iraq

All Things Considered: "Iraq Propaganda, from All Sides": July 12, 2004

Philip Reeves reports from Baghdad on insurgent propaganda. At the center of the report is commentary from Michael Ware of TIME on the tape, presumably from Zarquawi, handed over to him on July 4, 2004. The Iraq street is awash in inexpensive, roughly produced CDs and DVD's meant to rally support for the insurgency. For example, "God's Soldiers"—selling for fifty cents—shows American troops bursting into Iraqi homes, pictures from Abu Ghraib, and insurgents on the attack. They're crude, but effective.

However, the tape given to Michael Ware is professional in its production, virtually of broadcast quality. Ware says the tape shows the best view yet of insurgent operations. Unlike the DVD's aimed at Iraqi citizenry, Ware believes that this tape speaks directly to a global audience, intended to recruit both men and money to the cause. Ware narrates the tape as it plays in the background. Of his role as the middleman: "As journalists, we're always being used. But the quest is to find the truth."
[All Things Considered—RealAudio]

Joseph C. Phillips: "Beheading in Iraq": July 6, 2004 [NPR]

Phillips discusses the lynching of Afro-American Zachariah Walker, who in 1911 was pulled from the hospital by a hundred men and burned at the stake for killing a police officer. The crowd stood around the body in obvious delight, posing for a "Kodak moment," as Phillips suggests. Phillips compares this incident to the desecration of bodies in Fallujah and the beheading of Nicholas Berg. He notes how groups often have used violence to shock, frighten and intimidate others different from them.

Of this lynching Gode Davis and James M. Fortier write: "Walker was hurled onto the pyre, his body quickly enveloped in flames. The crowd roared its approval, and those close to the fire hunched forward, according to a newspaper report, 'eagerly watching the look of mingled horror and terror that distorted his blood-smeared face." [...] The following day, the Coatesville Record remarked on the politeness of the crowd: 'Five thousand men, women, and children stood by and watched the proceedings as though it were a ball game or another variety of spectator sport.' Boys had stopped for cold soda afterward at the Coatesville Candy Company to retell the story. Many returned to the site the next day to gather fragments of bone and charred flesh as souvenirs.'"

Camera/Iraq here includes the original picture of Walker that Phillips discusses—a reminder that recent acts of atrocity in the Middle East had striking parallels in our own country several decades ago.
[NPR's The Travis Smiley Show—RealAudio]
[Link to Phillips' essay in print]
["American Lunching," a film by Gode Davis and James M. Fortier]

"Control Room": Independent Documentary Film About Al-Jazeera: June, 2004

This independent documentary is opening in a limited theatrical release around the United States late summer, 2004.
"Jehane Noujaim, an Egyptian American filmmaker at home in two cultures, observed a war with dramatically different meanings in each of them. [...] The immediate subject of Noujaim's documentary "Control Room" is al-Jazeera, but its real theme is the huge gulf in understanding that exists between Americans and the Arab world and the way events, big and small, connected to the war in Iraq have taken on markedly different weight, meanings and emotional import. [...] Noujaim constructs her movie around several central episodes of the war: al-Jazeera's decision to show civilian casualties and the capture of American troops, the bombing by coalition forces of al-Jazeera's Baghdad office, which killed journalist Tariq Ayoub, and the fall of Baghdad, which profoundly demoralizes some of the al-Jazeera journalists. [...] The choice of what to show, and what not to show, becomes the central issue facing both Western media and al-Jazeera. For Khader, the senior producer at al-Jazeera, his newsroom's focus on the humanitarian cost of the war was central to an Arab perspective that is, in journalistic terms, no less biased than an American perspective."
[Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post]
["Control Room": website for the film]
[NPR's Steve Inskeep interviews the director and other principles for Morning Edition—audio link]
[Seattle Times]

NPR's Alex Chadwick: "Images from Iraq: Embedded in Fallujah": June 17, 2004

Interview with LA Times reporter Tony Perry about his experience embedded with U.S. Marines in Fallujah.
[NPR]

Lauren Weinstein on NPR's "Future Tense": Abu Ghraib

"The images of abuse in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are forvever burned in the American memory. Commentator Lauren Weinstein says digital photography made that so."
[Audio Link]

Brooke Gladstone interviews photo editor Peter Howe on NPR: May 14, 2004

"Howe: in some ways, we probably nowadays have less reason to believe photography. But in fact, actually it seems to becoming more and more important. [...] Gladstone: And as you observed in a very interesting article in Salon.com this week, this could mark the first time in history that the most iconic images from a war were taken by amateurs. Howe: It's almost becoming a new form of journalism. It doesn't conform to the rules that a lot of us were brought up with as journalists. There is no fact-checking. We don't know whether this photograph's authentic or that photograph's authentic. But once it gets out on the internet, it does seem to carry an equal weight to that which has been fact-checked and that we know comes from a reliable journalistic source. [...] Gladstone: Luc Sante wrote in the New York Times this week that "perhaps the digital camera will haunt the future of George W. Bush the way the tape recorder sealed the fate of Richard Nixon.""
[NPR]