[HenriRow]

Can defend Reporters of Iraq, but can NEVER defend SPH & Media Corpse!





http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/pos..._war_reporters

In defense of Iraq war reporters
Posted By Ellen Knickmeyer Monday, April 5, 2010 - 3:17 PM Share


The morning of Feb. 22, 2006, Baghdad lurched into its deadliest three days of the Iraq conflict and came as close as it would to full-on sectarian war. It was clear in the first hours after that day's bombing of the golden-domed Shiite shrine in Samarra that Shiite militias would launch massive attacks in retaliation for the mosque's destruction. Myself and Jon Finer, then my colleague at the Washington Post bureau in Baghdad, headed with our Iraqi colleagues to the headquarters of Muqtada al Sadr's Jaish-al-Mahdi headquarters in Baghdad's Sadr City -- I in a Western female reporter's usual disguise of a black abaya that covered all but my face; Jon in his usual clever disguise of a swarthy, not-exceptionally tall guy, indistinguishable from most Iraqi men (see picture above).

Crossing Baghdad, we passed through the normal number of armed militia checkpoints. At the borders of Sadr City, we experienced the not-normal event of a car loaded with gunmen leaning out their windows, AK-47s pointed, to force our car to the side of the road. They stuck their guns through the car window in my face. Our Iraqi security chief rushed to insert himself between myself and the guns. He calmed down the gunmen. Once in Sadr City, we watched cars similarly loaded with Shiite gunmen spread out into Baghdad proper to exact revenge wholesale from Baghdad's Sunnis. In the courtyard of the Sadr offices, filled with excited, milling men with AKs, we heard a Western voice cry out -- a little louder than Jon and I would have liked in the circumstances. "Jon! Hey, Jon!" It was Borzou Daragahi, of the Los Angeles Times, also in the headquarters of what for that day was Murder Inc. It became evident that many other Western reporters were out in Baghdad that day, and the following ones as well.

The day after the bombing, Iraqi colleagues at the Washington Post and I went to the Baghdad morgue to try to determine just how bad the week's Shiite slaughter of Sunnis was. We bypassed the morgue's front office -- the morgue, as part of the Health Ministry, was under Sadr's control; I didn't expect to get any honest numbers from the Sadr-affiliated morgue directors about the extent of the killing by Shiite militias. At the morgue, we saw crowds of Sunni families who'd come to try to find the bodies of men and boys who'd been taken away by Shiite militias. The morgue registrar helpfully showed myself and the Sunni families a computer photo album of the dead inside, punching with an index finger through screen after screen of photos of tortured faces streaked with blood and bearing grimaces or vacant looks. Leaning over a counter, the Washington Post Iraqi staffers and I heard the morgue's computer registrar remark repeatedly -- by way of explaining the day's poor customer service to the bereaved families -- that the morgue had taken in the bodies of more than 1,300 victims of Shiite-Sunni violence since the Samarra bombing. The 1,000-plus figure was also later confirmed by U.N. officials in Baghdad, drawing on their own sources within the Iraqi government, and by one of our Iraqi staffers via an official and acquaintance inside the Health Ministry.

When our story and others came out, every U.S. official from Gen. George Casey -- then the head commander in Iraq -- on down denied them. The military issued a press release quoting Casey as stating that Baghdad was "stable, calm, and peaceful." "So the country is not awash in sectarian violence,'' Casey told the talk shows, even as Sadr's Health Ministry was setting up refrigerated trucks outside the morgue to handle the overflow of victims slain by Sadr's militias and others. "I don't see it happening, certainly anytime in the near term." Only later, as reporting on the killing persisted through 2006, did U.S. officials finally back down from the pretense that all was hunky-dory in Iraq. How gratifying it was for me this year, hearing a Bush administration official who'd been influential in Iraq casually mention in a speech that more than 1,000 people died in Iraq in one day after the Samarra bombing. Yeah. Like I said.

My point: contrary to Marc Lynch's concern that "For years, journalists (even those not living in the Green Zone) were forced either to huddle down in offices and rely on stringers, or else go out into the field with the military as embeds," not all Western reporters in Iraq were huddled down, nor reliant on embeds. After the Samarra bombing, we didn't all turn anxiously to the U.S. military to tell us what they were seeing, and how we should interpret it. We were doing what reporters are supposed to do: tell what they see, and make people in power uncomfortable about it if possible. With the great exception of the Anbar province, the stronghold of the Sunni insurgency, where only a very few reporters ventured independently during the worst of the violence, we managed to do that.