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John Pilger: Iraq's Epic Suffering Is Made Invisible
In his latest New Statesman column, John Pilger describes viewing videotape of the attack on Iraq that was not shown in the West and is horrific evidence of a great crime. It begs the question: Why is there not a public inquiry into when the invasion was planned, and why? Why can't we read the email traffic between Bush and Blair? And why is Iraq's epic suffering invisible?
For the past few weeks, I have been watching videotapes of the attack on Iraq, most of them not shown in this country. The tapes concentrate on the epic suffering of ordinary Iraqis. There are photographs, too, that were never published here. They show streets and hospitals running with blood, as American and British forces smashed their way into Iraq with weapons designed to incinerate and dismember human beings.
It is difficult viewing, but necessary if one is to understand fully the words of the Nuremberg judges in 1946 when they laid down the principles of modern international law: "To initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Guiding me through this visual evidence of a great crime is the diary of a young law graduate, Jo Wilding, who was in Baghdad with a group of international human rights observers. She and the others stayed with Iraqi families as the missiles, bunker busters and cluster bombs exploded around them. Where possible, they hurried to the scene of civilian casualties and followed the victims to hospitals and mortuaries, interviewing eyewitnesses and doctors. Their work received scant media coverage.
Jo has described to me, in detail, attacks on civilian targets that were - she is in no doubt - deliberate. In any case, the sheer ferocity of the assault on elusive Iraqi defenders could not fail to kill and injure large numbers of civilians. According to a recent study, up to 10,000 civilians were killed.
"One of the stunning things about the quick coalition victory," John Bolton, George Bush's under-secretary of state for international security, told me in Washington recently, "was how little damage was done to Iraqi infrastructure, and how low Iraqi casualties were."
I said, "Well, it's high if it's 10,000 civilians."
He replied, "Well, I think it's quite low if you look at the size of the military operation."
Quite low at 10,000. And multiply that many times when the figure includes the killing of mostly teenage conscripts who, as a Marine colonel said, "sure as hell didn't know what hit them". Keep multiplying when the wounded are added: such as 1,000 children maimed, according to Unicef, by the delayed blast of cluster bomblets.
What does it take for journalists with a public voice and responsibility to acknowledge the truth of such a crime? Are those who stand in front of cameras in Downing Street and on the White House lawn, incessantly obfuscating the obvious (a technique they call objectivity), that conditioned? The resistance to the illegal Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is now propagated as part of Bush's "war on terror". The deaths of Americans, Britons and UN people are news; Iraqis flit across the screen: otherwise, they do not exist.
For Blair's ministers, the cover-up, like almost everything, originates in Washington. Read the armed forces minister Adam Ingram's replies to the tireless questioning by Llewellyn Smith MP and his message is almost identical to Bolton's. The "regrettable" loss of life is really not too bad, considering "a military operation of [this] size". As to numbers of people killed, "we have no way of establishing with any certainty..." Whoever Adam Ingram is, remember the name, for he embodies the mundane, routine, amoral apologist for state murder.
Of course, if the great crime in Iraq was represented not by the poignant moment of a dead squaddie's flag-draped coffin returning, but by the unrelenting horror I have watched on unseen videotape, the cover would crack. And the illusion presented by the Hutton inquiry would be revealed. As it is, Hutton is the magician Blair's best trick so far, for an inquiry into the death of one man ensures that real public investigation into why Blair took Britain into war will not happen. It ensures that while we are allowed to read internal e-mails in Whitehall, we are denied scrutiny of the traffic between Blair and Bush, which almost certainly would expose the biggest lie of all, and reveal that the decision to invade was taken long before Washington dreamt up the charade of weapons of mass destruction. That would sink Blair.
