Nir Rosen: How I Reported From Inside the Insurgency
The acclaimed journalist (and Truthdig contributor), who has spent the last three years in Iraq, explains how his street smarts, Arabic skills and Middle Eastern looks afforded him a view of the Iraqi insurgency almost unparalleled among Western journalists. Check out the Buzzflash interview.
The acclaimed journalist (and Truthdig contributor), who has spent the last three years in Iraq, explains how his street smarts, Arabic skills and Middle Eastern looks afforded him a view of the Iraqi insurgency almost unparalleled among Western journalists. Check out the Buzzflash interview.
AS CHAOS UNFOLDS, FIND SOLID GROUND…BuzzFlash:
BuzzFlash: You, however, seemed particularly well-accepted. Was this due to your contacts? Due to the fact that you spoke Arabic relatively fluently? How did you get to that point where they accepted you and trusted you, and that you were going to tell a balanced story, which you do in this book.
Nir Rosen: It was mostly having the right friends, actually. I came with the right friends. I had the right friends from each neighborhood. Even today, if I have to go to a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad, I will go with a Sunni interlocutor from that neighborhood. Likewise, if I?m dealing with Moqtada al-Sadr’s movement, I?ll go with somebody who is actually with his militia. You need an interlocutor. It doesn?t really matter what your ideas are in Iraq — it just matters who your friends are. You need somebody from the right tribe, from the right neighborhood, from the right sect. More and more, that’s what determines whether you can survive.
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The editors at Buzzflash argue that in displaying the picture of Zarqawi's dead, bloated face the way it did, the Bush administration is once again displaying the same kind of sophomoric bravado ("Bring 'em on") that it used to its great detriment in the past
Read Truthdig contributor Nir Rosen's account of the life, death and intellectual underpinnings of Zarqawi
Also: Buzzflash just won two Project Uncensored awards for contributor columns about U civilian detention camps and "net neutrality".
In a review of "Playing President," Buzzflash says Robert Scheer's "insights appear all the more astounding because he stood virtually alone in making them for so long among mainstream journalists."
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