Iraq: War by Persuasion
Mearsheimer and Walt fault two organizations, created after 9/11, for manipulating intelligence that was then leaked to “an alarmist pro-war press” to justify the invasion of Iraq. One was PCTEG, which was tasked to find links between al Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community supposedly missed. The other, the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was assigned to gather and shape evidence used to sell the war against Iraq. It was operated by recruits from pro-Israel think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the AIPAC-affiliated Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), as well as Michael Makovsky, who had worked for former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres after graduating from college. OSP relied heavily on information from Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles and had close connections to various Israeli sources. Chalabi’s influence stemmed from his close ties with key figures and groups in the Israel Lobby, especially the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), AIPAC, WINEP, the Hudson Institute and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), as well as, among others, political commentator Bernard Lewis.
All said, however, neither the Bush administration officials nor Israel and the Lobby could have led the country into war without a compliant and gullible press to present their propaganda as news and cheer them on. The question is how the evidence disputing the existence of WMD and Saddam’s’s link to 9/11 went largely unreported?
As we have seen, very few voices in the mainstream American media questioned the administration’s allegations. In addition to AP’s Charles Hanley, the Knight Ridder team—Jonathan Landay, John Walcott, Warren Strobel, and Joe Galloway—produced stories disputing the false reports. Major outlets, however, often aired administration claims, Iraqi defectors’ statements, and information from the Israel Lobby without verification. Pundits then amplified these claims with skewed analyses. When The New York Times reported on Iraq’s “worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb,” people believed it. Knight Ridder stories citing the lack of hard evidence in Iraqi WMD received little play. “From August 2002 until the war was launched in March of 2003, there were about 140 front-page pieces in The Washington Post making the administration’s case for war,” said Howard Kurtz, the Post’s former media critic. “But there was only a handful of stories that ran on the front page that made the opposite case. Or, if not making the opposite case, raised questions.”
The Iraq War coverage marked not only a political failure but a journalistic one—the culmination of years in which media proximity to power had replaced scrutiny with submission.
Inside Iraq
The American war on Iraq produced some of the most controversial media coverage in modern history. It defined the parameters, methods, tone, and framing of how wars would be reported in the years to come. Nearly 600 journalists from across the globe were embedded with U.S. and coalition forces as they invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003 , a practice media watchdogs criticized as a new form of government control. Embedding meant that U.S. coverage was saturated with stories of soldiers’ courage and emotions—a narrative that helped sustain support for the war at home—while the war itself or how Iraqi civilians were living and dying under it, received scant attention. Framed as a mission to bring democracy, the invasion obscured the fact that Iraq’s vast oil wealth was central to Washington’s motives.
Far from unusual, the alignment of media and state interests was a long-standing norm, only updated through new technologies and formats. What stood out in Iraq was how television outlets—particularly CNN and Fox—embraced “Hollywood-style entertainment values.” The Pentagon’s staged video of the supposed “rescue” of U.S. Private Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital was emblematic. Described by several accounts as one of the most audacious feats of news management yet attempted, it revealed the influence of Hollywood producers on Pentagon media planners and offered a template for how America hoped to choreograph its future wars. (We will return to Lynch’s “rescue” later in the chapter.)
The daily rhythm of reporting further entrenched this dependence. Each afternoon, journalists gathered inside Baghdad’s Green Zone—a heavily fortified area that housed the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority—for military press briefings that served as “primary definers,”1 allowing reporters to underwrite their claims to objectivity and impartiality.2 As media scholar Simon Cottle observed: “This authority skew institutionally emasculates journalism when it becomes, for example, reliant on partial and deliberately vague military press briefings that contribute to, rather than aim to clear, the ‘fog of war.’ All wars invariably reveal, after the event if not during, major distortions, misinformation and campaigns to deceive.”3
This dynamic was also evident in the daily press bulletins the U.S. military emailed to news organizations. AP editors in Baghdad relied on them to launch the afternoon “PMs cycle,” shaping coverage around whatever “fresh angle” the military provided. The flow of bulletins continued throughout the day, supplemented by the afternoon news conferences in the Green Zone. AP Television (APTN) maintained a live feed from the Green Zone to the bureau at the Palestine Hotel, so whichever editor was on duty could file stories directly from the briefings—though as backup, a reporter was always physically present at the news conference, just in case the feed failed and the official line went unreported.
