By Christina Paschyn

Who could forget the plight of Giuliana Sgrena: the unembedded Italian reporter who had been kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents. Held as a hostage for an entire month, her release was finally negotiated by Italian secret intelligence agent, Nicola Calipari. But as they drove to the Baghdad airport and safety seemed to be within their reach, they were suddenly and unexpectedly fired upon by American soldiers, and in the aftermath of the gunfire and smoke, Sgrena was found with an injured shoulder and a punctured lung - Calipari was dead.

In the array of investigations conducted after the incident, the Pentagon came out with a report that absolved its soldiers of any wrongdoing. According to officials, the soldiers involved flashed white lights and fired warning shots to try to stop the Toyota Corolla carrying Sgrena and Calipari. They said the car was “speeding” toward “a checkpoint,” and the soldiers shot into the Toyota’s engine block when the driver did not stop. Calipari, was not part of the engine block, but he was shot anyway. It was declared a “horrible accident.

But that’s not the Italian’s version of the story. According to a BBC NEWS article, published on May 3, 2005, an Italian report of the shooting conflicts with the U.S. report, and blames the troops’ inexperience and stress. It also says the supposed checkpoint set up by the Americans was ineptly set-up and that no signals indicated its presence.

The article states that the report “denied the U.S. assertion that their military command in Baghdad was unaware of the Italian mission to secure the hostage’s release, pointing out that the Italians had been allocated secure accommodation in an American-controlled area.”

Furthermore, according to an article in Asia Times, “the driver of the car has insisted that the Toyota had been driving slowly (no more than 40km/h), and had received no warning from the American soldiers, and that the Italians had advised the Americans they were carrying diplomatic personnel.”

Sgrena’s own version of the story contradicts that of the U.S. military. The Asia Times reports that in an interview with independent journalist Naomi Klein, Sgrena said she was not traveling on the road the Pentagon says she was on, and that there was no checkpoint ordering them to slowdown:

“It was simply a tank parked on the side of the road that opened fire on us,” Sgrena told Klein. “It was not a checkpoint. They didn’t try to stop us, they just shot us. They have a way to signal us to stop, but they didn’t give us any signals to stop and they were at least 10 meters off the street to the side.”

So what is going on here? Who is right? And, most importantly, is the U.S. military trying to kill independent journalists?

Well, for one thing, the Italian version is probably the correct one.

According to Klein, “Sgrena really stressed that the bullet that injured her so badly came from behind, entered through the back of the car. And the only person who was not severely injured in the car was the driver, and she said that this is because the shots weren’t coming from the front … They were driving away.”

The Asia Times uses this statement to explain why the Pentagon blocked the Italian government from inspecting the Toyota, even though the Italians had bought the car from the rental agency after the shooting.

In the interview, Sgrena says: “It was not self-defense. The soldiers were to the right of us on the side of the road, they started to shoot from the right and kept shooting from behind. Most of the shots came from behind. Calipari was shot from the right and I was shot in the shoulder from behind. When we stopped, they were behind us. We could see that all the back windows of the car were broken from behind … They didn’t try to stop the car and they shot at least 10 bullets at the level of people sitting inside the car. If Calipari had not pushed me down they could have killed me.”

But is the military deliberately trying to hurt these journalists?

That’s what the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders believes. Based on an investigation the group conducted, they have come to believe that the Pentagon considers independent journalists to be subversive and dangerous to the American occupation.

The Asia Times reminds the reader of the how the Pentagon intentionally targeted the “media-saturated” Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on April 8, 2003, killing a Ukrainian and a Spanish journalist. Four months later, the U.S. Army absolved itself from any possible mistake. And the army’s determination to prevent investigative journalism has led to the resignation of Eason Jordan, a top CNN executive for more than a decade, who said the Pentagon targeted journalists in Iraq. Reporters Without Borders has called for a UN-led independent investigation into the Sgrena tragedy, but have had no luck.

Will the Bush Administration continue to silence the media? The fate of Iraq and America lies in the perseverance of independent journalists.

Bibliography

They Shoot Journalists, Don’t They?
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, April 28, 2005

Italian report queries US claims
BBC NEWS

Other Related Articles

Independent Press Was a Target in Iraq
By Danny Schechter
Television Week
February 28, 2005

By Christian Appel

The January elections in Iraq were portrayed and described by much of the international media as triumphs of democracy and freedom.

As many independent new media sources have shown, the elections were by far not fair, and the idea that the elections were rooted in introducing democracy to the Iraqi state was a concept that a large number of Iraqis do not themselves believe in.

