JOURNALISM UNDER SIEGE IN BAGHDAD,
Part 1 Smothered in a security
blanket By Orville Schell
Introduction by Tom
Engelhardt In September 2004, the Wall
Street Journal's Farnaz Fassihi, then covering
Iraq, wrote an e-mail to friends that began,
"Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these
days is like being under virtual house arrest."
A year and a half later, it's still a
striking account to read, because the grim news
she was delivering both as a reporter - "One could
argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For
those
of us on the ground it's hard to imagine what, if
anything, could salvage it from its violent
downward spiral ... " - and on the ways in which
reporting was becoming so restrictive there would
prove sadly prophetic.
It was exactly the slice
of reporting reality that had somehow not made
it into any of the United States' normal mainstream
media outlets, though it was - and remains - the
daily experience ("being under virtual house
arrest") of Western reporters in Iraq. This
wayward e-mail, thanks to the pass-on phenomenon
of the Internet, became a "public document" and it
was exactly what one should have been reading all
along in major US newspapers, but wasn't.
As the Houston Chronicle put it in an
editorial, after the e-mail burst into public view
online and brought Fassihi's "objectivity" into
question in a modest firestorm of comment and
criticism, "Though the missive apparently does not
contradict her reportage, it is blunt, bleak and
opinionated in a way that mainstream coverage
generally avoids." And that, it turned out, was,
for many, a negative.
Fassihi's Journal
editor, Paul Steiger, when queried by the New York
Post, "supported" her with a classic defense of
the status quo: "Ms Fassihi's private opinions [as
seen in the e-mail] have in no way distorted her
coverage, which has been a model of intelligent
and courageous reporting, and scrupulous accuracy
and fairness."
It's worth considering,
though, why Fassihi had to write this to friends
and not to her editor to be published for the rest
of us. Why was this story relegated to the world
of "private opinion" and evidently not fit for
American readers? One has to assume, after all,
that editors in New York or Washington or Chicago
or Los Angeles deal daily with the difficult
dilemma of ensuring their reporters' safety and so
would have found Fassihi's comments no surprise.
But amid all the news that's fit to print, news
that would make sense of Iraqi reportage clearly
wasn't in September 2004.
At the time,
journalistic critic Jay Rosen at his PressThink
blog put the matter this way, "What makes the
piece resonate [for some of us] is the simple
question: why can't this be the journalism, this
testifying e-mail? Why can't reporters on the
ground occasionally speak to the 'public' like
this one occasionally spoke to her friends?"
In England what has become known as "hotel
journalism" has been argued about bluntly and at
length in the press. In the US, however, the
situation remains - with a few honorable
exceptions, including "Under the Gun", Fassihi's
recent, sad goodbye to all that (she's been
reassigned to Lebanon) - largely unchanged.
Television journalists still get up nightly on
those picturesque Baghdad balconies, never saying
that they weren't the ones who went out that day
to get the information they may be "reporting";
the most basic conditions under which reporters
work in Iraq - now far worse than when Fassihi
wrote her e-mail - are seldom alluded to in news
accounts, nor is there much sense that most of
Iraq remains largely beyond our view. It's true
that news junkies here have gained a sense of what
reporting conditions in Iraq for Westerners are
really like, but most Americans probably have no
idea. How could they, given the lack of coverage?
That's why the following report by Orville
Schell, dean of the graduate school of journalism
at the University of California, Berkeley (where I
teach every spring), is so valuable. It offers a
vivid, rolling, roiling description of
journalistic life, such as it is, in Baghdad
today. Its length - and it is long - is meant to
make up for everything that is so seldom published
on the subject. Guarantee: you won't think about
those daily reports from Iraq quite the same way
again.
Smothered in a security
blanket By Orville Schell
"Ladies and Gents," the South African
pilot matter-of-factly announced over the
intercom. "We'll be starting our spiral descent
into Baghdad, where the temperature is 19 degrees
Celsius."
The vast and mesmerizing expanse
of sandpapery desert that has been stretching out
beneath the plane has ended at the Tigris River.
To avoid a dangerous glide path over hostile
territory and missiles and automatic weapons fire,
the plane banked steeply and then, as if caught in
a powerful whirlpool, it plunged, circling
downward in a corkscrew pattern.