Instead, we have glimpses of truth. On 17 September 2001, six days after the attacks in America, Bush signed a document, marked Top Secret, in which he directed the Pentagon to begin planning "military options" for an invasion of Iraq. In July last year, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, told another Bush official: "That decision has been made. Don't waste your breath" (Washington Post, 12 January 2003; New Yorker, 31 March 2003). On 2 July last, Air Marshal Sir John Walker, the former chief of defence intelligence and deputy chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, wrote a confidential memo to MPs to alert them that the "commitment to war" was made a year ago. "Thereafter," he wrote, "the whole process of reason, other reason, yet other reason, humanitarian, morality, regime change, terrorism, finally imminent WMD attack... was merely covering fire."
The unfettered disclosure of this would present an uncontrollable crisis to the clique that runs Britain: the secret service, the civil service, Downing Street, the favoured City and the courted media. Few spooks and mandarins have much time for the strange, Messianic Blair, but they will strive to protect him in order to protect themselves and to ensure that their version of Lord Curzon's "great game" (ie, imperialism), continues unopposed.
It is a game exemplified by the arms fair that opened in London on 9 September, hosted by a government and an arms industry that are together the world's second-biggest merchant of death, selling to the usual tyrants and state killers. Their ruthlessness was expressed when the same fair last convened in 2001, and 11 September happened. Public events, such as the TUC conference, were abandoned out of respect for the victims in New York and Washington. The arms fair was told to keep going.
"The kaleidoscope has been shaken," Blair said in the wake of 11 September. "The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us." Whoever wrote that inanity might have left Downing Street now; but Blair tells us constantly that he believes what he says, and perhaps he does. Several of the defendants at Nuremberg offered the same plea, and so have other state murderers at The Hague. Like them, Blair should have his day in court.
It is difficult viewing, but necessary if one is to understand fully the words of the Nuremberg judges in 1946 when they laid down the principles of modern international law: "To initiate a war of aggression... is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Guiding me through this visual evidence of a great crime is the diary of a young law graduate, Jo Wilding, who was in Baghdad with a group of international human rights observers. She and the others stayed with Iraqi families as the missiles, bunker busters and cluster bombs exploded around them. Where possible, they hurried to the scene of civilian casualties and followed the victims to hospitals and mortuaries, interviewing eyewitnesses and doctors. Their work received scant media coverage.
Jo has described to me, in detail, attacks on civilian targets that were - she is in no doubt - deliberate. In any case, the sheer ferocity of the assault on elusive Iraqi defenders could not fail to kill and injure large numbers of civilians. According to a recent study, up to 10,000 civilians were killed.
"One of the stunning things about the quick coalition victory," John Bolton, George Bush's under-secretary of state for international security, told me in Washington recently, "was how little damage was done to Iraqi infrastructure, and how low Iraqi casualties were."
I said, "Well, it's high if it's 10,000 civilians."
He replied, "Well, I think it's quite low if you look at the size of the military operation."
Quite low at 10,000. And multiply that many times when the figure includes the killing of mostly teenage conscripts who, as a Marine colonel said, "sure as hell didn't know what hit them". Keep multiplying when the wounded are added: such as 1,000 children maimed, according to Unicef, by the delayed blast of cluster bomblets.
What does it take for journalists with a public voice and responsibility to acknowledge the truth of such a crime? Are those who stand in front of cameras in Downing Street and on the White House lawn, incessantly obfuscating the obvious (a technique they call objectivity), that conditioned? The resistance to the illegal Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is now propagated as part of Bush's "war on terror". The deaths of Americans, Britons and UN people are news; Iraqis flit across the screen: otherwise, they do not exist.
For Blair's ministers, the cover-up, like almost everything, originates in Washington. Read the armed forces minister Adam Ingram's replies to the tireless questioning by Llewellyn Smith MP and his message is almost identical to Bolton's. The "regrettable" loss of life is really not too bad, considering "a military operation of [this] size". As to numbers of people killed, "we have no way of establishing with any certainty..." Whoever Adam Ingram is, remember the name, for he embodies the mundane, routine, amoral apologist for state murder.
