Anger is energy, it’s a force. .. . It’s injustice that motivates us to do something, to take risks, knowing that if we don’t, things will remain the same.
—Digna Ochoa (1964–2001), slain Mexican human rights lawyer1
In 2004, the United States launched two major assaults on Fallujah, the Sunni city west of Baghdad that had come to symbolize Iraqi resistance to the U.S. occupation. The first offensive was in April 2004, and it came a few days after four American military contractors from the private security firm Blackwater USA were brutally killed in the city. The second assault took place in November 2004. In that attack, a U.S. military spokesman later confirmed to Democracy Now! that U.S. troops used white phosphorus—a chemical that can be used for illumination and obscuring troop movements, or as an incendiary weapon like napalm that melts the skin. This offensive use may violate international law.
The attacks on Fallujah were an extraordinary action by the U.S. military. As Marti Hiken, co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force, declared while filing a lawsuit against the military to obtain information about the assaults, “Not since the destruction of Guernica (1937), the Warsaw Ghetto (1942), Nagasaki, Hiroshima, or Dresden (1945) has there been such a total devastation of a city the size of Cincinnati or Oakland, housing 350,000 people or more. Having no apparent purpose other than a ‘show of power’ and a demand for revenge for four civilian American security contractors killed in March 2004, the Bush government unmercifully leveled one of the largest cities in Iraq.”
The U.S. military made clear that revenge was its motive in attacking Fallujah in April 2004. “We will pacify that city,” said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, the day after the killings. “We will be back in Fallujah. It will be at the time and place of our choosing.”2
The siege that followed was one of the bloodiest assaults of the U.S. occupation. In two weeks that April, thirty Marines were killed as local guerillas resisted U.S. attempts to capture the city. Some 600 Iraqis died and over 1,000 were wounded.
The American military insisted that there were almost no civilian casualties among the Iraqis reported killed, despite the fact that fierce fighting raged in the heart of a densely populated city. “What I think you will find is 95 percent of those were military-age males that were killed in the fighting,” said Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne. “The Marines are trained to be precise in their firepower. . . . The fact that there are 600 [dead] goes back to the fact that the Marines are very good at what they do.”3
Embedded American reporters described the firefights from the vantage point of the Marines. As Jeffrey Gettleman reported in the New York Times:
The Marines were pros. Nobody panicked. They crawled behind a berm, got on their knees and judiciously fired back, bullet after bullet. We escaped that firefight with no casualties. But soon we were in another. And then another. The countryside was so lush and pretty. But it was swarming with insurgents.
“Man, I think some of those guys were kids,” a lance corporal told me afterward. “Or they were midgets.”4
American press coverage also included the usual worshipping of weapons, and assurances that high technology would minimize civilian casualties. The New York Times reported on April 30, 2004:
By day, AH-1W Super Cobra helicopters have hovered over the city, launching Hellfire missiles at guerrillas who fire on the Marines. By night, lumbering AC-130 gunships have pounded trucks and cars ferrying fighters with the distinctive thump-thump of 105-millimeter howitzers. . . .
Commanders say they go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties, but they acknowledge they do not know how many civilians have died in recent attacks. Pilots concede that in at least one case, an American warplane mistakenly bombed the wrong building in Fallujah. . . .
The stepped-up air assault has sought to minimize the risks to both civilians and the military, senior officers said. Bombs guided by lasers or satellites permit American forces to attack weapons caches or clusters of fighters more precisely and with less risk to civilians than with ground fire, they say.
Al Jazeera had some of the only unembedded journalists inside the besieged city, and its exclusive footage was being broadcast by every network from CNN to the BBC. Al Jazeera’s reporting enraged the U.S. government. To the Bush administration, determined to control the flow of information, Al Jazeera had to be taken out. No one could imagine just how far this would go: In a White House meeting with British prime minister Tony Blair on April 16, 2004, George W. Bush actually proposed bombing Al Jazeera’s international headquarters in Qatar. This revelation came from top secret minutes of the Bush-Blair summit leaked to Britain’s Daily Mirror in November 2005. The British government swiftly invoked the Official Secrets Act and banned the Daily Mirror and any British media outlet from publishing further details of the leaked documents.5 Two civil servants were arrested for leaking the memo.
Blair was apparently able to persuade Bush to abandon the idea of incinerating the Al Jazeera headquarters, but the United States maintained its offensive against the Arab news network. On April 9, 2004, the Bush administration demanded that Al Jazeera leave Fallujah as a precondition for a cease-fire. Al Jazeera initially refused.
