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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (16603)	1/16/2007 1:00:55 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Last month, Iraq received the U.N.'s special environmental prize for reviving parts of the marshes drained by Saddam, thus saving one of the world's most precious ecological treasures. Almost no one in the media noticed. IRAQ: WHY THE MEDIA MISSTEP AMIR TAHERI NEW YORK POST Opinion January 15, 2007 JUST outside Um al-Qasar, a port in south east Iraq, a crowd had gathered around a British armored car with a crew of four. An argument seemed to be heating up through an interpreter. The interpreter told the Brits that the crowd was angry and wanted U.K. forces out of Iraq. But then a Kuwaiti representative of Amnesty International, accompanied by a journalist friend, approached - and found the crowd to be concerned about something quite different. The real dispute? The day before, a British armored vehicle had an accident with a local taxi; now the cab's owner, backed by a few friends, was asking the Brits to speed up compensating him. Did these Iraqis want the Brits to leave, as the interpreter pretended? No, they shouted, a thousand times no! So why did the interpreter inject that idea into the dialogue? Shaken, he tried a number of evasions: Well, had the Brits not been in Iraq, there wouldn't have been an accident in the first place. And, in any case, he knows that most Iraqis don't want foreign troops . . . * Since 2003, Iraq has experienced countless similar scenes, with interpreters, guides and "fixers" projecting their views and prejudices into the dialogue between Iraqis and the outside world. Immediately after liberation, interpreting and "fixing" for the Coalition and for hundreds of foreign media people became a cottage industry, employing thousands. Most of those were former Ba'athist officials, often from the Ministry of Information or media companies owned by Saddam Hussein and his relatives. Some tried to curry favor with the new masters; others decided to wage political guerrilla war against the "invaders" by misleading them. Both ended up offering a twisted view of post-liberation Iraq. The industry geared itself to meeting demand. In 2004, for example, many journalists coming to Baghdad wanted to interview the "militants" who were attacking U.S. soldiers. The industry obliged by arranging interviews. One popular interviewee was one "Abu Muhammad," who claimed to be a fisherman by day and "a killer of Americans" by night. One U.K. paper paid $2,000 (a tidy sum in the cash-starved Baghdad of those days) for an exclusive with Abu Muhammad, who later took up a full chapter in a book published in London. The scam ended when someone found out that Abu Muhammad was, in fact, a busboy at a local hotel who'd grown a beard and was "fishing" Western journalists, splitting the proceeds with his cousin, who acted as interpreter and guide. .... For the rest of the story follow the thread back one and click through to the story on another subject.