AP first set up base at the Hamra Hotel immediately after the invasion, a modern residence with a swimming pool in the Jadriyah district, a riverside peninsula on the Tigris that became a hub for many international news organizations. It later moved to the Palestine Hotel, which overlooked the Tigris River on one side and Firdos Square on the other — the site where U.S. troops and a small crowd of Iraqis pulled down Saddam Hussein’s statue for the cameras in April 2003. The Palestine was far less pleasant, but its central location and size allowed AP to install stronger communications facilities and build a larger, more secure operation. The agency occupied a whole floor for text, photo, TV, and radio operations, and used other floors for staff housing. About seventy employees worked there, including translators, drivers, technicians, and a cook for non-Iraqi staff. Four full-time print journalists were based in Iraq—a news editor, an American embed, and two Arabic-speaking reporters, including myself—with others rotating in from bureaus around the world. The “permanent” staffers—stayed in Iraq for eight-week stretches (“in”) followed by three weeks of vacation (“out”) with families abroad.
I was one of the few who traveled around the country, spending weeks or months at a time in a specific city or town—Mosul, Kirkuk and Arbil in the north, Basra in the south, or Najaf or Samarra to the east of Baghdad. I also made shorter visits to Ramadi and Fallujah in the Sunni-held Anbar province, and to Baqouba, a mixed Shia-Sunni town in Iraq’s Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. These extended stays were a crash course in the complexities of each city—life under occupation, providing an intimate window onto the people, politics, and history that defined it. My reporting focused mostly on ordinary lives, while embedded AP reporters covered the technical aspects of the war—troop movements and military operations—through the lens of the U.S. military. I rarely attended the daily military briefings in Baghdad, except when seeking answers about U.S. attacks on civilians. The stock reply was always the same: “This is under investigation so we are unable to comment.” By the time the results of those investigations were released months later, the media had moved on. The pattern was predictable—and it allowed the U.S. military, repeatedly, to evade accountability for violence against civilians. In Iraq, ‘parachute’ correspondents — who flew in and out without fully understanding the country’s complex sectarian, political, and social dynamics—were particularly susceptible to government and military manipulation, which colored how their reports reached U.S. audiences. The rise of 24/7 news, which has made live reporting a defining feature of war coverage, demands constant immediacy, often trading depth for speed, analysis for speculation, and carefully constructed reports for rolling, and thoughtful reporting for continuous, frequently ill-informed commentary. The relentless pressure to stay “live” also opened fertile ground for spin and propaganda.
Still, despite the broader alignment between media and government interests and the many shortcomings—framing, self-censorship, reliance on official sources—many journalists also managed to break important stories, cutting against the grain. As Cottle noted, war zones sharpen the tension between journalism’s commitment to inform the public and governments’ efforts to restrict and manipulate information. That tension is always present, but in wartime it becomes far more visible, revealing how power determines not just what is reported, but also how it is reported.4
Seymour Hersh’s 2004 investigation published in The New Yorker exposed U.S. soldiers’ torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison. In 2006, Time magazine uncovered the Haditha massacre, where U.S. Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians. In 2010, Wikileaks released the “Collateral Murder” video, depicting a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed two Reuters journalists and several others. These cases proved that the press could, and often did, pierce through the fog of military narrative—though rarely without resistance.
The Associated Press, too, was at the forefront of exposés. Several of the most controversial Abu Ghraib photographs—including the hooded detainee standing on a box with wires attached to his hands—were first obtained by AP and published in 2004, sparking global outrage. In the following years, AP kept pressing the story. In 2024, it reported on a landmark civil trial in Virginia in which three former detainees were awarded $42 million suit against the military contractor CACI for its role in their torture and mistreatment.