On
arriving in Amman in Jordan, the main civilian
gateway to Baghdad, one already has had the
feeling of drawing ever nearer to an atomic
reactor in meltdown. Even in Jordan, there is a
palpable sense of being in the last concentric
circle away from a radioactive ground zero
emitting uncontrollable waves of contamination.
Almost nowhere in our homogenized world
does crossing an international frontier deliver a
traveler to a truly unique land. There is,
however, no place in the world like Iraq. Even at
Amman's Queen Alia International Airport, one
finds hints of this mutant land to come.
Affixed to the wall above a baggage
carousel is an advertisement for "The AS Beck
Company, Bonn, Germany: CERTIFIED ARMORED CARS".
The company's logo is a sedan with the crosshairs
of an assault rifle's telescopic scope trained on
the windshield on the driver's side. "WHEN GOING
TO IRAQ, MAKE SURE YOU DRIVE ARMORED!" the ad
proclaims cheerfully. At the departure gate, a
crimson placard warns against carrying FORBIDDEN
ITEMS: "Gun Powder, Golf Clubs, Hand Grenades, Ice
Axes, Cattle Prods, Hocket Sticks [sic], Meat
Cleavers and Big Guns", making one wonder if
"little guns" are OK.
The small Royal
Jordanian Fokker F-28-4000, which makes daily
trips to Baghdad, sits out on the tarmac away from
the jetways as if some airport official feared it
might prove to be an airborne IED (improvised
explosive device, a US military acronym). Those of
us on this hajj to the global epicenter of
anti-Western and Islamic sectarian strife are an
odd assortment of private security guards,
military contractors, US officials, Iraqi
businessmen and journalists; a young man in a
sweatshirt announces himself as part of the
"Military Police K-9 Corps" (bomb-sniffing dogs).
The Baghdad International Airport terminal
is full of armed guards and ringed by armored
vehicles. I saw no buses or taxis awaiting
arriving passengers. Almost everyone is "met". I
am picked up by the New York Times' full-time
British security chief, who has come in a
miniature motorcade of "hardened", or bomb-proof,
cars, escorted by several armed Iraqi guards in
constant radio contact with each other.
As
America approached the third anniversary of its
involvement in Iraq, I had gone to Baghdad to
observe not the war itself, but how it is being
covered by the media. But of course, the war is
inescapable. It has no battle lines, no fronts,
not even the rural-urban divide that has usually
characterized guerrilla wars. Instead, the
conflict is everywhere and nowhere.
It
starts on the way into Baghdad, the cluttered
seven-mile gauntlet that has come to be known as
Route Irish after the Fighting 69th "Irish"
Brigade of the New York National Guard, which
patrolled it after the invasion. Some also now
call it Death Road, because so many attacks have
occurred along its length. Now largely patrolled
by Iraqi forces, it is not quite the firing range
it used to be. But it is still the most
nerve-racking trip from an airport that any
traveler is likely to make.
Although
pre-war Iraq had a relatively modern highway
system, with multi-lane roads and overpasses, an
occasional clover leaf, and even
international-standard green and white signs in
both Arabic and English, it has been eroded by
neglect, fighting, bombings and tank treads that
have ground up curbs and center dividers.
Everywhere there is churned-up earth,
trash and rubble, loops of razor wire draped with
dirty plastic bags, decapitated palm trees,
wrecked equipment, broken streetlights and packs
of roaming yellow dogs sniffing at piles of
garbage, the perfect places for insurgents wishing
to hide cell phone-triggered IEDs to greet the
next passing convoy of patrolling American troops.
Much of the roadside looks like a combat zone,
even when it hasn't been under attack.
Many of Baghdad's main roads are a
nightmare of traffic congestion. When American or
Iraqi patrols of Humvees mounted with 50-caliber
machine guns, M-1 Abrams tanks and Bradley
Fighting Vehicles pull onto a street, everything
slows to a crawl. Signs tied on their tailgates
warn in English and Arabic: "DANGER: Stay Back!"
Every driver gets the message. Failure to maintain
one's distance can draw fire. And so, like a herd
of cold and hungry animals fearful of getting too
close to a campfire, traffic cringes behind such
patrols, while frustrated drivers are left to
wait, breathe one another's exhaust and curse the
occupation.
