Outrage in a Time of Apathy

[babylonsister]

Outrage in a Time of Apathy
by Aaron Glantz

SAN FRANCISCO - Unlike most U.S. journalists who went to Iraq to cover a war, Dahr Jamail went to try to stop it. In his new book, ‘Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq‘, Jamail writes of volunteering as a rescue ranger at a Denali National Park in the U.S. state of Alaska while news of the invasion and occupation of Iraq played on the radio.

He had to get out of Anchorage, and in November 2003, Jamail got on a plane to Amman, Jordan, and then, a few days later, shared a taxi across Iraq’s Western desert to Baghdad.

‘My going to Iraq was an act of desperation,’ he wrote. ‘I was tormented by the fact that the government of my country illegally invaded and then occupied a country that it had bombed in 1991.’

Once in Iraq, Jamail set about reporting the stories of regular Iraqi people. He spent months in Iraq’s hospitals, morgues and mosques. His journalism covers some of the most mundane, but important, aspects of the U.S. occupation — like gas lines, checkpoints, and bombed out telephone switching stations. His stories appeared in numerous outlets around the world, including IPS.

Most significantly, Dahr Jamail is perhaps the only U.S. journalist to document firsthand the human costs of both U.S. sieges of Fallujah, in April and November 2004.

In covering those sieges, Jamail reported numerous violations of the Geneva Conventions, from the use of cluster bombs and white phosphorus (which is similar to napalm) on densely populated civilian areas, to the blocking of relief supplies from reaching the city, to U.S. military raids into hospitals and shots fired at ambulances. So many Iraqi people were killed in the assault on Fallujah, he notes, that the municipal football stadium had to be turned into a graveyard for the dead.

Visiting the site, he wrote: ‘I tried hard to imagine a soccer field back in the United States being turned into a graveyard — headstones above ground and buried shrapnel-shredded bodies underneath, populating a dry field where children once laughed, ran and kicked soccer balls — but my imagination failed me.’

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/14/5217/