iraq

Syrian Officer Claims To Have Trained Iraqis In Beheading: Feb. 23, 2005

“Iraqi state television aired a video Wednesday showing what the U.S.-funded channel said was the confession of a captured Syrian officer who said he trained Iraqi insurgents to behead people and build car bombs to attack American and Iraqi troops. The video also showed an Iraqi who said the insurgents practiced beheading animals to train for decapitating hostages. Syrian officials could not immediately be reached for comment on the claims. The video comes at a time when the Bush administration has stepped up pressure on Syria to stop meddling in Iraqi affairs by allowing insurgents to cross into the country to fight coalition troops and by harboring former Iraqi regime members. Syria has denied the charges.”
[MSNBC]

“The Syrian intelligence officer who appeared on the U.S.-funded Iraqi state television station had a stark message about the insurgency he’d helped train people to build car bombs and behead people. ”My name is Anas Ahmed al-Essa. I live in Halab. I am from Syria,“ he said by way of introduction naming what he said was his home in Syria. ”What’s your job?“ he was asked by someone off-camera. ”I am a lieutenant in intelligence.“ Then a second question. ”Which intelligence?“ The reply: ”Syrian intelligence.“ And so began a detailed 15-minute confession broadcast by al-Iraqiya TV on Wednesday, in which the man, identified as 30-year-old Lt. Anas Ahmed al-Essa, said his group was recruited to ”cause chaos in Iraq … to bar America from reaching Syria.“ ”We received all the instructions from Syrian intelligence,“ said the man, who appeared in the propaganda video along with 10 Iraqis who said they had also been recruited by Syrian intelligence officers.”
[ABC News]

Josie Appleton: “Putting The Photos In Perspective”: Jan. 20, 2005

“The papers are again full of images of domination and degradation - photos of British soldiers simulating punches and kicks at trussed Iraqi detainees, standing on a detainee with stick in hand, or forcing others to act out gay sex. But as Mick Hume pointed out last year on spiked, when similar photos from Abu Ghraib were made public, these images bear a striking resemblance to the everyday torture and humiliation that is part of our reality TV-obsessed culture [...] Degrading snapshots are everywhere - but commentators have offered little in terms of analysis or explanation. More insight comes from a somewhat unlikely quarter: On Photography [...] The growth of photography, said Sontag, was about taking a 'chronically voyeuristic relation to the world'. With camera in hand, the world and its occupants become prey for our amusement, with our subjects expected to pose, to expose themselves on film. The effect, said Sontag, 'is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation'. What Sontag saw in surrealist photographers who went around collecting images of freaks, we can see in the baiting of McCririck on Celebrity Big Brother, or the video Bumfights, featuring tramps beating each other up for food and liquor. [...] In the images of British soldiers, the torturers are indifferent to their subjects. All eyes are on the camera, giving grins or the thumbs up. Both London passersby and Iraqi detainees are being played with, allotted an involuntary part in somebody else's movie. 'You starred on Happy Slap TV', was the appropriate sign-off that one of the boys used for his video clips.

Today, you could say that the relationship between exhibitionist and voyeur is one of the few social relationships still standing. Others - between father and son, leader and party, with workmates or members of the public - have fallen away in recent decades. One way in which people make contact and gain affirmation is by making and consuming images of each other. Somehow people's actions don't seem so important unless they are caught on film and distributed. [...] The roles of exhibitionist and voyeur are often interchangeable. It is likely that the British soldiers who posed with Iraqi detainees had the camera in mind when they posed; they were leering at the same time that they showed themselves off. And in one of those photos you can see some other soldiers also taking photos, with the voyeurs becoming part of the shot. [...] Yet while others tended to see society's fascination with images as a mere sham, a fake show that should be exposed and dispensed with, Sontag saw it as a reflection of people's real relationships to one another. 'The notions of image and reality are complementary. When the notion of reality changes so does the notion of the image, and vice versa. ”Our era“ does not prefer images to real things out of perversity but partly in response to the ways in which the notion of what is real has been progressively complicated and weakened.' It is because of problems in real lives that people turn to the camera.”
[Spiked]