It has not helped that when
Saddam Hussein fell, almost all ordinary
governmental activities - such as registering cars
and issuing drivers' licenses - ceased, and
thousands of vehicles flooded the market in Iraq
from other countries. Traffic lights rarely work
since electric power is still sporadic; the only
control comes from a few street cops who have been
recently posted at key intersections to direct the
relentless crush of vehicles.
To make
matters worse, after several attacks or bombings,
the US military or the Iraqi government will often
simply prop up a sign in the center of a main
artery saying: "HAIFA STREET IS CODE RED! DON'T
USE!" Moreover, as the city has become ever more
violent and chaotic, people have begun blocking
off streets on their own to create safety zones.
Since there has been little law enforcement, there
is no one to stop this private appropriation of
public space.
At first people made
themselves feel more secure after the invasion by
piling sandbags along streets or in front of their
houses and offices. But as suicide bombers began
to proliferate and their explosive charges grew
larger and more destructive, private defense
efforts became more elaborate as well. The advent
of the "blast wall" changed the Baghdad landscape.
Developed by the Israelis to put up a
physical barrier between themselves and the
Palestinians, the Iraq version of these segmented
walls is constructed out of thousands of portable,
12-foot-high slabs of steel-reinforced concrete.
When stood upright on their pedestals, these
"T-walls" look something like giant tombstones,
totems perhaps from some long-lost Easter Island
culture gone minimalist. When placed together
edge-to-edge as "blast walls", they form the gray
undulations that have now become Baghdad's most
distinguishing feature. And because they
proliferated during the administration of former
US proconsul, L Paul Bremer, they became known to
some as "Bremer walls".
For example, when
one major news organization became alarmed at the
deteriorating security situation in the city, it
occupied part of Abu Nawas, a main road along the
Tigris River that the US military had already
blocked in front of two adjacent hotels to erect a
maze of protective blast walls, guard towers and
other fortifications. So, where there was once a
major highway complete with a center divider
shaded by trees, there is now a relatively quiet,
garden-like parking lot, surrounded by
12-foot-high protective concrete walls.
As
the quest for greater private security increases,
a new and unexpected kind of public insecurity has
grown alongside it. With vehicles rerouted through
an ever-diminishing number of open streets,
traffic jams have become more frequent, exposing
foreigners, rich Baghdadis and anyone else out of
favor with one or another group of insurgents to a
greater danger of being kidnapped, shot or blown
up.
It is unnerving (to say the least) to
be stuck in such traffic, wedged into a welter of
dilapidated sedans, vans and pickup trucks with
heavily armed Iraqis staring sullenly through the
window of your expensively reinforced car, as
security guards sitting next to you cradle their
automatic weapons. With no possibility of escape,
you can't help wondering when your unlucky moment
will come. And when traffic completely stops and
frustrated drivers begin to break out of line, gun
their vehicles up sidewalks, veer across center
dividers, or just charge up the opposite lane
against the flow of oncoming traffic, it is
difficult to remain calm.
The worst
offenders are private security guards who are
committed to protecting their charges any way they
can, and the Iraqi police, who now have brand new
fleets of green and white cruisers with whooping
sirens, allowing them to plow their way through
traffic-clogged streets as if they were kids on
joy rides.
Adding to the overall racket
and general sense of anxiety is the fact that it
is hard to tell if the incessant sounds of sirens,
the periodic bursts of automatic weapons fire, or
the occasional explosions that are heard
throughout the day mean anything or not. There are
police firing ranges within the city, and
sometimes a bored guard will just harmlessly fire
off a few shots by way of a warning. As Borzou
Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times explained,
"Squeezing off a few rounds of automatic weapons
fire here in Baghdad is the equivalent of honking
your horn in America."
So unless an
explosion is quite close, people hardly break
step. At most, if there is a particularly loud
report, a journalist might go up onto his bureau's
rooftop to see where the smoke is coming from.
There is undeniably a Blade Runner-like
feel to this city. The violence is so pervasive
and unfathomable that you wonder what people think
they are dying for. Nevertheless, despite the fact
that the everyday violence is horrendous, it does
not take too many days before the deadly noises
and the devastation everywhere seem to become just
part of the ordinary landscape.
