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The Other 98 Percent of Iraq
This morning's Column One feature in the Los Angeles Times is a terrific first-person account of life in Baghdad. It is written by an unnamed Iraqi reporter for the paper, and reading almost any random paragraph shows why he had to go unbylined.
I see my neighbors less and less. When I go out, I say hello and that's it. I fear someone will ask questions about my job working for Americans, which could put me in danger. Even if he had no ill will toward me, he might talk and reveal an identifying detail. We're afraid of an enemy among us. Someone we don't know. It's a cancer.
It's a revealing look at the unspoken, and unreported, reality behind the news we do get from Iraq. Dexter Filkins, who has done terrific reporting for the New York Times from Iraq, recently said that 98 percent of Iraq, including most of Baghdad, is now off-limits to Western journalists, a startling figure that begs the question of why reports from Iraq don't include such a disclaimer
Filkin's talk at Manhattan offices of the Committee to Protect Journalists offered a revealing look behind the scenes of Iraq reporting. Editor & Publisher noted that the Times, employs "45 full-time Kalashnikov-toting security guards to patrol its two blast-wall-enclosed houses—and oversee belt-fed machine-guns on the roofs of the buildings."
American journalists, [Filkins] said, spend their days piecing together scraps of information from the Iraqi reporters to construct a picture, albeit incomplete, of what life is like these days in the war-torn country. But he says that the work is slow and difficult, and it is hard in such an atmosphere for reporters to nail down specifics. "Five people doing a run-of-the-mill story takes forever," he said.
Filkins' reading of the situation overall raises the question of where to Bush administration is getting its optimistic assessments of progress in Iraq:
Most troubling was Filkins' assessment that the U.S. military may not know much more than the Times does about what life is like on the ground in Iraq. Soldiers barely leave their bases and they don't interact very much with average Iraqis, he said, so it is hard to say who, if anyone, has an accurate picture of the current situation.
Material here?: attorney Amal Kadham Swadi, one of seven female lawyers that represented woman detainees at Abu Ghraib, says that the torture and abuse against Iraqi women hasn't been confined only to Abu Ghraib, BUT IS HAPPENING ALL ACROSS IRAQ. "Sexualized violence and abuse committed by US troops goes far beyond a few isolated cases."
Of course one needn't go to Iraq to find blatant sexual abuse against woman, in Woman Prisoners v. District of Columbia (1994) the Court found a pattern of rape and sexual assault, coupled with other forms of sexual harassment and retailiation against woman who file complaints.
The Court also found that inmates had filed complaints and written letters to prison administrators to no avail, and that the harassment was obvious and WIDELY KNOWN.
Come now. The president declared mission accompolished. OK What the hay are we doing still there? I see. Halliburton needs the money.
Yes "Mission Accomplished" ... big fanfare!
Yet Bush seems to totally fail to see the irony in his pronouncements (against those lily-livered whiners who want to support the troops by bringing them home, out of danger) that we *must* stay until the job is done.
I just can't help wondering ... if the 'mission' is accomplished, just what the hell is the 'job'?
Our political leaders and their corperate flunkies, by their fiscal mendacity, are canabalistic.
they are eating the flesh of the American people!
How much more would I enjoy all these well-taken comments posted here if they weren't so sprinkled with egregious mistakes in spelling, punctuation, and syntax. It is hard to take seriously a sentence that contains "WOMAN PRISONERS" (which is it, singular case or plural?), "WOMAN DETAINEES" (ditto), "RETAILIATION","CANABALISTIC" (try: "CANNIBALISTIC"); "MISSION ACCOMPOLISHED". One gets distracted by these absurdities.
And in the body of the article itself, why the very out-out-place comma in : "Editor and Publisher noted that the Times, employs 45 full-time security... guards". What is that , doing there?? It makes the sentence look ridiculous.
I have noticed this incongruous use of the comma, especially between noun and following verb, becoming more and more frequent on the Web. Let's not have the Web writers add to the already rife accumulation of writing errors by both authors and commentators on the 'Net.
Folks, this is a classic net.tactic. When you can't attack a comment or argument on its face, or factually, attack the grammar of the poster in an attempt to discredit that poster.
Too bad it's such an old and completely transparent tactic.
I just thought that was the way you Americans wrote "English".
Cheers from Scotland.