Also in Politics & Social Justice

Unembedded

Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq

by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Rita Leistner

Foreword by Philip Jones Griffiths

Excerpt

Foreword

by Philip Jones Griffiths
August 2005

Today photojournalism is under attack, but the courageous photographers who’ve produced this book are fighting back. With the mainstream media having given up, for the most part, on the task of truly informing the public, books are fast becoming the medium of choice for getting the truth out. Unembedded shows that there are still brave independent publishers out there prepared to swim against the tide of public misinformation.

We live in a world where the few control the many. American expansionism is on a rampage. Some have observed that when the United States invades Syria and Iran it will dominate all the lands from the Mediterranean to Pakistan. But less obvious is the government’s current control over countries such as India, which is embracing American consumer capitalism without a shot being fired. American hegemony appears unstoppable, perhaps even taken for granted. We are witnessing an expansion of empire analogous to the Roman Empire’s reach two thousand years ago. Thankfully, this time there are cameras to record the machinations of a superpower, resource-hungry nation.

Photographers bearing irrefutable images pose difficulties for those in Washington who work on the principal that you can indeed fool most of the people most of the time. An eloquently captured view of the war in Iraq was feared by Washington insiders, who predicted that the truth could become a major problem. The entire Iraq misadventure, based on lies and deception, required a compliant media for support, and so a deal was struck.

Even loyal handmaidens can feel slighted, as did the major news media when they were prevented from covering Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf War in depth. The hollow excuse was that the press was to blame for the United States losing the Vietnam War. This lie eventually led to the currently accepted restrictions. So, for the American war on Iraq, a compromise was reached in which some seven hundred newsmen (and a few women) would be “embedded” with military units. For most of the media, the chance to get close to the action overrode professional judgement and the truth: a provision of the contract that journalists had to sign gave the military control over the output of an embedded newsman. Then there came the rugged training: reporters and photographers climbed ropes, lifted weights, crawled on their bellies, and trekked for miles.

Once in Iraq, these “trained” reporters became pawns of the military machine. Soldiers were armed with plastic cards printed with a list of answers to be parroted out if the media questioned them. “We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all” was one answer that must have confused the relatives of those people held in Abu Ghraib! Pentagon officials had already spelled out what “embedding for life” meant: “living, eating, moving in combat with the unit that you’re attached to. If you decide to make the decision that you’re no longer interested in the unit that you’re with or you’ve covered them sufficiently, of course you can say, ’I want to try to retrograde back and leave the unit that I’m with.’ But once you do that, there are no guarantees that you’ll get another opportunity with that unit or necessarily even with another unit. . . . That’s what I am talking about when I say a newsman ’embeds for life.’”

A photojournalist assigned to a unit that had seen little action noticed a firefight nearby. He asked the officer in charge if he could wander over to take pictures. He was told, “When you leave us you can never come back.” The photographer decided to stay.

Being embedded with a unit means that objectivity is quickly abandoned. Ties and relationships are soon formed, and that is to be expected; bonding is an essentially human trait. The military calls it “unit cohesion.” All of that living, eating, and—let us not forget—defecating does serve to bring people together. One female photographer, no doubt overcome with boredom, made a portrait of herself in the act, facing the camera while six or eight soldiers lined up on either side of her with their backs to the camera and mimicked urinating to produce what might well be the nadir of war photography.

The fearless photographers in this book chose to retain their independence and objectivity rather than drag the second oldest profession down to the level of the oldest one. This choice led to a problem for the authors: how to get their photographs published in magazines that mainly run pictures reminiscent of Army recruiting posters. The one hundred thousand or so dead Iraqis are the invisible “others” whose corpses are never allowed to sully the pages of magazines dedicated to the trivial pursuit of gossip and celebrity chitchat.

Being fed anodyne images of the war is infantilizing the American public. Various excuses are used by the Pentagon to sanitize the war, with the line “out of respect for family members” being plausible in the case of dead GIs. But the extension of this restriction to cover even the photographing of unidentified caskets reveals a disdain for a people’s right to know. The fear is that if the people appreciated the real cost, the administration would be subjected to further criticism. So the press is banned from any event that might reveal that American soldiers are being killed, and that ban includes soldiers’ funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. This while President Bush claims to be spreading democracy through the world, repeatedly emphasizing that those new democracies must have a ”free press.”

This book is an antidote to the pap served to the American public, and it will increase in importance over time, because the hired revisionist historians will spread their lies for years to come.

Your grandchildren will appreciate this book, as will their grandchildren.

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad's Upcoming Events

• Thorne Anderson at University of Washington
  
  Kane Hall, University of Washington, Seattle WA 98195
  October 12, 2008, 5:00 pm