when the dust clears

This video is an assemblage of three clips from 2006 that we couldn’t fit into the doc.

The first two are segments of a tour Iraqi Army soldiers gave me of their quarters at 1/2 Charlie Company’s Firm Base 1.

Number three is a second scene from 1/2 Bravo’s encounter with the Anbari college student Omar. In this one, they discuss (American) popular music.

The grunts, IAs, and Omar are clearly consciousness of me and my camera. They perform, as many (all?) of us do when there’s a lens trained on us. This camera consciousness made me uncomfortable as I screened the videotape the first half dozen times, but I realized that such performances were as meaningful as the candid moments — or moments in which folks appeared to be unaware of the video camera but could very well have been calculating and acting.

The IAs direct their mordant jokes and complaints at me and through me to the presumed American audience. Omar and the boys of Bravo are ostensibly communicating among themselves, but they too are calibrating their statements for the “reporter guy” and the people in the U.S. who will see the video. There’s a heap of subtext the men dance around, under, and on top of — the issue of race springs to mind. This verbal shimmying and jiving is funny, ironic, absurd, poignant, and telling.

Agree? Disagree? Weigh in with a comment below!

AND: This will be my final prodding. Voting for Best of Doc 2011 ends in two days. Please cast your final digi-ballots for Full Disclosure!

This sequence, edited by Rachel Shuman and Adam Bolt, was built from footage I shot on one of the first patrols I videotaped. Of all the scenes we had to cut, I was saddest to lose this one. It captures, from a boots-in-the-mud perspective, the perpetual miscommunication between our troops and Iraqi civilians and the general absurdity of the mission.

First Battalion/Second Marine Regiment was nearing the end of its 2004-05 deployment to northern Babil province. Iraq’s first national election since Saddam Hussein’s toppling was two weeks away. Anti-US forces, particularly Sunni militant groups like Hizb al Awda and Ansar al Sunna, had promised violence. “This ain’t the fucking Republicans and Democrats,” Col. Ron Johnson, commander of 1/2′s parent unit, the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, remarked in his characteristically colorful style about the growing Sunni-Shia conflict during a briefing for me and two other journalists.

Days after 1/2 left Babil—and before the unit had even shipped out from Kuwait—a car bomb rocked Musayyib Hospital. Eighteen people were killed. The patrol base Bravo Company set up for the election had been next door, in the Musayyib Police Station.

Less than six months later, a suicide-bomb blast in Musayyib (also rendered as Mussayab or Mussaib) killed more than a 100 people, all Iraqi.

“I knew the spot, an intersection in the city’s center,” I wrote in a 2005 blog post. “I had walked or driven through it a dozen times with grunts… There’s a beautiful mosque right at the crossroads.” The bomb had been planted in a fuel tanker nearby. “The blast ignited the fuel inside the truck, turning what might have been a sadly typical tragedy into mass slaughter.

“In November 2005, bombers attacked the same mosque, killing 20 and wounding 64.”

And so on through the years: December 18, 2011: “A sticky bomb attached to a car exploded when the driver entered a bus terminal…”

I can’t say with any assurance what life is like in Musayyib now. Just as it was in 2005, finding stories about the city (in English) that aren’t about violence and death is very difficult.

With economic, political, social, and you-name-it turmoil swirling around the globe, it’s inspiring to see concrete solutions to massive global problems.

The fixes on display at the United Nations’ exhibition Design with the Other 90%: CITIES are modest, but their implications are huge: a bicycle-powered cell phone charger; barge-like floating schools for flood-plagued Bangladesh; sturdy, locally sourced materials that slum dwellers use to build shelters, etc. These are relatively inexpensive things that palpably change the lives of the 90 percent of the world’s population for whom commodities aren’t designed.

This is the second in an ongoing series of exhibitions. The first one was called Design for the Other 90%. The with in this one is real: The products on display are the result of collaborations between local folks in poor urban communities and international designers. These are people who are taking care of business.

Twenty-plus years ago, my friend Apichart dragged me away from the comforts of Shanti Lodge, his Bangkok guesthouse, for a cruise deep into the klongs (canals) and oil-slick tributaries of the Chao Phraya River. Our longtail boat didn’t tear ass like James Bond’s in The Man With the Golden Gun; it chugged slowly enough for me to see the ramshackle stilt houses and trash bobbing up and down at the shoreline. Which was Apichart’s point: Bangkok is more—and less—than backpacker haven Khao San Road, salacious Patpong, and cheap paad Thai. It is also pollution and poverty. But also progress: Design highlights the Bang Bua Canal Community Upgrade, a project initiated by residents that has rehabbed homes and untrashed the water along an eight-mile stretch of the canal, which is home to 12 informal communities with 3,400 residents.

Bike-powered cell phone charger

Model of Medellín's Metrocable and Northeast Integral Urban Project

Useful ideas and potential inspiration, perhaps, for Occupiers around the country speaking and demonstrating on behalf of the 99% here in the US.

Design with the Other 90%: CITIES is at the United Nations Visitors Center through January 9, 2012. Head over if you’re hankering for a shot of hope.