In July 2006, along with The Washington Post, AP broke the story of the Mahmoudiyah gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the killing of her family by five U.S. soldiers. The murders dealt another devastating blow to the military’s standing, laying bare one of the most shameful episodes of the war that prompted U.S. authorities to announce charges against soldiers from the 502nd Infantry Regiment. AP carried some of the earliest detailed reports once the investigation became public; while the Post ran a prominent piece outlining the brutality of the crime and the military’s handling of it. Yet even here, the shame was deflected away from the military as an institution and pinned instead on the individuals involved, reinforcing the familiar “few bad apples” narrative.
British media also played a vital role in exposing atrocities by their military. The Daily Mirror published photographs of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners—“trophy photos,” beatings, and humiliation. Although prosecutions rarely followed, these reports made abuses public knowledge. An academic study cited in The Guardian noted that “embedded” correspondents sometimes produced sanitized accounts of war, underplaying violence for domestic audiences. And while the Chilcot Inquiry (2009–2016), which investigated Britain’s decision to go to war and the conduct of its military operations in Iraq, was not strictly a media exposé, press reporting on flawed intelligence, WMD justifications, and post-war planning failures helped generate the public pressure that fueled the inquiry. Outlets such as The Guardian and BBC published materials from leaks, including military logs via WikiLeaks, documenting the abuse and prompting official responses from the Ministry of Defense.
The ‘Rescue’ Pfc. Jessica Lynch
One of my first exposés challenged the U.S. military’s version of Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s rescue after a BBC report suggested the Pentagon had exaggerated the danger of the raid. I traveled to Nasiriyeh, 225 miles (360 km) southeast of Baghdad on the Euphrates, and headed directly to the hospital where the drama had unfolded. My report told the story from the Iraqis’ side. I interviewed more than 20 doctors, nurses, and staff members. Their accounts were unanimous: the theatrics were unnecessary. They had already been trying to hand Lynch over to the Americans, yet U.S. commandos refused a key, broke down the doors, stormed the hospital with guns drawn, and carried her off in the dead of the night under the roar of helicopters and the cover of armored vehicles—even though no Iraqi soldiers were present and the staff offered no resistance.5
“If they had come to the door and asked for Jessica, we would have gladly handed her over,” said Dr. Hazem Rikabi. “Why the show? They just wanted to prove they were heroes. There was no battle.”
Lynch, an Army supply clerk, had been captured by Saddam’s army on March 23—three days into the invasion—after being injured and knocked unconscious when the vehicle she was riding in crashed, not in a firefight with Iraqi forces as the U.S. military had claimed.6
The hospital staff’s testimony shredded the official story. Confronted with their accounts, the Pentagon had nothing of substance to offer. Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, tried to justify the raid with a flat line that only underscored the absurdity: “You don’t have perfect knowledge when you go in of what resistance you will face, so you prepare for the worst. The fact that we didn’t encounter heavy resistance in the hospital was a good thing.”
Night of August 7 in Slaykh
Another exposé followed in August 2003, when a breaking news report on Al Jazeera spoke of U.S. soldiers firing on civilians in Baghdad’s Slaykh neighborhood. I headed there to investigate. What I found became one of the earliest documented cases of U.S. forces killing unarmed Iraqis—an atrocity the military tried to justify as self-defense, though eyewitnesses and survivors told a very different story.
I started at the parents’ home of the family killed in the first shooting, listening to the accounts of the two survivors. From there, I went to the street corner itself and spoke to witnesses, including a shopkeeper who lived nearby and showed me bullet holes in the walls and described the sequence of events. He also gave me the names of the other two victims, who had been shot at different spots. I visited their homes, spoke with their fathers, and watched the mourning firsthand. Finally, I went to the battalion where the soldiers responsible were based, but was told I would need to contact military headquarters for comment.
