Category: Media

Those of us who knew Kimberly Dozier as a University of Virginia graduate student gasped when we learned that she was critically wounded, on Memorial Day while working as a CBS correspondent in Iraq. For the past 12 years, the last three in Iraq, Kimberly was doing exactly what she had counseled fellow journalists to do in her Virginia Master’s Thesis – to report Middle East news professionally, with objectivity, courage, steeled independence, breadth of perspective, and an unflinching empathy for her subjects.
Kimberly Dozier is one of the best, and we join in keeping a candle lit for her full recovery. In this small tribute, I offer a few glimpses into Kimberly Dozier’s Virginia studies and suggest how she became one of our finest, if not widely appreciated, journalists covering the Middle East.
UVA Background
Hailing from Hawaii, Kimberly Garrington Dozier came to the University of Virginia in January 1992 to study Foreign Affairs and the Middle East in particular. A high honors graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in Human Rights and Spanish, Kimberly already had several years of Washington journalism experience. To help pay her UVA freight, Kimberly tended bar long hours at a local hot spot on Charlottesville’s famed “corner,” the St. Marteen Café. Think Marion Ravenwood of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
At the time, I was continuing graduate studies and beginning my own travels to Iran. As such, Kimberly and I shared several extraordinary mentors, including R.K. Ramazani and Abdulaziz Sachedina. As she told the Virginia Arts & Sciences magazine last April, she remains grateful to both professors, praising their insights into the Middle East turmoil then brewing as “like an anatomy of 9/11 years before it happened.”
One fellow classmate, Scott Waalkes, a recent Fulbright Scholar and now on faculty at Malone College, remembers Kimberly as “thoughtful” and “engaging,” always asking “probing questions.” Another classmate, Beth Doughtery, now holding an endowed chair at Beloit College, fondly recalls “hanging out” with Kimberly, as a fellow free spirit and member of the “women’s college mafia” at UVA: Kimberly was “smart, articulate, fun, driven, and obviously headed for success.”

Continue reading “Kimberly Dozier: A Tribute”

Faiza has an eloquent and well-argued critique of the major US media on the op-ed pages of The Daily Star today.
Actually, right next to it is an intriguing piece by the DS’s former editor, Rami Khoury, titled Arab Liberals and Islamists, Unite!
Both good reading.

New York Times uber-columnist Tom Friedman has a pretty good column in today’s paper. Basically he’s urging everyone in Israel and the US (perhaps especially the US) not to get completely hung up on the nature of Hamas rehtoric, but to focus on the movement’s deeds instead.
A very good point!
I wish I could quote some decent-length excerpts from the column, or put in a link to it. But the NYT has instituted a system of tightly locking up much of its content into plutocrat-favoring payment systems. (Actually, our family does subscribe to the paper NYT and we thus have supposedly free access to the “NYT Select” online material… I jumped thru numerous hoops to become registered with that but I still can’t unlock Tom’s wisdom. What a crap system, may i say.)
Back to Tom. His bottom line:

[I]t is critical that Israel, the U.S., and the Palestinians not get themselves up in a tree right now over words. There is nothing Hamas could say today that would reassure Israelis, but there is a lot it could do on the ground that would have a huge impact over time. That– for now–is where the test should be.

