both a great honor and an enormous opportunity to reach a
much broader audience.
To be included in two of the top ten stories is even a greater honor.
The 2006 book also includes a chapter of several web-logs from Dahr Jamail.
The #2 and #7 stories can be read below. An excellent summary of all of the top ten stories, as well as
background on Project Censored can be read at:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/090805S.shtml Dahr's recent lecture sponsored and attended by Project Censored can be
seen here:
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/multi_media/Dahr_Jamail_Sonoma_State_Project_Censored_4_10_2005.html ##########
#2 Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Death Toll
Part 1: Fallujah - War Crimes Go Unreported
Sources: Peacework, December 2004-January 2005
Title: "The Invasion of Fallujah: A Study in the Subversion of Truth"
Authors: Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell
World Socialist Web Site, November 17, 2004
Title: "US Media Applauds Destruction of Fallujah"
Author: David Walsh
The NewStandard, December 3, 2004
Title: "Fallujah Refugees Tell of Life and Death in the Kill Zone" -
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/hard_news/000145.phpAuthor: Dahr Jamail
Faculty Evaluators: Bill Crowley, Ph.D., Sherril Jaffe, Ph.D.
Student Researcher: Brian K. Lanphear
Over the past two years, the United States has conducted two major
sieges against Fallujah, a city in Iraq. The first attempted siege of
Fallujah (a city of 300,000 people) resulted in a defeat for Coalition
forces. As a result, the United States gave the citizens of Fallujah two
choices prior to the second siege: leave the city or risk dying as enemy
insurgents. Faced with this ultimatum, approximately 250,000 citizens,
or 83 percent of the population of Fallujah, fled the city. The people
had nowhere to flee and ended up as refugees. Many families were forced
to survive in fields, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings without
access to shelter, water, electricity, food or medical care. The 50,000
citizens who either chose to remain in the city or who were unable to
leave were trapped by Coalition forces and were cut off from food, water
and medical supplies. The United States military claimed that there were
a few thousand enemy insurgents remaining among those who stayed in the
city and conducted the invasion as if all the people remaining were
enemy combatants.
Burhan Fasa'a, an Iraqi journalist, said Americans grew easily
frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English. "Americans did not
have interpreters with them, so they entered houses and killed people
because they didn't speak English. They entered the house where I was
with 26 people, and shot people because [the people] didn't obey [the
soldiers'] orders, even just because the people couldn't understand a
word of English." Abu Hammad, a resident of Fallujah, told the Inter
Press Service that he saw people attempt to swim across the Euphrates to
escape the siege. "The Americans shot them with rifles from the shore.
Even if some of them were holding a white flag or white clothes over
their head to show they are not fighters, they were all shot."
Furthermore, "even the wound[ed] people were killed. The Americans made
announcements for people to come to one mosque if they wanted to leave
Fallujah, and even the people who went there carrying white flags were
killed." Former residents of Fallujah recall other tragic methods of
killing the wounded. "I watched them [US Forces] roll over wounded
people in the street with tanks ... This happened so many times."
Preliminary estimates as of December of 2004 revealed that at least
6,000 Iraqi citizens in Fallujah had been killed, and one-third of the
city had been destroyed.
Journalists Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell assert that the continuous
slaughter in Fallujah is greatly contributing to escalating violence in
other regions of the country such as Mosul, Baquba, Hilla, and Baghdad.
The violence prompted by the US invasion has resulted in the
assassinations of at least 338 Iraqi's who were associated with Iraq's
"new" government.
The US invasion of Iraq, and more specifically Fallujah, is causing an
incredible humanitarian disaster among those who have no specific
involvement with the war. The International Committee for the Red Cross
reported on December 23, 2004 that three of the city's water
purification plants had been destroyed and the fourth badly damaged.
Civilians are running short on food and are unable to receive help from
those who are willing to make a positive difference. Aid organizations
have been repeatedly denied access to the city, hospitals, and refugee
populations in the surrounding areas.
Abdel Hamid Salim, spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad, told
Inter Press Service that none of their relief teams had been allowed
into Fallujah three weeks after the invasion. Salim declared that "there
is still heavy fighting in Fallujah. And the Americans won't let us in
so we can help people."
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour voiced a deep
concern for the civilians caught up in the fighting. Louise Arbour
emphasized that all those guilty of violations of international
humanitarian and human rights laws must be brought to justice. Arbour
claimed that all violations of these laws should be investigated,
including "the deliberate targeting of civilians, indiscriminate and
disproportionate attacks, the killing of injured persons and the use of
human shields."