Soon,
quite to your surprise, you find yourself paying
hardly more attention to the sounds of gunshots
than a New Yorker does to the car alarms that go
off every night ... until, that is, someone you
know, a neighbor, or just someone you have heard
about, gets blown up, shot on patrol or kidnapped
by insurgents.
Just a few days after I
left Baghdad, Iraqi newspapers carried a short
notice that a well-to-do Iraqi banker, Ghalib
Abdul Hussein, had been kidnapped from his
fortified house by gunmen wearing Iraqi Army
uniforms. Five of his personal guards were shot
execution-style in his yard. This is just one of
thousands of such occurrences. But except for
obeying the security guards responsible for you
(if you have them), there isn't much else you can
do.
Driving through the streets of
Baghdad, one now sees members of the newly
created, blue-uniformed Iraqi Police Service,
extolled by the Bush administration as another
hopeful sign of "Iraqization". But because police
recruitment stations, training schools and
district precincts are favorite targets of the
insurgents, many of these new police are afraid of
being identified as collaborators with the
Americans or the new Iraqi government.
Their remedy is to wear black stocking
caps with eye, nose and mouth holes pulled down
over their faces so they look like so many bank
robbers. One sees these sinister-looking
protectors of the peace at traffic circles and
intersections, or brandishing automatic weapons in
the back of American-bought pickup trucks, which
makes them seem far more menacing than reassuring.
The news bureaus Visiting any
of the news bureaus gives an immediate sense of
how embattled foreign journalists now are and how
difficult it has become for them to do their jobs.
Everyone I spoke to complained that the
deteriorating security situation had increasingly
made them prisoners of their bureaus.
"We
could go almost anywhere in Iraq in a regular car,
unprotected," wrote the Wall Street Journal
correspondent Farnaz Fassihi this February, in a
wistful front-page story for her paper about the
situation she found when she first arrived in
2003.
"I wore Western clothes - pants and
T-shirts, skirts, sandals - walked freely around
Baghdad chatting with shopkeepers and having lunch
or dinner with people I met." By the spring of
2004, she wrote, "the insurgency had been
spreading and gaining strength faster than we had
imagined possible. For the first time, I hired
armed guards and began traveling in a fully
armored car. Outings were measured and limited and
road trips were few and far between ... As
security deteriorated around the country, the
areas in which we could safely operate shrank."
Foreign news bureaus are either in or near
the few operating hotels, such as the Al-Hamra,
the Rashid or the Palestine. Like battleships that
have been badly damaged but are still at sea,
these hotels have survived repeated bomb attacks
and yet have managed to stay open. A few hotels
such as the Rashid, where once there was a mosaic
depicting George Bush Sr on the floor of the
lobby, are sheltered within the Green Zone. A few
other bureaus have their own houses, usually
somewhat shabby villas that have the advantage of
being included inside some collective defense
perimeter that makes the resulting neighborhood
feel like a walled medieval town.
Wherever
in the city the news bureaus are, they have become
fortified installations with their own mini-armies
of private guards on duty 24 hours a day at the
gates, in watch towers and around perimeters. To
reach these bureaus, one has to run through a maze
of checkpoints, armed guards, blast-wall
fortifications and concertina-wired no man's lands
where all visitors and their cars are repeatedly
searched.
The bitter truth is that doing
any kind of work outside these American fortified
zones has become so dangerous for foreigners as to
be virtually suicidal. More and more journalists
find themselves hunkered down inside whatever
bubbles of refuge they have managed to create in
order to insulate themselves from the lawlessness
outside. (A January USAID "annex" to bid
applications for government contracts warns how
"the absence of state control and an effective
police force" has allowed "criminal elements
within Iraqi society [to] have almost free rein".)
Nearly every foreign group working in Iraq
has felt it necessary to hire a PSD, or "personal
security detail", from more than 60 "private
military firms" (PMFs) - Triple Canopy, Erinys
International Ltd and Blackwater USA - now doing a
brisk business in Iraq. In fact, there are now
reported to be at least 25,000 armed men from such
private firms on duty in the country today. Led
mostly by Brits, South Africans and Americans,
these subterranean paramilitary PSDs form a
parallel universe to America's occupation force.
Indeed, they even have their own organization, the
Private Security Company Association of Iraq.
