In Iraq, the U.S. Does Eliminate Those Who Dare to Count the Dead
    By Naomi Klein
    The Guardian U.K.

    Saturday 04 December 2004

You asked for my evidence, Mr. Ambassador. Here it is.

    David T. Johnson,
    Acting ambassador,
    US Embassy, London

    Dear Mr. Johnson,

    On November 26, your press counsellor sent a letter to the Guardian taking strong exception to a sentence in my column of the same day. The sentence read: "In Iraq, US forces and their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, journalists - who dares to count the bodies." Of particular concern was the word "eliminating".

    The letter suggested that my charge was "baseless" and asked the Guardian either to withdraw it, or provide "evidence of this extremely grave accusation". It is quite rare for US embassy officials to openly involve themselves in the free press of a foreign country, so I took the letter extremely seriously. But while I agree that the accusation is grave, I have no intention of withdrawing it. Here, instead, is the evidence you requested.

    In April, US forces laid siege to Falluja in retaliation for the gruesome killings of four Blackwater employees. The operation was a failure, with US troops eventually handing the city back to resistance forces. The reason for the withdrawal was that the siege had sparked uprisings across the country, triggered by reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed. This information came from three main sources: 1) Doctors. USA Today reported on April 11 that "Statistics and names of the dead were gathered from four main clinics around the city and from Falluja general hospital". 2) Arab TV journalists. While doctors reported the numbers of dead, it was al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya that put a human face on those statistics. With unembedded camera crews in Falluja, both networks beamed footage of mutilated women and children throughout Iraq and the Arab-speaking world. 3) Clerics. The reports of high civilian casualties coming from journalists and doctors were seized upon by prominent clerics in Iraq. Many delivered fiery sermons condemning the attack, turning their congregants against US forces and igniting the uprising that forced US troops to withdraw.

    US authorities have denied that hundreds of civilians were killed during last April's siege, and have lashed out at the sources of these reports. For instance, an unnamed "senior American officer", speaking to the New York Times last month, labelled Falluja general hospital "a centre of propaganda". But the strongest words were reserved for Arab TV networks. When asked about al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya's reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed in Falluja, Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, replied that "what al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable ... " Last month, US troops once again laid siege to Falluja - but this time the attack included a new tactic: eliminating the doctors, journalists and clerics who focused public attention on civilian casualties last time around.

    Eliminating Doctors

    The first major operation by US marines and Iraqi soldiers was to storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the facility under military control. The New York Times reported that "the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties", noting that "this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons". The Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers "stole the mobile phones" at the hospital - preventing doctors from communicating with the outside world.

    But this was not the worst of the attacks on health workers. Two days earlier, a crucial emergency health clinic was bombed to rubble, as well as a medical supplies dispensary next door. Dr Sami al-Jumaili, who was working in the clinic, says the bombs took the lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients. The Los Angeles Times reported that the manager of Falluja general hospital "had told a US general the location of the downtown makeshift medical centre" before it was hit.

    Whether the clinic was targeted or destroyed accidentally, the effect was the same: to eliminate many of Falluja's doctors from the war zone. As Dr Jumaili told the Independent on November 14: "There is not a single surgeon in Falluja." When fighting moved to Mosul, a similar tactic was used: on entering the city, US and Iraqi forces immediately seized control of the al-Zaharawi hospital.

    Eliminating Journalists

    The images from last month's siege on Falluja came almost exclusively from reporters embedded with US troops. This is because Arab journalists who had covered April's siege from the civilian perspective had effectively been eliminated. Al-Jazeera had no cameras on the ground because it has been banned from reporting in Iraq indefinitely. Al-Arabiya did have an unembedded reporter, Abdel Kader Al-Saadi, in Falluja, but on November 11 US forces arrested him and held him for the length of the siege. Al-Saadi's detention has been condemned by Reporters Without Borders and the International Federation of Journalists. "We cannot ignore the possibility that he is being intimidated for just trying to do his job," the IFJ stated.