Al Jazeera, with a worldwide viewership of some 50 million people, has been under constant attack by the Bush administration. As the Guardian (UK) reported:
Last November [2003], George Bush declared that successful societies “limit the power of the state and the military . . . and allow room for independent newspapers and broadcast media.” But three days earlier, an Al Jazeera camera man, Salah Hassan, had been arrested in Iraq, held incommunicado in a chicken-coop-sized cell and forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for up to 11 hours at a time. He was beaten by U.S. soldiers who would address him only as “Al Jazeera” or “bitch.” Finally, after a month, he was dumped on a street just outside Baghdad, in the same vomit-stained red jumpsuit that he had been detained in. Twenty other Al Jazeera journalists have been arrested and jailed by U.S. forces in Iraq and one, Tariq Ayoub, was killed last April when a U.S. tank fired a shell at the Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel. It was an accident, the Pentagon said, even though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad offices before the war began.6
In addition, the Al Jazeera offices in Afghanistan and Basra were bombed by American planes, and two of its correspondents have been imprisoned on unspecified terrorism charges—one in Spain and one at Guantánamo Bay.
Al Jazeera’s journalists are not the only ones under siege. The Iraq War has been among the deadliest conflicts ever for journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that by mid-2006, over 100 journalists and media assistants had been killed in Iraq while doing their jobs. By comparison, 66 journalists lost their lives over the course of the 20-year-long Vietnam conflict.7 More than half of those killed in Iraq were Iraqi and other Arab journalists. Fifteen journalists have been killed by U.S. fire. Reporters Without Borders has declared, “Repeated statements by the U.S. military command in Iraq saying troops had acted in accordance with ‘the rules of engagement’ or in ‘legitimate self-defense’ are not enough.”8
Journalists also risk arrest while reporting on the war in Iraq: In 2005 alone, U.S. forces arrested seven Iraqi journalists “for prolonged periods without charge or the disclosure of any supporting evidence,” according to CPJ. All were eventually released, and no charges were ever filed. CPJ concluded that the Pentagon has “displayed a pattern of disregard when confronted with issues involving the security of Iraqi journalists and citizens.”9
In February 2006, the Al Jazeera journalists who reported from Fallujah in April 2004 spoke about their experience for the first time on Democracy Now! Ahmed Mansour and his cameraman Laith Mushtaq were reporting from inside Fallujah for much of the siege. Mansour, a senior Al Jazeera journalist, has been a special focus of American wrath. The Observer (UK) reported in 2005, “According to Sami Muhyideen al-Hajj, an Al-Jazeera cameraman arrested in Afghanistan in 2001 and detained in Guantánamo Bay, U.S. interrogators are obsessed with the idea of al Qaeda infiltration of the channel and asked about Mansour more than 100 times.”10
It was Mansour’s shocking dispatches from Fallujah that infuriated the Bush administration and the military. Mansour recounted, “The ninth of April 2004 was really like the day of judgment in Fallujah. We were under siege for two days from the U.S. forces and the snipers.”
Mansour and his crew decided to leave their offices and observe the battles in the heart of the city, at great risk to themselves. What they saw around Fallujah shocked them. “We found children, women, elderly, all lifting white flags and walking, or in their cars leaving the city,” he said. “When we reached the heart of the city at the hospital, I almost lost my mind from the terror that I saw, people going in each and every direction. . . . I felt like we need a thousand cameras to grab those disastrous pictures: fear, terror, planes bombing, ambulances taking the dead people.
“At the end, I felt that I have to control myself. . . . There were no reporters in the city. We were the only team that was able to enter the city. . . . We felt that we are responsible for all these civilians being bombed from the planes and who are threatened with death, so we have to transfer this picture of suffering to the whole world. It was extremely difficult.”
The U.S. military responded by ordering Al Jazeera out of Fallujah, so that the killing could continue without witnesses. Gen. Mark Kimmitt declared, “The stations that are showing Americans intentionally killing women and children are not legitimate news sources. That is propaganda, and that is lies.” Four days later, on April 15, Donald Rumsfeld said that Al Jazeera’s reporting was “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable. It’s disgraceful what that station is doing.”11
“They did not stop those accusations leveled against us,” Man-sour asserted. “If there’s anyone who lies, then it is the person who belies those pictures that we presented to the world.”
Cameraman Laith Mushtaq described the images that he captured: “There were a lot of children in the hospital that were wounded. Some children were brought, and their families were dead already.”
The cameraman described a wrenching scene that he encountered with a man named Hamiz, who lived in a neighborhood attacked by U.S. troops. “There were about four families in one place, children and women. Usually men leave to give some privacy for the children and the ladies. The planes bombed this house, as they did the whole neighborhood, and they brought the corpses and bodies to the hospital. I went to the hospital. I could not see anything but a sea of corpses of children and women—mostly children, because peasants and farmers usually have a lot of children. I was taking photographs and forcing myself to photograph. At the same time I was crying, because I used to move the camera from one picture of a child to the father Hamiz, who was the only one left alive from that family. He was speaking with his dead children. They had an infant named Ahmed. His nickname was Hamudi. In the child’s hand was a toy the shape of a car. Half the boy’s head was gone. Hamiz said to him: ‘Come back, my beloved. Come to my lap. I am your father.’ ”
Laith Mushtaq reflected, “Every time I look at a wounded girl or one who lost her family or is killed, I always remember my own little daughter. And I remember that I have to be here to protect those children.”