Excellent advice. Of course, he could have mentioned that for nearly one year now — with one exception only– Hamas has already maintained a quite unilateral tahdi’eh (ceasefire) with Israel, in an extraordinary act of organizational self-discipline that was completely unmatched by Fateh… (And Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has already given some public acknowledgment of that fact.)
Interestingly, in an op-ed that appears rights above Tom’s column in the paper edition of the NYT, Robert Wright — writing about the “cartoons” controversy– notes that back in the 1960s, the African-American “Nation of Islam” leader Elijah Muhammad, “called whites ‘blue-eyed devils’ who were about to exterminated according to Allah’s will.” But most US liberals– though they urged Muhammad to tone down his rhetoric– nevertheless recognized the place of deep wounding and hurt that it sprang from, and managed to live with it. And, as Wright notes, the N.I.’s rhetoric became calmer over time.
Another interesting argument that Tom makes in his column is that “If Hamas is going to fail now in leading the Palestinian Authority, it is crucial that it be seen to fail on its own… not because Israel and the U.S. never gave it a chance.” He quotes Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki (whose brother Fathi, btw, was killed by an Israeli assassination squad ways back when) as saying, “Any minute that it is evident that Hamas is being forced to fail [by outsiders] will guarantee that any future elections will only produce another Hamas victory.”
Another good point there.
Now, it seems evident to me that Tom probably really would like Hamas to fail. I can understand that though, personally, I’m more agnostic on that question. In my view, if Hamas can deliver good results for the Palestinian people, then it really is not up to Tom Friedman, or Helena Cobban, or any other outsider to pronounce on whether they “should” succeed or fail. (I would add in there parenthetically that imho, smart pursuit of a strategy of nonviolent mass citizen mobilization is by far the most effective way for them to succeed– but I think the Hamas leaders have already figured that out.)
I certainly, however, agree with the content of Tom’s analysis there: namely, that if Hamas is seen by Palestinians as failing because of external pressures, then that will only increase the support they win from the Palestinian public.
One final note. Tom prefaces the column with a little bit of Zionist-mollifying boilerplate: “Israel would be fully justified in saying that the only correct policy toward Hamas today is a fight to the death” … before he goes on to ask, ” But would that be smart right now?”
That first statement is a really stupid, pandering thing to say. “A fight to the death”? What on earth does Tom mean? Does he think for a moment that the IDF hasn’t tried to wage just such a struggle almost continuously over the past decade? How many assassination attempts has it launched against Hamas leaders over the years, and how many mass-punitive actions against the movement’s supporters? (Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is probably the only leader of a major political movement anywhere in the world today who is certifiably the survivor of a chemical-weapons attack. Undertaken by you-know-who, back in 1997. But many, many of his meshaal’s mentors and colleagues in the leaderships were indeed wiped out by Israel, including within the past two years.)
So why does Tom– who’s a fairly well-informed and smart guy– even say something idiotic and inflammatory like that?
I guess he was trying to cover his rear end against the swarms of NYT readers who will no doubt descend on him the moment they read the rest of his very sensible column…
So I wonder how long it will take the “usual suspects” here at JWN to descend on me for writing this little blog post?

Well, Ahmad Chalabi’s going to be coming to Washington soon. And who is rolling out the red carpet for his “rehabilitation” there but… his old pal at the WaPo, Jim Hoagland!
Chalabi’s chutzpah in seeking a major rehabilitation in DC– after the emergence of lots of evidence has emerged that not only does he have a close political relationship with the mullahs’ regime in Teheran, but also that he has handed over significant amounts of confidential US national-security information to them– is in itself quite astounding. Right now, indeed, as he makes his way to DC, he has decided to take a stopover in Teheran. (Don’t get me wrong. I am all for seeing the easing of tensions between the US government and the regime in Teheran, and the establishment of solid means of communication between them. Ahmad Chalabi, however, is not the kind of person one would like to see anywhere near to playing an “honest broker” role of this type!)
But Chala’s chutzpah in seeking rehabilitation in DC is not so surprising– hey, this is the guy who bounced back in the Middle Eastern and global arenas after having defrauded scores of thousands of investors in his “Petra Bank” scam in Jordan in the 1980s. What amazes me is his continuing success in being able to bamboozle and hold in his camp a number of apparently intelligent and well-connected members of the western polite who are far from hanging their heads in shame at this point at the revelations of their friend’s multiple shenanigans.
Hoagland is a case in point. As Douglas McCollam noted in this important piece in the Columbia Journalism Review in July/August 2004, Hoagie had been one of the main (and apparently very willing) tools used by Chala’s exile-based “Iraqi National Congress” as it systematically tried to build up the case for the US to invade Iraq. Hoagie, it should be noted, is no starry-eyed neophyte in the world of journalism. He is a decades-long veteran of the WaPo’s “Foreign Service” who has been an “Associate Editor” of the paper for several years now. He has no excuses except pure ideology for the pugnacious and quite uncritical role he played before March 2003 as he beat the drums for war.
There is obviously a lot more to say about the irony and chutzpah of Ahmad Chalabi than I have time to say here. Lots more to say, too, about Jim Hoagland. I guess he doesn’t really like having his role investigated. CJR’s McCollum wrote that when he called Hoagie to ask for comment on the piece he was writing last year Hoagie, “who has championed the INC for years, abruptly hung up on me before calling back to apologize graciously.” (If you haven’t read what McCollum wrote about Hoagie’s role in the INC’s pre-war disinformation campaign about Saddam’s alleged links with and international Islamist terrorism, you should go back there and do so.)
And now, in his latest fauning, excuse-laden piece about Chalabi, Hoagland tries to get a sly little dig of his own in against McCollum. Using very heavy “irony” he asks:

Chalabi? Isn’t he the aforesaid Arab con man of journalistic and political lore who tricked alert politicians such as Jay Rockefeller, and the entire CIA, into believing Hussein was moments away from blowing them to kingdom come? The same guy who provided the opportunity for shallow journalistic exposs and a magazine cover — on the Columbia Journalism Review, of all places — that were redolent with whiffs of anti-Arab stereotyping that would have been denounced if other ethnic groups had been so targeted?

