| Deadline Iraq: Uncensored Stories of the War |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 73 |
| Public Rating: 8.13 (23 votes) |
Director: Stuart Coxe, Douglas Arrowsmith, Eric Foss, et al. |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Documentary |
Year: 2003 |
| Writer(s): Stuart Coxe, Douglas Arrowsmith, Eric Foss, et al. |
| Distributor: Canadian Broadcasting Company |
| Reviewed by: Mel Valentin |
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Deadline Iraq: Uncensored Stories of the War, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Company for local television in November 2003 (but still unaired in the United States), examines the invasion and initial occupation of Iraq from the perspective of fifty journalists, cameramen, and photographers. Many journalists and their video crews were “embedded” with the military during the invasion of Iraq, but some, working for Western European news organizations, chose to take a more dangerous route to obtaining new about the war, either remaining in Iraq despite warning from the United States or Great Britain to leave the country, or by slipping behind Iraqi lines after the war began. For embedded reporters, the military set rules that restricted what they could cover and what they could report. More importantly, experience with combat troops also served to undermine the ability of journalists to report the war objectively, often resulting in self-censorship.
The interviews, often supplemented with graphic video footage or photographs taken by the interviewees or their crews, detail the complex, still raw experiences of witnessing the invasion of Iraq and its immediate aftermath. The journalists interviewed here, including Ted Koppel, the longtime host of ABC News's Nightline, give familiar, often banal, answers as to why they went to Iraq: for the singular experience of participating in a war, for career advancement, from a sense of duty and obligation to communicate, and for experienced war correspondents, for the adrenaline rush (Koppel, not incorrectly, refers to them as “adrenaline junkies”). Once immersed in the fog of war, however, these reasons became, for the most part, immaterial. What was of consequence for reporters, and for the quality and depth of the reporting that came out of Iraq, was whether reporters were “embedded” with the U.S. military.
For reporters embedded with the U.S. military, a tradeoff followed their decision to accept the U.S. military's rules for reporting from the frontlines. Embedded reporters were given unprecedented access to the war as it happened, often at grave personal risk to themselves and their crews, but as some critics in Deadline Iraq note, embedded journalists were likely to be influenced by the intense, intra-group bonds generated in the heat of battle. Those bonds, in turn, made journalistic detachment nearly impossible. As one NBC cameraman, Craig White, notes, any distinction between the soldiers in harm's war and the reporters became useless, their fight became his fight. In the final days of the invasion, White was caught in an intense, deadly firefight for a highway overpass in Baghdad. He confesses to the desire to join the U.S. soldiers fighting the Iraqis that had surrounded his squad. Per the rules for embedded reporters and their camera crews, White was not allowed to photograph the American soldiers killed in the firefight. After his experiences in Iraq, White has decided to pursue safer work at home in the United States.
For journalists unwilling to embed themselves with the U.S. military, and therefore risk the loss of journalistic objectivity, choices were limited. Many foreign correspondents and their camera crews used the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad as their base of operations, and as the invasion speeded across the deserts of Iraq toward Baghdad, the journalists retreated to the hotel, using it as a sanctuary. As the invasion of Baghdad raged, however, a U.S. tank fired artillery shells at the 15th floor of the Palestine Hotel, seriously injuring Samia Nakhoul, the Gulf Bureau Chief for Reuters, and killing her cameraman, Taras Protsyuk. Here too, Deadline Iraq gives us video footage of the attack and the chaotic aftermath unlikely to be found elsewhere. The reporters were no longer witnesses to the war, but active participants, trying, without success, to save the lives of their friends and colleagues. When traveling inside Iraq, of course, the former Iraqi regime assigned minders to non-Iraqi reporters. It wasn't until the war began that their freedom of movement increased, primarily because the Iraqi regime no longer saw them as a threat, but as a potential ally in describing and documenting the war from their perspective. Some followed Iraqi troops as they moved to the frontlines. One video segment, filmed by Fred Scott, a cameraman for the BBC working with Ben Brown, an on air journalist, captures the shelling and destruction of several Iraqi armored personnel carriers. Many Iraqi soldiers were killed. Scott and Brown's Iraqi translator, standing only a few feet away, was also killed in the attack.
Deadline Iraq also emphasizes the human costs of war, the innocent civilians victimized by the war on Iraq rarely seen in the nightly news. Even before the first bomb fell on Baghdad, however, reporting by the mainstream media had already given way to patriotic, flag-waving coverage that naturally emphasizes the efficiency and professionalism of the U.S. military, but de-emphasized the obvious human costs of war, whether soldiers in the field injured or killed on the battlefield or the Iraqi civilians tragically caught in the crossfire between Iraqi and U.S. combat forces. The human costs of war were rarely in evidence in the nightly news from the mainstream media. As one French journalist, Jacques Chamelot coldly notes, innocent Iraqi civilians injured in the invasion could be found in any city hospital (or morgue). In Baghdad, a shortage of medical supplies meant that surgeons, overwhelmed by the high number of civilian casualties, were forced to operate without anesthesia. Deadline Iraq is unsparing in showing us graphic, unedited, post-invasion footage from the Baghdad hospital, including Ali Ismail Abbas, the 13-year old boy who lost his family, and both arms in a bombing by an American airplane. Ironically, Ali Ismail Abbas became an international cause celebré, ultimately receiving medical care in Kuwait and becoming a symbol for Iraqi war victims. Ali Ismail Abbas, however, is alone among the Iraqi civilians injured or killed in the invasion and occupation of Iraq to have a name, an identity, beyond the abstract statistics reported by the mainstream media.
Unfortunately, Deadline Iraq: Uncensored Stories of the War is currently unavailable on DVD or video (it was broadcast on Canadian television late last year). Few here in the United States, then, will have the opportunity to hear, see, and respond to the multiplicity of issues it raises. Readers interested in seeing Deadline Iraq: Uncensored Stories of the War should consider contacting the Sundance Channel, the only cable channel that's chosen to broadcast documentaries with progressive themes or in a different perspective on the war in Iraq.
© Mel Valentin, 20th November, 2004
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