Of course, if the great crime in Iraq was represented not by the poignant moment of a dead squaddie's flag-draped coffin returning, but by the unrelenting horror I have watched on unseen videotape, the cover would crack. And the illusion presented by the Hutton inquiry would be revealed. As it is, Hutton is the magician Blair's best trick so far, for an inquiry into the death of one man ensures that real public investigation into why Blair took Britain into war will not happen. It ensures that while we are allowed to read internal e-mails in Whitehall, we are denied scrutiny of the traffic between Blair and Bush, which almost certainly would expose the biggest lie of all, and reveal that the decision to invade was taken long before Washington dreamt up the charade of weapons of mass destruction. That would sink Blair.
Instead, we have glimpses of truth. On 17 September 2001, six days after the attacks in America, Bush signed a document, marked Top Secret, in which he directed the Pentagon to begin planning "military options" for an invasion of Iraq. In July last year, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, told another Bush official: "That decision has been made. Don't waste your breath" (Washington Post, 12 January 2003; New Yorker, 31 March 2003). On 2 July last, Air Marshal Sir John Walker, the former chief of defence intelligence and deputy chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, wrote a confidential memo to MPs to alert them that the "commitment to war" was made a year ago. "Thereafter," he wrote, "the whole process of reason, other reason, yet other reason, humanitarian, morality, regime change, terrorism, finally imminent WMD attack... was merely covering fire."
The unfettered disclosure of this would present an uncontrollable crisis to the clique that runs Britain: the secret service, the civil service, Downing Street, the favoured City and the courted media. Few spooks and mandarins have much time for the strange, Messianic Blair, but they will strive to protect him in order to protect themselves and to ensure that their version of Lord Curzon's "great game" (ie, imperialism), continues unopposed.
It is a game exemplified by the arms fair that opened in London on 9 September, hosted by a government and an arms industry that are together the world's second-biggest merchant of death, selling to the usual tyrants and state killers. Their ruthlessness was expressed when the same fair last convened in 2001, and 11 September happened. Public events, such as the TUC conference, were abandoned out of respect for the victims in New York and Washington. The arms fair was told to keep going.
"The kaleidoscope has been shaken," Blair said in the wake of 11 September. "The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us." Whoever wrote that inanity might have left Downing Street now; but Blair tells us constantly that he believes what he says, and perhaps he does. Several of the defendants at Nuremberg offered the same plea, and so have other state murderers at The Hague. Like them, Blair should have his day in court.
For more information:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cf...
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wow! (She whispers)!
"On 17 September 2001, six days after the attacks in America, Bush signed a document, marked Top Secret, in which he directed the Pentagon to begin planning "military options" for an invasion of Iraq"
6 days too late.
9-11 The Day the Muslims Hit Us.
6 days too late.
9-11 The Day the Muslims Hit Us.
--"9-11 The Day the Muslims Hit Us."
Conflating all people of a certain ethnicity with the actions of a few of its extremist members is racist.
It is also *collective guilt* which is a very dangerous concept. By that concept, all Americans are guilty for the 500 Iraqi civilians killed in the Amariya bomb shelter, or the tens of thousands Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War or the 1.5 million who died due to sanctions for the last twelve years. You see where I'm going with this...Collective guilt is what led those extremists to do what they did to innocent people on 9-11. Our government (as well as a significant portion of the population) has follows the same logic as those extremists.
The Iraqi civilians who were gunned down by our troops on the streets of their country in their own cars or bombed from 20,000 feet are just as *innocent* as the American civilians who died on 9-11. 9-11 was terrible not because 3000 Americans were killed, but because 3000 *people* were killed. Few are mourning the 10,000 civilians killed by the US government in Iraq now.
In terms of suffering, the Arab people have endured far, far worse than Americans or Israelis.
Conflating all people of a certain ethnicity with the actions of a few of its extremist members is racist.