Dahr Jamail: “News About Iraq Goes Through Filters”: Feb. 17, 2005

“How is it that more than 40 percent of Americans still believe Iraq has weapons of mass destruction even though President Bush personally has admitted there are none? How is it possible that millions of Americans believe the recent election in Iraq showed that Iraqis are in favor of the ongoing occupation of their country? In reality, the determination displayed by the roughly 59 percent of registered voters who participated in the election did so because they felt it would bring about an end to the U.S. occupation. How do so many Americans wonder why more Iraqis each day are supporting both violent and non-violent movements of resistance to the occupation when after the U.S. government promised to help rebuild Iraq, a mere 2 percent of reconstruction contracts were awarded to Iraqi concerns and the infrastructure lies in shambles? It’s because overall, mainstream media reportage in the United States about the occupation in Iraq is being censured, distorted, threatened by the military and controlled by corporations that own the outlets.

Recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Eason Jordan, a CNN executive, told a panel that the U.S. military deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq. He said he ”knew of about 12 journalists who had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy,“ said Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts who was on the panel with Jordan. When we hear this statement with the knowledge that 63 journalists have been killed in Iraq, in addition to the fact that in a 14-month-period, more journalists were killed in Iraq than during the entire Vietnam War, one begins to get the feeling that the military clampdown on the media is more than a myth or a conspiracy theory. (Editor’s note: Jordan has since resigned from CNN, telling fellow CNN staffers: ”I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise.“) I’ve personally witnessed photographers in Baghdad who have had their cameras either confiscated or smashed by soldiers, who were, of course, acting on orders from their superiors. And no, the journalists weren’t trying to photograph something that would jeopardize the security of the soldiers. Even Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s top war correspondent, announced on national television that her own network was censuring her journalism.

Most Americans don’t know that on any given day, an average of three U.S. soldiers die in Iraq as a result of 75 attacks every single day on U.S. forces or that Iraqi civilian deaths average 10 times that amount.”
[Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

Dahr Jamail: “News About Iraq Goes Through Filters”: Feb. 17, 2005

“How is it that more than 40 percent of Americans still believe Iraq has weapons of mass destruction even though President Bush personally has admitted there are none? How is it possible that millions of Americans believe the recent election in Iraq showed that Iraqis are in favor of the ongoing occupation of their country? In reality, the determination displayed by the roughly 59 percent of registered voters who participated in the election did so because they felt it would bring about an end to the U.S. occupation. How do so many Americans wonder why more Iraqis each day are supporting both violent and non-violent movements of resistance to the occupation when after the U.S. government promised to help rebuild Iraq, a mere 2 percent of reconstruction contracts were awarded to Iraqi concerns and the infrastructure lies in shambles? It’s because overall, mainstream media reportage in the United States about the occupation in Iraq is being censured, distorted, threatened by the military and controlled by corporations that own the outlets.

Recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Eason Jordan, a CNN executive, told a panel that the U.S. military deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq. He said he ”knew of about 12 journalists who had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy,“ said Rep. Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts who was on the panel with Jordan. When we hear this statement with the knowledge that 63 journalists have been killed in Iraq, in addition to the fact that in a 14-month-period, more journalists were killed in Iraq than during the entire Vietnam War, one begins to get the feeling that the military clampdown on the media is more than a myth or a conspiracy theory. (Editor’s note: Jordan has since resigned from CNN, telling fellow CNN staffers: ”I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise.“) I’ve personally witnessed photographers in Baghdad who have had their cameras either confiscated or smashed by soldiers, who were, of course, acting on orders from their superiors. And no, the journalists weren’t trying to photograph something that would jeopardize the security of the soldiers. Even Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s top war correspondent, announced on national television that her own network was censuring her journalism.

