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Covering the Middle East
'Covering the Middle East' provides analysis and discussion of US mainstream news in light of Dahr Jamail's reports and photographs from the Middle East. Its intent is to identify unreported news from the Middle East and to make a broader audience aware of events there. 'Covering the Middle East' encourages your comments, reactions, and participation.
March 04, 2006
Conduct Unbecoming of the Commander-In-Chief
Perspectives on the historical origins of the systematic torture of Iraqis at US hands.
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Posted by Paul_Kamen at 04:00 PM
February 06, 2006
Interview with Samir Khader, Program Editor for Al-Jazeera
On 1 February 2006 in Doha, Qatar, I interviewed Mr. Samir Khader, Program Editor for Al-Jazeera Channel. Mr. Khader was a key personality in the highly acclaimed documentary “Control Room” about Al-Jazeera. I asked him questions about his channel, Bush’s plans to bomb Al-Jazeera, present and future goals of Al-Jazeera, Iraq and the state of journalism. -DJ
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Posted by Dahr_Jamail at 02:30 PM
January 27, 2006
Check Point Propaganda And Bush’s Mega State of War
“War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.” - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Voice of America’s Washington DC based bureau daily radio broadcast promotes President Bush’s State of the Union battle cry for global democracy and freedom as the altruistic war weapon against terrorism just as the Central Intelligence Agency broadcasted to Soviet occupied European countries during the Cold War.
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Posted by Paul_Kamen at 11:26 PM
Interview with Karen Kwiatkowski
In July, 2003, Karen Kwiatkowski retired as a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force, having served since 1978. From May, 2002, to February, 2003, Karen Kwiatkowski served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia directorate (NESA). Dr. Kwiatkowski presently teaches at James Madison University, and writes regularly for MilitaryWeek.com.
Interviewed by Omar Khan for www.dahrjamailiraq.com, read the interview of Dr. Kwiatkowski's blistering and revealing comments about the neo-conservatives, Bolsheviks, fascism and the Bush Administration agenda in Iraq and beyond.
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Posted by Dahr_Jamail at 02:08 AM
November 29, 2005
Triumph of the Beast
The torture of Iraqi detainees by US military forces is undeniable. We now know the Bush administration condoned torture even before Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched upon Afghanistan and Iraq, in this post-9/11 hysteria of terrorist infiltration on American soil.
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Posted by Zen_Toro at 09:11 PM
November 09, 2005
The Advocate
On September 29, 2005, shortly after 8 p.m., Amal Kadhum Swadi, and her youngest son Safa were arrested by U.S. forces in the Ghazaliya district of Baghdad on suspicion of planting an improvised explosive device.
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Posted by Andrew_Stromotich at 06:26 PM
October 08, 2005
The Dark Cloud of Democracy
On Saturday morning, October 2nd, hours after the Pentagon officially launched ‘Operation Iron Fist’, the Associated Press reported, “About 1,000 U.S. troops, backed by attack helicopters, swarmed into a tiny Iraqi village near the Syrian border Saturday in an offensive aimed at rooting out fighters from al-Qaida in Iraq, the country’s most feared militant group, the military said.”
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Posted by Andrew_Stromotich at 04:28 AM
September 17, 2005
Securitizing the Global Norm of Identity: Biometric Technologies in Domestic and Foreign Policy
Pablo Picasso. Guernica, 1937.
Securitizing the Global Norm of Identity: Biometric Technologies in Domestic and Foreign Policy
For presentation at Global Norms Under Siege: Non-Intervention, Human Rights, and Abstention from Torture, 20 May 2005, Queen's University Belfast, N. Ireland.
Posted by Dahr_Jamail at 01:24 PM
February 23, 2005
Conversation with David Barsamian
Journalist, author, and lecturer, David Barsamian is perhaps best known as the founder and director of Alternative Radio, a weekly one-hour public affairs program that began in 1986 and today reaches millions of listeners from on top of an alleyway garage in Boulder, Colorado. Like Dahr’s Dispatches, Alternative Radio is a news medium sustained solely by the support of individuals.
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Posted by at 09:00 AM
February 15, 2005
Vigilant Resolve
Quare siletis juristae in munere vestro?