It is also *collective guilt* which is a very dangerous concept. By that concept, all Americans are guilty for the 500 Iraqi civilians killed in the Amariya bomb shelter, or the tens of thousands Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War or the 1.5 million who died due to sanctions for the last twelve years. You see where I'm going with this...Collective guilt is what led those extremists to do what they did to innocent people on 9-11. Our government (as well as a significant portion of the population) has follows the same logic as those extremists.
The Iraqi civilians who were gunned down by our troops on the streets of their country in their own cars or bombed from 20,000 feet are just as *innocent* as the American civilians who died on 9-11. 9-11 was terrible not because 3000 Americans were killed, but because 3000 *people* were killed. Few are mourning the 10,000 civilians killed by the US government in Iraq now.
In terms of suffering, the Arab people have endured far, far worse than Americans or Israelis.
And now you've been brainwashed Saddam H. did it all by remote control. Those of us with a functioning brain are spellbound by the lies and deceit, rendered speechless as it were, by the gullibility of people.
There has not been a shred of evidence linking Iraq to September 11th.
And to use that (as Bush et al did) to justify its attack on a soverign nation is as evil as anything your beloved Sharon has done.
And just like the LIE with respect to the weapons of mass destruction, the "liberation" of Iraq another lie.
In the documentary I watched last night, it sure didn't look liberated to me, nor to the people who are injured, or the famaily.members of the dead, to the rubble of homes and other property, the lack of water, power, and the basic essentials of living. If that's "liberation", then God help us all!i
I haven't read the above article yet. I just wanted to tell everyone I've seen it, and I will read it, and then I will come back here.
Bearing in mind Robert Fisk yesterday I am giving you a chance to make notes before you leap.
John is, after all, another of the chosen few I read religiously. But, then, again, I read Gerald Warner. Wonder if you'll ever see him here!
There has not been a shred of evidence linking Iraq to September 11th.
And to use that (as Bush et al did) to justify its attack on a soverign nation is as evil as anything your beloved Sharon has done.
And just like the LIE with respect to the weapons of mass destruction, the "liberation" of Iraq another lie.
In the documentary I watched last night, it sure didn't look liberated to me, nor to the people who are injured, or the famaily.members of the dead, to the rubble of homes and other property, the lack of water, power, and the basic essentials of living. If that's "liberation", then God help us all!i
I haven't read the above article yet. I just wanted to tell everyone I've seen it, and I will read it, and then I will come back here.
Bearing in mind Robert Fisk yesterday I am giving you a chance to make notes before you leap.
John is, after all, another of the chosen few I read religiously. But, then, again, I read Gerald Warner. Wonder if you'll ever see him here!
John should have added Bush should have his day in Court as well Lying war criminals, both.
Now if the person who has been attacking me with respect to Robert Fisk wishes to do so here, by all means. You will have read the story. You will either agree or disagree, but the bottom line is what have you seen about Iraq lately?
We saw a documentary on Iraq last night. It was not pretty either.
So now that we've seen Robert and John here in the past few days, who knows? Uri, Israel Shamir, Gwynne Dyer (to name three more) might be showing up here before the week is out. I don't know, but it would be fun.
Now if the person who has been attacking me with respect to Robert Fisk wishes to do so here, by all means. You will have read the story. You will either agree or disagree, but the bottom line is what have you seen about Iraq lately?
We saw a documentary on Iraq last night. It was not pretty either.
So now that we've seen Robert and John here in the past few days, who knows? Uri, Israel Shamir, Gwynne Dyer (to name three more) might be showing up here before the week is out. I don't know, but it would be fun.
any sort of sucking up that's needed to 'get' the story....
Oh, wait, maybe that should be 'appeasment'.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1979014
SEPTEMBER 15, 2003
John Burns: 'There Is Corruption in Our Business'
'NY Times' Writer on the Terror of Baghdad
The following are the words of New York Times correspondent John F. Burns, on his experiences reporting from Baghdad during the war. Excerpted from the book Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, an Oral History by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson, published this week by The Lyons Press, used with permission.