A recent US-run poll of Baghdadis showed that one per cent agreed that the goal of the invasion was to bring democracy to Iraq. Five per cent thought the goal was to help Iraqis. The majority assumed the US wants to control Iraq’s resources and to use its new bases there to control the region. As Noam Chomsky stated in his article Imperial Presidency, Baghdadis, demonstrating insight far beyond the capacity of most Western journalists, felt that the US did want ‘democracy’, but not one that would allow Iraqis to run their lives “without US pressure and influence.”

In addition, further reporting on the opinions of Iraqi expatriates gave voice to their fears and doubts of the election. Unfortunately the accompanying articles of these expatriate profiles failed to criticize the elections despite the obvious concerns voiced by the Iraqi’s themselves. In fact, as Rohan Pearce’s article states, outside Iraq, only about 22% of potential expatriate voters cast a ballot, clearly showing that there was little confidence in the fairness of the elections among this population of Iraqis.

At the same time, the media has failed to report on many other aspects of the elections, particularly the U.S.’s behind-the-scenes role. Though the media did report on Iran’s influence in the election, as it financially supported a number of candidates with close ties to the ruling ayatollahs of Iran, the U.S.’s pushing of its own candidates went unreported.

Washington-funded organizations with long records of manipulating foreign democracies in favour of US interests are deeply involved in the election. The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI), considered by some to be “extensions” of the state department, are part of a consortium to which the US government has provided over $80 million for political and electoral activities in Iraq. NDI is headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while IRI is chaired by Republican Senator John McCain.

Professor William I. Robinson of the Global and International Studies Programme at the University of California stated to NewStandard reporters, “I suspect that [NDI and IRI] are trying to select individual leaders and organisations that are going to be very amenable to the US transnational project for Iraq.”

Robinson added that these leaders must be willing to engage in “pacifying the country militarily and legitimating the occupation and the formal electoral system”, the goal being to guarantee that Iraq is controlled by “economic, political and civic groups that are going to be favorable to Iraq’s integration into the global capitalist economy”.

In a search using the LexisNexis media database, it was found that no British or U.S newspapers have mentioned these NDI and IRI activities in the Iraqi election at any time over the last twelve months.

Finally, the actual coverage of the election by the corporate media was greatly affected by circumstances that only provided completely skewered perspectives of the success of the election and the reactions of the Iraqi people.

As Rohan Pearce reported in the Green Left Weekly, Western television news broadcasts were “awash with Iraqis ecstatically casting their ballots.”

However, in a January 29 panel on CNN’s International Correspondents program, Julian Manyon, Britain’s ITV Baghdad correspondent, revealed that Western TV reporters covering the election were being “limited to filming at only five polling stations”, out of 5244. When the list of “approved” polling stations was published, Manyon added, reporters found out that “four of those five polling stations are actually in Shia areas” which therefore meant that very little light was shed on whether Sunnis were voting and their reactions to the elections.

According to the Reuters news agency, while there were 63,000 polling booths throughout Iraq, there were only 33,763 Iraqi election monitors and 622 international monitors. Manyon told CNN: “It’s very difficult to see how these elections can live up to international standards in terms of dispassionate supervision and policing of the polls.” However, for the bulk of the Western corporate news media’s reporting, particularly on television, most commentators stuck to the White House’s script of January 30 being the “dawn” of Iraqi “democracy”.

Bibliography:

Iraq and Zimbabwe – A Tale of Two Elections,
April 13 2005

Unity in Deceit: The British Media and Iraq’s Election
January 20 2005

IRAQ: Have the elections saved the occupation?
Rohan Pearce
Green Left Weekly
February 9, 2005

Imperial Presidency
Noam Chomsky,
Canadian Dimension,
January/February 2005

Controversial U.S. Groups Operate Behind Scenes on Iraq Vote
Lisa Ashkenaz Croke and Brian Dominick
December 13, 2004

By Christina Paschyn

On April 9, 2003, the Middle East was changed forever. On this fateful day, a tyrant was overthrown, and his poor, miserable subjects finally gained their independence. It was an event that heralded an era of democracy and equality for all people of the suppressed nation of Iraq. The Iraqi people miraculously gathered their strength and united together to bring down the statue of Saddam Hussein — the defining moment of the American led Iraq war. Or so that was what we were led to believe.