Visitor photographs Fredrik Reuterswärd's sculpture Non-Violence

Photographer/journalist/activist/educator (and friend) Shahidul Alam was in NYC last night—from Dhaka by way of Bamako, Addis Ababa, and Dubai—to launch the US publication of “My Journey as A Witness,” a collection of his photos and writing. Essays by Sebastião Salgado, Raghu Rai, and Rosa Maria Falvo, who is also the editor.

Shahidul writes: “I don’t want to be your icon of poverty or a sponge for your guilt. My identity is for me to build, in my own image. You’re welcome to walk beside me, but don’t stand in front to give me a helping hand. You’re blocking the sun.”

Pix from the event:

Photos from the occupation’s near-eviction from Zuccotti/Liberty Park here in NYC today.

More—plus audio—to come….

The Aperture Foundation hosted a symposium last week, What Matters Now—Proposals for a New Front Page, which I participated in. We explored possibilities for creating a website rooted in images that would be a source for news, information, narrative journalism, and other forms of nonfiction narrative work, AND—and this is the key— also foster civic engagement.  Below is a short item and a photo I submitted to the web page. I made the image while traveling from one demonstration to the next with members of VOCAL (see previous post). The point of the photo is: communication. A VOCAL member was discussing the purpose of their direction action against Merck with an interested commuter.

VOCAL member reaches out between actions, July 28, 2011

Any new web entity, however engaging and brilliant, will be lost unless it has an active constituency participating in and supporting it. There must be a community behind it, a movement in fact. For inspiration I look to community organizers such as Saul Alinsky, Mike Gecan, and the Industrial Areas Foundation—and the Tea Party. All stress the centrality of building communities and movements around both shared values and substantive person-to-person connections. These are the keys to our success with this project—and to the challenges we face.

“In organizing, we teach that great and thriving institutions do three things: they provide people with opportunities to relate publicly; they design ways for people to learn together, satisfying the enormous appetite for knowledge and improvement that seems wired into our DNA; and they engage in meaningful public action.

“Relating, learning, and caring—when a congregation, or association, or party, or community, or country hits an all three of these cylinders, it can really move forward. When it misses on one or more, it either lumbers or stalls or goes into reverse.”

– Mike Gecan. “The Tea Party Movement Isn’t Radical Enough.” February 2011

Last Thursday, July 28, members of the advocacy group VOCAL, Voices of Community Activists and Leaders, subwayed from across the city to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. They gathered on a shady stretch of 78^th Street to ask one member of the Merck board of directors, Rochelle Lazarus, to reconsider the pharmaceutical company’s pricing of its Hepatitis C medication, Victrelis, which at $80,000 for a 48-week course, is beyond the means of most people who actually need it. The group, about two-dozen strong, was respectful, but loud—vocal, as the name implies.

VOCAL protests outside home of Merck board member, July 28, 2011

Members rang Lazarus’s doorbell. No one answered. Upstairs, a woman stood at the window, holding a telephone and looking down at the demonstration. Several VOCAL members chose to block the street and halt traffic. A police cruiser arrived, perhaps summoned by the board member herself or the polo-shirted private security guard who took a powerful interest in the demonstration. The police officer calmly asked the protesters to move, which they did. Eventually. After making their point: The price of this life-saving medicine is extortionate. It should be lowered. It reminded me of ACT UP demos I photographed in the early 1990s. (Full disclosure: I put my camera down, left my NYPD press pass at home, and participated in one such block-the-street action. This got me a one-way ride down a one-way street “at a high rate of speed,” as cops say, to a holding pen in a Lower East Side precinct.)

ACT UP’s mantra: Silence=Death.

Figures from the corporation’s 2010 IRS filings and annual report indicate that Merck and its execs are not hurting for cash. Merck’s 2010 worldwide sales: $46 billion. The corporation’s 2010 marketing and administrative expenses: $13.2 billion. President/Chairman/CEO Richard T. Clark’s salary in 2009: $16,838,367. Board member Lazarus’s total 2009 compensation: $191,080. Not too bad for a part-time job.

The VOCAL crew—black, white, Latino, young, and oldish—decamped to the offices of another board member, Leslie Brun (2009 Merck compensation for his part-time service: $178,200.) Mr. Brun was not available to meet with the group, according to a building security guard. When VOCAL members began chanting, security called the police. VOCAL took the street again, halting traffic on Park Avenue. Major police response this time, followed by much negotiation between the lead organizer and the officers—plus a fair amount of cursing from motorists blocked by VOCAL. Emotions rose with the temperature. Again, VOCAL stepped to the sidewalk after stating its case.

VOCAL blocks Park Avenue, July 28, 2011

As part of my documentary project on community organizing, I showed up to photograph VOCAL’s work—rather the culmination of one aspect of the group’s work. Direct action of the civilly disobedient type such as this is the product of a long and deliberative process that’s heavy on organizing, research, and planning. For some people, this sort of action smacks of class warfare, have-nots pressuring the haves to give up chunks of their hard-earned profits. For others, it is an object lesson in grassroots democracy. Merck, as a publicly held corporation, is accountable to the market and to citizens, the latter being the primary element of the former. Wall Street isn’t the market, nor is the amorphous “consumer.” The market is people, the public, in whose space the firm operates. VOCAL stood up in that space to remind Merck’s officers that they are accountable, not just to shareholders, but ordinary folks, too.

