August 13, 2005
by Mike Ferner
DALLAS—“I didn’t really plan to be a journalist. It was more an act of desperation…desperation I felt as I watched the war coming closer.”
That’s how the most influential independent journalist covering the occupation of Iraq described his entry into the dicey trade of 21st Century war correspondent. His actual entry into Iraq, however, was anything but auspicious.
Through mid-2002, war drums emanating from Washington, D.C. grew louder, foreshadowing the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Dahr Jamail, a mountain climbing guide in his mid-30’s from Anchorage, Alaska, felt he had to do something significant in response. He had been emailing a couple internet writers to get tips for a trip to Lebanon to visit his cousins. But, growing more discontent with the mainstream news media’s coverage of the lead-up to war, he decided to ask his contacts if they could instead advise him how to get to Baghdad so he could observe and write.
I met Dahr at the Agadir Hotel in central Baghdad, the cheapest lodgings I could find in a hurry when I returned there in January 2004. Just ten days away from finishing his first visit, he had already begun to make his mark as an independent journalist and would return three more times. The next opportunity we had to sit and talk at length was in August 2005, at the Veterans For Peace convention in Dallas, where he was scheduled to be one of the main speakers. The afternoon before his talk, I asked him to describe how and why a mountain climbing guide from Alaska became an independent journalist in Iraq.
DJ: When I asked the guys I’d been emailing about the Lebanon trip if they could tell me how to get into Iraq instead, they were like, “yeah, you can do it…this is how…go to this hotel in Jordan…get a car there…this is how much you should pay ‘em…,’ they basically gave me like this individual ‘Lonely Planet’ guide on how to get into Baghdad. Both of them told me to go to the Fanar Hotel, but the day before I went in was when the donkey cart blasted the Palestine Hotel…and I started shittin’ kittens! (Iraqi resistance fighters scored direct hits on the Palestine, across the street from the al-Fanar, with a rocket launcher mounted on a donkey cart). So I emailed these guys and they said, ‘naw, don’t worry, it’s OK, it’s OK…but maybe (the Fanar) is not so safe, so go to the Agadir.’
MF: What made you want to go to Iraq to write in the first place?
DJ: Becoming a journalist was really an act of desperation. I saw the lead-up to the invasion and I was reading everything I could get my hands on. I could tell it was bullshit. I could tell it was lies. It was about oil and strategic positioning. So I did the usual things we do to express dissent. You know – I went to demonstrations. I tried to educate people. I tried to educate myself more. I wrote letters to my senators. Made phone calls. Signed petitions. All the stuff we’re supposed to do.
And then I saw February 15, ’03 come and go. (On that day, millions of people around the world protested the likely U.S. invasion of Iraq). Nothing changed, and then the invasion. I was horrified. I would sit up at nights and listen to BBC Radio or read the internet to watch what was happening in Iraq. And I was just…I was losing it.
At the same time, when I saw or heard Bush talk I was on the brink of having an aneurism. And I just decided, ‘I’ve gotta do something else. I’ve gotta take it to the next level. I’ve got to do something to at least put my drop in the bucket.’
I’m not married, I don’t have kids, and I started saving money because I got this idea that maybe I could go over there and just report because I felt that these bastards were getting away with it because of the media – that if the American people had half an idea what was really going on, they wouldn’t stand for it. And so I figured my two cents would be, well I’ll just go over there and try to report it myself.
MF: Had you done any journalism before that?
DJ: I’d done a little freelancing for a weekly alternative paper we’ve got in Anchorage. I was writing mountain-climbing stories and we started getting political after 9/11 and after about a month of that we were doing some good articles – like ‘why did this happen? Well, let’s look at our policy in Afghanistan and let’s look at what Reagan did.’ Well, they fired the editor, and that really put the lid back on my pressure cooker because then I had nowhere to write. Then everything led up to the invasion and something had to give.
MF: Once you were in Baghdad, how did you get around, get a translator, and so forth?
DJ: Just to show you how serendipitous the whole thing’s been, I delayed my trip (from Amman, Jordan to Baghdad, in November 2003) for a couple days because of the donkey cart attack. I was at the hotel (in Amman) and James Longley, the filmmaker, had just come out of Iraq. He’d spent a ton of time there – before, during and after the invasion. We started talking and he told me how to get a hold of his interpreter in Baghdad. Stuff like that just kept working out.