Marjorie Cohn, executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild,
and the US representative to the executive committee of the American
Association of Jurists, has noted that the US invasion of Fallujah is a
violation of international law that the US had specifically ratified:
"They [US Forces] stormed and occupied the Fallujah General Hospital,
and have not agreed to allow doctors and ambulances to go inside the
main part of the city to help the wounded, in direct violation of the
Geneva Conventions.
According to David Walsh, the American media also seems to contribute to
the subversion of truth in Fallujah. Although, in many cases,
journalists are prevented from entering the city and are denied access
to the wounded, corporate media showed little concern regarding their
denied access. There has been little or no mention of the immorality or
legality of the attacks the United States has waged against Iraq. With
few independent journalists reporting on the carnage, the international
humanitarian community in exile, and the Red Cross and Red Crescent
prevented from entering the besieged city, the world is forced to rely
on reporting from journalists embedded with US forces. In the US press,
we see casualties reported for Fallujah as follows: number of US
soldiers dead, number of Iraqi soldiers dead, number of "guerillas" or
"insurgents" dead. Nowhere were the civilian casualties reported in the
first weeks of the invasion. An accurate count of civilian casualties to
date has yet to be published in the mainstream media.
Part 2: Civilian Death Toll Is Ignored Sources:
The Lancet, October 29, 2004
Title: "Mortality Before and After the 2003 Invasion of Iraq"
Authors: Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi
and Gilbert Burnham
The Lancet, October 29, 2004
Title: "The War in Iraq: Civilian Casualties, Political Responsibilities"
Author: Richard Horton
The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 4, 2005
Title: "Lost Count"
Author: Lila Guterman
FAIR, April 15, 2004
Title: "CNN to al-Jazeera: Why Report Civilian Deaths?"
Author: Julie Hollar
Faculty Evaluator: Sherril Jaffe, Ph.D.
Student Researcher: Melissa Waybright
In late October, 2004, a peer reviewed study was published in The
Lancet, a British medical journal, concluding that at least 100,000
civilians have been killed in Iraq since it was invaded by a United
States-led coalition in March 2003. Previously, the number of Iraqis
that had died, due to conflict or sanctions since the 1991 Gulf War, had
been uncertain. Claims ranging from denial of increased mortality to
millions of excess deaths have been made. In the absence of any surveys,
however, they relied on Ministry of Health records.
Morgue-based surveillance data indicate the post-invasion homicide rate
is many times higher than the pre-invasion rate.
In the present setting of insecurity and limited availability of health
information, researchers, headed by Dr. Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins
University, undertook a national survey to estimate mortality during the
14.6 months before the invasion (Jan 1, 2002, to March 18, 2003) and to
compare it with the period from March 19, 2003, to the date of the
interview, between Sept 8 and 20, 2004. Iraqi households were informed
about the purpose of the survey, assured that their name would not be
recorded, and told that there would be no benefits or penalties for
refusing or agreeing to participate.
The survey indicates that the death toll associated with the invasion
and occupation of Iraq is in reality about 100,000 people, and may be
much higher. The major public health problem in Iraq has been identified
as violence. However, despite widespread Iraqi casualties, household
interview data do not show evidence of widespread wrongdoing on the part
of individual soldiers on the ground.
Ninety-five percent of reported killings (all attributed to US forces by
interviewees) were caused by helicopter gunships, rockets, or other
forms of aerial weaponry.
The study was released on the eve of a contentious presidential election
- fought in part over US policy on Iraq. Many American newspapers and
television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it
far from the top headlines. "What went wrong this time? Perhaps the rush
by researchers and The Lancet to put the study in front of American
voters before the election accomplished precisely the opposite result,
drowning out a valuable study in the clamor of the presidential
campaign." (Lila Guterman, Chronicle of Higher Education.)
The study's results promptly flooded though the worldwide media -
everywhere except the United States, where there was barely a whisper
about the study, followed by stark silence. "The Lancet released the
paper on October 29, the Friday before the election, when many reporters
were busy with political stories. That day the Los Angeles Times and the
Chicago Tribune each dedicated only about 400 words to the study and
placed the stories inside their front section, on pages A4 and A11,
respectively. (The news media in Europe gave the study much more play;
many newspapers put articles about it on their front pages.)
In a short article about the study on page A8, the New York Times noted
that the Iraqi Body Count, a project to tally civilian deaths reported
in the news media, had put the maximum death count at around 17,000. The
new study, the article said, "is certain to generate intense
controversy." But the Times has not published any further news articles
about the paper. The Washington Post, perhaps most damagingly to the
study's reputation, quoted Marc E. Garlasco, a senior military analyst
at Human Rights Watch, as saying, "These numbers seem to be inflated."