The suggestion that McCollum’s piece “would have been denounced [as anti-Arab stereotyping] if other ethnic groups had been involved” is outrageous. It comes out of literally nowhere. There is no hint of ethnic stereotyping in what McCollum wrote, and Hoagie should immediately retract and apologize for that suggestion.
Hoagie goes on with the crux of how he is hoping, this time round, to “sell” his old buddy Ahmad to the US public:

Yes, Chalabi is back, in Iraq and in Washington. He visits here this week at the invitation of an administration that listened to him before the war — except of course when he opposed the occupation and other things they wanted to do — and then tried to eliminate him from Iraqi politics in Allawi’s favor. I know, the story line gets confusing, but remember, we are in Valerie Plame deep-cover territory here.
The visit would be a good occasion for the American public to catch up on the thing that interests Hagel — the chances of democracy in Iraq — and on how Chalabi would hurry American troops home. Rockefeller, Harry Reid and other Democrats could ask him in person how he so brilliantly tricked them, and then explain that in detail to their constituents.

Gimme a break. Time for all this tired old hack to retire, at the very least. (If not, to be aggressively investigated regarding the nature of his ties to Chalabi and the role he played in helping spread and add credibility to Chala’s disgraceful pre-war disinformation.)

Yesterday, the Guardian had a tautly written first-person account by Rory Carroll, of what happened during and at the end of his recent kidnaping in Iraq.
Carroll was seized in Sadr City on Wednesday afternoon, and at first feared that– even if his immediate kidnapers were Shiites– they might “sell” him to the highest bidder. Initial utterances from his driver magnified that fear. (Seemed like the driver knew how to terrify Rory.)
But he ended up in an oubliette in the family home of a thirty-something guy with connections to Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army, which wanted to swap him with a Sadrist who was being held by the British. Rory is Irish; and he doesn’t make clear– quite likely, he didn’t even know– whether any such swap took place.
At some point in the second night in the oubliette, he was bundled into the trunk (boot) of another car and taken to the office of — guess who?– Ahmad Chalabi, who had negotiated his release.
A great outcome! Al-hamdu lillah ala salamtak, Rory. And a few moments of quiet to remember the lives of the 73 media workers who’ve been killed in US-occupied Iraq in the line of duty.

The whole sorry story of NYT pseudo-journo Judy Miller and her entanglement in disinformation campaigns concerning Iraq’s alleged WMD arsenal, that were designed to jerk the Bush administration into invading Iraq, has obscured another very important part of Miller’s record: the role she has played in disinformation campaigns aimed against the UN.
Now, Barbara Crosette, who was the NYT’s bureau chief at UN headquarters 1994-2001, has reminded people that:

Over the last year or so, Judith Miller also wrote a series of damaging reports on the “oil for food” scandal at the United Nations — in particular, personally damaging to Secretary General Kofi Annan because the reports were frequently based on half-truths or hearsay peddled on Capitol Hill by people determined to force Annan out of office. At the UN, this was interpreted as payback for the UN’s refusal to back the US war in Iraq. As a former NYT UN bureau chief [now retired] I have been asked repeatedly by diplomats, former US government officials, journalists still reporting from the organization and others why Times editors did not step in to question some of this reporting — a lot of it proved wrong by the recent report by Paul Volcker — or why the paper seemed to be on a vendetta against the UN. The Times answered that question Sunday in its page one report on the Miller affair. Ms. Run Amok [i.e. Miller] had at least one very highly placed friend at the paper, and many Timespeople were afraid to tangle with her because of that. Note also, that Ambassador John Bolton, a severe critic of the UN and a figure so controversial he could not face a confirmation hearing in the Senate, was one of the administration officials who took time to visit Miller in jail.