Earlier this week, members of VOCAL and another grassroots group, Community Voices Heard, launched an action in DC. They disrupted the debt bill debate in the House of Representatives to press legislators to stop pushing spending cuts, which will have a disproportionate impact on the working and middle-classes, and focus on revenue increases.

“John Boehner should stop worrying about keeping his job as Speaker of the House and start worrying about creating jobs for the millions of Americans who are unemployed,” VOCAL board member Bobby Tolbert said. Tolbert relies on Medicare and the Federal/state Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS program.

Twenty-two people from the groups were arrested. Half are living with HIV. They made themselves visible as citizens and spoke up, when and where it mattered. They disobeyed, civilly—again—because policymakers do not seem to pay any attention to the obedient.

I’m breathing many sighs of relief after my screening last night at the Frontline Club here in London. Judging from the facial expressions of the viewers I peeked at during the film—eyes wide open, hands covering eyes—people were engaged. The Q&A, which included the director and protagonist of the documentary that preceded mine, was one of the best in my yearlong film festival saga.

I am not a fan of double bills. Often the pairing is random or pretty damn close. My biggest fear, of course, is, What if the other film is better? But there are many others: What if my doc is scheduled to screen second and the first one sucks? I’ll lose half the audience. What if, what if, what if….

Last night, I had a bellyful of fear bubbling away because Full Disclosure was up second on such a bill. Screening first was Beneath the Sky, a 38-minute doc about war videographer Sulejman Mulaomerovic, directed by Bosnian filmmaker Ismet Lisica. Watching it, I realized that the pairing was inspired.

Lisica built the film around gritty, graphic footage Mulaomerovic shot during the Bosnian war. It’s more a collage than a straight narrative. Interviews with people Mulaomerovic encountered during the war provide milestones throughout the journey on which Lisica takes us. Mulaomerovic submits to a couple of awkward interviews. He shifts from foot to foot, stares at the ground—Mulaomerovic makes it clear he belongs behind the camera. Lisica also introduces us to surgeons who performed countless operations on wounded civilians, journalists who worked with Mulaomerovic, a lawyer who became a soldier who then became a lawyer again after the war, and so many others. But the doc devotes most of its time to the ordinary citizens under fire Mulaomerovic lived with. Soldiers, fighters, generals, snipers—this is not their movie.

Mulaomerovic was in the audience and participated in the Q&A. For a journalist who has seen and lived so much carnage—one doctor in the film talks about stuffing Mulaomerovic’s entrails back into his gut after he got torn up by shrapnel—he is stunningly warm, funny, and quite huggy. When he speaks, he speaks of humanity, of the survivors, their struggles and their attempts to knit their lives back together after the killing stopped.

Full Disclosure is primarily about marines. The nature of embedding limited my contact with ordinary people, but it allowed me to accomplish what I set out to: document what US troops were doing in my name. What I witnessed was, as I have said before, a tragic improvisation enacted on a daily basis. Heavily armed young marines, untrained and unprepared for an amorphous mission, wandered across an alien landscape and through an abused population hunting for invisible enemies. I tried to represent these young men as individuals. I liked many of the men, respected many of them, but what mattered in the context of the occupation—and Full Disclosure—is their life-changing, life-taking power over Iraqi civilians. They were instruments of American policy, and that is what I show.

The focus of our docs is different, but I think the spirit of the filmmakers and the BTS protagonist Mulaomerovic is similar. In response to a question about bravery, Mulaomerovic avoided fluffing himself up and spoke, at length —his translator called him beautifully verbose—about the importance of witnessing. It is the daily process of climbing a hill that never ends. The point isn’t to reach the top but to record everything on the way. He needed to show, to gather essential images—so essential that they’re being used in the Hague trials of alleged war criminals, Lisica told the audience.

I volunteered some of my own motivations for going to Iraq: a sense of responsibility as a citizen and journalist and, I admitted, a secret vanity. During my career as a journalist I had absorbed the message that real reporters cover wars. I hadn’t. But the first death I witnessed amplified the former feeling and erased the latter. Rage filled the gap, rage at the everyday senselessness and casual brutality of the occupation, and a virulent anger at the policymakers who unleash the disease of war—of choice, not defense— yet remain insulated from it. They inoculate themselves with the rhetoric of national security, national interest, nation-building, WMDs, or whatever floats on a given day and send others to die. Although I had a faint, vain hope that I could influence the debate about the occupation—silly after a certain point because there wasn’t one—simply making a record for history of what I witnessed kept me moving.

Ever the photographer, Sulejman—no longer Mulaomerovic to me—rounded me, his producers, festival director Patrick Hazard, who skillfully piloted the Q&A, and anyone who didn’t escape his grasp and posed us in various combinations. Then everyone retired to the bar.

I dashed out of the club to catch a train and passed Sulejman downstairs. He hugged me one last time, then invited me and my partner to Sarajevo.