Mr. Garlasco says now that he hadn't read the paper at the time and
calls his quote in the Post "really unfortunate." (Lila Guterman,
Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Even so, nobody else in American corporate media bothered to pick up the
story and inform our citizens how many Iraqi citizens are being killed
at the hands of a coalition led by our government. The study was never
mentioned on television news, and the truth remains unheard by those who
may need to hear it most. The US government had no comment at the time
and remains silent about Iraqi civilian deaths.
"The only thing we keep track of is casualties for US troops and
civilians," a Defense Department spokesman told The Chronicle.
When CNN anchor Daryn Kagan did have the opportunity to interview the Al
Jazeera network editor-in-chief Ahmed al-Sheik - a rare opportunity to
get independent information about events in Fallujah - she used the
occasion to badger al-Sheik about whether the civilian deaths were
really "the story" in Fallujah. CNN's argument was that a bigger story
than civilian deaths is "what the Iraqi insurgents are doing" to provoke
a US "response" is startling. "When reports from the ground are
describing hundreds of civilians being killed by US forces, CNN should
be looking to Al Jazeera's footage to see if it corroborates those
accounts - not badgering Al Jazeera's editor about why he doesn't
suppress that footage." (MediaWatch, Asheville Global Report.)
Study researchers concluded that several limitations exist with this
study, predominantly because the quality of data received is dependent
on the accuracy of the interviews. However, interviewers believed that
certain essential charcteristics of Iraqi culture make it unlikely that
respondents would have fabricated their reports of the deaths. The
Geneva Conventions have clear guidance about the responsibilities of
occupying armies to the civilian population they control. "With the
admitted benefit of hindsight and from a purely public health
perspective, it is clear that whatever planning did take place was
grievously in error. The invasion of Iraq, the displacement of a cruel
dictator, and an attempt to impose a liberal democracy by force have, by
themselves, been insufficient to bring peace and security to the
civilian population.
The illegal, heavy handed tactics practiced by the US military in Iraq
evident in these news stories have become what appears to be their
standard operating procedure in occupied Iraq. Countless violations of
international law and crimes against humanity occurred in Fallujah
during the November massacre.
Evidenced by the mass slaughtering of Iraqis and the use of illegal
weapons such as cluster bombs, napalm, uranium munitions and chemical
weapons during the November siege of Fallujah when the entire city was
declared a "free fire zone" by military leaders, the brutality of the US
military has only increased throughout Iraq as the occupation drags on.
According to Iraqis inside the city, at least 60 percent of Fallujah
went on to be totally destroyed in the siege, and eight months after the
siege entire districts of the city remained without electricity or
water. Israeli style checkpoints were set up in the city, prohibiting
anyone from entering who did not live inside the city. Of course
non-embedded media were not allowed in the city.
Update: Since these stories were published, countless other incidents of illegal weapons and tactics being used by the US military in Iraq have
occurred.
During "Operation Spear" on June 17th, 2005, US-led forces attacked the
small cities of al-Qa'im and Karabla near the Syrian border. US
warplanes dropped 2,000 pound bombs in residential areas and claimed to
have killed scores of "militants" while locals and doctors claimed that
only civilians were killed.
As in Fallujah, residents were denied access to the city in order to
obtain medical aid, while those left inside the city claimed Iraqi
civilians were being regularly targeted by US snipers.
According to an IRIN news report, Firdos al-Abadi from the Iraqi Red
Crescent Society stated that 7,000 people from Karabla were camped in
the desert outside the city, suffering from lack of food and medical aid
while 150 homes were totally destroyed by the US military.
An Iraqi doctor reported on the same day that he witnessed, "crimes in
the west area of the country ... the American troops destroyed one of
our hospitals, they burned the whole store of medication, they killed
the patient in the ward ... they prevented us from helping the people in
Qa'im."
Also like Fallujah, a doctor at the General Hospital of al-Qa'im stated
that entire families remained buried under the rubble of their homes,
yet medical personnel were unable to reach them due to American snipers.
Iraqi civilians in Haditha had similar experiences during "Operation
Open Market" when they claimed US snipers shot anyone in the streets for
days on end, and US and Iraqi forces raided homes detaining any man inside.
Corporate media reported on the "liberation" of Fallujah, as well as
quoting military sources on the number of "militants" killed. Any
mention of civilian casualties, heavy-handed tactics or illegal
munitions was either brief or non-existent, and continues to be as of
June 2005.