    It's not the first time journalists in Iraq have faced this kind of intimidation. When US forces invaded Baghdad in April 2003, US Central Command urged all unembedded journalists to leave the city. Some insisted on staying and at least three paid with their lives. On April 8, a US aircraft bombed al-Jazeera's Baghdad offices, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. Al-Jazeera has documentation proving it gave the coordinates of its location to US forces.

    On the same day, a US tank fired on the Palestine hotel, killing Jos� Couso, of the Spanish network Telecinco, and Taras Protsiuk, of Reuters. Three US soldiers are facing a criminal lawsuit from Couso's family, which alleges that US forces were well aware that journalists were in the Palestine hotel and that they committed a war crime.

    Eliminating Clerics

    Just as doctors and journalists have been targeted, so too have many of the clerics who have spoken out forcefully against the killings in Falluja. On November 11, Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaidaei, the head of the Supreme Association for Guidance and Daawa, was arrested. According to Associated Press, "Al-Sumaidaei has called on the country's Sunni minority to launch a civil disobedience campaign if the Iraqi government does not halt the attack on Falluja". On November 19, AP reported that US and Iraqi forces stormed a prominent Sunni mosque, the Abu Hanifa, in Aadhamiya, killing three people and arresting 40, including the chief cleric - another opponent of the Falluja siege. On the same day, Fox News reported that "US troops also raided a Sunni mosque in Qaim, near the Syrian border". The report described the arrests as "retaliation for opposing the Falluja offensive". Two Shia clerics associated with Moqtada al-Sadr have also been arrested in recent weeks; according to AP, "both had spoken out against the Falluja attack".

    "We don't do body counts," said General Tommy Franks of US Central Command. The question is: what happens to the people who insist on counting the bodies - the doctors who must pronounce their patients dead, the journalists who document these losses, the clerics who denounce them? In Iraq, evidence is mounting that these voices are being systematically silenced through a variety of means, from mass arrests, to raids on hospitals, media bans, and overt and unexplained physical attacks.

    Mr. Ambassador, I believe that your government and its Iraqi surrogates are waging two wars in Iraq. One war is against the Iraqi people, and it has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. The other is a war on witnesses.

The theory that Mark Bingham, a public relations executive from San Francisco, may have rushed the cockpit with a few other passengers stems from phone call conversations that were made during the flight.

Before the crash, Thomas Burnett, of San Ramon, Calif., phoned his wife and said that he and two other passengers were prepared to take action against the men who had taken control of the plane, which was en route to San Francisco from Newark, N.J.

"I know we're all going to die - there's three of us who are going to do something about it," he told his wife, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Bingham, 31, also made a call from the plane. He told his mother, Alice Hoglan, about three men who claimed to have a bomb before the phone connection failed.

What happened between those phone calls and the plane's nose-dive into a wooded field near Pittsburgh is still a matter of speculation. There were no survivors of the crash.

Counterintelligence experts speculated that the plane was headed toward a Washington landmark before it crashed. Moments before the tragedy, three other hijacked planes, also traveling from the East Coast to California, destroyed the World Trade Center in New York and a portion of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

"This was the only flight of the four that did not reach its target, which they believed to be Camp David, and that gives us reason to believe that perhaps Mark was able to help save the lives of people on the ground," Hoglan, a United Airlines flight attendant, told NBC's "Today" show.

A senior U.S. intelligence official told MSNBC.com that mobile phone communications from Flight 93 suggest that three passengers overpowered the hijackers but were unable to maintain control of the plane.

Friends of Mark Bingham, a former Division 1 rugby player who also played in San Francisco's gay rugby and basketball leagues, believe he may have been one of the three passengers who confronted the hijackers, but they acknowledge they may never be able to prove it.

Lloyd Kinoshita, who played pick-up basketball games with Bingham, said, "I have no doubt that if there was an opportunity to save lives that Mark would have initiated action. He was a competitor and leader, but even more so, he was a caring individual."