I started out sending emails to 130 people – just dispatches to 130 people that wanted to know what was goin’ on. Then after a few weeks, I ran into someone who told me ‘you should post on Electronic Iraq,’ so I started doing that and that was really the launching pad. Flashpoints and BBC Radio started interviewing me and at the end of that trip the New Standard (an electronic newspaper) found me and I began to get paid for some of my work.
MF: That was near the time your first trip ended, and then what?
DJ: Then I came back to the states and started giving presentations and raising some money. The New Standard helped organize a speaking tour and things were really, really tight, but I soon had enough money to go back for another few months, beginning in April ’04.
I could tell on that second trip that my stuff was starting to get out…going into Fallujah and writing about that and the torture…there was so much kicking off and people really started to respond to my writing. I decided that although it was fine working for The New Standard I might as well be fully independent.
On the second trip, I wrote for New Standard, Interpress, and Islam Online. Those gigs plus some online fundraising covered my costs and allowed me to save for another trip.
When I went back home for several months after that second trip I was busy doing lots of presentations and radio interviews, funding myself by passing the hat after personal appearances. One of my first presentations was in Berkeley, California, where a friend of one of my mountain-climbing buddies lived. He created a website I could use for posting reports from my third trip that started in November 2004.
That third trip was a turning point. I knew they (U.S. military forces) were about to siege Fallujah right after the U.S. elections. I flew out of JFK the evening of November 2, 2004, the day of the elections. When I left, Kerry was just barely behind. When I landed in Amman, I was talking with this woman on the plane and she’d called her dad back in the states, and I could tell by the look on her face that he (Bush) had won. It was just really an intense time to be going over there. About two days later, I was flying into Baghdad and just a few days after that they started the siege of Fallujah.
As far as I know, I was the only non-embedded American journalist there and I was just working my ass off, writing for Interpress, on Flashpoints, and then on Democracy Now which really brought it to a whole other level as far as how many people were listening to and reading my stuff.
A lot of times we think that ‘well, we’re just alternative media and people aren’t really following us,’ but I’d like to point out that for whatever the reasons, there were times from early November to mid-December, 2004, when my site was getting a million hits a day. We had to upgrade the server three times in one week. It was just goin’ off the charts. That just showed me that people are just desperate for the truth…desperate for real news. The people know that the jig is up on mainstream media and they respond. When you put your ass on the line and go out there to get ‘em that information, they respond and they’ll support it. People were donating to the site. I was getting so many amazing emails from people…it was really incredible.
MF: Then you took another break?
DJ: Yeah, came out to Jordan for a break and went to Egypt to do some scuba diving in the Red Sea, then went back in early January for a month to stay for the quote-unquote elections.
That was another really intense trip. There was an incredible amount of violence. It was super tense. The election was just a debacle, such a sham. Reporting on that was a full time job. There were days on that trip when I was getting 12 or 13 radio calls a day and writing for several publications. I had more work than I could do, sometimes writing two stories a day. It was a ridiculous pace. That’s how I dealt with my nerves…I was a workaholic. I got up and turned on my computer while I was going to brush my teeth.”
I wrote early in the morning, and then my translator came by, we’d go out to cover a story, and I’d write it up later in the day.
In February 2005, I came back home…did lots of presentations. In fact, if all I wanted to do was presentations, I could do that for six months straight right now. I hired a friend to be my presentations coordinator…it’s just really exploded beyond belief and I’ve just been goin with it. It just feels like ‘hey, I’m makin’ a difference and it feels really good…the bigger the platform I get the louder I want to talk and I’m just gonna keep doin’ it. I have this signature on my Yahoo email, an Orwell quote that says ‘During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act,’ and that’s what it feels like. We’re like half a step away from fascist lockdown in my opinion and the time to speak out is now. So now I’ve got a voice to use, to give other people a voice who don’t have one, like the IVAW (Iraq Veterans Against the War) guys, and people at this convention…I just feel I’ve been given this job to do and I can do it., and I’m gonna keep doin’ it.”
MF: Are you planning on going back?
DJ: I definitely want to go back to Iraq although I don’t really know when…I’m looking at writing a book, doing more presentations, more conferences…but it’s great. It’s been one hell of a ride and I wouldn’t trade one second of it.
