reporting iraq: an oral history of the way by the journalists who covered it
DESCRIPTION
Included are contributions from fifty international journalists, including Dexter Filkins, The New York Times correspondent who won widespread praise for his coverage of Fallujah; Rajiv Chandrassekaran, author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City; Anthony Shadid of the Washington Post, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his war coverage; Richard Engel of NBC; Anne Garrels of NPR, and other star reporters from both the print and broadcast world, not to mention their translators, photo journalists, and a military reporter.TRANSCRIPT
Reporting Iraq AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE WAR BY THE JOURNALISTS WHO COVERED IT
MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHINGHOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY
EDITED BY MIKE HOYT, JOHN PALATTELLA,AND THE STAFF OF THE COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW
HANNAH ALLAM
REPORTER
KNIGHT RIDDER (McCLATCHY)
July 2003–September 2005
CHRISTOPHER ALLBRITTON
FREELANCE WRITER, BLOGGER
TIME , Back to Iraq March 2003–present
GHAITH ABDUL-AHAD
REPORTER, PHOTOGRAPHER
THE GUARDIAN ,
GETTY IMAGES
March 2003–present
DEBORAH AMOS
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT
NPR
May 2003–present
JON LEE ANDERSON
STAFF WRITER
THE NEW YORKER
February 2003–present
JANE ARRAF
SENIOR BAGHDAD CORRESPONDENT
CNN
March 2003–present
LUKE BAKER
BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF
REUTERS
February 2003–December 2005
ANNE BARNARD
REPORTER
THE BOSTON GLOBE
March 2003–December 2005
YOUSIF MOHAMMED BASIL
STRINGER, TRANSLATOR
TIME , CNN
September 2004–present
JOHN BURNS
BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF
THE NEW YORK TIMES
October 2002–May 2007
The Journalists
This oral history knits together excerpts from interviews with forty-four journalists. Noted below are the periods during which these journalists have reported on the war from Iraq and the media organizations for whom they have worked while in country (unless otherwise indicated) through June 2007 (the “present”).
R E P O R T I N G I R A Q 16
ANDREW LEE BUTTERS
FREELANCE WRITER
NEW YORK SUN, PEOPLE, TIME
October 2003–July 2004
THANASSIS CAMBANIS
REPORTER
THE BOSTON GLOBE
March 2003–December 2005
RAJIV CHANDRASEKARAN
REPORTER, BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF
THE WASHINGTON POST
March 2003–October 2004
PATRICK COCKBURN
REPORTER
THE INDEPENDENT (LONDON)
March 2003–present
BORZOU DARAGAHI
REPORTER
LOS ANGELES TIMES
September 2002–present
WILLIAM DARLEY
FORMER U.S. ARMY PUBLIC
AFFAIRS OFFICER, EDITOR IN CHIEF MILITARY REVIEW: THE PROFESSIONAL
JOURNAL OF THE U.S. ARMY
August 2003–March 2004
THOMAS DWORZAK
PHOTOGRAPHER
MAGNUM PHOTO October 2002–December 2005
RICHARD ENGEL
CORRESPONDENT
NBC NEWS
February 2003–present
ALI FADHIL
TRANSLATOR, REPORTER
NPR, FINANCIAL TIMES,
THE GUARDIAN, THE NEW YORKER
October 2003–January 2006
FARNAZ FASSIHI
REPORTER
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 2003–December 2005
DEXTER FILKINS
REPORTER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 2003–August 2006
ANNE GARRELS
CORRESPONDENT
NPR
October 2002–present
MARCELA GAVIRIA
PRODUCER
FRONTLINE
July 2003–December 2006
PATRICK GRAHAM
FREELANCE WRITER
OBSERVER (LONDON), NATIONAL POST, THE NEW YORK TIMES
MAGAZINE, THE GUARDIAN,
OUTSIDE, HARPER’S, CBC RADIO
November 2002–September 2004
CAROLINE HAWLEY
CORRESPONDENT
BBC
April 2003–December 2005
JAMES HIDER
REPORTER
THE TIMES (LONDON)
May 2003–present
17
PAUL HOLMES
EDITOR, POLITICAL AND GENERAL NEWS
REUTERS (BASED IN NEW YORK CITY)
September 2002–present
CHRIS HONDROS
PHOTOGRAPHER
GETTY IMAGES
March 2003–present
LARRY KAPLOW
REPORTER
COX NEWSPAPERS
March 2003–present
TOM LASSETER
REPORTER
KNIGHT RIDDER (McCLATCHY)
March 2003–February 2007
PETER MAASS
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
March 2003–April 2005
GEORGES MALBRUNOT
REPORTER
LE FIGARO
February 2003–December 2004
DAN MURPHY
REPORTER, BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
September 2003–December 2006
ROBERT NICKELSBERG
CONTRACT PHOTOGRAPHER
TIME
March 2003–present
ELIZABETH PALMER
CORRESPONDENT
CBS NEWS
December 2002–present
SCOTT PETERSON
REPORTER, PHOTOGRAPHER
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR ,
GETTY IMAGES
September 2002–present
