The Dominion - Dahr Jamail

"Everything in my life is destroyed now, so I will fight them."

Fri, 28 Jul 2006 22:45:52 +0000

Dispatches from the war-torn Lebanese capital

A car carrying a family and children is hit in Southern Lebanon. photo: Kodak Agfa

"I am in Hezbollah because I care," the fighter, who agreed to the interview on condition of anonymity, told me. "I care about my people, my country, and defending them from the Zionist aggression." I jotted furiously in my note pad while sitting in the back seat of his car. We were parked not far from Dahaya, the district in southern Beirut which is being bombed by Israeli warplanes as we talk.

The sounds of bombs echoed off the buildings of the capital city of Lebanon yesterday afternoon. Out the window, I watched several people run into the entrance of a business center, as if that would provide them any safety.

The member of Hezbollah I was interviewing—let's call him Ahmed—has been shot three times during previous battles against Israeli forces on the southern Lebanese border. His brother was killed in one of these battles. It's been several years since his father was killed by an air strike in a refugee camp.

"My home now in Dahaya is pulverized, so Hezbollah gave me a place to stay while this war is happening," he said, "When this war ends, where am I to go? What am I to do? Everything in my life is destroyed now, so I will fight them."

That explains why earlier in the day, when driving me around, he'd stopped at an apartment to change into black clothing—a black t-shirt and black combat pants, along with black combat boots.

A tall, stocky man, Ahmed seemed always exhausted and angry.

"I didn't have a future," he continued while the concussions of bombs continued, "But now, Hassan Nasrallah is the leader of this country and her people. My family has lived in Lebanon for 1,500 years, and now we are all with him. He has given us belief and hope that we can push the Zionists out of Lebanon, and keep them out forever. He has given me purpose."

"Do you think this is why so many people now, probably over two million here in Lebanon alone, follow Nasrallah?" I asked.

"Hezbollah gives you dignity, it returns your dignity to you," he replied, "Israel has put all of the Arab so-called leaders under her foot, but Nasrallah says 'No more.'"

He paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead. The summer heat in Beirut drips with humidity. During the afternoon, my primary impulse is to find a fan and curl up for a nap under its gracious movement of the thick air here.

Earlier he'd driven me to one of the larger hospitals in Beirut where I photographed civilian casualties. All of them were tragic cases… but one really grabbed me-that of a little 8 year-old girl, lying in a large bed. She was on her side, with a huge gash down the right side of her face and her right arm wrapped in gauze. She was hiding in the basement of her home with 12 family members when they were bombed by an Israeli fighter jet.

Her father was in a room downstairs with both of his legs blown off. Her other family members were all seriously wounded. She lay there whimpering, with tears streaming down her face.

I think I won Ahmed's trust after that. I walked out the car, got in and sat down. He asked me where I wanted to go now.

Ahmed put his hand on my shoulder and said, "This is what I've been seeing for my entire life. Nothing but pain and suffering."

A photographer from Holland who was working with me was able to respond to Ahmed that maybe we could go have a look at Dahaya.

Ahmed had told me that it was currently extremely dangerous for a journalist to try to go into Dahaya. Before, Hezbollah had run tours for people to come see the wreckage generated by Israeli air strikes. All you had to do was meet under a particular bridge at 11 a.m., and you had a guided tour from "party guys" (members of Hezbollah) into what has become a post-apocalyptic ghost town.

A couple of days ago I went there, without the "party guy" tour. A friend and I were driven in by a man we hired for the day to take us around. I was shocked at the level of destruction—in some places entire city blocks lay in rubble. At one point we came upon the touring journalists, all scurrying to their vehicles. Everyone was in a panic.

"What's going on?," I asked our driver. "A party guy who is a spotter said he saw Israeli jets coming," he responded, while spinning the van around and punching the gas as we sped past the journalists lugging their cameras while running back to their drivers.

While driving we were passed by several Hezbollah fighters riding scooters. Each had his M-16 assault rifle slung across his back and wore green ammunition pouches across his chest.

Ahmed told me he'd captured two Israeli spies himself. "One of them is a Lebanese Jewish woman, and she had a ring she could talk into," he explained as new sweat beads began to form on his forehead, "Others are posing as journalists and using this type of paint to mark buildings to be bombed."

I doubt the ring part, and also wonder about the feasibility of paint used for targeting, but there are no doubt spies crawling all over Beirut. In Iraq, mercenaries often pose as journalists, making it even more dangerous than it already was for us to work there.

Nevertheless, war always fosters paranoia. Whom can you trust? What if they are a spy? What are their motives? Why do they want to ask me this question at this time? These types of questions become constant I my mind, and so many others in this situation where normal life is now a thing of the past. I think they are some sort of twisted survival mechanism.

We drove back near my hotel and parked again. People strolled by on the sidewalks. Ahmed said, "I will never be a slave to the United States or Israel."

Dahr Jamail's daily dispatches from Beirut are being posted on the Mother Jones website.

Dahr Jamail tours the war-torn Lebanese capital of Beirut with a member of Hezbollah.

Independent Journalism Under Occupation

Fri, 28 May 2004 00:29:42 +0000

Residents of Fallujah transport a woman shot by a US sniper. Dahr Jamail/New Standard News

Today in Iraq, like in the U.S., there is a horrendous disparity between what is really occurring on the ground and what the Western corporate media chooses to report.

I recently spent nine weeks in Iraq working as a freelance independent journalist. On a daily basis, I witnessed first-hand the corporate media either mis-reporting or not reporting stories as they arose.