Back in the office, I pieced together all the accounts from survivors, parents and witnesses and drafted a story, holding off on filing it until I could get a comment from the American military. That afternoon, I went to the daily CPA news conference and questioned Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the military spokesman, and Dan Senor, who handled the civilian press briefings, about the incident. They seemed surprised by the level of detail we had and said only that an investigation would be conducted. My question was noted by The Guardian correspondent, who later ran his own story on the killings. AP’s coverage prompted a formal inquiry into the killings, but as often happened, the army deflected questions, insisting it could provide no comment until the investigation concluded.
Timeline
At around 9:15 p.m. on August 7, 2003, sweltering heat blew up a transformer, plunging the north Baghdad neighborhood of Slaykh into darkness.
Soldiers from Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Field Artillery Regiment of the 1st Armored Division went on alert, setting up unannounced checkpoints at dark intersections and blocking the main street with armored vehicles. One checkpoint was erected at the corner of Bilal Habashi Street and Street 5.
At 9:20 p.m., Adel Abdel-Karim al-Kawwaz was driving home from his in-laws’ house with his nine-months-pregnant wife, Anwaar Kawaz, and their four children. Soldiers opened fire without warning. By 9:30, Kawaz and three of his children—18-year-old Haydar, 17-year-old Olaa, and 8-year-old Mirvet—were dead. Only Kawaz and 13-year-old Hadeel survived.
A block ahead, 19-year-old Sayf Ali, celebrating his high school diploma, was driving with two friends. He did not see or hear soldiers’ warnings. They opened fire on his car; Sayf was killed, and one of his friends, Ali al-Jbouri, was shot in the back. He and another friend, Abbas al-Ameri, were pulled from the burning vehicle.
At the same time, 31-year-old Ali Salman, also unaware of the checkpoints, was killed while driving home. With the windows up and air conditioning on, the victims could not hear the soldiers’ warnings.
They detained al-Jbouri and al-Ameri without informing their families. Al-Jbouri, shot in the back, was later transferred to Abu Ghraib prison. Ten days later, a guerrilla mortar struck the prison, killing six and wounding around 60, including Al-Jbouri. After surgery at a U.S. base, he was flown to the Western Desert, still unaware why he was being held. Four weeks later, soldiers dumped him near a Baghdad bus station. Collapsing, he was helped by passersby. His father, who had searched hospitals, morgues, and U.S. bases across the country, had all but lost hope. “I was sure he was dead and they weren’t telling me,” he told me.7
Only Anwaar Kadhim received compensation — $11,000 — for the deaths of her husband and three children. She was grateful but had lost her livelihood. The Americans never apologized or took responsibility for killing Sayf Ali and Ali Salman, instead branding them terrorists.
The story carried a few subtle insertions by the editor—assumptions added without evidence and without my consent — but its overall voice and narrative integrity held firm.8 The changes seemed to stem less from malice than from a familiar instinct among some American editors in Baghdad and New York: a reflex of patriotism. The Baghdad editor, a 60-year-old veteran foreign correspondent, was genuinely shocked to learn that Americans were capable of killing six unarmed Iraqi civilians, including three children, without provocation. Most likely, he had innocently added a few presumptions into my story: “American soldiers, apparently fearing a bomb attack, went on alert. Within 45 minutes, six Iraqis trying to get home before the 11 p.m. curfew were shot and killed by U.S. forces.” Another line read: “Confronted by daily guerrilla attacks that have claimed 56 American lives since May 1, U.S. troops are on edge.”
By doing so, he effectively exonerated the American soldiers. The framing implied that they fired because they mistook the transformer explosion for an attack and, after months of guerrilla assaults, had shot the Iraqis in panic. The implication was that since the killings were unintentional, the soldiers were not be judged as murderers.
The question remains: would he have offered a psychological or circumstantial justification if the shooters were Iraqis and the victims American soldiers? Almost certainly not. Little effort would have been made to consider their motives—revenge for lost loved ones perhaps, opposition to the illegal occupation. To add salt to injury, the Iraqi attacker would have been portrayed as representing the entire population. By contrast, American soldiers’ actions—no matter how brutal—rarely reflected on the military as a whole. Even when a soldier was officially deemed ‘deviant,’ he was cast as a lone “bad apple.”