(Why are you jurists silent about that which concerns you?)
—Giorgio Agamben
Remembering the first siege of Fallujah: excerpts from testimony submitted to the World Tribunal on Iraq, Session on Media Wrongs against Humanity, University of Rome (III), February 10-13, 2005.
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Posted by at 02:33 AM
January 30, 2005
Democracy in Iraq
Operation Iraqi Freedom revisited.
When President George Bush announced ten days ago that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” he drew upon a notion with deeper roots in the history of political thought than perhaps he was aware. This notion, the neo-roman theory of freedom, states that individual liberty is constrained not merely by force or the threat of it, but by “a condition of dependence”—which “is in itself a source and form of constraint.”1 That is to say that “it is the mere possibility of your being subjected with impunity to arbitrary coercion, not the fact of your being coerced, that takes away your liberty and reduces you to the condition of a slave.”2 It is accordingly only possible for an individual to be truly free in a free state. President Bush, by making “liberty in our land” dependent on “liberty in other lands,” internationalized this notion as he invoked it. The move was programmatic and prescriptive, but equally self-satisfied and retrospective—referring undoubtedly to the War on Terrorism and, specifically, the liberation of Iraq, which comes into being today with the first national elections in fifty years. Here we undertake only to examine the terms of this liberation in the language supplied by our president and our media.
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Posted by at 09:33 PM
January 24, 2005
Bending it
Kevin Benderman is a mechanic who is trained to fix Bradley armored vehicles. On December 20, 2004, he applied for conscientious objector status. Yesterday he made time to talk with us about his decision.
Posted by at 04:07 AM
January 20, 2005
Commissioned Spirit
Thursday, January 13, 2005: a photo colors the upper left corner of the front page of the New York Times. The photo’s apparent subject is a second image embedded within it. This second image is also a photograph. It is of a man’s hand, which appears from the right edge, holding a miniature red, white, and black striped likeness of the Iraqi flag. The Arabic writing above the hand (“In order to give our children a better country”) provides context: the blue backdrop of what now appears to be poster is the curtain of a voting booth, inside of which the hand drops a ballot into a ballot box. A vote is cast.
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Posted by at 11:24 PM
November 29, 2004
International weapons conventions in Iran, Iraq
A word on differing standards of accountability to international agreements.
In hundreds of articles over the past few weeks, our press has tirelessly reported on Iran’s uranium enrichment program, or rather—in characteristic shorthand—on “Iran’s efforts to develop the capability to make nuclear weapons” (Foreign Affairs, 11/24). Early on the morning of the November 29th, however, in “Iran Backs Away From a Demand on A-Bomb Fuel,” the New York Times announced that a settlement between Iran and Britain, France, and Germany (EU-3) had been reached: Iranians had agreed to suspend all research on uranium enrichment. One hopes that with this agreement, daily scrutiny of hypothetical Iranian weapons might also give way to some observations of actual American weapons being deployed nearby.
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Posted by at 05:49 AM
November 26, 2004
Abu Hanifa and its terrorists
A comparison of two accounts of an attack on a Baghdad mosque followed by some observations.
What gives violence legitimacy? Last Friday, in Baghdad, Iraqis attending mosque were interrupted by a US-led military assault. Several accounts of the event circulated in the hours following. Among them I would like to briefly compare two: one by an independent journalist and a second by a major newspaper.
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Posted by at 06:03 PM
November 16, 2004
Liberating Fallujah
A look at major US coverage of its most recent military campaign.
The past several days posed a characteristic difficulty for the US Department of Defense: how to wage war upon a population while doing so on behalf of that population. But it has been fortunate not to face this difficulty alone. Both public and private sectors have developed and deployed a vast literature in order to adequately answer this question. With the arrival US advisors of Vietnam, “counterinsurgency doctrine” developed original ways of keeping like states independent where local populations threatened to determine the character of their governments. When counterinsurgency began to bear an unfortunate association with the deaths of millions against whom it had been mobilized, discussion has increasingly become of “foreign internal defense” and in recent years, measures of “internal security and stability.”
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Posted by at 02:28 AM
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