Don't mention Fallujah: Another unembedded journalist disappears in Iraq
By Luciana Bohne
Online Journal Contributing Writer
February 9, 2005—Joseph Goebbels, minister of the Nazi propaganda factory, urged Hitler's willing journalists "to think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."
I thought of this snarling manufacturer of lies Saturday as I learned that the unembedded Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, disappeared in Iraq.
What happens to unembedded reporters who refuse to play the government's keyboard? Night and fog? Kaput? Many in Italy are asking this question, especially since Giuliana Sgrena is the second Italian journalist to disappear in less than a year. The other one, Giuseppe Baldoni, was killed last fall. By Muslim extremists, of course. Odd that these "extremists" (which we understand are means "terrorists" who oppose non-terrorist John Negroponte's "democracy" in Iraq) target so many anti-imperialism, anti-invasion, anti-occupation journalists. Can't these fanatical, anti-American, Muslim spoilers of Bush's great jihad against tyranny read? Or are they someone else?
Giuliana Sgrena is to me the Italian version of Robert Fisk—the intrepid reporter of the British Independent. She covered Afghanistan from under the bombs, and she was in Baghdad during "Shock and Awe," the six days of relentless bombing in March of 2003. She writes for Il Manifesto, a new-left paper founded in the '60s. I depend on her dispatches. I hope she survives. She is brave.
The news about her disappearance are scant: she called the editorial offices of her paper at noon last Friday.
She had an appointment in a Baghdad Sunni mosque with refugees from Fallujah. A few minutes after the phone call, she was abducted.
That is all that is known at this time. However, it is noted, at least by many in Italy, that every independent journalist who attempts to investigate what happened in Fallujah is kidnapped—some, like Baldoni, are killed.
US forces, in the meantime, are said to be removing the soil from Fallujah's most battle-scarred ground. Removing evidence of the use of chemical weapons?
A silence like the tomb's has descended on what happened during that assault on Fallujah last November, led by US occupying forces, flanked by Kurdish peshmergas, and Israeli military advisers. In Fallujah, no Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was found—the pretext for the attack—but of the 300,000 Fallujah residents only 15,000 remain. The rest have disappeared or have fled. And with some of these Sgrena had an appointment.
If the dots connect, the "Salvador option" is not a "debate": it is already operational. Before proceeding to the death-squad phase of terrorizing civilians, uncomfortable witnesses must be removed—humanitarian workers like Margaret Hassan and journalists like Baldoni and Sgrena, and others.
And as for the embedded press, play on, sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye, four and 20 [Muslim] blackbirds baked in a pie, when the pie was opened, the birds began to sing: what a dainty dish to put before the King! Enjoy the tales of the unexpected and the improbable! The rest will be silence.
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at lbohne@edinboro.edu.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/020905Bohne/020905bohne.html
By Luciana Bohne
Online Journal Contributing Writer
February 9, 2005—Joseph Goebbels, minister of the Nazi propaganda factory, urged Hitler's willing journalists "to think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."
I thought of this snarling manufacturer of lies Saturday as I learned that the unembedded Italian journalist, Giuliana Sgrena, disappeared in Iraq.
What happens to unembedded reporters who refuse to play the government's keyboard? Night and fog? Kaput? Many in Italy are asking this question, especially since Giuliana Sgrena is the second Italian journalist to disappear in less than a year. The other one, Giuseppe Baldoni, was killed last fall. By Muslim extremists, of course. Odd that these "extremists" (which we understand are means "terrorists" who oppose non-terrorist John Negroponte's "democracy" in Iraq) target so many anti-imperialism, anti-invasion, anti-occupation journalists. Can't these fanatical, anti-American, Muslim spoilers of Bush's great jihad against tyranny read? Or are they someone else?
Giuliana Sgrena is to me the Italian version of Robert Fisk—the intrepid reporter of the British Independent. She covered Afghanistan from under the bombs, and she was in Baghdad during "Shock and Awe," the six days of relentless bombing in March of 2003. She writes for Il Manifesto, a new-left paper founded in the '60s. I depend on her dispatches. I hope she survives. She is brave.
The news about her disappearance are scant: she called the editorial offices of her paper at noon last Friday.
She had an appointment in a Baghdad Sunni mosque with refugees from Fallujah. A few minutes after the phone call, she was abducted.
That is all that is known at this time. However, it is noted, at least by many in Italy, that every independent journalist who attempts to investigate what happened in Fallujah is kidnapped—some, like Baldoni, are killed.
US forces, in the meantime, are said to be removing the soil from Fallujah's most battle-scarred ground. Removing evidence of the use of chemical weapons?
A silence like the tomb's has descended on what happened during that assault on Fallujah last November, led by US occupying forces, flanked by Kurdish peshmergas, and Israeli military advisers. In Fallujah, no Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was found—the pretext for the attack—but of the 300,000 Fallujah residents only 15,000 remain. The rest have disappeared or have fled. And with some of these Sgrena had an appointment.
If the dots connect, the "Salvador option" is not a "debate": it is already operational. Before proceeding to the death-squad phase of terrorizing civilians, uncomfortable witnesses must be removed—humanitarian workers like Margaret Hassan and journalists like Baldoni and Sgrena, and others.
And as for the embedded press, play on, sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of rye, four and 20 [Muslim] blackbirds baked in a pie, when the pie was opened, the birds began to sing: what a dainty dish to put before the King! Enjoy the tales of the unexpected and the improbable! The rest will be silence.
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at lbohne@edinboro.edu.
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/020905Bohne/020905bohne.html