When Mushtaq returned to the Baghdad bureau, he said Al Jazeera “took an initiative to cover both sides.” So the network sent him and a journalist back to Fallujah, this time embedded with U.S. forces. His first task was to cover a press conference in Fallujah in which the spokesman for the Marines announced that they had made advances into the city and killed terrorists. When the Al Jazeera reporter asked about civilian casualties, Mushtaq recalled the Marine spokesman replying, “Oh, there are no civilians. The people whom you see their corpses on Al Jazeera TV and on the media, it is fighters wearing civilian clothing.”
“What about the child?” Mushtaq challenged him. “Is he a fighter disguised in civilian clothes?”
“This Is Our Duty Toward Humanity”
Few journalists have faced the dual burden that has confronted Ahmed Mansour and his Al Jazeera colleagues: Not only must they survive reporting from a war zone, but they must maintain their professionalism and reputation in the face of relentless criticism by U.S. and British leaders.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt issued a veiled threat in April 2004 in response to Mansour’s Fallujah coverage: “If somebody sees it a different way than we do, that’s OK. If somebody’s got a different editorial view, that’s OK. But when they start telling intentional lies, that goes beyond the pale,” said the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.
Kimmitt continued, “Much of what we are doing over here depends on the consent and trust of the Iraqi people. When an organization intentionally tries to break that trust and confidence, that puts us in a more precarious position”—such as when Iraqis avenge killings “that we did not do.”12
“What I can say is that we did our duty as journalists,” Mansour told Democracy Now! He remains deeply committed to his work. “If this battle took place on the land of the U.S. and I was the one covering it and American civilians were vulnerable to killing, I would not have done any different than what I have done at Fallujah. This is our duty toward humanity in general, as journalists, to report the truth from any place that we are in.
“Our role was to present the truth about what is happening to the civilians. We did that with documents and pictures, and no one could deny this. The whole world reported and transferred this truth and these facts.”
But as Mansour quickly learned, the Bush administration tolerates only its own version of the truth. By embedding journalists with U.S. troops, the Pentagon maintained near total control of what the reporters could see and say. It was a brilliant propaganda coup for Bush, and a devastating compromise of journalistic integrity by the Western press.
“Why did the Americans refuse the entering of any journalists or media or TV stations to Fallujah in the second battle [in November 2004] and they only limited to those who are embedded with them?” asked Mansour. From his vantage point among the civilians, Mansour saw the Western media abdicating their commitment to cover all sides of the story. “Is it professionalism that the journalists wear U.S. clothing and they go with them in the planes and tanks to cover this and report this? The battles have to be reported from both sides. We were among the civilians, and we reported. They had embedded journalists with those who launched this attack from the U.S. forces who occupied Iraq, and they reported what they wanted. We were trying to create an equilibrium or a balance, so that the truth was not lost.”
The penalty for presenting unofficial truths soon became apparent: U.S. bullets and bombs were ultimately trained on Al Jazeera. Mansour was left to draw his own conclusions. “We were going live and from this roof. We had three telephones, and we were doing satellite signals, so they could have monitored that,” he recounted. “We photographed the battles in the al-Julan neighborhood, because this was the highest building in the area and it’s well known. Everybody knows that in this area is Al Jazeera’s team. So we photographed the battles of Fallujah, of airplanes bombing and cars taking bodies to the hospitals. And we were live with Al Jazeera, and the whole world was seeing that. And General Kimmitt came at night and said, ‘Ahmed Mansour spreads lies.’ After that we were fired upon. I think they know exactly where their tanks were firing upon.”
Laith Mushtaq added, “I do feel that we were targeted. . . . I was afraid as a journalist. I was extremely frightened. . . . I shouldn’t be afraid to do my duty with professionalism. We were standing on the roof and taking pictures. They fired upon us.”
The Al Jazeera team continued to broadcast from Fallujah at great risk to their lives. Mansour insisted, “I wanted the whole world to know what’s happening to those besieged people. I wasn’t thinking about leaving the city at all. I decided to stay and let my destiny be as those of the people. If they die, I’ll be with them. If they escape, I’ll be with them. I decided not to think about what the U.S. forces will do with me if they catch me, and
not to think about my family or anything. I only think about those people. . . . Despite that, they accused us of lying, only because they don’t want the world to see the truth and the reality.”
In an extraordinary attack on the press, the U.S. military declared in April 2004 that there could be no peace for Fallujah unless Al Jazeera abandoned the city. For Mansour to remain would mean even more Iraqis would die. “The extreme stresses and pressures leveled against Al Jazeera because of my reporting of what happened in Fallujah made Al Jazeera unable to help me to go back one more time,” he said. “I left Fallujah when I had to leave Fallujah. I was leaving as one who was carrying a funeral within himself. I did not want to leave those people, simple people, alone and abandon them.”
In August 2004, the U.S.-backed Iraqi government ordered Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau closed. It was an important milestone in Bush’s war against independent media.
Ahmed Mansour remains ready to return. “Anytime and any day, and for any oppressed people subject to death, I am willing to go to report the truth and express those people anywhere in the world—even if it’s in the United States of America.”