Anti-Climacus

LINK: Positively chilling. Those of you against war in Iraq might do well to get an idea of the sort of enlightened behavior Saddam extends to people he actually wants to say good things about him:

" The American correspondents I spoke with corroborated that they were under constant surveillance. One producer describes making a satellite telephone call from a corner of the Al Rasheed Hotel's garden, far from her minder and any other apparent eavesdroppers. As she left the garden a man approached and told her, "Never do that again." Hammer spoke in French with a friend by satellite phone in his hotel room; the next morning his minder greeted him, "Vous parlez français, aussi?" When one correspondent unplugged a television, a repairman knocked on his door a few minutes later asking to fix the set. "They're obviously watching me in bed," he said. "And I'm pretty sure that they're watching me in the bathroom. I've never wanted to leave a place so badly."

Even when reporters faithfully follow the regime's instructions, the Ministry of Information still torments them. Arnett describes constant harangues from ministry officials, even about colleagues over whom he had no control. They'd complain, "What the hell is Larry King saying? Can't you shut him up?" Other reporters describe fierce tongue-lashings for having crossed prosaic red lines. The Iraqis won't abide references to the "regime" (they prefer "government") or to "Saddam" (they prefer "President Saddam Hussein").

Sometimes the officials go beyond angry lectures. According to a network source, on about four separate occasions in 1996 the Iraqis roused MacVicar from her hotel room at 2 a.m. and drove her to the Ministry of Information, where officials screamed that she was working for the CIA. The French documentary filmmaker Joel Soler told me how his minder took him to a hospital, ostensibly to examine the effects of sanctions, but then called in a nurse with a long needle. "He said, 'Now we'll do a series of blood tests.'" Soler jumped on the table screaming: "I said, 'I'm calling my ambassador.' If I'd been American, forget about it." There's the horror story of The London Observer's Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian-born British journalist. A few months before the Gulf war, the Iraqis tried Bazoft behind closed doors on charges of espionage. They then hung him. As he turned over Bazoft's remains to the British Embassy in Baghdad, Information Minister Latif Nassif Jassim told journalists, "Mrs. Thatcher wanted him alive. We gave her the body.""