The signs were glaring -- from the parking lot full of parked white SUV's in the middle of the day supposedly used by the CNN and Fox news crews, to the absence of ABC, NBC, or CBS media crews at any of the sites of the news stories I was covering. Even stories that were on the front pages stateside are regularly being covered from the press room and not the field.

It's no wonder the corporate media rarely reports on the torturing of many of the over 10,000 detained Iraqis by the US military, the constant home raids, or the infrastructure in nearly complete disrepair as we begin the second year of the occupation. For most of the corporate media tend to stick closer to their hotels, rather than where the stories are occurring and being lived every day -- out amongst the Iraqi people.

The majority of the corporate media tend to simply go where the U.S. military tells them it is safe to go, while donning their flack jackets, helmets, and the preferred 'we vs. they' mentality with Iraqis. Once they arrive at the scene of, say, a sealed off section of Baghdad where yet another Improvised Explosive Device has detonated near a passing patrol, they are herded to the one section the military allows to be photographed - so at best they might get shots of an already cleaned up scene. The U.S. military in Iraq has a strong tendency to hide its own destroyed hardware to sanitize a scene, and the corporate media does a good job of making sure they don't run photographs of this, nor any wounded or dead U.S. soldiers.

Then there is, of course, the editorial selection factor. In mid-December I broke a story of U.S. military personnel detaining sixteen 14-17 year-old school boys at a secondary school in Al-Amiriya, Baghdad for holding a non-violent pro-Saddam Hussein demonstration after the dictator was captured.

When a friend who writes for the AP assisted in filing the story of armed soldiers pulling children from their classrooms to over 100 major newspapers throughout the U.S., only one editor responded. The reply? "This is not news."

Other stories I covered that were never run by corporate media outlets included a massacre near Ramadi where the military executed three men from a family, the gross mis-reporting of the military of their 'killing' 54 Fedayin fighters in Samarra during the end of November (really there were two fighters and eight civilians killed), or the fact that most of the people in southern Iraq are suffering from water borne diseases due to the fact that Bechtel is not fulfilling their contractual obligations and rebuilding the water infrastructure there.

Instead, the US public is fed bogus polls telling them half of Iraqis feel they are better off now with a year of occupation under their belts. That is an amazing figure, since nearly every one of the hundreds of Iraqis I interviewed throughout Iraq was understandably enraged at the 70% unemployment, less than 8 hours of electricity per day in Baghdad, water so terrible there are cholera outbreaks in southern Iraq, and a security situation that spirals further out of control on a daily basis.

About the only time it's easy to find Iraqis who are pro-occupation is if you let the CPA show them to you, thus it's the journalists with the least initiative that find the rarest selections of public opinion by speaking to those pushing brooms or sitting at a desk at CPA HQ.

Every independent journalist I spoke with in Iraq reported the same thing: the majority of Iraqis, already incensed at the Americans' failure to rebuild, and coping with the aforementioned abuses and hardships, have run out of patience with the occupying forces.

In fact, the conduct of the corporate media in Iraq is making the climate more dangerous for journalists. I have arrived at the scene of an attack on the U.S. military to report their heavy-handed reactions of shooting several Iraqi civilians, only to be threatened and yelled at by angry Iraqis. Why? Because they had become frustrated with telling their stories to corporate journalists, only to have these journalists return to Baghdad and parrot the military press release.

The most common example of the lack of investigative journalism by the corporate media in Iraq is that most of the journalists simply parrot what General Kimmitt and Dan Senor (Mr. Bremer's spokesman) feed them at the Coalition Provisional Authority press conferences. During these surreal "press conferences", if the general or Mr. Senor are asked a tough question, the journalists microphone is sometimes cut, or the question is simply avoided altogether.

This was clearly illustrated when a US patrol was hit by an Improvised Explosive Device on January 27 in Khaldiya, an area between Ramadi and Baghdad.

The U.S. military reported three American soldiers and one Iraqi civilian killed in the attack. Every witness I interviewed at the scene, as well as wounded Iraqis in the nearby Ramadi hospital and an Iraqi Policeman, reported seeing far more body bags than the three reported by CENTCOM.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rayid Al-Ani, the Assistant Director of the Ramadi Hospital reported three dead Iraqis having been brought to his hospital from the scene of the attack, and said three of the wounded brought to him with terminal injuries died shortly thereafter. Did the military revise their story? Of course not. Did any of the corporate media outlets hold them accountable for this? Of course not. Did they even bother driving out to Khaldiya to check the military's claims?

Getting the facts in Iraq is not rocket science. I am simply doing my job as a journalist to report the Iraqi side of the story, along with the Coalition Press Information Center side. An informed citizenry forms the basis of a democracy. Not only are U.S. citizens being deprived of access to information about the true nature of the critical situation in Iraq, they are being outright lied to by most of the corporate media outlets.

Should the corporate media not be held accountable for blocking the democratic process? How can U.S. foreign policy be shifted when the media is simply not reporting the facts?

There may never have been a time such as this where the need for investigative independent journalism has been so great. In Iraq, citizens and soldiers both will continue to die on a daily basis while the corporate media continues to report on bogus polls.

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who recently spent 9 weeks in Iraq. His writing has appeared on websites such as Electronic Iraq, Information Clearinghouse, and The NewStandard. You can help Dahr continue his crucial work in Iraq by donating to help fund his return trip, beginning April 1.

Dahr Jamail describes the current state of independent journalism in Iraq.