Iraq Conference

Ali Adeeb Al Naemi, left, John F. Burns, and Charles Eisendrath at the Iraq seminar held at Wallace House.

When editors from The New York Times called Ali Adeeb Al Naemi ’08 late at night in his Baghdad home, his mother would chastise him if he spoke English too loudly. She was afraid the neighbors might hear and discover that her son worked for an American organization, a fact that could endanger them both.

As news editor for the Time’s Baghdad bureau, Adeeb Al Naemi took daily precautions to conceal his place of work. He hid in his socks all documentation and identification linking him to his employer until he walked into the Times’ fortified compound.

Adeeb Al Naemi, who had arrived in Ann Arbor from Baghdad the previous night, shared his experiences at a closed Knight-Wallace conference “Covering the War in Iraq” held in early November at Wallace House. The other panelists were John F. Burns, former Times Baghdad bureau chief; Jim MacMillan ’07, who photographed the war for the Associated Press; Richard Leiby ’01, a feature writer for the Washington Post; and Mort Rosenblum, former Associated Press reporter and author of the recently published “Escaping Plato’s Cave: How America’s Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival.”

For Iraqi journalists, Adeeb Al Naemi said, the disintegration of the security situation in their country and the danger it poses for them has become a daily obsession. And justly so.

Hundreds of Iraqis who work for international media face risks far greater than the foreign correspondents who get the bylines, appear on television, or narrate radio reports. Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq four years ago, it has been one of the bloodiest wars for journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 165 journalists and media support staff have been killed since the conflict started in March 2003. Of those, 142 were Iraqi.

Mort Rosenblum, author, and John F. Burns, The New York Times, in handsome headgear

“The largest price has been paid in the post-invasion phase by Iraqi journalists,” said John F. Burns. The general security situation in the country and the targeting of Iraqis who work for U.S. organizations has made it “harder and harder” to find Iraqis who are willing to work for American publications, he added.

In July, Khalid W. Hassan — a colleague of Adeeb Al Naemi and Burns — was killed by insurgents on his way to work. “When you lose one who is close to you, it has a different impact. You feel like you’ve been touched by the fire. You’ve been burned. You’re not describing it, you’re feeling it,” Adeeb Al Naemi said. “This killing broke a lot of things inside us.”

Jim MacMillan worked with a team of Iraqi and foreign photographers in 2004 and 2005. During that time he edited the work of photojournalist Bilal Hussein, who filed gripping photographs from his hometown of Fallujah. Both men were part of a team of AP photographers that won a Pultizer Prize in 2005 for their coverage of Iraq.

On April 12, 2006, Hussein was detained by the U.S. military, which claimed the former cell phone salesman was a security threat. In November, the U.S. military handed Hussein over to an Iraqi court for criminal prosecution. Hussein is charged with being linked to terrorist groups, although neither the Iraqis or the U.S. military have disclosed detailed evidence to support the charges.

“Why is Bilal in prison?” MacMillan asked before showing a selection of Hussein’s pictures, which ranged from close shots of insurgents to wrenching images of the human cost of the war.

Hussein’s work “looks like the Iraq that I saw. It looks like the photos I edited every day and it didn’t look a whole lot worse than the Baghdad outside my window at that time … It wasn’t the White House’s version of Iraq,” MacMillan said. “There was some kind of horrible disconnect between the reporting in Iraq and the presentation in newspapers in the U.S.”

Hussein was held in custody at Camp Cropper on the edge of Baghdad, according to MacMillan. He was allowed to see friends and family for one hour a month and to go outside for one hour a day. For most of the remaining time, his hands and feet were shackled. An AP colleague described Hussein as a ruined and broken man, MacMillan said.

Richard Leiby referred to what he saw as a complicity of the media in the early days of the war. “Not many people seemed to be asking, should we be going into war?” he said, “but rather [were] making strategies on white boards as to how we would cover the war.”