On the flight, Bingham was seated in the first-class cabin. Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network has not yet confirmed that Burnett, 38, the former chief operating officer for Thoratec Corp., was also in first class.

Friends said Bingham was a large, athletic man who was once gored in the leg while running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. He was the type of person, they said, who wouldn't be afraid to take on the hijackers.

"Today, in the face of this great tragedy, I am taking a small amount of comfort in the growing body of evidence indicating that Mark was a hero," said Bryce Eberhart, a PlanetOut Partners employee who played rugby with Bingham.

Counting Our Losses
By Ann Rostow


Based on percentages alone, hundreds of gay men and lesbians lost their lives last week, along with Americans of every category, and citizens of dozens of other nations. As the gay and lesbian press struggles to make sense of these events, reporters and publishers are feeling the tension between the mandate of the gay press - to cover the GLBT community - and the sense that neither sexual orientation, nor any other human feature, divides the nation at this time. Yet, that tension is resolved by the realization that if we don't cover the "gay angle," perhaps no one will. Nor does the "gay angle" set our community apart from the rest of America. Indeed, it submerges us.

The heroes and heroines of Sept. 11 will never be counted, and many of their stories will never be told. Surely the names of every firefighter and every police officer will be etched somewhere in stone, but who knows how many invisible acts of courage took place that day? How many people comforted their colleagues as the fires approached? How many people died trying to save others? When we do put names and faces on a few individuals, we do so with the realization that they represent the common bravery of the hour. And when we single out gay heroes in particular, we do so with the realization that every community has its heroes. We were all in this together, but the several gay men who died so visibly, symbolize for our community our role in our country's common sacrifice.

On the afternoon of the attack, one of the first men eulogized by the media was the Reverend Mychal Judge, a 68-year-old Franciscan friar who served as the chaplain for the New York City fire department. Summoned from his home on West 31st after the first plane hit One World Trade Center, Father Mike joined the firefighters at the base of the twin towers, which still stood. In a horrifying final act of duty, Mychal Judge knelt by a dying fireman who had been hit by the body of someone who jumped from one of the towers. He gave the man last rites, and died moments later as parts of the building rained down on the early rescuers. Grieving firefighters carried his body from the area and brought him first to a nearby church. Later, they carried his body through the torn streets of New York to the 31st Street stone friary he had lived in for the last 15 years.

On that Tuesday afternoon, the smiling face of Mychal Judge appeared on CNN along with the City's Fire Chief and other top ranking personnel who had rushed to the scene of terror before the buildings had collapsed. Firemen with tears in their eyes told reporters how much he had meant to them, how often he had helped them, how he had never missed a major fire. There was no reason, at that early stage of coverage, to mention that he was openly gay, and no one did.

But he was. Updating his online dispatches throughout the day, gay reporter Rex Wockner immediately listed Judge as "among the other openly gay people known dead." How did he know that? "I asked people who knew him," he told us. Later, Wockner received calls from other editors asking for evidence that Judge was gay. "How many gay activists and gay leaders and straight colleagues does one need to be out to, before one can be considered openly gay?" Wockner asked. "Or does one have to come out on the cover of The Advocate?" Indeed, Judge was a longtime member of the Catholic lesbian and gay group, Dignity, which sent its "particular condolences" to Judge's friends and family on its New York web site. Speaking to Wockner on the afternoon of the attack, gay journalist Andy Humm called Judge "a decent, wonderful human being," who abhorred discrimination from within and outside the Catholic Church, and who often joined protests for gay and AIDS causes. As far as I know, his sexual orientation was not reported anywhere in the mainstream press.

