Complicit Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry - An UnEmbedded Journalist ... The InnerView with Dahr Jamail

This interview was conducted by Peter Moore and Werner Brandt of Alternatives Magazine on February 22, 2008.

Five years into war, with no end in sight, it is virtually impossible to get the holistic story from the mainstream press about what is happening over there in our name, paid for with out taxes.

Dahr Jamail goes after that story. He finds that we’re paying for it in more than blood, taxes and tears. We’re paying for it in war crimes committed, honor broken, and spirits in the void.

Dahr also finds an America that gets no corporate press coverage: people working hard to create a better world to live in.

How did you become an unembedded journalist in Iraq?

Well, it was kind of by accident. I ended up going to Iraq as a concerned citizen—concerned about the horrible reporting during the selling of the war, and then the war itself, and then the first months of the occupation. I was outraged, and decided to go over to Iraq and write about what I was seeing myself. I had no intentions of working as a journalist, I was just going to send emails back to my friends in Alaska for the two months I was there, then go home and hopefully sleep better at night. But by the end of that trip I was getting picked up by a couple of outlets and getting paid, and I realized that I could come back and work as a journalist.

So you didn’t have the journalist credentials hanging around your neck to get through doors & blocked areas?

Well I made my own press badge off the internet, using a laminating device. I knew I would need that. I had some freelance journalism experience at our weekly alternative paper, The Anchorage Press, but that was the extent of my journalism experience. I didn’t go to journalism school in college or anything like that.

Did you go to Iraq as a person named Dahr Jamail, or did you pick that name up while you were there.

No, that’s my name. I have an Arabic name because I’m 4th generation Lebanese on my father’s side. It’s a bit of a fluke that I got one of the traditional family names passed down to me, but my mom is German/Irish and my middle name is Kelly—born and raised in Houston, as were my parents and grandparents.

Could you highlight some of the key experiences that really transformed you while you were in Iraq?