From the point of view of my being in Baghdad, I had more authority than anybody else. Without contest, I was the most closely watched and unfavored of all the correspondents there because of what I wrote about terror whilst Saddam Hussein was still in power.
Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that this was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.
In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories -- mine included -- specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.
Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance. CNN's Eason Jordan's op-ed piece in The New York Times missed that point completely. The point is not whether we protect the people who work for us by not disclosing the terrible things they tell us. Of course we do. But the people who work for us are only one thousandth of one percent of the people of Iraq. So why not tell the story of the other people of Iraq? It doesn't preclude you from telling about terror. Of murder on a mass scale just because you won't talk about how your driver's brother was murdered.
...
In February I was denied a visa. Then I found there were visas available. I was in Amman. Some of my rivals who had omitted to notice that Iraq was a terror state were busy here sucking up. They were very pleased with themselves. These were people who'd argued that it was essential to be in Iraq for the war. I got a visa of dubious quality; it was a visa which allowed me to come in and cover the peace movement.
I assumed I would be thrown out immediately. I arrived only two weeks before the war. They accredited me. They took my passport away and held it for five days until a man who is said to be a deputy director of the Mukhabarat showed up one day -- a certain Mr. Sa'ad Mutana.
He was assigned to be my minder. He was an extremely unpleasant man. At this point a dozen people from the information ministry came to me and said, "Get out!" They said he was certainly a senior official. He introduced himself as a former general. The reason they kept me here is that when the war starts, I could become a hostage.
Well, I stayed. On the night of April 1, they came to my room at this hotel and said, "You're under arrest. We've known all along you're a CIA agent. You will now collaborate with us or we will take you to a place from which you will not return." They stole all my equipment. They stole all my money.
Then they left. The hotel had no electrical power at the time. They said, "You stay in your room." I assumed they left somebody outside. I went out into the darkened corridor. There was nobody there, so I slipped into the stairway.
To tell you the truth, I didn't know what to do. As it happened, a friend of mine, an Italian television correspondent, happened to be coming up the stairwell. She asked, "What are you doing?" I replied, "I really don't know. I'm at wit's end." She said, "You come to my room. They won't attack my room." She is a former Italian communist who had not challenged them.
So there's a strange inversion. I found my safety at a critical moment with an old friend who had not challenged them.
I then arranged a meeting with [General Uday] Al-Tayyib through my Italian friend. "Director," I said to him, "if something happens to me now, the facts are all well known to my newspaper and well known to people in Washington, and you will be held directly responsible. If something happens to me, you will go before an American military tribunal and I wouldn't be surprised if you were shot. So you better do something to stop it." He seemed frightened. The director said, "I'll see what I can do."
A week earlier I had been apprised by the Times that the ministry of information building was to be destroyed in twenty-four hours. We had a general notification that the ministry of information and the Al Rashid Hotel were not excluded from the target lists. But as long as we were all in those buildings, they wouldn't attack.
So we had moved to the Palestine Hotel, but the TV networks were still filing from the information ministry because they were not allowed to file from anywhere else. Which is why CNN got expelled. They refused to go on filing from there; they used a videophone to file their stories on the first heavy night of bombing on March 21. They were caught with a videophone and they were expelled by dawn.
So in the three or four days that followed, I got a call from the Times saying that they had certain indications from the Pentagon that in twenty-four hours the information ministry would be gone. So I got up at 2:00 a.m., and I said to people downstairs, "Get Mr. Al-Tayyib here." He arrived at 5:00 a.m and I said to him, "Listen to me and listen carefully. I'm not going to cause a panic among journalists. I remember what you did to CNN the last time. I don't want to be accused of spreading alarm and despondency, but you've got to close that ministry down, because anybody who's in that building tomorrow night will be killed. We have friends in Washington. People who are concerned about my welfare and that of other American correspondents. That's how we know it."