Well, having John Bolton visit her in jail is strongly suggestive of a relationship of friendship, but not necessarily of anything more than that. But the “protection” she enjoyed from the people at the top of the NYT– primarily the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and executive editor, Bill Keller— is incontestable, and is amply demonstrated in that story I linked to there.
Between them, those two guys allowed Miller to do virtually as she pleased at the newspaper, without apparently being subject to any of the kinds of control and supervision by a departmental editor that are the norm at all reputable media institutions. Given that a newspaper is indeed liable for huge damages if a reporter publishes something libelous, or makes other serious mistakes, such supervision is natural… But not for Miller….
And then, when she decided for whatever idiosyncratic reason not to accept at face value the waiver of confidentiality that her source in Cheney’s office, Lewis Libby, had offered her a year ago, Sulzberger and Keller continued to back her to the hilt on that. They even had the NYT pay out millions of dollars to hire top-notch lawyers to defend her from the Special Prosecutor, in court. (Also, though she had by that time told them– or at least, Keller– the identity of her mystery “source”, they did not share that info with other Times journos, and indeed squelched the paper’s reporting on the case for quite a period of time.)
What a debacle for a once-great newspaper…
But I’m also intrigued by the point Barbara Crosette made. Time to look again through the portfolio of reporting that Judy Miller did on Kofi Annan and the UN, and look at the damage she caused there.

As I noted here on Sept 21, Mark Glaser had just then put a well-researched piece up on Online Journalism Review about the “body part porn” story that I wrote about here (and here) on JWN, almost exactly a month ago.
Glaser did a good, professional job with his piece, explaining how (with the translating help of Christiane and other JWN commenters) I helped get the story out in English. He linked to my August posts, and included material from a little interview with me.
He also had a number of other excellent interviews. His piece is certainly well worth reading. (As are my earlier ones, including the exchanges in the comments section of the first one.)
Now, I just learned that on September 22, someone called Georgre Zornick put a piece up on The Nation website, also on the “body part porn” story… without giving any acknowledgment of the role we at JWN played in getting the story out. (And indeed, with a lot less solid research and detail than Mark Glaser’s piece.)
I object strongly to the use of material found on JWN that is used by other writers without any attribution or acknowledgement at all. That, in essence, is what the “Creative Commons” licence is all about. (It’s also, by any definition, sleazy and a rip-off.)
So I ask George Zornick a simple question: Did you find out about this story yourself, directly, and if so, how? Or did you in fact read it on JWN first?
If the latter, then why no acknowledgment or attribution?
Also, I ask others who write about this issue to refer to Mark Glaser’s story on this issue, and to the role JWN — and Nur al-cubicle (see below)– had earlier played in bringing it to an English-speaking audience, rather than to continue claiming that it was George Zornick and The Nation who in any way “broke” this story inside the US discourse.

Addendum, Sept 26, 1:15 p.m.: I went back and checked the link to the “Nur al-cubicle” post on this topic that Mark from Ireland had mentioned in a JWN comment on August 24. On that post, timestamped August 21 at 10:51 a.m., Nur provided a fairly full translation of the core Italian news article in question. So I think the laurels for publishing the first good piece about this story in English should go to HER.
Great work, Nur al-cubicle!
My questions to George Zornick and The Nation regarding their complete lack of any acknowledgment of existing work on this topic still stands.
Maybe in addition to answering the questions I put to him, George should consider turning over any actual income he made from that story to the charity of Nur’s choosing?

Mark Glaser got a good, well-researched story up onto Online Journalism Review yesterday about the pornsite Nowthatsfuckedup.com, that I wrote about at the end of August, here and here.
He went a lot further in researching the story than I had the time (or the stomach) to do. He does cite our role at JWN in getting news about the site out in English. (Biggest chapeau there to Christiane.) He also quotes a couple of things I said in a quick email exchange with him a couple of days ago.
He wrote this about the replies he got from the DOD and Centcom:

