From an act of desperation to a million hits a day: an interview with Dahr Jamail

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2005 by Mike Ferner

"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 twenty-first-century war correspondent.

Through mid-2002, the war drums emanating from Washington, D.C., grew louder, foreshadowing a March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Dahr Jamail, a mountain climbing guide in his mid-thirties from Anchorage, Alaska, felt he had to do something significant in response. He had been e-mailing a couple of 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 leadup 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, Texas, where he was scheduled to be one of the main speakers. There, I asked him to describe how and why a mountain climbing guide from Alaska became an independent journalist in Iraq.

Dahr Jamail: 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 an 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 e-mailed these guys again and they said, "Naw, don't worry, it's okay, it's okay ... but maybe the Fanar is not so sale, so go to the Agadir."

The Humanist: What made you want to go to Iraq to write in the first place?

Dahr Jamail: Becoming a journalist was really an act of desperation. I saw the leadup to the invasion and read 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, 2003, come and go. [On that day, millions of people around the world protested the likely U.S. invasion of Iraq.] Nothing change& And then the invasion occurred and I was horrified. I would sit up 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 George W. Bush talk, I felt on the brink of having an aneurism. So I just decided, "I've got to do something else; I've got to 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. I felt that these bastards were getting away with it because of the mainstream media--that if the American people had hall an idea what was really going on they wouldn't stand for it. And so I figured my two cents would be worth something ... well, I'll just go over there and try to report it myself.

The Humanist: Had you done any journalism before that?

Dahr Jamail: I'd done a little freelancing for a weekly alternative paper we've got in Anchorage. I was writing mountain-climbing stories for it, and it started getting political after 9/11. After about a month of that we were doing some good articles--like "Why did this happen?" "Let's look at our policy in Afghanistan and let's look at what Reagan did." Well, the editor was fired, 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.

The Humanist: Once you were in Baghdad, how did you get around, get a translator, and so forth?

Dahr Jamail: Just to show you how serendipitous the whole thing was, I delayed my November 2003 trip from Amman, Jordan, to Baghdad 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 rime there before, during, and after the invasion. We started talking and he told me how to get in touch with his interpreter in Baghdad. Stuff like that just kept working out.