The cold metal in my hand may as well have been the palm of Jesus Christ welcoming me into heaven. As I gripped the Humvee door latch, pulled it, and dragged myself inside, it meant I had made it out of the unprotected kill-zone and back into armored protection - although still inside of the kill-zone. My camera was no longer in my hands - it was outside, perhaps obliterated. There was yelling inside. The Lieutenant, who had been sitting next to me in the back right seat, was no longer visible. Conley had to be dead. My leg was throbbing, I thought it might be broken. I frantically checked my soaking and sore left hand--I couldn't find an open wound. I couldn't see, I had to go by what I could feel. I smelled the liquid - it was diesel, not blood. I realized I was covered in diesel. I was more alert and animated than I had ever been in my life. "We have no ass end!" Kother yelled, almost moaning. Then more horrible news: "The Lieutenant is down! The Lieutenant is down!" Conley. Fitz. We'd been speaking for an hour; I'd been filming them for an hour. In a millisecond, we were finished.
Ramadi. The Government Center, the seat of government for all of Al Anbar Province, which includes Fallujah and Ramadi. We are heading out of the Government Center (smack in the middle of infamous Michigan Avenue, Ramadi's main and bisecting street) onto a dangerous joint foot patrol between the Marines of 3/7 Kilo Company and the Iraqi Army. One such foot patrol was ambushed and resulted in a 2 hour firefight. In my earlier trip here, one such firefight lasted 7 hours. The Government Center was attacked all the time, the scene of an uncountable and unbelievable amount of firefights. There was a really big one, in which we called in air, in just the couple of days before I left Ramadi.
Today we hoped to further train the Iraqis, and spend a good amount of time gathering intel from the citizens.
The area we are staging from is the parking lot of what used to be the Ramadi Police Department. As reported earlier, the department was being recreated while I was there. This may well have been where many of those who were killed in the suicide bombing would have come to work.
Before we rolled out Conley yelled in frustration at a problem with the radio "Why is everything so fucked up tonight!? This is a bad sign, this is a bad sign." As we stood by the camp gate, getting ready for the late night patrol, I turned the little night vision camera on myself, Blair Witch style, and spoke to the audience: "The song 'Sympathy for the Devil' keeps going through my head, I don't take this as a good sign." An hour later, the notion of prophecy had another bit of supporting evidence for anyone who cared to consider such things.
Ramadi is the de facto Capital of the Sunni Triangle. It is the actual capital of Al Anbar province. It is the de facto capital of the Sunni and Al Qaeda insurgencies. We get all the best Jihad talent in the world here, flocking from Chechnya to Pakistan, well-paid by the murky wealthy Islamists from the good ol' USA to Dubai, who fund the fascist Army of the International Jihad Machine. All transportation is facilitated by the governments of Syria and Iran. The International Jihad Machine has a simple goal: Planet Islam. And it won't stop if we pull out of Iraq tomorrow. The front will simply shift back to where it was before: America. And it will have the resources of Iraq at its disposal just as it had the resources of Afghanistan. We are not fighting the politically correct term "Terrorism". We are fighting Islamist Fascist Imperialism. Welcome to World War Three. It seems more controllable, our future more secure, if this was a war George Bush started. Because then we can end it if we end him as our leader. It didn't begin with him; it didn't begin with Palestine, it didn't begin with U.S. bases overseas. And it won't end with any of those. Wake up and smell the coffee. Fight the fight, or suffer more civilian casualties at home. I'm beyond caring what you believe. The consequences are yours. I know the enemy.
Ali Baba.
The Iraqi People, and I mean all the Iraqi people, not just in certain areas, have a term for the insurgents - it is the same term they use to describe a common thief. It is Ali Baba. In every house, street, and scene of violence I was at, like the suicide bombing, the common Iraqi referred to the insurgents as "Ali Baba". There is no other term they use. The insurgency in Iraq is not a popular insurgency. It's Baathists and terrorists. People looking to steal the future of Iraq from the common man and a common democracy: Ali Baba.
The Iraqi people (and I have this repeatedly on videotape) also have a term for CNN and Al Jazeera. The term is Ali Baba. In one particular passionate interview, a group of Iraqis tell me of an incident where insurgents murdered a group of Iraqis in broad daylight. Al Jazeera showed up, found out what was happening, went live on the air, and reported that the Iraqis had just been killed by American soldiers. According to the taped interview I have, the crowd went berserk and attacked the Al Jazeera reporters for blatantly lying in aid of the insurgency. I have interviews where it is repeated over and over that Al Jazeera is in total league with the insurgency. Ali Baba.
It's almost sad how well-received I was by the Marines. None of them would believe where I stood on both the war and the military when they first heard it. They had never heard anything like this before. It was too good to be true. It took weeks of really getting to know me to really believe that a filmmaker or journalist was not of a liberal persuasion. It is very sad that our military has to respond to a journalist who supports us winning the war like a man dying of dehydration in the desert. It doesn't seem to me that it should be this way.
I also have some very shocking accusations of some very big names in the U.S. media for fabricating stories and quotes. The accusations are made by Marines in the documentary. The stories are appalling and enraging. The names will be named in "Young Americans".
A Young American watches some Young Iraqis
I'm not sure how to separate "American" and "Journalist" when you're an American Journalist covering your country at war. Actually, it's not that I can't figure out how, it's just that I can't figure out how it could be appropriate. In short, it can't.