For Additional Information: For those interested in following these
stories, it is possible to obtain information by visiting the English
al-Jazeera website at
http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage, my website
at
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com, The World Tribunal on Iraq at
http://www.worldtribunal.org, Peacework Magazine at
http://www.afsc.org/pwork/0412/041204.htm and other
alternative/independent news websites.
##########
#7 Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood
Sources: www.truthout.org, Feb. 28, 2005
Title: "Dead Messengers: How the US Military Threatens Journalists"
Author: Steve Weissman
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022405A.shtml Title: "Media Repression in 'Liberated' Land" -
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/hard_news/000124.phpInterPress Service, November 18, 2004
Author: Dahr Jamail
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=26333 Faculty Evaluator: Elizabeth Burch, Ph.D.
Student Researcher: Michelle Jesolva
According to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), 2004 was
the deadliest year for reporters since 1980, when records began to be
kept. Over a 12-month span, 129 media workers were killed and 49 of
those deaths occurred in the Iraqi conflict. According to independent
journalist Dahr Jamail, journalists are increasingly being detained and
threatened by the US-installed interim government in Iraq. When the only
safety for a reporter is being embedded with the US military, the
reported stories tend to have a positive spin. Non-embedded reporters
suffer the great risk of being identified as enemy targets by the military.
The most blatant attack on journalists occurred the morning of April 8,
2004, when the Third Infantry fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad
killing cameramen Jose Couso and Taras Protsyuk and injuring three
others. The hotel served as headquarters for some 100 reporters and
other media workers. The Pentagon officials knew that the Palestine
Hotel was full of journalists and had assured the Associated Press that
the US would not target the building. According to Truthout, the Army
had refused to release the records of its investigation. The Committee
to Protect Journalists, created in 1981 in order to protect colleagues
abroad from governments and others who have no use for free and
independent media, filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act to
force the Army to release its results. The sanitized copy of the
releasable results showed nothing more than a Commander inquiry.
Unsatisfied with the US military's investigation, Reporters Without
Borders, an international organization that works to improve the legal
and physical safety of journalists worldwide, conducted their own
investigation. They gathered evidence from journalists in the Palestine
Hotel at the time of the attacks. These were eye witness accounts that
the military neglected to include in their report. The Reporters Without
Borders report also provided information disclosed by others embedded
within the US Army, including the US military soldiers and officers
directly involved in the attack. The report stated that the US officials
first lied about what had happened during the Palestine Hotel attack and
then, in an official statement four months later, exonerated the US Army
from any mistake of error in judgment. The investigation found that the
soldiers in the field did not know that the hotel was full of
journalists. Olga Rodriguez, a journalist present at the Palestine Hotel
during the attack, stated on KPFA's Democracy Now! that the soldiers and
tanks were present at the hotel 36 hours before the firing and that they
had even communicated with the soldiers.
There have been several other unusual journalist attacks, including:
March 22, 2003: Terry Lloyd, a reporter for British TV station ITN, was killed when his convoy crossed into Iraq from Kuwait. French cameraman
Frederic Nerac and Lebanese interpreter Hussein Osman, both in the
convoy, disappeared at the same time.
June, 2003: According to Dahr Jamail, within days of the 'handover' of power to an interim Iraqi government in 2003, al-Jazeera had been
accused of inaccurate reporting and was banned for one month from
reporting out of Iraq. The ban was later extended to "indefinitely" and
the interim government announced that any al-Jazeera journalist found
reporting in Iraq would be detained. Corentin Fleury, a French freelance
photographer, and his interpreter Bahktiyar Abdulla Hadad, were detained
by the US military when they were leaving Fallujah before the siege of
the city began. They were both held in a military detention facility
outside of the city and were questioned about the photos that were taken
of bomb-stricken Fallujah. Fleury was released after five days but his
interpreter, Bahktiyar Abdulla Hadad, remained.
April 8, 2004: The same day of the attack on the Palestine Hotel,
Truthout writes, the US bombed the Baghdad offices of Abu Dhabi TV and
al-Jazeera while they were preparing to broadcast, killing al-Jazeera
correspondent Tariq Ayyoub. August 17, 2004: Mazen Dana was killed while filming (with permission) a prison, guarded by the US military in a Baghdad suburb. According to Truthout's Steve Weissman, the Pentagon issued a statement one month later claiming that the troops had acted within the rules of engagement.
