Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq

by Dahr Jamail (Author), Amy Goodman (Foreword)

34 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1931859479

ISBN-10: 1931859477

Why is ISBN important?

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Share <Embed>

Other Sellers

from

Other Sellers

See all 7 versions

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Capitalism101

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

21 used from $4.00

+ $11.98 shipping

Deliver to Germany

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Sold by TheLostArtOfBooks and Fulfilled by Amazon.

Available at a lower price from other sellers that may not offer free Prime shipping.

Arrives: Feb 5 - 26

4 new from $26.22

+ $11.98 shipping

Deliver to Germany

Available at a lower price from other sellers that may not offer free Prime shipping.

“Dahr Jamail does us a great service, by taking us past the lies of our political leaders, past the cowardice of the mainstream press, into the streets, the homes, the lives of Iraqis living under US occupation. If what he has seen could be conveyed to all Americans, this ugly war in Iraq would quickly come to an end. A superb journalist.”—Howard Zinn

We walk slowly under the scorching sun along dusty rows of humble headstones. She continues reading them aloud to me, “Old man wearing jacket with dishdasha, near industrial center. He has a key in his hand.” Many of the bodies were buried before they could be identified. Tears welling up in my eyes she quietly reads, “Man wearing red track suit.” She points to another row, “Three women killed in car leaving city by American missile.”

As the occupation of Iraq unravels, the demand for independent reporting is growing. Since 2003, unembedded journalist Dahr Jamail has filed indispensable reports from Iraq that have made him this generation’s chronicler of the unfolding disaster there. In these collected dispatches, Jamail presents never-before-published details of the siege of Fallujah and examines the origins of the Iraqi insurgency.

Dahr Jamail makes frequent visits to Iraq and has published his accounts in newspapers and magazines worldwide. He has regularly appeared on Democracy Now!, as well as the BBC, Pacifica Radio, and numerous other networks.

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Dahr Jamail
161
Paperback
$15.99
Rajiv Chandrasekaran
353
Paperback
$15.99

More items to explore

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Judith Heumann
278
Hardcover
26 offers from $13.33
J. M. Berger
57
Paperback
18 offers from $9.75
Joseph P. Shapiro
152
Paperback
$13.22
Albert M. Cook PhD PE (ret.)
48
Hardcover
$83.00
Mark M. Lowenthal
154
Paperback
$77.84
Bonnie Tsui
417
Hardcover
in Swimming
34 offers from $14.00

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Dahr Jamail
161
Hardcover
$17.00
Dahr Jamail
12
Paperback
$16.00

Special offers and product promotions

Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Readers unsatisfied with mainstream coverage of the Iraq War will want to grab this, an up-close look at daily life in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. One of the few unaffiliated journalists in Iraq, journalist Jamail went to see the conditions for himself, and the compelling, heartbreaking stories he sent back over his eight month stay were carried in publications world-wide: from family houses destroyed with their inhabitants to mosques full of people held under siege to the ill-equipped medical facilities and security forces meant to deal with them. Emphatically populist and unapologetically dubious of the U.S. government's party line, Jamail sees "resistance" where "obedient" mainstream reporters see "insurgents," "the occupation" where others see "the war." Jamail is a courageous writer who relates fears and bouts of panic alongside jaunts to Fallujah and other hotbeds unapproached by the press at large. Though the writing can be clunky, and the stories hard to distinguish-without any characters to follow (besides Jamail) one is left with the picture of a terrible forest, but few of the trees-this fascinating, eye-opening document of Iraq's day-to-day has a unique perspective and moments of incredible impact.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Dahr Jamail's reporting from Iraq has been published in newspapers and magazine worldwide. He has appeared on Democracy Now! as a regular guest, as well as BBC, Pacifia Radio, and numerous other networks. Amy Goodman has been confronting the Washington establishment and its corporate sponsors while giving voice to the ordinary citizens and activists who are fighting for a better, more peaceful world. Her daily international radio and TV show, Democracy Now!, began in 1996 and is now carried on more than 500 stations and on http://www.democracynow.org.