When I contacted military public affairs people in the U.S. and Iraq, they didn’t seem aware of the site and initially couldn’t access the site from their own government computers. Eventually, they told me that if soldiers were indeed posting photos of dead Iraqis on the site, then it’s not an action that’s condoned in any way by the military.
“The glorification of casualties goes against our training and is strongly discouraged,” said Todd Vician, a U.S. Defense Department spokesman. “It is our policy that images taken with government equipment or due to access because of a military position must be cleared before released. While I haven’t seen these images, I doubt they would be cleared for release. Improper treatment of captured and those killed does not help our mission, is discouraged, investigated when known, and punished appropriately.”
Capt. Chris Karns, a CentCom spokesman, told me that there are Department of Defense regulations and Geneva Conventions against mutilating and degrading dead bodies, but that he wasn’t sure about regulations concerning photos of dead bodies. He noted that the Bush administration did release graphic photos of the dead bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein to the media…
“I don’t think it will get to that point [where cameras would be banned],” Karns said. “All it takes is one or two individuals to do things like this that cast everyone in a negative light. The vast majority of soldiers are acting responsibly with cameras in the field. But on the Internet there aren’t a whole lot of safeguards and the average citizen can create their own site.”
Karns did say that if soldiers were posting these photos online, that it would have a negative strategic impact, especially when the enemy relies so heavily on the media to win the battle of perception.

So, once again, it’s mainly the “perception” that they claim is the issue, not the facts of the gross abuse of humanitarian norms that were committed by US forces in the field and that almost certainly continues to be committed as I write this…
Glaser quotes me as follows:

“The important thing is for the U.S. military and political leadership at the highest levels to recommit the nation to the norms of war including the Geneva Conventions, and to be held accountable for the many violations that have taken place so far,” Cobban said via e-mail. “What I don’t think would be helpful would be further punitive actions that are still limited to the grunts and the foot soldiers, who already have the worst of it.”

Anyway, check it out.

It is an outrage that Steven Vincent was killed and his translator, Nour al-Khal, was shot and badly roughed up last week.
Every single one of the deaths in Iraq through violence and through war-imposed infrastructure decay is an outrage.
The Daily Telegraph (London) has an interesting twist on the story. Colin Freeman writes there that Al-Khal, also known as Nour Weidi,

has told investigators from her hospital bed that Mr Vincent planned to marry her so she could settle in the United States.

That sounds quite instrumental and non-romantic, doesn’t it?
The case is being investigated in the first instance by Iraqi investigators; but they reportedly have a lot of help from US and British investigators. I’m guessing it was a British investigator who was Freeman’s main source for this story?
He writes:

“There is a straight-line connection that people have drawn between Steven Vincent criticising the Iraq police and therefore being murdered,” said one investigator.
“But from the evidence so far, including accounts we have had from the Iraqi interpreter, that is not the immediate conclusion we are drawing. It appears to be quite a complex case.
“There is the possibility that this was an attempted ‘honour killing’, related in some way to the relationship he had with his interpreter. But it does not fit the pattern of honour killings as it is usually the woman who dies.”
Mr Vincent, 49, a former art critic who turned to journalism after witnessing the September 11 attacks, had been married to his American wife for 13 years. She is understood to have been aware of his plans to marry Ms Weidi for visa purposes.

Over at The Sunday Times (London) Tony Allen-Mills has some more (and more nuanced) speculation about the role that Vincent’s relationship with Weidi/Khal (also known as Nooriya Tuaiz) may have played in his murder:

All of these security sources commented that whatever Vincent may have written was unlikely to have offended local sensitivities as much as his relationship with Tuaiz.

I am at our big annual Quaker gathering in the Shenandoah Valley this week. I saw the accounts of the murder in Basra of freelance journo Steven Vincent. What a tragedy.
Just recently, he published an oped in the NYT strongly criticizing the degree of control that the Shiite parties have won over the security forces in Basra. So the circumstances of his killing are extremely fishy indeed.
I was looking at the blog he’d been keeping during his latest visit to Iraq. He wrote well and (obviously) tried to get outside the Green Zone bubble as much as he could. I note, though, that unlike most US reporters today he never gave any byline credit at all — even under a nom-de-plume– to his translator, Nouraya Itais Wadi (also known as Nour al-Khal).
In his blog he did sometimes write about her, in a fairly patronizing way and under the name “Layla”. But in his writings published elsewhere he kept in place the paradigm of the fearless, all-knowing Western male who goes “out” to some third-world adventure and through his own amazing omniscience and sensibility is able to capture the essence of the story. No professional recognition at all given to the “native informant” without whom literally none of his work would have been possible.
Nouraya Itais Wadi was badly injured in the attack that killed Vincent. My greatest hope now is that she can get the medical help, rehab help, and professional advancement and recognition that I hvae no doubt that she deserves. Deep sympathies, too, to Vincent’s widow, Lisa.