The Takeaway: Story of the Day - Unwilling Witness: The Terror of Reporting on Your Own Country

Unwilling Witness: The Terror of Reporting on Your Own Country

03/14/13 • -1 min

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the U.S-led invasion of Iraq. Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi, who covered the war as a correspondent for The New York Times, has mixed feelings about the consequences of the occupation of his native country. Like many Iraqis, Al-Saiedi initially welcomed the war that brought an end to Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship. Especially since his brother had been executed in Abu Ghraib prison by Hussein's security forces.

However, Al-Saiedi was not prepared for the ramifications of the war and the sectarian violence and chaos that would tear his country apart. "We gained our freedom, but we lost the state, the country...and our national identity," he says. "I don’t think Iraq will ever be the same."

Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi is currently a senior researcher with Physicians for Human Rights in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Al-Saiedi says that after the U.S. invasion his optimism for his country was dashed as the situation in Iraq deteriorated quickly. "I lived most of my life in a war zone, since the Iraqi-Iranian war started in 1980," he says. "We thought, this is the end. Unfortunately, it was the start of different oppression. The start of a different brutal era."

Al-Saiedi was working as a journalist for The New York Times in March of 2004 when he reported on a particularly gruesome and savage attack on American contractors in Fallujah. Upon learning of the deaths of the Americans, he joined a mob of mostly children and teenagers headed for the bridge where it was believed the bodies hung. "When I arrived to the bridge, I saw two bodies hanging on the bridge and two on the ground," he explains, "and the kids were there and kind of celebrating...that just broke my heart and made me so scared because I just imagine...I could be the fifth one. I will be the fifth one if any one of them know I work for The New York Times.”

Al-Saiedi describes the scene at the bridge in Fallujah as the most brutal thing he has seen in his life so far: "A child, I think he’s 10 or 11 years old, he was kicking one of the bodies. There was smoke coming from the flack jacket and he was shouting 'pacha.'" Pacha, Al-Saiedi explains, is a very famous meal in Iraq consisting of the head of a sheep.

"I was thinking: What’s the game? What’s the goal? I don’t understand...where are we going?"

Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi (Alex Johnson/WGBH)

Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi is currently a senior researcher with Physicians for Human Rights in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"I was thinking: What’s the game? What’s the goal? I don’t understand...where are we going?"

Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi (Alex Johnson/WGBH)

Previous Episode

North Korea Ups the Ante

On Monday, North Korea declared the 1953 Korean War armistice nullified. On Tuesday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper emphasized the danger posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, calling them, for the first time, "a serious threat to the United States."

"The rhetoric, while it is propaganda-laced, is also an indicator of their attitude and perhaps their intent," Clapper said.

Is it time to start to take North Korea more seriously? Karin Lee, executive director of the National Committee on North Korea, weighs in.

Next Episode

Why Drones Are Our Modern Nuclear Bomb

The use of the nuclear bomb in World War II fundamentally altered the nature of modern warfare. For the United States, it forever changed the role of the presidency, giving the executive branch the power to unilaterally detonate a stunningly destructive bomb. Today, drones have, arguably, become the modern version of the nuclear bomb, controlled from a computer, with the potential for no loss of American life, no boots on the ground, and a relatively small price tag.

The use and deployment of drones rests comfortably in the hands of the president. He alone can order the killing of another human being abroad, including an American citizen. To date, three Americans have been killed in Yemen in drone strikes, include Anwar al-Awlaki, the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It's a presidential power that Attorney General Eric Holder has reaffirmed in the face of imminent danger.

David Cole, professor of constitutional law, national security, and criminal justice at Georgetown University Law Center, says that the administration legally justifies the drone program with two legal documents: First, they can engage in targeted killing on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Pakistan because it's a war. And second, the targeted killings in Yemen and Lebanon — thousands of miles away from any battlefield — are justified because those individuals they are targeting are an imminent threat.

According to Cole, "They have redefined imminence to say that if somebody is involved in one of these groups that’s associated with Al Qaeda and they're an operational leader, then by definition they constantly pose an imminent threat to us."

"In this program, a judge doesn’t decide anything," he says, "because the administration has taken this authority on for itself and asserts that it doesn't have to get any approval from any other branch, whether it be Congress or the judiciary, to kill even an American citizen."