Product details

Publisher : Haymarket Books (October 1, 2007)
Language : English
Hardcover : 240 pages
ISBN-10 : 1931859477
ISBN-13 : 978-1931859479
Item Weight : 1.03 pounds
Dimensions : 5.6 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,800,245 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #259 in Bankruptcy Law (Books)
- #1,756 in Iraq War History (Books)
- #4,266 in Military History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
34 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload video

Customer reviews

5 star		69%
4 star		15%
3 star		10%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star		5%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Z. T. Heise

Someone finally tells the truth about Iraq

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2007

Verified Purchase

I'm halfway through the book after buying it a week ago, and it's tough to put down to do my homework! This book is an amazing and terrible story about what real Iraqis are suffering as my country destroys it through negligence and hired thugs; not to mention the actual military.

I'm tired of Petraeus and other Bush Goons telling me about how the war is going; I want to hear what the people we're "liberating" have to say about it. And they don't have very much good to say; Bechtel, for example, was supposed to install water treatment plants and pumps in a dying city, but instead painted houses for the Iraqis! Simply ridiculous.

When a sovereign nation cries out "please leave us alone" and yet we stay and continue to destroy the country house by house and turn a blind eye to the street crime now occurring because our troops are too busy indefinitely-detaining, or executing, any "terrorist" (that is, patriot fighting for a Free Iraq) they come across...who are the true Terrorists? Our government and the thugs they employ.

My thought is - show me a rightwinger and I'll challenge him/her to read any book I pick and I'll read any book they pick. This would be the book I would pick...not that I needed any convincing that Terrorist America is in the wrong in this sickening occupation, but this book could (and hopefully will) convince anyone who reads it!

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Neal Diamond

"Sadaam killed 3 of my relatives, yet the occupation is worse."

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2013

Verified Purchase

"Sadaam killed 3 of my relatives, yet the occupation is worse." This is a quote I remember most from reading this book. This quote is not to be confused for any kind of support for Sadaam. It is in fact a great portrayal of how awful both were to the Iraqi people.

This book tells the story of Iraq from the civilian stand point. It is by far the best book I've read on Iraq. Topping Chris Hedges' book Collateral Damage, which interviews soldiers. Hearing the story from the civilian perspective will change anyone's opinion on the war, even those who already did not support it.

Dahr Jamail goes in depth and risks his life to bring out a side of journalism rarely seen or read about.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Claire. Whitley

Iraqi War victims

Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2014

Verified Purchase

If you're young and think war is exciting, patriotic,or noble-- forget it! Dahr Jamail is an investigative reporter who wrote this book about life behind the scenes in war-torn Iraq. He is an accomplished writer and reporter who gives an honest view of life in Baghdad, with all the blood, guts, tragedy, destruction, horror, pain and suffering that is the result of a war that never should have been. If you understand that there is no winner, and no innocent participant in war, you will appreciate this book and the man who risked his life to write it..

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Did you know a THIRD WTC building fell on 911?

Beyond the Greenzone

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2016

Verified Purchase

Awesome incredible great book.
Ignore the Hollywood action-packed Green Zone crap, instead read this, Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars, anything by Amy Goodman, etc.
Naomi Wolf will scare the crap out of you - if you have any left.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” – 1984

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Z. Cohen

Intensely provocative, meticulous account of the reality of the US occupation of Iraq

Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2010

Verified Purchase

Beyond the Green Zone is a powerful, shocking, and meticulous account the US invasion of Iraq told from the perspective that has been largely neglected by US corporate media: its victims.

The US military, in the wake of Vietnam, considered the media to be a great threat to its ability to wage offensive wars of counterinsurgency and occupation. When the public is fully informed of the atrocities that quite naturally follow wars pitting modern armies against grass roots, popularly supported resistance movements, domestic outrage and anti-war sentiment quickly erodes the political foundation of the war. In the past 20 years, among the efforts to ensure what happened in Vietnam did not happen again, the Pentagon developed "embedding", a most pernicious assault on journalistic integrity, to ensure information about the war was restricted US political and military leaders perspective. Embedded journalists rely on the soldiers around them for their lives, causing them to form unprofessional relationships and abandon the responsibility of holding authorities to account that should define the profession of journalism in a functioning democracy. They see only what military authorities want them to see, and fail to independently examine assertions or cover perspectives from members of the society in which the military is operating.

