From Tom Dispatch:
Tomdispatch:
Dahr Jamail, How to Control the Story, Pentagon-style
Acts matter. Here's how Dahr Jamail, a young mountain guide and volunteer rescue ranger in Alaska (who did freelance writing in the "off-season") describes his rash decision, back in 2003, to cover George W. Bush's Iraq War in person: "I decided that the one thing I could do was go to Baghdad to report on the occupation myself. I saved some money, bought a laptop, a camera, and a plane ticket, and, armed with information gleaned via some connections made over the Internet, headed for the Middle East." That was it. The next thing he knew he was driving through the Iraqi desert from Amman, Jordan, toward Baghdad and directly into the unknown. He had few contacts; no media organization to back him; no hotel/office with private guards to return to at night; no embedded place among American forces for protection; not even, on arrival in Baghdad, any place to write for.
Call that a shot in the dark. The result? A singularly remarkable running account of what Iraq actually felt like, of what life for Iraqi civilians actually was like after the shock-and-awe onslaught of March 2003 devolved into the endless occupation/catastrophe we all know so well. Jamail, who has written regularly for Tomdispatch these last years, has now published a book on his time on (and always very close to) the ground in Iraq, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq. Unnerving as it is to come, once again, upon the real face of the American occupation, largely seen through Iraqi eyes, Jamail's new book is also a gripping adventure to read, the odyssey of a neophyte becoming a journalist under the pressure of events.
In reviewing the book for Mother Jones magazine, Nick Turse recently wrote:
"I suspect Jamail's account will prove an enduring document of what really happened during the chaotic years of occupation, and how it transformed ordinary Iraqis. To paraphrase one of the Vietnam War's finest correspondents, Gloria Emerson, writing about Jonathan Schell's exceptional accounts of that conflict: If, years from now, Americans are willing to read any books about the war, this one should be among them. It tells everything."
Don't miss it -- or Jamail's latest below. Tom
Iraq Has Only Militants, No Civilians
"Tactical Perception Management" in Iraq
By Dahr Jamail
"Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him." -- Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H
http://www.tomdispatch.com:80/post/174866/tomdispatch_dahr_jamail_how_to_control_the_story_pentagon_style
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