March 4, 2005: Nicola Calipari, one of Italy's highest ranking
intelligence officials, was shot dead by US troops. He was driving with
Italian journalist Guiliana Sgrena, who had just been released from
captivity and was on her way to Baghdad's airport. Sgrena survived the
attack. She stated in an interview with Amy Goodman on KPFA's Democracy Now! that the troops "shot at us without any advertising, any intention, any attempt to stop us before" and they appeared to have shot the back of the car.
In all cases, little investigation has been conducted, no findings have
been released and all soldiers involved have been exonerated.
At the World Economic Forum, on a panel titled: "Will Democracy Survive
the Media?," Eason Jordan, a CNN news chief, commented that the US
commanders encourage hostility toward the media and fail to protect
journalists, especially those who choose not to embed themselves under
military control. According to Truthout, during a discussion about the
number of journalists killed during the Iraq war, Jordan stated that he
knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops, but
had been targeted. Jordan also insisted that US soldiers had
deliberately shot at journalists. After the forum, Jordan recanted the
statements and was forced to resign his job of 23 years at CNN.
As a matter of military doctrine, the US military dominates, at all
costs, every element of battle, including our perception of what they
do. The need for control leads the Pentagon to urge journalists to embed
themselves within the military, where they can go where they are told
and film and tell stories only from a pro-American point of view. The
Pentagon offers embedded journalists a great deal of protection. As the
Pentagon sees it, non-embedded eyes and ears do not have any military
significance, and unless Congress and the American people stop them, the
military will continue to target independent journalists. Admirals and
generals see the world one way, reporters another; the clash leads to
the deaths of too many journalists.
Update by Steve Weissman: When Truthout boss Marc Ash asked me earlier this year to look into the Pentagon's killing of journalists, many
reporters believed that the military was purposely targeting them. But,
as I quickly found, the crime was more systemic and in many ways worse.
As far as anyone has yet proved, no commanding officer ever ordered a
subordinate to fire on journalists as such. Not at Baghdad's Palestine
Hotel in April 2003. Not at the Baghdad checkpoint where soldiers
wounded Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena and killed her Secret Service
protector in March 2005. Andnot anywhere else in Iraq or Afghanistan.
How, then, did the US military end up killing journalists?
It started with a simple decision - the Pentagon's absolute refusal to
take any responsibility for the lives of journalists who chose to work
independently rather than embed themselves in a British or American
military unit. Despite repeated requests from Reuters and other major
news organizations, Pentagon officials still refuse to take the steps
needed to reduce the threat to independent journalists:
1.The military must be forced to respect the work that independent
journalists do, protect them where possible, and train soldiers to
recognize the obvious differences between rocket launchers and TV cameras.
2.Commanders need to pass on information about the whereabouts of
journalists with a direct order not to shoot at them.
3.When soldiers do kill journalists, the Pentagon needs to hold them
responsible, something that no military investigation has yet done.
4.When the military tries to forcibly exclude journalists and otherwise
prevent "hostile information" about its operations, such as its
destruction of Fallujah, Congress and the media need to step in and force
the Pentagon to back off. One other problem needs urgent attention. Military intelligence
regularly monitors the uplink equipment that reporters use to transmit
their stories and communicate by satellite phone. But, as the BBC's Nik
Gowing discovered, the electronic intelligence mavens make no effort to
distinguish between journalistic communications and those of enemy
forces. All the sensing devices do is look for electronic traffic
between the monitored uplinks and known enemies.
In Gowing's view, this led the Americans to order a rocket attack on the
Kabul office of the Arab broadcaster Al Jazeera, whose journalists kept
regular contact with the Taliban as part of their journalistic coverage.
To date, neither Congress nor the military have done what they need to
do to protect unembedded journalists and the information they provide.
More shamefully, the mass media continues to underplay the story.
But, for those who want it, reliable information is easily available,
either from the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters without
Borders, or the International Federation of Journalists.
Notes:1.
www.ifj.org.(Independent Federation of Journalists)
2. "Missing ITN Crew May Have Come Under 'Friendly Fire,'"
www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/ Story/0,2763,919832,00.html, March 23, 2003.3. Democracy Now! March 23, 2005, "Wounded Spanish Journalist Olga
Rodriguez Describes the US Attack on the Palestine Hotel that Killed Two
of Her Colleagues."
4. Democracy Now! April 27, 2005, "Giuliana Sgrena Blasts US Cover Up,
Calls for US and Italy to Leave Iraq."
_______________________________________________
**More writing, photos and commentary at
http://dahrjamailiraq.com