That is why this Jamail and his work are so critically important. Working as a park ranger in Alaska, he was struck by the contrast between the way international news agencies in Britain, France, and the Arab world and the US corporate media were covering the lead up to the war. Assertions by the US government relating to the non-existent WMD, links between Saddam to Al-Qaeda/9-11, and other false claims were critically examined and debunked by foreign press, but taken on faith and passed as truth and trumpeted by the war cheerleading US media. Outraged that his country was being lied into a war and determined to help get the truth out, Jamail scraped some money and equipment together and set off to Iraq to independently report the consequences of the war.

Jamail spends his time in country visiting residential neighborhoods, rural farms, hospitals, and various cities around Iraq. He interviews countless locals, farmers, resistance leaders and fighters, and the occasional Iraqi authority or US soldier. Much of his reporting is from Baghdad, but some of the most powerful section of the book were trips he made to the city of Fallujah during the Marines' two attempts to destroy the resistance movement there, at massive cost to civilian life. The great risk he took to tell this suppressed truth is beyond admirable. Beyond the risk of random carbombings, kidnappings, and other daily Iraqi occurrences, unembedded journalists in Iraq were sometimes targets of US military detention and even assassination (see the killings of Al Jazeera journalists, documented elsewhere).

Jamail's accounts reveal the extent to which the US military establishment blatantly lied about the nature of the resistance movement, the scope of military operations, and the extent of civilian casualties. He frequently juxtaposes pictures and first hand accounts he documents with a dishonest military press release, which is uncritically accepted by the establishment media.

Overall, Jamail paints a horrendous, heart wrenching picture of the utter chaos and destruction that has been unleashed on 27 million innocent people, already suffering from decades of US sponsored genocidal sanctions and brutal US backed dictatorship. One of the elements most lacking in the US national discourse is empathy, and it's difficult not to be overwhelmed with anger and sadness at the Jamail's endless accounts of 8 hour gas lines, lack of electricity, lack of medical supplies, use of illegal cluster bombs and white phosphorous on civilians, intentional sniping of women and children, intentional firing upon ambulances, night raids, and the general sense of anxiety, uncertainty, and terror that pervades the lives of ordinary people throughout the country.

On top of the sheer horror and scale of the crimes perpetrated by the US in Iraq, Jamail touches on the obscene levels of corporate profiteering and corruption. Bechtel, despite receiving almost 3 billion in reconstruction money, failed to deliver the medical facilities, electricity, and clean water it promised. The US and Iraqi puppet authorities amended Iraqi law to permit foreign companies to invest in Iraq without local partnership, without hiring Iraqis, and to freely take any profits out of the country. What kind of reconstruction is structured to exclusively benefit foreign companies at the expense of the local population?

After reading this book, it's quite easy to understand why such a massive resistance movement developed in Iraq. I fail to understand how anyone in the US can act as if Iraqis should be happy to have our armies in their homeland, murdering innocent people with abandon. Human beings everywhere chafe and revolt under foreign occupation. Our ideology pretends that we are freedom incarnate, and constitutionally incapable of aggressive war and occupation, but that is preposterous. The US establishment's attempts to write these people off as terrorists are absurdly hypocritical, as this country was founded in exactly that kind of nationalistic grass roots resistance to foreign power.

The time period covered by Jamail's coverage in the country mainly ended before the sectarian conflict really developed to horrific proportions, and I would have liked to hear more about that, but I'm sure there are other sources for that.

Upon perusing other reviews, I noticed some people accusing him of 'bias' or questioning his journalism because it did not flow through an editor. I find these claims absurd. Given the extremely well documented failures of US corporate media, with their huge number of employees, editors, and resources, to do basic fact checking on the claims of the US government and military, and their willingness to spread the lies and propaganda that started this war, criticizing Jamail for not having the infrastructure they have is a weak argument. I hope these people hold the corporate media to the same level of skepticism and treat everything that comes out of such blatantly dishonest institutions as suspect. Many of the incidences Jamail documents have been investigated by international human rights organizations as well, whose accounts corroborate his. Furthermore, if even 10% of what he said was true, if only 10% of those women and children were brutally murdered, the US occupation of Iraq would still be an unconscionable travesty of justice that that can't be tolerated by a civilized world.