For twenty-four hours he said he'd see what he could do. They did nothing. That night at 8:00 p.m, I went to every floor of the ministry. I told everybody. "Get off! Get off this building. It's going to be attacked this night."
When I got back to my hotel room I got another call from New York saying it's been put off twenty-four hours because of weather. It was after my second meeting with Al-Tayyib that they raided my room. He shouted at me. He said, "We know you're a CIA agent because they attacked the ministry." I said, "You lying son of a bitch. I told you that because I come from a newspaper and a country who cares about people. We were told this on the basis of human decency. Not just for ourselves but also for Iraqis. They didn't want to kill innocent Iraqis. You failed to do anything at all about it."
I went there two nights running to get people out. As a result, there was only one person injured, a secretary to the minister, which is pretty amazing considering they hit the building with seven or eight cruise missiles. I said, "You're a son of a bitch. You know exactly what the truth of this was. I told you as a matter of decency and you did nothing at all. Now you invert this to say I'm a CIA agent." The end of the story was that on the night of April 8, he stole $200,000.
Now this son of a bitch sits in his home about three miles from here, saying he expects to be re-appointed director general of information. He has been meeting with director generals of ministries and is using a vetting process where they will disqualify only senior Ba'ath Party officials. I think this guy will be disqualified because he was a Mukhabarat official, but he is now saying to visiting correspondents, "Well, of course, we all knew it was time for a change in Iraq." This was a man who is incapable of telling the truth, who attempted at every opportunity to seduce Western women correspondents. He was screwing people in his office. He had photographs of himself and Saddam Hussein and a box of Viagra. This was a loathsome character altogether.
...
Now left with the residue of all of this, I would say there are serious lessons to be learned. Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It's not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies, that they're actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it's extremely revealing.
We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil. I think people just simply didn't recognize it. They rationalized it away. I cannot tell you with what fury I listened to people tell me throughout the autumn that I must be on a kamikaze mission. They said it with a great deal of glee, over the years, that this was not a place like the others.
I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It's not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: "The universal spirit of sport," "My esteemed colleague." The world chose in the main to ignore this.
For some reason or another, Mr. Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which is still an open case. This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone.
As far as I am concerned, when they hire me, they hire somebody who has a conscience and who has a passion about these things. I think I was a little bit advantaged in this, because I am 58 years old.
Look, I don't believe in the journalist as hero, because I think that wherever we go, and whatever degree of resolve that may be required of us, there are always much, much braver people than us. I travel in a suit of armor. I work for The New York Times. That means that I have the renown of the paper, plus the power of the United States government. Let's be honest. Should anything untoward come to me, I have a flak jacket. I have a wallet full with dollars. I'm here by choice. I have the incentive of being on the front page of The New York Times, and being nominated for major newspaper prizes.
The people who we write about have none of these advantages. They are stuck here with no food and no money. I don't want to be pious about this, but for a journalist to present himself as a hero in this situation is completely and totally bogus.
We have the lure of a spectacular reward. That draws us on. I got a Pulitzer Prize in Sarajevo, which was awarded for "bravery" or something somewhere in the citation. I said, and I absolutely meant it, "I assume that we are talking here about chronicling the bravery of the people of a city that was being murdered. That was where bravery came into this. Then there were no rewards save the possibility of surviving." So I don't want to present myself here as anything like that. No, I don't. As a matter of fact, I think this vainglorious ambition is part of the same problem really. It is the pursuit of power. Renown. Fame.
There is corruption in our business. We need to get back to basics. This war should be studied and talked about. In the run up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility. You have to be ready to listen to whispers.
---
E&P welcomes letters to the editor: letters [at] editorandpublisher.com.