MITCH PROTHERO
REPORTER
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
April 2003–present
NIR ROSEN
FREELANCE WRITER
TIME, ASIA TIMES, THE PROGRESSIVE,
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE, THE NEW YORKER,
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
March 2003–present
ALISSA RUBIN
REPORTER, BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF
LOS ANGELES TIMES
April 2003–present
ANTHONY SHADID
REPORTER
THE WASHINGTON POST
March 2003–present
LIZ SLY
REPORTER
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
March 2003–present
MARTIN SMITH
PRODUCER
FRONTLINE
April 2003–December 2006
VIVIENNE WALT
FREELANCE WRITER
USA Today, Time, The Boston GlobeSeptember 2002–present
NANCY YOUSSEF
BAGHDAD BUREAU CHIEF
KNIGHT RIDDER (McCLATCHY)
April 2003–January 2007
T H E J O U R N A L I S T S
DEXTER F ILKINS | THE NEW YORK TIMES
If you look at the whole arc of this thing, it used to be easy in the beginning, but it was never easy. I remember literally the first day I went into Iraq, and it was the day of the invasion. I drove in on my own; I was one of a very small handful of people that actually got across the border in Kuwait. And I was what the American military called a unilateral [laughing], which is, I just had my own car. I think it took about twelve hours that day to find my way across the border into Iraq. In the invasion I was on my own completely; I had an Arabic translator and I had a photographer, and we made our way to Baghdad by ourselves, basically, and it was pretty insane, and I probably wouldn’t do it again.
I remember, literally the first day, driving into Safwan, which is the first town on the border when you cross over. It’s where they signed the surrender in 1991. And I went in there thinking that this is probably going to be something like what I saw in Afghanistan, which was cheering crowds and people throwing their turbans off, and everybody happy to see the American forces. And that wasn’t the case at all. To me, it looked like we’d pried the doors off a mental institution, and there were a bunch of people standing around with their jaws hanging open. Some people were absolutely horrified, people were crying, some people were cheering, some people were—you could tell how afraid they were. Some people, you could sense that there was emotion that they didn’t want
IN THE BEGINNING
I
R E P O R T I N G I R A Q 20
to express, so they didn’t. There was a lot of uncertainty.
But it was pretty scary, too. I remember that moment when I arrived in Safwan: the great concern of many of the people there—they were all Shiites—was that there were secret police all over the place, and as soon as the Americans left, the secret police were going to come in and arrest everybody and kill them. So everyone was totally horrified and really afraid to talk to us, and it was really, really dangerous because there were Iraqi Army people all over the place, and there were guys taking their uniforms off, there were tanks up the road and stuff going off, and it was really, really crazy, and it wasn’t anything like Afghanistan. I mean, Afghanistan was like a tea party compared to Iraq, just in terms of size and just insanity. Iraq was just orders of magnitude greater. Whatever expectations that I brought in across the border that day, I just chucked immediately because it was totally different. It was clear immediately that it was going to be a lot harder to work. It really was.
PETER MAASS | THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
The marines took a bridge [on the way to Baghdad], and then took the other side of the bridge, and seized the road that went from Baghdad to the bridge, and they set up a perimeter. And unfortunately, because this road was actually an escape route for civilians who were trying to leave Baghdad, there were cars that came up the road to leave Baghdad
by the bridge that the marines had just taken. And, because the marines had not been able to drive vehicles over the bridge, because the bridge was damaged, civilians who were driving up the road to flee Baghdad over the bridge did not see any American military vehicles and thought, “Fine, it’s safe,” because the marines were dug in, into camouflage positions, setting up their new perimeter on this road. So what happened was, civilian vehicles drove up this road, and the marines shot them up.