Jamail is an angry citizen holding his government to account by allowing the victims of a war to share their suppressed stories. The US military and their corporate media lapdogs have a well documented record of lying, murdering, committing war crimes, and advancing corporate interests above human interests. Who will you believe?

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Julie A. Crego

A view of the war without political filters

Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2008

Verified Purchase

This is a view of the Iraqi people and of the war without the hype and politics. How it impacted the people who lived there, who had no part in any aggression against the US, the parts that our national news doesn't talk about or show us. It is well written and paints us a picture of Iraqi lives in a war zone. Dahr deserves our thanks.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

packardal

from afar

Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2010

Verified Purchase

An excellent book. Slanted heavily toward the Iraqi citizen's point of view. It shows the fear and prejudice that the American troops on the ground have wherever they go. When some Iraqis shoot at you and kill your friends you begin to both fear and hate all Iraqis. It also shows the lack of effort on the U.S. Gov't's part to provide all that we could for the people while occupying their land. It shows that we were totally unprepared to deal with Iraq after accomplishing the easy job of taking out Saddam. It shows that we created our own enemies among the people. Hopefully that has changed by now.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

J.R

A wake up call

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 19, 2014

Verified Purchase

Writing from the midst of the disastrous war zones of Iraq, Daher Jamil proves his bravery, integrity and credibility through his clear but hard hitting account of how the average Iraqi lived during and after the 'war of freedom' in Iraq.
Strangely, the book begins to feel very personal after a few pages even though the author hardly ever, explicitly, displays any emotion or personal opinion (during his time in Iraq that is, later on the effects of his traumatic experience and his feelings towards the war can be discerned by his conflicting emotions when he returns to his homeland). The book is largely based on detailed observations and interviews conducted with local citizens, citizens who are clearly angry and frustrated by the constant abuse and humiliation they are forced to suffer at the hands of the occupiers.
An absorbing read but painful and shocking at the same time. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how the war was received by the Iraqi people.

2 people found this helpful

pcg_100

First Rate Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 10, 2013

Verified Purchase

Shines a light on the abuses of the US and the UK in Iraq and undermines the orthodox narrative peddled my the mainstream media.

One person found this helpful

Hans Schwinger

Freiheit und Demokratie aus USA? Nein, danke.

Reviewed in Germany on February 23, 2008

Verified Purchase

Dieses Buch gibt ein anschauliches und realistisches Bild über die verzweifelte Lage der einfachen Leute im besetzten Irak. Angesichts der geschilderten unsäglichen Verbrechen der amerikanischen Besatzer lernen die Iraker, was Freiheit und Demokratie wirklich für sie bedeuten und verzichten gerne auf diese 'Gabe' und auf die Besatzer. Um den Autor in freier Übersetzung zu zitieren: '„Während 1968 in dem vietnamesischen Dorf My Lai mehr als 400 Unschuldige von US-amerikanischen Truppen massakriert wurden, wurden z.B in Fallujah im November 2004 um die 5.000 Unschuldige von US-Truppen hingeschlachtet, meistens Frauen, Kinder und Ältere.“ Überall im Irak werden Krankenhäuser und medizinische Hilfe systematisch angegriffen, sogenannte 'Snipers' (auch das sind US-Boys) schießen in den Straßen auf alles, was sich bewegt, uralte Kulturstätten wie Bagdad werden zerstört, die Iraker als Untermenschen angesehen ' von den Kulturheroen aus Texas…. Durch Verträge wie aus dem Schatzkästlein der alten Kolonialzeiten werden die Ölquellen auf Jahrzehnte dem USA-Profit gesichert. Das irakische Volk leidet Hunger und Durst. Viele weitere Beispiele bringt Dahr Jamail.

Als Folge von all diesem hat man nur den einen Wunsch: die Besatzer sollen endlich das Land verlassen. Der Irak ist in der Lage, sich selbst zu regieren, was allerdings mit zunehmender Besatzungsdauer immer schwieriger gemacht wird. Und darauf arbeiten die Besatzer hin.

One person found this helpful

Translate review to English

See all reviews

Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Buy used: $13.50

Buy new: $26.22

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

More items to explore

Customers who bought this item also bought

Special offers and product promotions

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Product details

Videos

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy used:

$13.50

Buy new:

$26.22