As a token nod to the flimsy requirement of “balance,” the U.S. army’s unproven accusation that the two murdered young Iraqis were “terrorists” were also inserted into the story, planting doubt that maybe they were not so innocent after all. As was often the case, they were presented as linked to al-Qaida—regardless of evidence—a characterization that dehumanized them much as Vietnamese civilians had been during an earlier American war. The real story—the killing of two unarmed men—was obscured, their deaths treated as somehow inevitable. Still, the editorial tweaks were unable to blunt the stark reality of U.S. soldiers killing unarmed civilians, and its significance could not be obscured.
In Iraq, reporters’ own self-censorship came in various forms: avoiding critical reporting of the actions of U.S. troops, dismissing or ignoring—especially in the early days and months of the war—reports that indicated misconduct by soldiers, sometimes taking military officials’ words at face value despite the inaccurate information they had provided regarding Iraq’s WMD possession. Even when reporters were willing to go the extra mile to investigate American atrocities—such as the Slayk killings—they often had to tread carefully—with the kind of “balance” that often tilted in favor of the military.
Wedding Party Attack
Another glaring example of a U.S. military cover-up was exposed in May 2004, when American planes bombed a wedding party in western Iraq, killing up to forty-five civilians from the Bou Fahad tribe in Mogr el-Deeb—mostly women and children— and then spun it as an attack on foreign fighters.9
Late that night, an AP stringer in Ramadi sent our Baghdad bureau photos of the dead. I called him back for details: American aircraft had bombed a house in the desert village of Mogr el-Deeb, near the Syrian border, where a wedding was underway. We reached out to the U.S. military, who said they could not confirm but would look into it. I filed the first urgent with those few details.
In London, AP’s photo desk refused to move a picture of a dead girl, calling it “a raw hamburger.” Only after Baghdad photo editor Anja Niedringhaus threatened to resign was the image released.
At the time, most Western journalists were confined to their hotels after a wave of kidnappings and gruesome beheadings by al-Qaida in Iraq. But the wedding story was too important to ignore. I told Niedringhaus I would go to Ramadi the next morning, rules or no rules. Ramadi was the permanent home of the Bou Fahad tribe, who spent the winters in the desert. It was also where the injured were taken to the hospital. Niedringhaus insisted on coming.
In Ramadi, I interviewed more than a dozen survivors, including some of the injured in hospital. Niedringhaus took their photos. Dr. Salah al-Ani told us that the guests had been firing in the air—a traditional celebration custom. American troops came to investigate, left, and returned at 3 a.m., destroying two houses in an air strike.10
Niedringhaus and I gathered evidence that flatly contradicted the military’s account: wedding video showing the singer Hussein al-Ali performing beside his brother; bomb fragments stamped “ATU-35,” identical to U.S. ordnance; and survivors who described how the celebration turned to carnage. Yet AP editors in New York balked at the headline “Wedding Attack,” settling instead for the diluted slug “Attack.”11
Still, U.S. Central Command insisted that “coalition forces” had hit a “suspected foreign fighter safe house.” Because I had mentioned the videotapes in a dispatch, the military demanded AP hand them over. A dozen officers showed up at our Baghdad office in the Palestine Hotel. As they headed through the long corridor toward the newsroom, Niedringhaus ran to the APTN office, grabbed the tapes, and locked herself in the bathroom. The news editor, apparently ready to hand the videos over, told the officers Niedringhaus had them. They left empty-handed when they couldn’t find her. The army kept up the pressure.
Pressed by our mounting evidence, the military shifted its line: perhaps there had been a wedding, though foreign fighters were among the dead. “Bad people have celebrations, too,” said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt12—a bizarre suggestion that foreign fighters would slip across the Syrian border to dance at a wedding in the open desert. The U.S. army persisted in its denial.13
We kept the story alive for almost a week, filing updates that detailed evidence and survivor accounts. But by the end of the week, AP began to soften the story.14 New York’s edit of my May 23 dispatch seemed to refute all the evidence we had gathered. It opened with Kimmitt’s charges and buried the facts far below.
