The
AsiaTimes has an excellent article today by the renown journalist, Dahr Jamail. Though Jamail lives in the US, he has been a "unilateral" covering the occupation of Iraq for the past several years. As the AsiaTimes notes:
Unlike other members of the media, he lacked the guards, vehicles, elaborate home base, tech support, fixers and all the other appurtenances of an American journalist. Unlike most American reporters, however, Jamail (gambling his life) refused to let himself be trapped in his hotel, and so his reporting was of the (rare) outside-the-Green-Zone variety.
Indeed. Dahr Jamail should win a Pulitzer. His article touches on many stories, in Iraq as well as the US. The subjugation of Iraqi citizens to a foreign occupier, the vacillation and "unclear chain of command" from bush that resulted in the debacle of Fallujah and the comparisons to Mai Lai, the heartbreak of a Vietnam-era father whose son has just returned from Iraq, and a touching email from an Iraqi (which gave rise to the title of this diary).
More below the fold:
Not too long after, I get an e-mail from a friend in Baghdad who's just spoken with a friend of his, a teacher in Fallujah. She crossed another kind of "border" there, also guarded by Americans - a border around her own city.
She had to undergo a retinal scan mandated by the Americans and had all 10 fingers printed in order to obtain the necessary identification badge that, unfortunately, she then lost while shopping in a Baghdad market. When she tried to return to Fallujah without it, Iraqi National Guard soldiers wouldn't let her back in.
"She told them she'd lost her ID in Baghdad at the market, that she wants to go home, that they have to let her in, but they refused," my friend wrote. "A neighbor of hers inside Fallujah was there and told them she was his neighbor, but they refused. She called her husband with her neighbors' mobile and he came to the checkpoint with her papers, showing that she is his wife and he lives in Fallujah but they still refused to let her in."
She was crying, my colleague said, as she related her woes to him. She had lost nine relatives during the American assault on the city in November 2004. Then he wrote: "I want you to tell your friends and your audience about this. Please ask them what would happen if they were prevented from getting inside their city although the people inside knew they were a teacher who had to get to their school?"
My friend also wanted me to ask what Americans would do if our country were invaded and the only ID that was worth anything was that given by the invading forces - even though you had several of your regular forms of identification with you?
...most Americans back in this strange land know nothing about such doings in Iraq, thanks to the ongoing efforts of the Bush administration and its faithful loudspeaker, the corporate media, which has done such a fantastic job of whitewashing the degrading situation in Iraq:
Fallujah begins to resemble a concentration camp; the death toll of innocent Iraqis continues to escalate; the Iraqi resistance and foreign terrorist groups are now focusing heavily on the new Iraqi government and the new Iraqi security forces; the American troops continue their aggressive operations -
and all that comes through here in this still peaceful-seeming land are flickering images of car-bomb carnage.
In 1968, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, American troops massacred more than 400 innocent civilians, by far the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly. In Fallujah during the November siege of the city, according to Iraqi medical personnel, well over 1,000 innocent civilians (the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly) were slaughtered. More than 1,000 innocent civilians, people who, under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power is required by law to protect, died in what was essentially a Vietnam-style "free-fire zone".
In "Conditions of Atrocity" written for the Nation magazine, Robert Jay Lifton, psychiatrist and well-known expert on humans in extreme moments, cited both My Lai and the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib as examples of what he called "atrocity-producing situations ... so structured, psychologically and militarily, that ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities."
If you will recall, Fallujah began its descent into purgatory when 4 mercenaries working for Blackwater Security Consulting were killed there by an angry mob. bush reacted angrily and, with a wave of his imperial autocratic hand, ordered collective punishment on the entire city. Bush ordered a start, then a stop, then finally an annihilation of the city. Vacillation. Flip-flopper.
...Mr. President, someone
ordered the Marines to take Fallujah when the Marine commander on the ground wanted to hold back and let the city settle, and then, after the fighting had started, ordered them to retreat. Who gave those orders, and why? [snip]
Actually, there's a technical military term for "a decision-making process that has no formal structure, but involves constant consultations." It's called "an unclear chain of command." It gets people killed.
And, from a stranger seated next to Jamail on a train:
"Did you see Bush's press conference yesterday?"... "This damned guy! When are people going to wake up to his bullshit?"
I assure him I have no idea - and that's true...As if he'd been reading my mind, he quickly lets loose with this: "I'm a Vietnam vet. My son just got back from Iraq. He was in Fallujah in November. It's all bad, man. My son, he's like me, he won't talk to many people about what happened over there ... but he told me."
He looks me in the eye intently and then points to the side of his head - that familiar kid's gesture for insanity - and continues, "Now my son has problems upstairs. He told me they don't have a plan, they don't have a solution, they're just trying to contain things over there." [snip]
..."Bush is a draft dodger and a deserter," he continues. "He and all his cronies are thieves and should be in jail! If I keep talking about this I'm going to lose it. Have a good trip."
As Dr. Paul Oestreicher wrote in Not in a Soldier's Name, "Theirs not to question why, theirs but to do and die," will no longer wash. Soldiers are trained to obey. Yet even military law makes it illegal to obey an illegal order.
"...they have no right to put ideas in the minds of people of a civilized country, a country in which civilization began before the United States existed. Those people who know that democracy is not given, it is obtained. Who know that Iraqis are people who have to live just like any nation. Who believe that we are no different in the ability of our minds because God made us all so you cannot force us to have the ideas of others unless we accept it after we are fully contented. Those people of the world who raise their voices against colonialism, control, force, the invading of other countries... I thank them, I encourage them, and I ask God to save them."