alternative news sources on Iraq

I don't have time to blog lately, but here's a post I wrote on a discussion I had to do for homework. Then I thought I'd share it with the rest of y'all.

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A couple people (possibly including myself) have commented that we don't really know what's going on in Iraq.

Actually there are many alternative sources of information. (The fact that I know about them, and yet rarely read them, I guess just reveals my laziness). They have their own bias/point of view, but who doesn't?

Here are a few (a "blog" is a sort of online diary, check them out):

http://www.empirenotes.org/
Blog of Rahul Mahajan, one of the smartest people I've ever met, author of a couple of books about the US role in the post 9/11 world; he has been to Iraq several times and has enough contacts there to keep his finger on the pulse, so to speak. I would trust his "read" on the situation over just about any other.

http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/
This blog is written by an Iraqi person who has published a book and now apparently does stuff for the BBC. He publishes photos, reports, opinions etc. (Here's an excerpt, just to entice you to visit this site:
"The first time I got an email from an American soldier in Iraq I wasn’t sure how to react. These days I read a couple of US soldier blogs and a couple even send me emails every now and then. I was answering one of them from [Mr. Somewhere-in-the-north-of-Iraq] when I decided later to post it on the blog. So here it is. And on a more personal note; No [Mr. Somewhere-in-the-north-of-Iraq], it doesn’t bother me that you are 'one of the American occupiers?' because I don’t think of you as an Occupier, I know you would much rather be home and you are stuck here because someone said this is where you should be."
There are also a lot of links on this site to other sources of information.

http://www.occupationwatch.org/
Occupation Watch is a pretty comprehensive news source, although it has a strong & obvious point of view. It's run by a coalition of groups but mostly the brainchild of Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, whose sincerity (if not necessarily brilliance) is unquestionable. Sign up for their weekly update to stay on top of things--it's very useful.

You can forget Poland, but don't forget the BBC...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/middle_east/2002/conflict_with_iraq/default.stm
Always better coverage than CNN; as far as I can tell, this is due in part to the BBC reporters' willingness to get out of the friggin' tank once in a while and actually take a couple photos, maybe even talk to someone on the ground.

There's always Al-Jazeera in English, at
http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage
(god, those pictures!)

Here are two sites that have not been updated in a while, but both are written by people I can vouch for, about their travels in the region:

http://www.devo.com/mideastlog/
Ben Granby, a hometwon boy from our very own Madison (note that he uses the European date notation, day-month-year, so that 05.02.04 is February 5 not May 2).

http://www.iraqjournal.org/
Blog of Jeremy Scahill, correspondant for Democracy Now! It only goes up to April 7, 2003, but has lots of great info up to then. Much of it was written from Iraq.

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