Another story making the rounds on the cable news networks that afternoon was the mystery surrounding the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 near Pittsburgh. Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett and Mark Bingham all called their families from the doomed plane. Burnett's wife and Bingham's aunt told reporters they had no doubt their men had attacked the hijackers and possibly saved the lives of people in an unknown target on the ground. Burnett told his wife that he and a couple of the other men on the plane were going to take action. The L.A. Times reported that Glick made four calls to his wife, telling her in the final call: "We're going to rush the hijackers." According to Glick's wife, there were sounds of a struggle in the background.

The online gay community learned quickly that Bingham, the 31-year-old owner of the Bingham Group, a public relations firm with offices in New York and San Francisco, was an openly gay man. An avid rugby player, the 6'5" athlete had run with the bulls at Pamplona and had fought off street muggers who attacked him a few years ago. Speaking at an informal memorial on Sept. 16, Bingham's friend Todd Sarner connected the dots:

"Many of you have heard the story of how a couple of guys, one of them with a gun, attacked Mark and his friends Mike and Paul," Sarner told the gathering. "Mark jumped in front of his friends to protect them, knocked the gun out of the attacker's hand, and proceeded to beat the crap out of them until they ran away.

"Does anybody here doubt what happened on that airplane?"

Although there's no confirmation one way or another, the gay community has embraced Bingham as a symbol of courage. On Sept. 17, thousands of San Franciscans remembered their lost friends and family at a ceremony in the Civic Auditorium, where Senator Barbara Boxer presented an American flag to Bingham's partner, Paul Holm. "I will miss Mark each day of the rest of my life," Holm had said a few days earlier. "He was one of the finest men to come before us. I hate what has happened, but I believe it was God's will and Mark's destiny to go out this way, as the hero he was to those who knew him and the hero he is now to the whole world."

In a thoughtful piece syndicated by writer Michael Alvear, Alvear asks why America's mainstream newspapers have yet to highlight the sexual orientation of some of these men, who one wouldn't call gay activists, but who were certainly openly gay. David Charlebois, the 39-year-old co-pilot of American Airlines flight 77, lost his life to a hijacker, or perhaps was killed when his plane slammed into the Pentagon. He was a member of the National Gay Pilots Association. He marched on Washington last year. He signed up his partner of 14 years for American Airlines' domestic partner benefits, yet as Alvear notes, the Associated Press report of his funeral, attended by a thousand people, never mentioned this central aspect of his life.

As for Ronald Gamboa, Dan Brandhorst and their adopted son David, most of the national news media did indeed report that these victims of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, were a gay family, as was so obvious. But not everyone. According to the Kentucky GLBT paper, The Letter, the Louisville Courier-Journal inexplicably ignored the men's relationship and referred to Gamboa as "single." Whether or not this happened in other local newspapers around the country is anyone's guess.

In an unprecedented moment of national solidarity, Alvear writes, "a profound respect and admiration is emerging between America's incongruous groups. A respect that begins with an explicit recognition of our differences. That's why it's so important for the media to acknowledge the gay men and women who are among the dead and missing, among the victims and heroes, among the loved and lost. How can gay men and women be part of this emerging inter-group respect if the media constantly ignores us?"

In all probability, the mainstream press is not "ignoring" the sexual orientation of men like Judge and Bingham, but acting out of a misguided sense that sexual orientation is a "private matter" that would be somehow inappropriate to "expose" in a tragic context. Well, it's not a private matter to most, and it wasn't to these men, and Alvear is right to calculate the cost of the 1980s mentality that assumes gay people are in the closet unless they've issued a press release to the contrary.

In San Francisco, the Sept. 18 Chronicle recounts the fate of a gay man, who shockingly died after escaping from the Trade Center area. Jack Keohane located his partner of 17 years and the two men stood transfixed as they watched the collapse of the towers from what they thought was a safe distance. Keohane, 41, was talking to his mother in Petaluma on his cell phone when he was killed by falling debris. His partner was unhurt. "He just had a passion with news and politics and human rights," his mother said. "He shouldn't have died."

We expect such coverage in San Francisco. We should expect it everywhere. There is a Jack Keohane in every city.