Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Baghdad
October 17, 2003

Overcast morning. Our first very few drops of rain of the season.

No diary entry yesterday. I was busy adapting three diary entries into an article for the November Peace Newsletter. Since the three came in at a couple hundred words over the 1200 word limit I was given, I had to shave them a bit. Of course that only improved them.

One change in Baghdad since the invasion: more men wearing jeans. I asked Wadah, who these days always wears jeans, about this. When he was our minder last spring he was always dressed in creased slacks. He explains: more men out of work.

Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Baghdad
October 14, 2003

PRESS CONFERENCE
Around 11am Ghareeb takes me and Neville to Nejaf., a two-hour drive. Once there it takes us an hour to find the press conference. The site has been moved from the announced location. We park at a traffic barrier in the old city and walk a carless block along an arcaded commercial street, past numerous men with guns, toward the main mosque.

Ghareeb seeks the office of Muktate Al-Sadur’s organization to get access and directions to the press conference. In an alley, Ghareeb is searched by a clot of armed men before being escorted to the office. Two men are detailed to accompany us as we drive to the site, maybe a couple miles away. When we arrive there are numerous men with guns keeping watch, some on neighboring rooftops. No uniformed authorities are present. We don’t have to show any ID or press pass. We are pattted down and wanded before being let through a narrow door into a dwelling. We head upstairs onto a roof packed with journos and cameramen.

Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Baghdad
Oct. 13, 2003

No muezzin this morning at 4:30. Neville was set up to record that typical and remarkable chant calling the faithful to prayer. He’s begun using the muezzin’s morning call to prayer as his own.

At 4:50 a chopper hovers overhead before moving on down toward The Palestine. This is the first chopper I’ve seen with navigation lights on. With Abu Mohammed driving, we go by the Hotel Baghdad, recently bombed. Armed men on the roof, armed men strung along Al Sadoon St every few feet. The windows of shops across the boulevard blasted out.

Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Oct 10-11, 2003
Baghdad

PRE-OCCUPIED

In an article I wrote a few weeks ago, I asked which was the wilderness: Iraq or the US? Of course, in their own way both are wildernesses.

The CPA has 10,000 detainees. By contrast, the US, a country only ten times as populous as Iraq, has a million detainees.

Iraq is occupied by foreign military. The US is occupied by a domestic military and police machine. This machine abuses human rights and chills democratic initiative both internationally and domestically.

Elements within Iraq resist an Occupation still struggling for control. In the US the Occupation is vastly far more successful and systematic. It is vastly more subliminal and entrenched. Read, for example, Herbert Marcuse’s classic, One Dimensional Man.

Ed Kinane
Voices in The Wilderness
Baghdad
October 9, 2003, Thursday

Neville is 74 today. Six months ago today the US Marines arrived outside our hotel. I’ll never forget Neville standing on the Al Fanar balcony overlooking the troops with his sign: WAR=TERRORISM.

BBC news: in this morning’s rush hour a suicide bomber drove headlong toward a Baghdad police station. Police opened fire. The explosives in the car detonate, killing the driver, several police and several others � nine in all. Forty are wounded. The BBC commentator explains that the police are seen as collaborators with the CPA. These days police stations are heavily fortified.as
Also today: a Spanish diplomat is assassinated on a Baghdad street.