Source: Editor & Publisher Online
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh, wait, maybe that should be 'appeasment'.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/headlines/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1979014
SEPTEMBER 15, 2003
John Burns: 'There Is Corruption in Our Business'
'NY Times' Writer on the Terror of Baghdad
The following are the words of New York Times correspondent John F. Burns, on his experiences reporting from Baghdad during the war. Excerpted from the book Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, an Oral History by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson, published this week by The Lyons Press, used with permission.
From the point of view of my being in Baghdad, I had more authority than anybody else. Without contest, I was the most closely watched and unfavored of all the correspondents there because of what I wrote about terror whilst Saddam Hussein was still in power.
Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that this was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror.
In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories -- mine included -- specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper.
Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance. CNN's Eason Jordan's op-ed piece in The New York Times missed that point completely. The point is not whether we protect the people who work for us by not disclosing the terrible things they tell us. Of course we do. But the people who work for us are only one thousandth of one percent of the people of Iraq. So why not tell the story of the other people of Iraq? It doesn't preclude you from telling about terror. Of murder on a mass scale just because you won't talk about how your driver's brother was murdered.
...
In February I was denied a visa. Then I found there were visas available. I was in Amman. Some of my rivals who had omitted to notice that Iraq was a terror state were busy here sucking up. They were very pleased with themselves. These were people who'd argued that it was essential to be in Iraq for the war. I got a visa of dubious quality; it was a visa which allowed me to come in and cover the peace movement.
I assumed I would be thrown out immediately. I arrived only two weeks before the war. They accredited me. They took my passport away and held it for five days until a man who is said to be a deputy director of the Mukhabarat showed up one day -- a certain Mr. Sa'ad Mutana.
He was assigned to be my minder. He was an extremely unpleasant man. At this point a dozen people from the information ministry came to me and said, "Get out!" They said he was certainly a senior official. He introduced himself as a former general. The reason they kept me here is that when the war starts, I could become a hostage.
Well, I stayed. On the night of April 1, they came to my room at this hotel and said, "You're under arrest. We've known all along you're a CIA agent. You will now collaborate with us or we will take you to a place from which you will not return." They stole all my equipment. They stole all my money.
Then they left. The hotel had no electrical power at the time. They said, "You stay in your room." I assumed they left somebody outside. I went out into the darkened corridor. There was nobody there, so I slipped into the stairway.
To tell you the truth, I didn't know what to do. As it happened, a friend of mine, an Italian television correspondent, happened to be coming up the stairwell. She asked, "What are you doing?" I replied, "I really don't know. I'm at wit's end." She said, "You come to my room. They won't attack my room." She is a former Italian communist who had not challenged them.
So there's a strange inversion. I found my safety at a critical moment with an old friend who had not challenged them.
I then arranged a meeting with [General Uday] Al-Tayyib through my Italian friend. "Director," I said to him, "if something happens to me now, the facts are all well known to my newspaper and well known to people in Washington, and you will be held directly responsible. If something happens to me, you will go before an American military tribunal and I wouldn't be surprised if you were shot. So you better do something to stop it." He seemed frightened. The director said, "I'll see what I can do."
A week earlier I had been apprised by the Times that the ministry of information building was to be destroyed in twenty-four hours. We had a general notification that the ministry of information and the Al Rashid Hotel were not excluded from the target lists. But as long as we were all in those buildings, they wouldn't attack.
So we had moved to the Palestine Hotel, but the TV networks were still filing from the information ministry because they were not allowed to file from anywhere else. Which is why CNN got expelled. They refused to go on filing from there; they used a videophone to file their stories on the first heavy night of bombing on March 21. They were caught with a videophone and they were expelled by dawn.
So in the three or four days that followed, I got a call from the Times saying that they had certain indications from the Pentagon that in twenty-four hours the information ministry would be gone. So I got up at 2:00 a.m., and I said to people downstairs, "Get Mr. Al-Tayyib here." He arrived at 5:00 a.m and I said to him, "Listen to me and listen carefully. I'm not going to cause a panic among journalists. I remember what you did to CNN the last time. I don't want to be accused of spreading alarm and despondency, but you've got to close that ministry down, because anybody who's in that building tomorrow night will be killed. We have friends in Washington. People who are concerned about my welfare and that of other American correspondents. That's how we know it."