The U.S. military said Saturday it has found ‘no evidence of a wedding’ at the site of an airstrike last week near the Syrian border, and said evidence so far suggested the target was a desert base for foreign terrorists sneaking into Iraq.15
It reported that Kimmitt showed “slides of military binoculars, guns, and battery packs that could be used to trigger roadside bombs found by U.S. troops at the site. Terrorist manuals, telephone numbers for Afghanistan, and foreign passports, including one Sudanese, were also recovered there.”
Most foreign correspondents present at the military presentation, who could not read Arabic, didn’t realize the so-called “passports” were actually driving licenses—as I discovered when I watched the briefing live from the AP newsroom at the Palestine Hotel.
I complained in an email to foreign editor Deborah Seward about my story’s edit , which I said “sounded like we were refuting everything” we had reported for days. What disturbed me most was the insertion of a sentimental quote from the widow of the slain musician, giving the story a false “balance.” Seward’s reply was brief: “Nobody deliberately distorted the copy.” She promised to “look at it.” There was no further discussion.
I had been meticulous, cross-checking every name and verifying each account. In the hospital, I saw a baby with shrapnel wounds, a teenage girl with burns, four women who had lost their children. Among the victims was two-year-old Kholood, who lost her parents and four siblings, and Haleema Shihab, who broke her leg as she fled while clutching her baby and five-year-old as the bombs fell. “Only Yousef stayed in my arms,” she told me from her hospital bed. “Ali had been hit and was killed. I couldn’t go back.”
The bombing of Mogr el-Deeb was not just a tragedy for one tribe, but a study in how truth dies in war—first under official denial, then through the quiet complicity of editors and institutions that prefer pretense of “balance” to accuracy. The U.S. military called it a victory over insurgents. It was a wedding.
“No matter how big the lie,” wrote author Sam A. Cohen, “the more you tell it, the more likely it is to be believed. The more we believe the lies that saturate our airwaves, the more we salute our ‘heroes’ in Iraq or Afghanistan, the more we militarize social and political values, the more frightened we become, the more we bow down and clamor for enslavement, the more the elite detests us.”16
The deaths in Mogr el-Deeb were among the thousands of civilian casualties that came to define the U.S.-led war in Iraq—each loss collapsing into the vast, numbing arithmetic of occupation.
Fast forward twenty years from the war on Iraq, and such instances of journalistic defiance—and indeed courage—to expose war crimes have been almost entirely absent in covering the current coverage of genocide in Gaza. Even when a handful of exclusives do appear, they come only after official narratives and disinformation that framed global perception have already taken root. By then, their impact is negligible, if not entirely futile. From the earliest hours after October 7, 2003, false atrocity claims —babies burned in ovens, mass rapes, beheaded infants—were reported and amplified by major Western outlets with no verification, often sourced directly to Israeli officials. Even as these stories were quietly walked back or collapsed under scrutiny, their emotional power had already cemented the public narrative of barbarity and justified collective punishment, forming perceptions that would endure long after. The same outlets that echoed such fabrications later repeated the Israeli military’s exaggerated or unsubstantiated claims about hospital tunnels, human shields, and “terror infrastructure” under medical facilities. The bombing of Al-Ahli hospital, initially blamed on a “misfired Palestinian rocket,” was treated as settled fact before any independent investigation, despite contradictory evidence and evolving U.S. and Israeli statements. Later, when evidence emerged that most of the claims—if not all—were false, editors did not revisit their coverage, allowing the initial misinformation to ossify in public memory. These early falsehoods, endlessly recycled across platforms and uncorrected in public perception, set the boundaries of permissible empathy and reporting, long before any “exclusive” could attempt to reclaim the truth—such as the dozens of Palestinian journalists that Israel killed.