It has not escaped the attention of US
National Guardsmen, reservists, regular army
soldiers and Marines that their mercenary
counterparts get paid four or five times more than
they do, sometimes as much as US$1,000 a day.
Understandably, there is a good deal of resentment
about this inequity, and not a few American
soldiers now aspire to nothing more than getting
out of their low-paying jobs working for the
military so that they can sign on with one of
these companies.
"I look at it this way,"
one young former Marine told me. "The Corps was an
all-expenses-paid training ground to graduate me
into the private sector."
But being in a
PSD is a dangerous occupation, as four guards from
Blackwater learned in 2004 when, while on a
mission to pick up some kitchen equipment from an
82nd Airborne base in Fallujah, their vehicles
were attacked and set on fire, and they were
killed and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates
River. (As this issue went to press, 50 employees
of a private Sunni Arab-owned security company
were abducted in Baghdad.)
The US
government has ended up hiring thousands of
private guards to protect its contractors and even
high-ranking officials, such as Bremer. In fact, a
2005 US government audit reported that between 16%
and 22% of reconstruction project budgets in Iraq
now go for security, almost 10% more than had been
anticipated. As one private security guard told
PBS Frontline's Martin Smith, "We are a taxi
service, and we're equipped to defend ourselves if
we're attacked."
Security is a very costly
business, which has meant that most stringers and
freelance journalists who could never afford such
protection have been driven out of Baghdad.
Bureaus such as that of the New York Times, which
can afford it and are still in Iraq, now carry
costly insurance policies and require that all
coming and going - indeed, all aspects of life
outside the compound, including trips to the
airport - be under the control of a full-time
security chief, who acts as an earthbound
air-traffic controller for the bureau.
His
job is to carefully set times and routes for
reporters' trips, and then maintain almost
constant contact with their cars until they are
safely back. If you want to have an interview
outside the bureau, there is always a chance that
it will be canceled or delayed for security
reasons. Security chiefs are also in charge of the
armed guard details that protect the bureau around
the clock. No one goes anywhere without a plan
worked out in advance, and then preferably in a
"hardened", or reinforced, vehicle followed by a
"chase" car with several trusted Iraqi guards
ready to shoot if necessary.
Even if a
reporter wants to conduct an interview in another
secure zone, it has become increasingly foolhardy
not to coordinate the meeting in advance. If a
photographer is out covering the aftermath of a
suicide bombing or a reporter is interviewing an
Iraqi, for example, he or she is advised to stay
no more than a very short time, because someone
may be tempted to phone the sighting to a jihadi
group, often for a payoff.
Some critics,
such as the London Independent's Robert Fisk, have
written about how Western reporters have been
reduced to "hotel journalism", or what the former
Washington Post bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran
somewhat more charitably describes as "journalism
by remote control". Guardian war correspondent
Maggie O'Kane was even more emphatic, "We no
longer know what is going on, but we are
pretending we do."
The Washington Post,
which has been forced for security reasons to move
several times, now occupies a large house next to
the run-down Al-Hamra Hotel. When I stopped there
for lunch with a group of other journalists, the
Post's Jonathan Finer told me that concern for
reporters' lives has "completely changed the way
people move around the city".
"In the
summer of 2003, you could walk out of the Al-Hamra
and get a cab or even drive to Fallujah for
dinner, chill out, or go to a CD shop," I was told
by the Los Angeles Times' Borzou Daragahi, whose
bureau is in the Al-Hamra. "Now, the AP
[Associated Press] won't even let its people leave
the city."
"It's amazing now to think back
to November 2003 when the insurgency was starting
to gain momentum, and all we had were a few
sandbags in front of our house and a few guards,"
recalled Ed Wong, who is on his seventh rotation
at the New York Times Baghdad bureau.
"Back then, you might have met a few angry
people, but you didn't fear for your life. Then,
things started to change. At first, a few
civilians became targets, but not journalists.
Then, in the spring of 2004, we started changing
our security protocols, using two-car convoys and
guards. It felt very weird. For the first time I
confronted that barrier between me and the people
I was supposed to be reporting on."