Some of the boys from CATT ( Combined Anti-Terrorist Team pka CAAT Combined Anti-Armor Team ) Blue Platoon of Weapons Company that I patrolled Ramadi with regularly. These guys had a close friend killed by a Jihadi sniper.
I remember standing around in the main building of the Government Center (the seat of all Government for Al Anbar Province) in Ramadi, smoking and joking as usual with the boys, preparing to head out on a major night mission. Based on intel, we were going hunting for IED factories. As I was standing there, CNN was reporting that the Government Center had just been overrun and captured by insurgents. It was a quiet day. Nothing had happened at all. I was in the very place that the enemy had supposedly just overrun. How could they get it so wrong? Because the hard parts of Iraq are not really covered by the mainstream media; they rely on "stringers", locals they supply with sattelite phones and other gear to feed stories and pictures to them. Many of these stringers (people being paid by CNN and other outlets, (read: paid by American dollars like yours and mine that flow into CNN and the NY Times, et. al.) are, in fact, insurgents themselves. They feed lies to our media, they feed our media's money to the insurgency, they gather intel for the insurgents. The media ends up reporting that entire neighborhoods of Ramadi are under insurgent control, that Ramadi is an "insurgent stronghold." Neither are true at all. Ramadi is the worst battleground in Iraq, but it is not controlled by the insurgents a la Fallujah, or any other place that fits the definition of a "stronghold". In fact, they need to keep finding new ones to pump in from around the globe as we keep killing them. Over a hundred in the last few weeks alone.
I'll never forget one afternoon, January 24, when a "journalist" working for a Sunni-financed Baghdad TV station was "tragically" killed by about 30 Marine small arms and machine gun rounds while he was filming a firefight that lasted a few minutes at the Government Center. His name was Mahmoud Zaal. I was happy to hear he was dead. He was not embedded with the military. He was out on the street. There is no foot traffic on Michigan Ave, where the Government Center is located, except to cross over it at a very few points. It is illegal to walk or drive up and down this part of Michigan. The odds of a journalist just happening to be at a street corner where insurgents launch a 5 minute small arms and rpg attack on the Government Center, are astronomical to the point of impossibility - there is nowhere to safely "just hang out there", to "just happen to be there" for such a brief, lightning attack. The only way to be there, filming, (and much footage of attacks against the Government Center from these two Michigan cross-streets, Central and Cinema, both of which are right next to each other, has been supplied to the American Media by "stringers" in league with insurgents) at such a precise time, is to know the attack is coming: To be in leaque with Ali Baba. The Coalition has a tip line. If Mr. Zaal knew the attack was coming, that fellow Iraqi soldiers and American military as well as potentially Ramadi civilians might be killed, why did he not call our tip line, instead of just heading out with the insurgents to make propaganda videos of them? Good riddance Mr. Zaal. You got probably less than you deserved.
Proof that becoming an insurgent means you've lost your mind.
And by the way, whatever happened to that Civil War the liberal media was assuring us Iraq was in the middle of or about to slide into? Iraq was in the middle of one, remember? Well then, why did it never happen? Because it was never happening. The press is too out of touch with the realities of the country to know it was just not even possible at the time, or so biased that all they knew was they now had the opportunity to cry "Civil War!" and "More Bush Failure!". Today Civil War is not mechanically possible in Iraq. Iraqis are nowhere near mentally and emotionally capable of embracing the concept of a civil war. The average Iraqi is worried about feeding his children on a daily basis. No one is in the mood or position to turn to their wife and say "Honey, I'm just going to stop caring for everyone and pick up a rifle and go with a militia that doesn't exist to a place I can't get even get to, because I'm ticked off at those pesky Shiites today!" We control the highways - the countryside is untraversable for large bodies of people - the supposed enemies couldn't even get to each other to fight if they wanted to. There are no large bodies of armed men, no huge caches of weapons and munitions easily distributable to armies and militias that might even magically appear one morning to fight each other.
Iraqis in the streets. I don't see a CNN truck, do you?
And more importantly, Iraqis were smarter and knew the truth of what happened. They knew that it was Zarqawi's Al Qaeda (AQIZ as the Marines refer to it) that blew up the shrine in the first place. They knew it was fake sectarian violence. And they also knew that the killing that was being done in the aftermath was being done by small pockets of hotheads, and by Al Qaeda itself, massacring groups of Shiites and Sunnis in an attempt to stage sectarian killing. They knew what the mainstream media did not - because the mainstream media was not out on their streets and in their houses.
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Comments
Thank You,
I knew this was happening in Iraq, I just needed the proof.
Power to our Troops.
Posted by: Michael Byc at May 23, 2006 05:35 PM
Well, I'm still anti-Bush, but I've always known there was more to the picture. I despise the fact people my age and younger are being sent off to Iraq by rich oilmen to come home as hamburger meat in flag-covered boxes or in wheelchairs. But, that's war, I guess.
This site you have puts up far stronger an argument than anything I've seen put forward by most who defend Bush. That's because it's reported and debated straight from the trenches. You're not retreating to a million-dollar mansion in a gas-guzzling SUV wearing a silk suit. It's not a bunch of smart-assing from campus pissants, either.
I'm gonna go volunteer at Walter Reed medical center and do something tangible to help. It seems far more effective a thing to do than marching in the streets parroting slogans OR slapping an American flag on the bumper of my car. Even if the troops don't need my sympathy, I'd like to have their respect years from now.
Posted by: Michael Rosse at June 8, 2006 10:34 AM