They parroted official accusations that journalists— the only witnesses left in Gaza—were “Hamas media operatives,” effectively betraying their own colleagues, even their own employees, and the principles of their profession. By reinforcing the occupier’s narrative, these newsrooms helped normalize the suppression of eyewitness testimony and discouraged scrutiny of military claims. The newsrooms also internalized the logic of the occupier: to question official Israeli claims was to invite suspicion of “sympathizing with terrorists.” By the time a handful of so-called investigations surfaced—into civilian massacres, hospital sieges, or starvation as a weapon—the damage was done. The lies had long since written the history, shaping both policy debates and public understanding in ways that few subsequent reports could undo.
In post-2003 Iraq, too, the civilian dead were largely faceless in mainstream American media. Unlike American casualties, their names were not published, their faces not shown on television, their lives were not honored, and the pubic did not learn how they lived their lives. For years, in the blur of violence, a single death often passed unnoticed beyond the victim’s family. Local papers may have carried brief death notices, and neighbors and friends mourned. But the numbers were staggering—estimates ranged from 250,000 to 500,000, even up to a million—making it nearly impossible to grasp that each statistic represented a life ended.
This erasure was not only visual but textual. Even the language of reporting stripped victims of individuality, turning lives into anonymous data points. At times, the failures were astounding—dispatches failing the most basic test of journalism.
A 334-word story from Baghdad on February 28, 2008, began: “U.S. soldiers killed an Iraqi civilian who raised suspicion and failed to heed warnings to stop as he approached their foot patrol north of Baghdad, the military said Thursday.” The next two paragraphs repeated the military version almost verbatim: “The man was wearing a bulky jacket and had his hands in his pockets Wednesday as he walked toward the troops in the area around Muqdadiyah, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, according to a statement.” Next: “U.S. troops issued warnings for the man to stop, then killed him when he failed to heed them, the military said, adding no weapon was found when the man was searched. No U.S. troops were wounded in the incident, which was under investigation.” Only in the fourth paragraph—where it barely mattered—did readers learn if they continued reading that the “slain man was elderly and suffered from mental disabilities and hearing problems.”17
When security collapsed in late 2004, AP management banned non-Iraqi reporters from leaving the Palestine Hotel. We were confined to our rooms and the bureau’s cramped offices in the grubby 19-story (18 European) building. A bunker mentality took hold. Reporting was done mostly by phone. Occasionally, sources were invited to the hotel lobby for interviews. Yet AP stories datelined Baghdad and bearing Western bylines continued to give readers the impression that little had changed—as though we were still out in the field.
The daily operation was rigidly structured: a morning writer and a night writer produced stories from emailed or phoned-in statements by the U.S. military, live broadcasts of military briefings via APTN feeds into the newsroom, and reports from Iraqi stringers across the country. These stringers, who spoke only Arabic, dictated their reports—often on car bombings and other security incidents—over the phone to Iraqi employees, who then translated them for the Western writers. The news editor—the most senior staffer, almost always an American—rarely left the hotel, even in the early days of the invasion, except for occasional trips to the Green Zone to renew CPA press cards, before security became extremely dangerous. He started his shift in the afternoon, when senior editors in New York were on duty, and joined conference calls about the day’s top stories being worked on around the world.
For most Western journalists in Baghdad, the only connection to Iraq came through the local staff and drivers, the cook, technician, and the cleaners in the hotel, the hardship of living in filthy conditions, the bad food, and the constant sound of gunfire or explosions nearby. From the balcony, they watched black plumes of smoke rise across the city—sometimes adding that “color” to their stories. On a few occasions, the heavily guarded hotel itself was targeted—perhaps the only time some of the desk editors came close to real danger. Many later went on to become veteran chroniclers of the war on Iraq, promoted to senior positions within the organization or hired by larger news outlets.
