US journalist who exposed Shiite death squads murdered in Basra

Vincent and his translator and assistant, Nour Weidi, were seized Tuesday evening outside a currency exchange shop by five men dressed in police uniforms and driving police cars. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, “One witness, who refused to give his name, said he recognized one of the abductors as an Interior Ministry employee”—that is, a functionary of the US-backed puppet regime in Baghdad. “The man also recognized me, after I saluted him,” the eyewitness told the Times. “He said to me: ‘Do not interfere! It is our duty.’”

A few hours later, the journalist’s body was found dumped by a road outside the city, with multiple bullet wounds to the head. He suffered bruises to his face and shoulder, had been blindfolded and his hands were tied in front with plastic wire. Weidi was seriously wounded but survived. She was taken to a local hospital.

On Sunday, July 31, Vincent received his widest media exposure with an op-ed column in the New York Times describing the takeover of the Basra police by Shiite militants, some loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr, others to the two main Shiite parties which run the US-backed government in Baghdad.

He wrote, “A police lieutenant confirmed for me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations—mostly of former Baath Party members—that take place in Basra each month.... He told me that there is even a sort of ‘death car,’ a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.” Two days after these words were published, a “death car” came for Vincent himself.

Vincent was a freelance writer and professional art critic living and working in New York City until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. After the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which he fervently supported, he decided to go to Iraq and report on the conditions there and the progress of what he mistakenly believed was an exercise in the establishment of democracy in the Middle East. He wrote a book-length account of his experiences in Iraq after the US invasion, In the Red Zone: A Journey Into the Soul of Iraq, Spence Publishing, 2004, and was at work on a contemporary history of Basra.

However misguided his faith in the democratizing mission of American imperialism, Vincent was a man of some personal courage and an honest observer of events, traveling without military escort or bodyguards, his physical safety depending on using his wits and his contacts among ordinary Iraqis. (He spoke no Arabic and relied heavily on his unpaid translator, to whom he gave the pseudonym Layla.)

His columns, mainly published in the right-wing National Review Online, did not simply parrot Bush administration propaganda. On December 15, 2004, for instance, under the headline, “The Oppressive Occupier? This Wasn’t How the Liberation was Supposed to Go,” he related discussions with Iraqi men on the streets of Fallujah and Ramadi, two cities which have been the focal point of opposition to the US occupation. (Vincent posed as a Yugoslav journalist and was promptly deluged with complaints, whose gist was “America bad, worse than Saddam.”)

“It was painful to see America the object of so much hatred and fear, the very image of an oppressive occupier,” he wrote. “It was worse when we found ourselves behind a trio of Humvees ... and I looked at the GI manning the roof-mounted m60 machine gun (Where was he from? What city? Where did his parents live?), reflecting on the isolation of these young men out here, how the Iraqis shun and avoid them, even as they face the threat that a roadside pile of debris will erupt into fire and shrapnel. This was not how the liberation was supposed to go.”

Vincent spent the bulk of his time in Iraq reporting from Basra, supposedly a quieter and more secure location than Baghdad or the Sunni Triangle, without the constant terrorist attacks and gun battles between US troops and insurgents. He came to regard the Shiite organizations, particularly that of Moqtada Sadr but also the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri), one of the two main parties in power in Baghdad, as reactionary and violently antidemocratic.

Read More
http://wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/vinc-a05.shtml