I was two hundred or three hundred meters back. The road bends just a little bit, and there are some small houses and stores on the side of the road. So I could not see what was happening down the road. I was with the commander. I knew that there were vehicles coming up and they were taken care of. We assumed they were all military vehicles. Or ordinary vehicles carrying Republican Guard or whatever, because, you know, we didn’t really know the situation. But the marines, particularly the snipers who were on the front line, who were looking through scopes and could see faces in vehicles, knew what was going on. And the photographers were there. So, the photographers heard the sniper commanders saying, “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.” The snipers would fire to disable the vehicles, hit the engine block, hit the tire so the vehicle can’t go forward. Even though the orders were, let the snipers handle it, when the marines, the ordinary grunts, heard one or two shots from a sniper, they’d all open up.
21
So, you had all these civilians, women and children, getting killed on that road.
[In the morning] I just kind of walked down there and looked at the vehicles and saw the civilian bodies. And on the side of the road there were a couple of civilians who were burying the bodies, and one of them spoke a little bit of English. He had been in one of the vehicles and told me what had happened. And so I was able to see with my own eyes the result of what had happened. I was able to see dead civilians, cars along this road that were shot full of holes, the bodies were still there, and there were witnesses there. The title of the story in The New York Times Magazine was “Good Kills,” because the battalion commander, [Lieutenant Colonel] Bryan McCoy, when I was with him during the battle, I had asked him, “How are things going?” And he had a cigar at that moment, I think, and he said, “Oh, you know, it’s a day of good kills.” And that, “good kills,” is kind of a military term that officers and soldiers will use, meaning their job is to kill people, the right people. But he didn’t know, at that time he didn’t know that there were civilians being killed.
He did realize afterwards. And a lot of people in that battalion knew, not just the ones who shot those vehicles. And I think, actually, when they were shooting, they didn’t know whether there were civilians in them or not, they were just scared. There was one marine who I quoted in the story, who was on the road checking out the bodies. And one of the photographers was with me at
that moment, and the photographer was saying, not in a whisper, “This should not have happened. This was wrong.” And, this particular marine heard that and swore, said something. So I went up to him and said, “Well, what do you think about what happened?”—because he was amid all the bodies, as I was—and he kind of said, “Look, you know, you can’t second-guess it. We’ve got to keep ourselves safe. We didn’t know who was in the vehicles. This is war, and this is what happens in war.” And so I put that in, paraphrasing his words, into the story. Two days later, Baghdad falls. This battalion, by the way, was the battalion that took down the statue of Saddam.
DEXTER F ILKINS | THE NEW YORK TIMES
This is during the invasion, and I was hanging out with some soldiers and these two very young guys came back, and their eyes were burning, they were really, really pumped up. They’d just been in a big firefight, and I remember—I can’t remember the guy’s name—he said, “Yeah, we were just mowing people down. We were just whacking people.” And I said, “Are the insurgents mixing in with civilians?” And he said, “Yeah, and we just shot the civilians too.” And I remember he said this remarkable thing. He was describing some woman who had kind of stepped in front of—the insurgent had stepped behind her, so he said, yeah, he shot this woman, and he said, “The chick got in the way,” and so he killed her. He wasn’t especially troubled by it.
I N T H E B E G I N N I N G
© COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW, 2007
MELVILLE HOUSE PUBLISHING
300 OBSERVER HIGHWAY
THIRD FLOOR
HOBOKEN, NJ 07030
WWW.MHPBOOKS.COM
ISBN: 978-1-933633-34-3
FIRST MELVILLE HOUSE PRINTING: OCTOBER 2007
BOOK DESIGN: BLAIR & HAYES
A CATALOG RECORD FOR THIS BOOK
IS AVAILABLE FROM THE LIBRARY OF
CONGRESS.
ON THE COVER: IRAQI SHIITE MEN CARRY RELIGIOUS
FLAGS ON A PILGRIMAGE TO KARBALA. THE
PILGRIMAGE, BANNED UNDER SADDAM HUSSEIN, HAD
LAST BEEN MADE IN 1977. APRIL 19, 2003.REUTERS/
YANNIS BEHRAKIS/LANDOV