The isolation became unbearable after the Baghdad operation turned inward, became more a news factory than a newsroom, its field reporters sealed off from the country they were meant to cover. Iraq became a dateline detached from reality—a place reported through telephones, screens, and military briefings rather than lived experience. Working conditions became so claustrophobic that one day Niedringhaus and I decided to sneak out and walk to an elementary school a couple of blocks from the hotel so she could photograph children on their first day of class. In the schoolyard, the children were running and laughing, thrilled to be back, their voices briefly drowning out the fear and absurdity of our reporting lives. Inside the classrooms, Niedringhaus faced a different challenge: every time she raised her camera, the pupils stopped what they were doing and looked straight into the lens, smiling shyly or giggling, making it almost impossible for her to capture a candid moment. On the way back, we stopped at a barbershop, where I asked the clients the generic question of how they felt about the situation—the daily bombings, the shortages, the fear—as one would ask about the weather or the price of gas in another country. We had been reduced to this, I remember thinking, trying to secretly report a war from behind hotel walls.
When we returned to the hotel, the news editor was furious. From then on, all Western journalists arriving or departing Baghdad were transported in armored cars—even for routine trips to the U.S. base to renew press cards. The restrictions were less severe for Middle Easterners like myself, and nonexistent for Iraqi staff. A couple of years later, AP added two armored vehicles and two British security men to “protect” its foreign staff.
A few weeks after the total hotel confinement was imposed, I decided to leave Iraq. There was no longer any professional reason to remain confined in a hotel room. Seward, the foreign editor, suggested I move to Rabat, Morocco, to cover “terrorism” in Europe and North Africa, as well as report on Muslim communities in Western Europe.
Read Chapter Three, Part 4 in the next post
Hall et al, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Critical social studies), Macmillan, 30 April 1978.
Simon Cottle, Mediatized Media: Development in Media and Conflict Studies (UK: Open University Press, 2006). p. 83.
op cit. 83-84.
op. cit. 77.
Scheherezade Faramarzi, “Hospital staff say forceful U.S. rescue operation of American POW wasn’t necessary,” Associated Press, May 28, 2003.
According to Lynch’s own testimony to Congress later.
Scheherezade Faramarzi, AP, “Iraqi criss-crosses country looking for son swallowed up in U.S. detention system,” December 16, 2003.
Scheherezade Faramarzi, AP, “Jittery U.S. soldiers firing in the dark kill six Iraqis trying to get home before curfew,” August 10, 2003.
Scheherezade Faramarzi, AP published in Fredericksburg.com, May 20, 2004, “U.S. Aircraft Reportedly Kills 40 Iraqis” -http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/04/05/Iraq_wedding_massacre.html
Scheherezade Faramarzi, AP published on Boston Globe.com, May 21, 2004,”Iraqi survivors recount US tent shelling after wedding party”- http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2004/05/21/
Scheherezade Faramarzi, AP published on Commondreams.org, May 24, 2004, “Video Contradicts US Military, Shows Iraq Wedding Celebration” - http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0524-02.htm
CNN, “U.S.: No evidence of wedding at attack site,” May 22, 2004. http://www.ar15.com/archive/top- ic.html?b=1&f=5&t=245324
Rudi Williams, American Forces Press Service, “No Wedding Party, Children’s Deaths Indicated, Military Spokesman Says,” May 22, 2004. http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=26427
Anthony Deutsch, AP published in Spartanburg Herald-Journal, “No wedding at border, says military: Evidence: Military binoculars, guns and passports,” May 23, 2004. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1876&dat=20040523&id=zz0fAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZNAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6847,3233021
Scheherezade Faramarzi, AP, “U.S. presents more photos to bolster case that it attacked foreign fighters, not Iraqi wedding party,” May 25, 2004.
Sam A. Cohen, Future of the Middle East - United Pan-Arab States: Divided by Imperialism, United by Destiny (Indiana: AuthorHouse, August 27, 2014).
Kim Gamel, Associated Press, AP published in USA Today, Feb. 28, 2008, “US mil: Iraqi killed north of Baghdad” - http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-02-28-1394763717_x.htm