Dexter
Filkins of the New York Times, who was in
Afghanistan before he went to Iraq, told me, "When
I first got here in March of 2003, it was like any
war zone I have covered: dangerous, but lines were
clear. We went all around the Sunni Triangle at
night. I went to Uday and Qusay's [Saddam's sons]
funeral. Saddam's family stared at us, but I had
no trepidation.
"Now, only a lunatic would
do something like that! It all started to change
in the fall of 2003 when all of us started to have
a lot of close calls. I was shot at, attacked by a
mob and had bricks thrown at my car. We had one
car raked by gunfire. Then, everything totally
changed after April 2004 and Fallujah and the
uprising of the Mehdi Army [the militia run by
Muqtada al-Sadr]. John Burns was captured,
blindfolded and walked into a field. He thought he
was a goner. Later in 2004 came the beheadings."
According to Filkins: "The situation has just
truncated the center of being a reporter. We can
still talk to Iraqis and do journalism, but it's
dangerous and unpredictable."
As Larry
Kaplow of the Cox Newspapers said, "It is
frustrating not being able to talk to the
insurgents and not to be able to find out what is
happening in other parts of Baghdad."
The
price of staying in Baghdad is to have Iraqi
surrogates perform more and more tasks, from
driving and shopping to getting exit visas and
plane tickets - and reporting. This situation
deeply frustrates Western journalists, who pride
themselves on their independence; but they know,
as the Committee to Protect Journalists reports,
that some 61 reporters (many of them Iraqis) have
been killed here, and many others wounded, since
the 2003 invasion.
New York Times reporter
Sabrina Tavernise, who had spent several years
reporting from Russia and had been to Baghdad
several times before her most recent rotation,
said: "I sometimes think that all I know are tiny
little pieces of the larger puzzle. If you can get
into someone's house, you can tell that other side
of the story. But the hurdles to doing that, just
going to a hospital after a bombing, are now huge.
During a recent Muslim holiday, I went to a park
to talk to people and children. But I had a
translator, a photographer, three guards and two
drivers." It was, she said, "intimidating".
In recent history, there have been few
wars more difficult to report on than the war in
Iraq today. When I was covering the war in
Indochina, journalists went out into the field,
even into combat, knowing that they would
ultimately be able to return to Saigon, Phnom Penh
or Vientiane, where they could meet with local
friends or go out to a restaurant for dinner with
colleagues. Although occasionally a Vietcong might
throw a hand grenade into a bar, the war
essentially was happening outside the city.
I had arrived here in Baghdad naively
expecting that as an antidote to their isolation
from Iraqi society, journalists might have kept up
something of a fraternity among themselves. What I
discovered was that even the most basic social
interactions have become difficult.
It is
true that some of the larger and better-appointed
news bureaus (with kitchens and cooks) have tried
to organize informal evening dinners with
colleagues. But while guests were able to get to
an early dinner, there was the problem of getting
back again to their compounds or hotels by dark,
when the odds of being attacked vastly increase.
The only alternative was to stay the night, which
posed many difficulties for everyone, especially
Iraqi drivers and guards.
The result is
that reporters find themselves living in a
strangely retro mode where their days end before
sunset, and they are pulled back to their bureaus
for dinner like an American family of the 1950s.
Not a few have sought solace in cooking.
One evening while I was in Baghdad, a
British security guard mentioned that Fox News was
giving a "party" in the nearby Palestine Hotel,
once the almost elegant, five-star Le Meridien
Palestine on the banks of the Tigris River. I was
curious both to see what had happened to this
legendary hotel and also what now passed for a
social gathering among foreign reporters. So at
dusk, accompanied by two armed guards, I walked
over to the Palestine through the maze of blast
walls.
The first thing I noticed was that
the hotel, which had become something of a
household name when US tanks opened fire on it in
April 2003, killing three journalists, was now
largely dark. Of the major bureaus, only Fox News
and APTN are still here. The Palestine and the
equally fabled Ishtar Sheraton, known as "the
Missile Magnet", are the two tallest buildings in
Baghdad. They are situated adjacent to the
roundabout in Firdos Square, made famous when a
statue of Saddam was pulled down by a US tank in
2003. Although the Ishtar has long since been
excommunicated by the Sheraton chain, the hotel
continues to call itself a Sheraton, like some
aging divorcee who cannot quite bear the thought
of giving up her former husband's last name.
