There was a period a few months ago when there were many alternative and decent journalists in Iraq: Dahr Jamail (who is still there), Rahul Mahajan, Andrea Schmidt, Naomi Klein, and others. This coincided with the US invasion of Fallujah and a tremendous amount of news coverage of Iraq everywhere. Today though, there isn’t as much coverage of what’s going on. Alternative media (notably Dahr) are still there, there are still reports coming out on Iraq, but somehow, it isn’t dominating the news. And yet it seems like there is as much happening there as ever. The body count has certainly not abated, as the insurgents mount bombing attacks and the US forces continue to slaughter their way through civilian areas, including Fallujah.
Things seem to be happening in Afghanistan, a place that never made much news even when it was being invaded by the US and can hardly make news now that it’s only occupied, starving, and has insurgents making moves against the occupiers.
The last non-news item is Israel/Palestine, which is going through one of those periods of ‘calm’ when only Palestinians are being killed. There is a compilation of assassinations of Palestinians by Israel for September to April. The Israelis killed another two people, ‘suspected militants’ as the saying goes, in Nablus in an assassination with a car bomb on June 15. I read somewhere that the Israeli secret service conducted an assassination in Jenin earlier this week as well, though I haven’t been able to track down the source.
