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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (19577)	3/15/2003 8:13:27 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

REPORTER'S ACCOUNT How I was forced to leave Baghdad By David Filipov, Globe Staff, 3/15/2003 AGHDAD - In the end, my editors at The Boston Globe never had to make the difficult decision whether to keep me in Baghdad to cover a possible war or order me to pull out of the country. The Iraqi government made that decision for me Thursday, ordering me to leave the country and confiscating my satellite phone. I was caught making an illegal call from the phone, an event that showed just how serious Iraqi authorities are about controlling communications by foreign media with the threat of war looming. The summons to appear came Thursday morning from Kadhim al-Taie, the usually implacable deputy director of the press center at the Ministry of Information. Mr. Kadhim, as everyone knows him, is the man correspondents see for permission to stay in Baghdad, and therefore he always has a crowd of reporters around him. When Mr. Kadhim chased everyone else out so that we could speak in private, I knew he wasn't going to compliment me on my writing. ''You have to leave the country!'' he shouted. ''Give me your phone, and get out of my office! This is a very, very grave offense.'' The Iraqi government tries to control all communications, and journalists are prohibited from filing stories from their satellite phones in their hotel rooms. Customs officials seal reporters' phones when they cross the Iraqi border. Only a man known as Mr. Mazen, the designated press center technical specialist, can unseal them. (Doing so by oneself is an offense.) New media arrivals to Baghdad are easy to spot. They are the ones frantically running around with their phones in their sealed carrying cases, looking for Mr. Mazen.. To use their phones, journalists have to pay the press center $100 per day. In addition, print reporters have to pay $30 to $50 per day for a government-appointed minder and another daily fee of unclear purpose of $125 per person. Radio and television crews pay much more. The Iraqis insist reporters leave their phones in the press center overnight and make all their calls from the press center. It is clear that the government wants all journalists in one place if a war begins, and that place is the Ministry of Information, which US officials have indicated is a potential target for any American-led attack on Baghdad. Aware of this, some journalists have asked the press center to move them to a safer location. Others have been trying to decide whether to leave Baghdad. Finding a safe site in the city outside the government's control is complicated by the fact that watchers and informers are everywhere. My personal preference, born of experience in other potential conflict zones, is to keep my vital equipment where I sleep. So every night I stuck a scale that looked and weighed the same as my phone in my satellite phone bag and locked it up in Mr. Kadhim's office. Still, I avoided using my satellite phone anywhere but the press center, especially when the signs went up at my hotel warning reporters not to try it. The exception came Wednesday night, when I got a late assignment and had to send the story after two in the morning. The transmission took 30 seconds. I didn't think anyone would be listening or be able to pick up my signal in that amount of time, but they were. ''The hotel called to warn us that David had made an illegal phone call,'' Mr. Mazen, the man in charge of satellite phones at the press center, told my driver. ''We were waiting for him when he came in this morning.'' Mr. Kadhim was livid. ''Do you realize that Iraq is not some Third World country?'' he shouted, quite uncharacteristically. ''We are more developed than America!'' The operation to nab my phone showed quite a bit of ingenuity. Someone had caught the signal in the 30 seconds I was on the line. Someone else had picked the lock on my decoy bag to reveal the scale where my phone should have been. I was caught red-handed and felt rather foolish about it (another US scribe caught with his phone in his room got off with a reprimand because he had not yet made a call). I tried to appeal the decision. In Iraq, no usually means no until the right words are uttered to make it yes. Every journalist who works here has to learn to ''yes the no,'' as one wag put it. Much of the day is spent chatting up the officials who work at the press center, handing out souvenirs (they loved the Globe pens), delivering deliberately undefined ''fees,'' and then waiting and hoping that they will let you stay another 10 days. This time the no meant no. ''They are cracking down on journalists now, and they need a scapegoat so that everyone sees that they are serious,'' said another senior official at the press center. ''You are the scapegoat.'' So they got my beat-up old satellite phone, literally held together by duct tape. And I got a one-way trip out of Baghdad; I traveled by road yesterday to Amman, Jordan. ''In three weeks, you'll ride back in on an American tank,'' said the senior official, making a joke that would cost him dearly if the wrong people overheard it. ''Then you can make them give you your phone back.'' This story ran on page A9 of the Boston Globe on 3/15/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (19577)	3/15/2003 9:59:09 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

U.S. Takes Back Turkey Aid Package As U.S. hopes dwindled of going through Turkey for an attack on Iraq, the Bush administration took back its offer to give $15 billion in aid to Turkey in exchange for military cooperation, officials said Saturday. U.S. commanders have been eager to use the NATO ally to open a northern front in any invasion of Iraq. Staging in Turkey would allow more U.S. troops and heavier equipment to push toward Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit. The two countries had negotiated a package of U.S. grants and loans aimed at boosting Turkey's ailing economy, which is expected to suffer even more if there is war. Earlier this month, Turkey's parliament - mindful of polls showing a vast majority of the public opposed war - rejected a government motion to authorize the deployment of 62,000 American troops on Turkish soil. Turkey has since delayed a final decision, and the new prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said Saturday a second vote was at least another week off. Now, the $15 billion is off the table, said two senior U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. Nonetheless, Pentagon officials said Saturday there are no immediate plans to move any more U.S. military forces or equipment away from Turkey. Meanwhile, the White House's special envoy to the Iraqi opposition was in Ankara holding talks at the Turkish Foreign Ministry. Zalmay Khalilzad's primary mission during the Friday meeting was to persuade Turkey not to send its troops into northern Iraq, as the United States had agreed to allow as part of the negotiated aid package, one of the officials said. Khalilzad warned that such intervention would be a "tragedy" for U.S.-Turkish relations, another official said. Turkey already has thousands of troops in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and has said it plans to send more in the event of a U.S.-led invasion. Turkey worries that the political aspirations of its own sizable Kurdish minority would be boosted if Iraqi Kurds win more independence. But the United States, which insists it wants Iraq's current territorial boundaries to remain intact, hopes to keep violence from flaring in the volatile region now controlled by two autonomous Kurdish factions. U.S. military commanders and White House officials repeatedly have said they have other plans that, although costlier and riskier, allow for operating in northern Iraq without sending troops in from Turkey. But Pentagon officials said about three dozen ships with equipment for the Army's 4th Infantry Division will remain for now off Turkey's coast, where they have been for weeks. Other troops and equipment are still surging into Kuwait and the 4th Infantry's troops are still at their home base of Fort Hood, Texas, the officials said. It was not decided whether the U.S. aircraft carriers Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman would stay in the eastern Mediterranean or follow the other ships in their battle groups, armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, that already relocated to the Red Sea. Staying in the Mediterranean mean the carriers' planes might have to fly over Turkey to strike targets in northern Iraq. Turkey has not granted the United States the rights to fly warplanes or cruise missiles over Turkey to attack Iraq. The U.S. aid package was withdrawn because it was linked to a certain time frame, said one official. It was not clear if the package could be renegotiated if Turkey were to later approve a U.S. troop deployment. Meanwhile, U.S. forces continued upgrading some Turkish military bases, under a previous agreement that was meant to pave the way for American use of those bases. Workers continued unloading gear for that purpose at Turkish ports Saturday, but not the tanks, helicopters and other U.S. weaponry waiting in ships offshore. --- washingtonpost.com