In October, both hotels were the target of
attacks by three vehicles with explosives driven
by suicide bombers. The last of them, a cement
mixer loaded with explosives that drove through a
hole just blasted in the wall by another suicide
bomber, might have brought both hotels down if its
axle had not got snarled in a razor-wire
barricade. Snipers on the roof of the Palestine
Hotel then opened fire on the truck, setting off
an explosion that, among other things, blew out
windows at Reuters, the New York Times and the BBC
several hundred meters away. The Sheraton Ishtar
was so badly damaged that it never really
reopened, while the Palestine, which had much of
its lobby blown out, somehow manages to keep going
in a state of suspended animation.
Inside
its darkened lobby, a lone Iraqi sat dozing at a
battered wooden desk under a caved-in ceiling that
was hemorrhaging wires, electrical fixtures and
plumbing. A faded placard still marks the closed
Orient Express Restaurant, once the meeting place
of all the correspondents who used to live here.
In our search for the alleged Fox News
party, we asked the attendant in the lobby for
directions. He told me and my guards to go to the
fifth floor, but added that in order to get
upstairs, we must first go downstairs, evidently a
strategy to prevent suicide bombers from going
directly to their targets.
In the
basement, amid a stack of discarded cardboard
boxes and heaps of broken plate-glass windows, an
Iraqi man is knelt on a rug in front of a cement
block wall, presumably facing toward Mecca, in
prayer. When we finally arrived on the fifth
floor, we had to leave our guards at a checkpoint
fortified with a steel door.
Inside, we
were greeted by the stink of disinfectant and
stale air filled with the smell of curry and
cigarette smoke. Down a hallway with a greasy
carpet I found a small sitting room with shabby
furniture and a soccer game playing on a TV. The
Fox News staffers who were smoking and drinking
seemed glad to see almost anyone. The scene made
me think of a group of elderly retired people
clinging to a residential hotel slated for
demolition.
"Where are all the other
guests?" I asked, as one of them thrusts a bottle
of beer into my hand. Zoran Kusovac, Fox's bulky,
unshaven bureau chief, took a long drag on his
cigarette and explained in his Croatian accent,
"Everybody's gone home." He laughed. "It's
Saturday. We wanted to have some fun. We used to
be able to have parties until late at night. But
now our security people told us that if we wanted
to have a party, it would have to end no later
than 6pm, so that everyone could get home before
dark. We started at 3!"
"It's a little
like being in third grade, where everybody has to
be home before dark," someone else said. Everyone
laughed.
"TV means you have to get close
to the action," Kusovac complained when I asked
how Fox's coverage has been going. "After all, we
have to get pictures. It's absolutely essential.
If you're a print reporter and out in a Humvee,
you can look through the window. But as a TV
reporter, you have to stand up and get tape."
Everyone nodded, thinking, no doubt, about
ABC TV's Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug
Vogt, who had just been wounded while out on
patrol. "All of us," Kusovac said, "depend on our
Iraqis whom we have learned to trust ... Our 'bona
fiders'. But still, they're filters."
The
BBC's Baghdad bureau is housed at an adjacent
compound in a shabby old villa occupied in the
1930s by a Jewish school, which still has Star of
David patterns on its floor tiles and its old
rickety wrought-iron porch railings. "The
challenge here is always getting there to get the
story," the Canadian-born bureau chief, Owen
Lloyd, told me.
"And then, when we do get
there, we can only stay for 15 to 30 minutes.
Finally, the focus has to be as much about safety
as it is about the story." I asked Lloyd how the
BBC deals with these problems. "We have a staff in
the newsroom with four Iraqis who work as fixers,"
he told me. "They are from different Muslim
factions and give us a sense of what people in
their neighborhoods think. We couldn't get by
without them!"
PART 2: Remote
reporting and the Green Zone
Orville Schell is the dean of
the graduate school of journalism at the
University of California, Berkeley and a
contributor to the New York Review of Books as
well as Tomdispatch.com. His most recent book is
Virtual Tibet, Searching for Shangri-La from
the Himalayas to Hollywood.
(This article
appears in the April 6 issue of the New York Review of Books
Used with permission.)
(Copyright 2006
Orville Schell.)
Tom Engelhardt
is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. (Used by
permission.)