The mainstream media broadcasted the story of the statue falling with the image that “several hundred” to “one thousand” Iraqis had tied a noose around the statue’s neck and began pulling it down. The FOX NEWS network gave this description of the event:

A crowd of Iraqis, with the help of U.S. Marines, toppled a 40-foot statue of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in a main square of the capital Wednesday, pelting it with garbage and shoes and dragging the head through the streets.

And CNN and NBC did not trail far behind. They recorded quotes such as this one:

“I’m 49, but I never lived a single day. Only now will I start living,” Yussuf Abed Kazim, a mosque preacher, said as he whacked away, knocking tile and concrete off the pedestal. “That Saddam Hussein is a murderer and a criminal.”

And they dismissively mentioned American troops covering the statue with the American flag (an act, Al Jazeera and several other Middle Eastern news stations and papers labeled as a symbol of the unjust American occupation of Iraq):

The crowd, however, appeared unable to bring the statue down, or unsure how to do it safely.

The Marines got into the act, climbing up and briefly covering Saddam’s face with an American flag like a hood. They replaced it with the black-white-and-red Iraqi flag, wrapped around the statue’s neck.

The Americans then put their winch’s cable in place, waved the crowd back out the way, and began to pull.

Sadly, like an inverse effect, as the mainstream media increased ratings with sensationalism, they lost their journalistic integrity and watchdog position. It was up to the independent media to uncover the truth behind the statue falling and only now are American civilians beginning to learn it.

Simply put, the pulling down of the Saddam Statue was staged event by the American military. As hard as this might be to believe, the military has recently admitted to it, and yet hardly any of this information has been made known to the public, with only a few independent journalists and some popular media, such as the Los Angeles Times, publishing it. A recent report released by the military states that the Saddam statue falling was not instigated by jubilant Iraqis, but by a Marine colonel. Reporter David Zucchino of the LA Times wrote this in a July 2004 article:

It was a Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick- thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.

Zucchino says that the report states that the colonel – who not named in the report – used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqis to participate in the false Berlin Wall like uprising. However, as the Centre for Global Research points out, only a few Iraqis actually participated. Contrary to what the media depicted, there were not several hundred or thousands of Iraqis present. Aerial images of the event show that a max 300 Iraqis were at Firdos Square in central Baghdad at the time.

Furthermore, the report states that a Marine recovery vehicle toppled the statue with a chain. However, as Zucchino explains, the effort appeared to be Iraqi- inspired because the military unit’s psychological team had managed to pack the vehicle with cheering Iraqi children.

Evidently, the cunning Marine colonel knew what sort of pictures the American public wanted. But how could our trusted media have let this happen – how could they have allowed themselves to be used for such military deception?

It is interesting to note that the alternative media knew about the deception days after the event occurred. The website for the Center of Research on Globalization, http://globalresearch.ca/articles/NYI304A.html, posted aerial video footage of the statue falling on April 11, 2003. Why has it taken the mainstream media a year to uncover the truth?

According to an article by Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times, at least some members of popular media had an inkling that something wasn’t quite right. Ted Koppel apparently said his problem with how quickly the Saddam statue fell was that he remembered seeing anti-Soviet crowds trying to bring down a statue of Lenin, and “it took them 17 hours.”

But finding truth is no longer the most essential duty of journalists. In era of 24-hour news stations and rating competitions, the main priority of TV stations and newspapers, is to get the best and most stimulating pictures that will boost sales. To ask for anything more is simply too much.

Articles used:

The pulling down of the Statue was a staged media event

Watching Saddam Fall

Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue
By: David Zucchino
Los Angeles Times

Iraqis, Marines Pull Down Saddam Statue
FOX NEWS

CPT Iraq - Human Rights Testimonies

The following testimony was documented on July 27, 2004 by Maxine Nash and Sheila Provencher. The interview took place at her home, and was done with the help of a translator.

NOTE: CPT received permission to publicize this testimony but only if names, dates, and places were changed.

CPT Iraq - Human Rights Testimonies

The Iraqi Police arrested Thabaat Al-Soudany, a human rights worker and resident of Baghdad, on 12 February 2004 on suspicion of stealing Iraqi antiquities. The charges were dropped and he was released on 11 April 2004. The Iraqi Police rearrested him on 29 June 2004, and then dropped the charges again and released him on 25 September 2004. Shortly after his second release he wrote the following account, originally in Arabic, of his experiences inside prisons run by the Interim Iraqi Government. CPT Iraq has edited the following version from its original translated version to correct typos and spelling and grammar errors. Some portions, which were not clear in the translation or were tangential, have been omitted.