The Daily Collegian

Issue date: 10/23/07 Section: News

Dahr Jamail never intended to be a journalist, let alone a war correspondent whose reports from Iraq would become the basis for his recently released book. Yet that's exactly what this former mountain guide from Alaska - who will be speaking at the University of Massachusetts about his experiences tonight - ended up doing.

Jamail will appear in Bowker Auditorium at Stockbridge Hall at 7 p.m. as a part of his national book tour for "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq."

In November 2003, Jamail, fed up with what he saw as a misinformation campaign from the mainstream media to justify the invasion of Iraq, packed his bags and boarded a plane there in search of the truth.

"My intention was just to go for one trip," he said in an interview Thursday. "I was just going to go and send e-mails back home. I started out with 130 e-mail addresses of people that wanted it, and I would just go out on the streets and each day I'd send home an e-mail. I didn't even know what blogging was at the time. That's what it was: blogging without a blog."

After a couple weeks, Jamail started posting his dispatches to independent news portal electroniciraq.net, where he was picked up by BBC and the online newspaper The NewStandard News. Since then, Jamail's reports have been published in The Nation, The Sunday Herald, The Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus and The Independent. He would end up spending eight months in Iraq over the course of several trips from 2003 to 2005.

Jamail's stories, often told in Iraqi civilians' own words, reflect a grim reality of what was happening on the ground in Iraq often glossed over by mainstream news. Among them are reports on the illegal use of white phosphorous weapons - incendiary weapons that burn on touch - by the U.S. military, the 2004 bombings of Fallujah, the plight of refugees, the rapidly deteriorating living conditions and the day-to-day bloodshed and violence.

Excerpts from the Collegian's interview with Jamail:

Jackie Hai: A lot of people describe you as an unembedded journalist. How do you define that?

Dahr Jamail: I actually describe myself that way as well, but more commonly just independent journalist. The unembedded comes from choosing to not embed with the US military, but it's kind of become a more ubiquitous term. It basically has come to mean, at least to the alternative media in the US, to not being embedded with the corporate media. Meaning, you're not taking marching orders from a particular editor telling you what to write and how to write it. I think that's an important term. The other reason why I take such issue with the embedded reporters is that the program was set up by the Pentagon in the 1991 Gulf War as a means of controlling information.

Continued...

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