Most Americans don’t know that on any given day, an average of three U.S. soldiers die in Iraq as a result of 75 attacks every single day on U.S. forces or that Iraqi civilian deaths average 10 times that amount.”
[Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

Frontline's “A Company of Soldiers” and the FCC: Feb. 16, 2005

“PBS has warned its member stations that it cannot protect them against federal indecency sanctions if they broadcast an unedited, profanity-laced version of a documentary about a United States Army regiment in Baghdad as it faced insurgent attacks leading up to the Iraqi elections, producers of the documentary said yesterday. The documentary, ”A Company of Soldiers,“ was produced by Front- line, a production of WGBH, the public television station in Boston, and is scheduled to be broadcast on Tuesday night. The Public Broadcasting Service will offer its stations both an edited and an unexpurgated version, as it commonly does with programs that have content that might be objectionable in some parts of the country. But producers at Frontline said PBS had taken the unusual step of offering only the edited version of the film for direct retransmission. Stations that want the unedited version, which the producers say is the one that captures the realities of combat faced by soldiers in Iraq, will be required to pre-record it and to sign a waiver indemnifying PBS against damages or fines they might incur because of the broadcast.”
[NYT]

“The Echo Chamber”: Network News & The Road To Iraq: Feb. 10, 2005

“”The Echo Chamber“ is a 90-minute documentary project that takes a critical look at how the ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly newscasts covered the Bush Administration’s public relations campaign to sell the war in Iraq. Working with eight months of media footage leading up to the war, this project will detail how the media adopted the government’s ”Countdown to War“ approach to diplomacy as well as how they failed to give proportional coverage to skeptical viewpoints. The television news media’s content should be analyzed and understood because it exerts a significant influence on our democratic process. According to Neilsen Media Research, the three major network news programs reach over 30 million Americans every night, and 43.6% of adults report broadcast television as their primary news source. ”The Echo Chamber“ will show how the media’s coverage was driven by vivid imagery and entertainment rather than by information and investigative reporting. ‘Infotainment’ is more profitable because covering military mobilizations and exercises will attract more viewers than debates over international law. Issues that were significant but not interesting were often ignored. The film will also teach audiences how to critically evaluate the media and will identify the specific tactics that were used to persuade the population to support the war.”
[The Echo Chamber]

TV Reporter Gunned Down In Iraq: Feb. 9, 2005

“A correspondent for a US-funded Arabic television station has been shot dead in southern Iraq, police have said. The journalist from al-Hurra channel was gunned down in the city of Basra. His eight-year-old son was also killed. Al-Hurra was set up by the US in 2004 to compete with pan-Arab stations like al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya. Meanwhile, gunmen have abducted a senior Iraqi Interior Ministry official in southern Baghdad, according to an unconfirmed report. Correspondent Abdel Hussein Khazal, and his son, Karar, were shot dead as they left their house at 0900 local time (0600 GMT). As well as working as a correspondent, Mr Khazal was the head of the press service at Basra city council and a member of the Shia Dawa Party. The al-Hurra network, set up with a $62m grant from US Congress, was launched with the aim of promoting democracy and winning over public opinion in the Arab world to the US point view. But it has been unpopular with Arab audiences, who commonly view it as a tool of US propaganda. The BBC’s Jon Leyne in Baghdad says that, in the current climate, anyone connected with the Americans in Iraq automatically becomes a target.”
[BBC]

“The Torture Papers”: Winter, 2005

“As soon as the repugnant photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison - the pyramid of naked prisoners, the groveling man on a dog leash, the hooded man with outstretched arms - hit the airwaves and newspaper stands, they became iconic images: gruesome symbols of what went wrong with the war and postwar occupation of Iraq, and for many in the Muslim world, the very embodiment of their worst fears about American hegemony.

They have become a potent propaganda tool for terrorists, and at the same time, they remain so repellant and perverse that they have served to bolster the ”few bad apples“ argument - the suggestion not only that the photographed abuses were perpetrated by ”a kind of 'Animal House' on the night shift,“ in one investigator's words, but also that the larger problem was confined, as the Bush administration has asserted, to a few soldiers acting on their own.

