William Rivers Pitt | Hostile Information

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[Zepps_News] #t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Hostile

Information

 

 

 

 

<http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/042705A.shtml>

 

Hostile Information

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Wednesday 27 April 2005

 

In this mean and meager time of pre-packaged, pre-processed,

corporate-controlled infotainment that passes itself off as 'news, it is

a rare and refreshing experience to see and hear a true journalist

reporting the facts. I was privileged on Monday night to share a stage

in Boston with Dahr Jamail, the intrepid reporter who could not stomach

the biased non-news coming out of Iraq after the invasion, and went over

there to see and report on what was happening himself.

 

Jamail, an unassuming spectacled man in his mid-30s, spoke in a

calm and precise manner on what he had seen while in Iraq. His words

carried the weight of witness, but more devastating than what he said

was what he showed the crowd. For an hour, Jamail flashed photograph

after photograph from Iraq on a large screen. It is one thing to hear

the truth. It is another again to see it, in slide after slide, through

the eyes of a man who was there and returned to tell the tale.

 

Jamails photo essay described the current situation in the starkest

of terms. Buildings that had been bombed out during the invasion remain

today blasted and unusable piles of rubble. One photo showed a blown-out

supermarket with a collapsed roof. He took the picture in 2003, but

showed it on Monday night because it looks the same today as it did when

the bomb first fell. There are many times many such damaged buildings.

The ones that remain standing are often pockmarked from machine gun fire.

 

In a nation with the second largest proven stores of petroleum on

earth, there are today gas lines that make the American gas-line

experience of the 1970s seem a picnic by comparison. Iraqis must spend

two days in their cars, sleeping in them overnight, to get a rationed

7.5 liters of gasoline, provided the station does not run out before

they get to the pump. Jamail interviewed a high-ranking member of the

Petroleum Ministry, who reported that the oil infrastructure is stable

enough to provide gas to the country. That gas is not being provided,

said the Minister, because the Americans are not pumping it, but sitting

on it.

 

Hospitals in Iraq are in utterly deplorable condition, with few

specialists to treat common illnesses and the wounds inflicted on

civilians by the bomb and the bullet, and almost no medicine. Almost all

the best-trained and highest-ranking medical professionals have fled the

country because they are targeted by criminal gangs seeking to extort

money from them, leaving undertrained Residents to handle the load. A

Health Minister interviewed by Jamail said Coalition officials had

promised $1 billion in medical aid. To date, almost none of that has

been provided.

 

The sanitary conditions are almost beyond description; one photo

showed a hospital bathroom that was filled from wall to wall with urine

and feces, because the plumbing does not work. To make matters worse,

ambulances are targeted by American forces because they fear the

vehicles are being used by resistance fighters. Jamail showed a photo of

one such targeted ambulance that looked as though it had been driven

through a blast furnace.

 

In the best Iraqi neighborhoods, there is electricity available for

eight hours a day. The rest of the nation gets electricity for perhaps

three hours a day, if at all. At least two car bombs a day can be heard

and felt, and the supposedly-safe Green Zone constantly comes under

bombardment. Dead and bloated cattle line the roads, said roads existing

in profoundly damaged condition.

 

Some 70% of the population is unemployed, leaving a great deal of

spare time for despair and rage to take root. A good portion of the

violent resistance, reported Jamail, is being carried out by foreign

fighters, Baathist holdouts and former Iraqi military personnel. But

more and more, everyday Iraqis are picking up guns, he said, because

conditions are so deplorable.

 

The heavy-handed tactics of the American occupation force, reported

Jamail, have also fed that rage. Jamail stated that the Americans have

taken to using 'collective punishment against large segments of the

population to try and dampen the violence. In one instance, a road

leading out of a remote farm community was blown up and blocked to

punish the residents, and the only nearby gas station was machine-gunned

and blasted by a tank.

 

The most glaring example of collective punishment took place within

the city of Falluja. You will clearly recall the events of March 31,

2004, when three mercenary contractors from Blackwater were pulled from

their car, butchered, burned and hung from a bridge in that town. The

American corporate news media carefully described these four repeatedly

as 'American civilians, failing to note that some 30,000 highly-paid

military mercenaries just like these four are operating in Iraq, beyond

the laws and rules of American military justice. These mercenaries stand

accused by the Iraqi populace of a variety of crimes including rape and

theft.

 

It was a despicable and horrifying act of violence, to be sure. Yet

the American populace was left with the impression, reinforced by the

media, that these 'civilians' were targeted by the entire city of

Falluja. In fact, the act was committed by perhaps 50 people, and the

Imams in the mosques spoke with one outraged voice against what was done

to those four.

 

This did not matter. The collective punishment of Falluja began

days later. Civilians were targeted by snipers. Helicopters and bombers

rained fire and steel indiscriminately on the city. After a while, a

truce was called so the city could bury its dead, and so medical

supplies could be brought in. No supplies made it into the city, but the

casualties were entombed in soccer fields that were renamed 'Martyr's

Graveyards.' Jamail photographed the fields of burial mounds, and

translated the names on many of the headstones. A majority of those

stones bore the names of women and children.

 

In the lull between attacks, the citizens of Falluja flooded the

streets in a massive victory celebration, unaware that the worst was yet

to come. The rage they vented on the Falluja streets was proof enough

that American tactics are manufacturing resistance fighters every day.

Not long after, the second phase of the punishment of Falluja began,

this time as an aerial bombardment of the city that left thousands dead

and wounded.

 

Bodies remained unburied in the streets to bloat in the sun and be

gnawed by dogs. One Jamail photo from Falluja showed the shattered,

rotting corpse of a man lying next to his prosthetic leg. It seems this

one-legged man was an enemy of freedom, a feast for dogs in the hot

Iraqi sun.

 

The Pentagon has a phrase for the photos and reports Dahr Jamail

was able to bring back to us from his time in Iraq. They call it

'Hostile Information,' otherwise known as unassailable facts that cut

violently against the pretty portrait and non-news the American people

have been spoon-fed about our occupation of that country.

 

If you believed the situation there was bad, it's worse than you

can imagine, a war crime writ large, a grinding of a civilian population

that was no threat to America and is now caught between hot steel and a

cold grave. Dahr Jamail was careful in every instance to point out that

the civilian leadership issuing the orders, and not the soldiers, are

ultimately to blame for what is taking place. Specific soldiers

committing war crimes must be punished, he said, but the ultimate

responsibility for these acts belongs in Washington, DC.

 

'Horror' is not a strong enough word to describe what Dahr Jamail

showed us on Monday night, what he saw with his own eyes, what almost no

American has been allowed to see because 'Hostile Information' is not

permitted in George Bush's America.

 

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally

bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't

Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence. Join the

discussions at his blog forum.