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Dahr Jamail never intended to be a journalist, let alone a war correspondent whose reports from Iraq would become the basis for his recently released book. Yet that's exactly what this former mountain guide from Alaska - who will be speaking at the University of Massachusetts about his experiences tonight - ended up doing.
Jamail will appear in Bowker Auditorium at Stockbridge Hall at 7 p.m. as a part of his national book tour for "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq."
In November 2003, Jamail, fed up with what he saw as a misinformation campaign from the mainstream media to justify the invasion of Iraq, packed his bags and boarded a plane there in search of the truth.
"My intention was just to go for one trip," he said in an interview Thursday. "I was just going to go and send e-mails back home. I started out with 130 e-mail addresses of people that wanted it, and I would just go out on the streets and each day I'd send home an e-mail. I didn't even know what blogging was at the time. That's what it was: blogging without a blog."
After a couple weeks, Jamail started posting his dispatches to independent news portal electroniciraq.net, where he was picked up by BBC and the online newspaper The NewStandard News. Since then, Jamail's reports have been published in The Nation, The Sunday Herald, The Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus and The Independent. He would end up spending eight months in Iraq over the course of several trips from 2003 to 2005.
Jamail's stories, often told in Iraqi civilians' own words, reflect a grim reality of what was happening on the ground in Iraq often glossed over by mainstream news. Among them are reports on the illegal use of white phosphorous weapons - incendiary weapons that burn on touch - by the U.S. military, the 2004 bombings of Fallujah, the plight of refugees, the rapidly deteriorating living conditions and the day-to-day bloodshed and violence.
Excerpts from the Collegian's interview with Jamail:
Jackie Hai: A lot of people describe you as an unembedded journalist. How do you define that?
Dahr Jamail: I actually describe myself that way as well, but more commonly just independent journalist. The unembedded comes from choosing to not embed with the US military, but it's kind of become a more ubiquitous term. It basically has come to mean, at least to the alternative media in the US, to not being embedded with the corporate media. Meaning, you're not taking marching orders from a particular editor telling you what to write and how to write it. I think that's an important term. The other reason why I take such issue with the embedded reporters is that the program was set up by the Pentagon in the 1991 Gulf War as a means of controlling information.
JH: The stories you sent back are those that often don't get told in the mainstream press. Why do you think that is?
DJ: Basically we have corporations controlling the major media outlets, i.e. the mainstream press. We have to look at the goals of these media corporations. And the classic example I like to cite is that NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, one of the largest weapons manufacturers on the planet. It does not behoove GE to have a national television station showing what happens when bombs hit human beings, because it's bad for business. So that's a very direct influence over what that station is going to report and how they're going to report it.
JH: When you were out there doing reporting among Iraqi civilians, what was the response like to the fact that you were an American?
DJ: It was overall positive. Overall the Iraqi people were quick to differentiate between me as an American citizen and the policies of my government. Those people were very clear to make that delineation, so I didn't run into problems. There, of course, were a couple times where just because I was a Westerner, and it was clear that I was, that would raise tempers because people were suffering greatly and would see someone that maybe they could vent their anger on.
But people would meet me and see that I was there to take their comments and that I was going to report them, and that I wasn't just there to snap a photo or get a quick video bit and run back home into my guarded compound and upload it. That I was really there to tell their story and what was happening on the ground, and once that was established, I was treated well and people spoke with me very freely.
JH: What was your process for getting a story?
DJ: I would oftentimes have a story in mind and go out knowing "Okay, I need to interview some of these people, and then I want to go interview some doctors," depending on what the story was, and I would go out with my interpreter to start heading for that story. But then there was so much going on, and so much violence and turmoil, that six or seven times out of ten I would be just sideswiped by a totally different story and end up doing that.
Whether it was a bomb going off nearby and covering that, or meeting someone along the way who goes, "Well, yes, I can tell you about that story, but what's more important is this…" and I would agree and say, "Yeah, that is a more important story." More often than not, that's how it went. The stories kind of ran into me rather than me seeking them out.
JH: Where were you staying during your time in Iraq?
DJ: It changed every trip, because the security situation was degrading so rapidly. For example, the first trip, I was with a lot of other foreign journalists in a totally unguarded hotel right in central Baghdad. My second trip, during the spring and summer of '04, I moved to a more off-the-beaten-path hotel and was one of the only people there, with a couple other Western journalists. And my third and fourth trip, the kidnappings and the bombings and such were so bad that I had to stay in a guarded hotel/compound and just kind of sneak out of it every day with one of my interpreters to do my work.
JH: Was there ever a time that you felt that you were in danger?
DJ: Being in Iraq anywhere, especially during my last couple of trips there, that's just pervasive. That's every second. And that's not unique to me, that's the reality for every Iraqi person and every US soldier over there. There's literally no security. But on top of that, there were several instances of being near conflict, being near gunfire, having a car bomb detonate right near my hotel where it blew my door open and knocked down parts of my ceiling. So there were definitely several kinds of incidents like that as well.
JH: You mentioned in your blog that since returning to the US from Iraq, it feels like you're living in a bubble and Americans are disconnected from the realities of what's happening over there. Can you talk a little about that?
DJ: It's indicative of the fact that the mainstream media is only showing the Pentagon perspective and they're not showing consistently how bad the situation is on the ground for the Iraqi people, or how the ground troops - the guys actually having to go out on patrols - really feel about what's going on. Therefore, very few people here even pay attention to the war. Most of us can go about our daily lives and not even see one thing about it all day, if that's what we choose to do.
When you come back from a place like the Middle East where it's the opposite, where most people are very, very clear on what's happening in Iraq and they can't look away from it because it is shown - much more the realities of it - on Arab media, when you have millions of Iraqi refugees moving into refugee camps in or outside their cities, and everyone knows what's going on, you can see by the contrast why I made that comment.
JH: Ten years ago, did you ever see yourself doing this?
DJ: Absolutely not. Five years ago I didn't see myself doing this. It was not in the cards, not my plan. I had no intention of being a war correspondent and I certainly had no idea I would ever write a book. It's a very interesting time for me, but I'm really grateful that it's worked out so that I can do this and help get this information out to more people.
Jackie Hai can be reached at jhai@student.umass.edu.
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