”The Torture Papers,“ the new compendium of government memos and reports chronicling the road to Abu Ghraib and its aftermath, definitively blows such arguments to pieces. In fact, the book provides a damning paper trail that reveals, in uninflected bureaucratic prose, the roots that those terrible images had in decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration - decisions that started the torture snowball rolling down the slippery slope of precedent by asserting that the United States need not abide by the Geneva Conventions in its war on terror.”
[NY Times]

Solidier-Blogger Jason Hartley Court Marshalled: Jan., 2005

“My battalion S2 section made a hard copy of my blog and there was an investigation. It concluded that I had violated OPSEC, violated the Geneva convention (for photos of detainees), and that I was guilty of conduct unbecoming an NCO (primarily for a photograph of me sitting on a shitter, among other things). Then I sat around for a month after being transferred from my job as a rifle squad leader (about to be promoted to E-6) to our headquarters platoon doing absolutely nothing while I waited for the other shoe to drop. I was taken off missions altogether (which is the ultimate punishment for a soldier-- to not let him work). Waiting for my article 15 hearing and not knowing what was going to happen to me was one of the worst experiences of my life. I wanted to demand a court martial because I felt I had done nothing wrong, but the thought of being kept on active duty in legal limbo while the rest of my unit went back to their homes weighed very heavily on me. I was ready to be off active duty like I can't explain. Sitting around for that month while anxiety consumed me was far worse than combat. Call me a wimp, but it really sucked.

Apparently our brigade JAG guy (2 BCT 1 ID) was too busy with his own blog (daggerjag.blogspot.com or something like that) to process my article 15 while we were in Iraq, so it didn't get resolved. Instead it was handed over to the garrison support unit at Ft. Drum upon our return. The article 15 I was given charged me with violating a direct order and violating OPSEC. The JAG lawyer I spoke with at Drum was little help and I was in no shape emotionally at that point to deal with a court martial, so I took the hit. I was given a field-grade article 15 by a colonel I never met in my life who didn't know me from a bucket of paint except for an investigation that made me sound like a traitor. I was demoted to E-4 and fined $1000.”

[Quote above from letter by Jason Hartley]
[Jason Hartley's “Just Another Soldier”]

[Via Boing Boing]

Baghdad Blast Wall Art

[BBC]

“Baghdad Blogger's” Film Shown At Rotterdam Fest: Feb. 2, 2005

“The film has been directed by the man who calls himself Salam Pax, the author of the weblog about Iraqi life during and after the war. The movie version comes in the form of a series of shorts made by Pax on a hand-held camera. Baghdad Blogger is among a number of films about Iraq showcased at the Dutch festival, which runs until Sunday. Following the fascination with the writing of Salam Pax - not his real name - he began a regular column in The Guardian newspaper and was given a crash course in documentary film-making. For the film he travelled Iraq to document the changing landscape of the country and the problems it has faced since the invasion, speaking to ordinary Iraqis about their experiences.”
[BBC]

Film By Murdered Film Director Theo van Gogh Pulled From Rotterdam Fest: Feb. 1, 2005

“The screening of a film by Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker murdered by an alleged Islamist extremist last November, has been called off amid fears of violence. Organisers of the Rotterdam Film Festival had hoped to screen the film Submission, which criticises Islam's treatment of women, over the weekend. But they decided not to go ahead on the advice of the police after receiving threats. ”The decision not to show Submission was made on the basis of security concerns,“ the film rights holder, Column Productions, said in a statement.

Written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament who is under armed guard, the film uses words of the Koran written on women's bodies to denounce the oppression of women. The film brought protests when it was shown on television last August. Other filmmakers were angered by the cancellation of the screening. ”Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim extremist because he directed a short film,“ said a statement printed by inter national filmmakers at the festival. ”Freedom of expression is under threat.“”
[Guardian]