On-the-ground Reality TV

On November 22, 2003, the 16th paragraph of an Associated Press story filed from Baghdad reported that troops from the U.S. Army's Fourth Infantry Division had arrested former Iraqi lieutenant general "Taha Hassan" "for alleged involvement in mortar attacks on police stations" in his hometown of Baquoba. One day later, Agence France-Presse noted the arrest of "Taha Hassan Abbas," as he was correctly identified, in a report that included additional dramatic details. A Fourth Infantry Division spokesman quoted by AFP provided the official account of the arrest: Abbas had "resisted when an assault force approached his house," and "engaged [in] fire," which was returned by U.S. troops who "captured" Abbas and two others.

Far more important than the AP's errant reporting -- itself a reflection of the story's low priority -- is that these two dispatches moved over the wires but went unpublished by any newspaper. Instead, in what has become par for the course, readers were treated to brief depictions of beleaguered U.S. troops engaging in the challenge of bringing law and order to a country beset by Ba'athist insurrectionists. But as disturbing details and images continue to flow from investigations into the horror show that was Abu Ghraib, an increasingly outraged American public is trying to fathom why U.S. forces seem so obviously out of control in their sweeping arrests and torturous interrogations of Iraqis. Just as important, they're also wondering whether the American media have failed -- by design or default -- to convey the ground-level truth of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, minimizing the causes of Iraqi alienation and resentment.

In a soon-to-be-released documentary, a top international investigative reporter offers a tentative explanation for both forms of derailment. On March 14 -- almost six weeks before 60 Minutes II aired its Abu Ghraib story -- the Australian NineNetwork's Sunday newsmagazine program aired a scaled-down version of Iraq -- On the Brink," reported by Ross Coulthart, a journalist whose award-winning investigations have spanned rough-and-tumble assignments in East Timor and Afghanistan to seminal intelligence and public-corruption investigations in the U.S. and Australia. Indirectly, Coulthart raises serious questions about American media self-censorship -- something journalists have been wrestling with since the first Gulf War. The film also raises the possibility that, then as now, such self-censorship may have helped the military cover up Iraqi wartime deaths. (A 15-minute trailer for "Iraq -- On the Brink" can be seen at the Journeyman Pictures website Latest RealPlayer required. American audiences may get to see snippets of the documentary in Michael Moore's award-winning Fahrenheit 9/11, depending on how it's released.)

Indeed, what began at Abu Ghraib as a probe into torture has now forced the Army to reveal that at least 32 Iraqi deaths may qualify as homicides. Whether Taha Hassan Abbas was one of the victims is difficult to say; extensive official and unofficial inquiries by the Phoenix into the former general's status yielded no answers. Yet as film footage shot by the NineNet crew shows, the Fourth Infantry Division's official account of Abbas's arrest was disingenuous at best.

Beyond the sometimes-shocking documentary content of "Iraq -- On the Brink," the film bears witness to the yawning gap between what on-the-scene journalists see and what the rest of the world sees. The Hassan-arrest footage was not recorded or guarded or classified by the U.S. Army. It was shot and marketed by a major news organization, the Associated Press Television News (APTN). So why doesn't footage like this make it into U.S. news coverage? TV news services send out teasers for potential stories, and clients buy footage based on what they see in the teasers. The trouble is, either teasers don't include the most damning material or, even if such material is included, news producers, for whatever reasons, decide not to buy the whole piece. However, it happened, the footage that made it into Coulthart's documentary, as well as that which was left out, was as available to American TV networks as, say, footage of George W. Bush carrying a turkey platter to troops on Thanksgiving Day. Yet no one chose to run it.