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Anbar suicide bombing fatalities - 30 civilians, three Marines, and the truth one photographer showed

by Mikasi | July 3, 2008 at 01:49 pm | 436 views | 13 comments

[note: The word "fired" in this article is used very informally in service to the employment analogy later in the piece. It refers to the fact that the Marines chose to rescind Zoriah's access and unembed him due to a blog entry and some photographs he posted.

Please know that Zoriah was never actually hired by or paid for by the Marines. As with many other journalists he was simply given access to certain areas. My apologies to Zoriah, his staff and any confused readers. I will be more careful and less stupid in the future.]

The truth is always one of the casualties of war - whether you support a war or are against it this is true. In this case, showing more “truth” than was deemed prudent led Zoriah - a noted war and disaster photographer embedded with Marines in Anbar – to being effectively “fired.”

A few hours after posting my story on the suicide bombing in Anbar Province, I was woken up by a young marine who took me to receive a phone call. A high ranking Public Affairs Officer told me that they were requesting that I remove my blog post immediately. I asked on what grounds, as media rules state that wounded and killed soldiers may be portrayed in images as long as their name tags and identifiable features are not shown. I made very sure my images followed those guidelines, and questioned a large number of soldiers on base to see if they could find anything at all that would identify the dead. I did this primarily out of respect for the families.

After the post was online, I was told that the Marine Corps would not allow even the pants or shoes of a injured or killed Marine to be depicted in images. This was a rule I had never been told or even heard of. I refused to remove the blog post. It seemed insane to me that the Marines would embed a war photographer and then be upset when photographs were taken of war.

A few minutes later my embed was terminated...

One of my biggest complaints about war coverage in the U.S. the war is that we pedal it in a very PG, essentially kid-friendly fashion - the pictures we get, the stories we hear are sanitized and made sterile so as not to alarm the meek or the frighten the children. In short, war is to be regarded as a video game - everyone plays hard, nobody really gets hurt and if you do get whacked, hey just reload the last save point and get back to the killing.

I truly labored with the decision to post these images and I still do. But in my heart of hearts I know that people need to see and feel the reality of this horrible situation. How can things change if all that comes out of Iraq are sanitized, white-washed images of war designed for mainstream media outlets who focus on making money, not on the quality and truth in what they report?

The danger with letting people see and hear what is really going is that we are put in danger of having popular support go soft or of turning people against turn against the war. Hearing there was a suicide bombing that killed three soldiers, two interpreters and 30 civilians is just plain sad, but having to drink in the sight of bloodied uniforms, the limp corpses of old men and little kids and blown off body parts is quite another thing all together.

Managing the truth - "spin" that is - then is a very important job for those managing the war. Managing the message, after all manages the opinion.

I have done everything I can to post images of Marines that are not in any way identifiable. I photographed to the best of my ability -- hoping to capture images that speak the truth yet capture the horror and senselessness of these kinds of attacks in a dignified, emotional, and artistic way. I have made sure there are ample warnings that the post is very graphic and very disturbing. I put it on a separate page that contains even more warnings and buffer text and images before the graphic content is displayed to avoid anyone stumbling on it by accident.

Good managers make sure "employees" tow the company line, maintain morale and keep a tight lip about what is actually going on. Questions are referred, are always referred, to the public information people, those who know what not to say, what to say and how to say it so that the proper picture is painted. It is a simple fact that those with loose lips must be fired.

Please know that my intent is to show the true nature of the abominations of war in hopes that this will deter others from committing or accepting senseless acts of violence.

Sanitizing images is a great disservice, not just to the victims of the violence but to the men and women who are sent into the thick of the violence. By censoring the imagery we insult the soldiers by making the war they are fighting seem clean and easy. The full impact of the burdens they bare - from lost limbs to PTSD to simple guilt is lost on us.

Similarly we miss the scope of the victories they achieve in battles raged, thousands of miles from we arm-chair generals and pundits who idly debate cost and benefit and collateral damage.

To the families of the Marines, the interpreters, the Iraqi police, and the civilians killed in the attack: you have my deepest condolences. These men were attending a city council meeting and working together to better their community. Something terrible happened to them when they were in the midst of doing a good thing.

[emphasis mine - Mikasi]

In short, keeping the truth from us keeps us from making fully informed decisions and opinions. But sanitizing the truth also short-changes our veterans by veiling their daily reality. We, the uninvolved, never get to see why we should laud them nor why we should help them once they return from tour.

Click here to see the blog post that got Zoriah “fired.”

Click here to hear a phone interview concerning this issue with Zoriah by Ernesto Arce for Pacifica Public Radio.

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amyjudd

at 14:00 on July 3rd, 2008

good stuff:

Mikasi, I like this story. It's good stuff.

Excellent post - I can't believe he got fired - that is just so ridiculous!

Mikasi

at 14:14 on July 3rd, 2008

amy, I want you and other readers to know that I used the word "fired" in quotation marks for good reason - he was not actually hired by or paid for through the U.S. Marines. Being a blue collar male I used the word "fired" informally and as I might use it with a friend who would more likely understand this.

I see now with your comment that I need to amend this. Let me add the adjective "effectively" and a disclaimer. My apologies to Zoriah, confused readers and others.

amyjudd

at 14:23 on July 3rd, 2008

Oh, I didn't realize that - thanks for clearing that up.

PEP

at 14:24 on July 3rd, 2008

I think you did a good job in putting quotes around "fired." It's not just grammatically correct, classically, it does signal that the usage of the word or phrase is one that's a bit changed from the normal. And good job, too, on adding more explanation. But I did want you to know that I got your message very clearly, and I think you did well. :)

Rachel Nixon

at 14:04 on July 3rd, 2008

good stuff:

Mikasi, thanks for letting us know about Zoriah.

The sanitisation of war - the photos and videos we're not allowed to see by politicians and media self-censorship - results in an ill-informed public and skewed coverage, IMO.

julianw

at 14:14 on July 3rd, 2008

good stuff:

Good stuff, Mikasi. I think you get it right when you say that war is depicted to the public as a video game. Things that show reality rather than virtual reality are prone to censorship.

PEP

at 14:27 on July 3rd, 2008

Julian, in the 1970's there was an underground film (shown on the wall of a campus building at my college) that depicted a day in which war was a reality show. When I first started seeing interviews with military and shots from the battlefield, I just went AH HA!

PEP

at 14:25 on July 3rd, 2008

good stuff:

Mikasi, I like this story. It's good stuff.

But I would like to have one question answered--if he wasn't working for a media outlet, then how did he get "embedded"? Is the military now embedding bloggers?