“It was a failure of citizenship of the American people that the Bush cabal was allowed to invade Iraq. Thus, every U.S. citizen who is not doing everything in their power to end this illegal and immoral occupation as quickly as possible is complicit with the war crimes being committed in Iraq on a daily basis.”
In early 2003 Dahr Jamail was happily working as a mountain guide on Denali, writing about climbing for an independent Alaskan newspaper, and saving money. Then the drumbeat for war in Iraq destroyed his peace. As he read foreign and independent news and “did the usual stuff to express dissent,” he was infuriated by how he saw the corporate media cooperating with the Bush administration.
When the invasion began, Jamail, a fourth-generation Lebanese American who grew up in Houston, decided he could sit at home, depressed and angry, or he could take action. He bought a laptop computer, a digital camera, and a plane ticket.
In Iraq for eight months between November 2003 and February 2005, Jamail reported “collateral damage” far beyond what the military or embedded journalists acknowledged. He wrote of soldiers shooting people in prayer at a Baghdad mosque. He relayed accounts of civilians in Fallujah with extraordinary burns (later revealed to be caused by white phosphorus) and of men and women who bore white flags being shot in the Euphrates River as they tried to swim to safety. Jamail also watched those profiting from the war, reporting examples of blurred lines between the military and corporations operating in Iraq, as well as Bechtel’s failure to restore potable water after being paid hundreds of millions to do so.
Unrelated sources corroborated the stories Jamail heard. “So either it’s a city-wide, conspiratorial lie, or it’s the truth,” he says. Acknowledging his reliance on interpreters, Jamail says, “I trust them. They put their lives on the line to even be seen with me, in an effort to get the truth out.”
After starting with a homemade press pass and no outlet but e-mail, Jamail created a web site, dahrjamailiraq.com, and began writing for the Inter Press Service, The Asia Times, and The Nation, among others. He also reports for Democracy Now! and the BBC. At the culminating session of the World Tribunal on Iraq in June 2005, he documented U.S. violations of Fourth Geneva Convention provisions for health care in occupied countries.
By autumn 2005, Jamail’s interpreters said it was too dangerous for them to help him to return to Iraq. His articles and e-mail dispatches continued, blending information from his phone calls and e-mail with that culled in hours of reading Arab and other foreign media. He also tours as a speaker, sharing details of the occupation’s immorality. “It’s not about defense,” Jamail says. “It’s about money, and that, to me, is the greatest travesty of all.”
In spring 2006, Jamail was at work on a book synthesizing what he learned in Iraq and planning to travel again and report. “Since an informed citizenry is the basis for a healthy democracy, independent, non-corporate media are more crucial today than ever before,” he says.