For twenty-four hours he said he'd see what he could do. They did nothing. That night at 8:00 p.m, I went to every floor of the ministry. I told everybody. "Get off! Get off this building. It's going to be attacked this night."
When I got back to my hotel room I got another call from New York saying it's been put off twenty-four hours because of weather. It was after my second meeting with Al-Tayyib that they raided my room. He shouted at me. He said, "We know you're a CIA agent because they attacked the ministry." I said, "You lying son of a bitch. I told you that because I come from a newspaper and a country who cares about people. We were told this on the basis of human decency. Not just for ourselves but also for Iraqis. They didn't want to kill innocent Iraqis. You failed to do anything at all about it."
I went there two nights running to get people out. As a result, there was only one person injured, a secretary to the minister, which is pretty amazing considering they hit the building with seven or eight cruise missiles. I said, "You're a son of a bitch. You know exactly what the truth of this was. I told you as a matter of decency and you did nothing at all. Now you invert this to say I'm a CIA agent." The end of the story was that on the night of April 8, he stole $200,000.
Now this son of a bitch sits in his home about three miles from here, saying he expects to be re-appointed director general of information. He has been meeting with director generals of ministries and is using a vetting process where they will disqualify only senior Ba'ath Party officials. I think this guy will be disqualified because he was a Mukhabarat official, but he is now saying to visiting correspondents, "Well, of course, we all knew it was time for a change in Iraq." This was a man who is incapable of telling the truth, who attempted at every opportunity to seduce Western women correspondents. He was screwing people in his office. He had photographs of himself and Saddam Hussein and a box of Viagra. This was a loathsome character altogether.
...
Now left with the residue of all of this, I would say there are serious lessons to be learned. Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It's not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies, that they're actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it's extremely revealing.
We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil. I think people just simply didn't recognize it. They rationalized it away. I cannot tell you with what fury I listened to people tell me throughout the autumn that I must be on a kamikaze mission. They said it with a great deal of glee, over the years, that this was not a place like the others.
I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It's not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: "The universal spirit of sport," "My esteemed colleague." The world chose in the main to ignore this.
For some reason or another, Mr. Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which is still an open case. This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone.
As far as I am concerned, when they hire me, they hire somebody who has a conscience and who has a passion about these things. I think I was a little bit advantaged in this, because I am 58 years old.
Look, I don't believe in the journalist as hero, because I think that wherever we go, and whatever degree of resolve that may be required of us, there are always much, much braver people than us. I travel in a suit of armor. I work for The New York Times. That means that I have the renown of the paper, plus the power of the United States government. Let's be honest. Should anything untoward come to me, I have a flak jacket. I have a wallet full with dollars. I'm here by choice. I have the incentive of being on the front page of The New York Times, and being nominated for major newspaper prizes.
The people who we write about have none of these advantages. They are stuck here with no food and no money. I don't want to be pious about this, but for a journalist to present himself as a hero in this situation is completely and totally bogus.
We have the lure of a spectacular reward. That draws us on. I got a Pulitzer Prize in Sarajevo, which was awarded for "bravery" or something somewhere in the citation. I said, and I absolutely meant it, "I assume that we are talking here about chronicling the bravery of the people of a city that was being murdered. That was where bravery came into this. Then there were no rewards save the possibility of surviving." So I don't want to present myself here as anything like that. No, I don't. As a matter of fact, I think this vainglorious ambition is part of the same problem really. It is the pursuit of power. Renown. Fame.
There is corruption in our business. We need to get back to basics. This war should be studied and talked about. In the run up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility. You have to be ready to listen to whispers.
---
E&P welcomes letters to the editor: letters [at] editorandpublisher.com.
Source: Editor & Publisher Online
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