Friday, March 14, 2003

Photoblogging at the Iran-Kurdistan border  

Image: An Iranian woman in full hejab (covering), shot yesterday on March 13, 2003. Click on image for full-size view (640x480).

Kevin 7:54 PM

Blood of the Rooster  

Dateline: Iran

This morning we will leave Tehran, Iran and drive ten hours to the border of Kurdish-controlled Northern Iraq. A few months ago an Iranian contact told me it would cost thousands of dollars to cross from here. Now, apparently, journalists stream across by the dozens--as many as 200 so far--all to cover a possible northern front in a war against Iraq.

There are eight of us from CNN making this trip to the city of Erbil, a mix of shooters, satellite engineers, producers and reporters--we will ride in a 12-passenger tour bus with a microphone mounted to the dash. A small, blue pickup--filled to the bursting point, will carry most of the 50 cases of television equipment and personal belongings we are taking with us.

As we pack up our gear, I cross the street in front of the small Iranian apartment building where we were staying, to shoot some video, a wide shot of the truck and bus. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a man come out of a small convenience store, carrying a beautiful black rooster. He gently places it below the curb on the busy street. With a box cutter he cuts off its head. The lump of its body pulsates like a heart for a few moments as little puddle of crimson spreads across the pebbled asphalt. The rooster’s cockscomb lying close by.

With his hand, the man then wipes some of the rooster’s blood on the front panel of his white car. A smear of red with a few feathers stuck to it. Our fixer tells me this is sometimes done when someone buys a car--a blood christening, he says, for road safety, for good luck while driving. "Not very lucky, however, for the rooster," I say. But still we ask the man to smear a little on our blue pickup. As we begin our journey, we think, maybe we should have done the bus as well.

Fingerprints
The plan was for all of us to meet in Tehran--and then to cross over the border to "Kurdistan" together. We would be coming from different places and different stories. Shooter/Engineer Bill Skinner and I from Kuwait. On the day we fly into Tehran, we wait for an hour in long lines at passport control. I learned from an earliker that despite the perception the people of Iran seem to love Americans. They find out where you’re from they want to know everything, the movies, the food, the clothes, the freedom. Government relations are a different story. Since the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy here, American has not had diplomatic relations with Iran. In fact, an American needing help here has to go through an American Interests section located at Polish Embassy.

Since I carry two passports, I've learned the Irish allows a smoother transition into Iran than the U.S. one. Skinner doesn’t have that luxury. At passport control he is shown to a side room where he is fingerprinted, although reluctantly. "Mr. Skinner we apologize for this," he says the Iranian customs officials told him, "but we are required to do this. Your country does the same to our citizens when they visit the United States."

Later, at our apartment in Tehran, I tell night clerk, a young engineering graduate, the story about Skinner’s fingerprinting. He is amazed. "But you know," he says to me, "my brother just got his PhD. From Northeastern University in Massachusetts. My parents were denied a visa to attend his graduation. My auntie and uncle went instead. When they arrived at the airport, in Boston they did the same thing to them."

Kebobs
We’re moving slowly. The over-packed pickup miles behind us. It’s four in the afternoon and we’re not even half way yet. We decide to try and make only as far as the Iranian city of Tabriz tonight. Near the Turkish border. We stop for lunch at a roadside restaurant. One of our driver’s speaks a little English and we’re able to communicate to the owner, a stocky, balding man wearing a gray suit coat and three-day old stubble, that we'd all like the chicken kebobs with rice. The place is the size of a small cafeteria. We are the only ones here. There are posters of the frowning Ayatollah Khomeini on the glass entrance doors.

In a few minutes our food arrives. Hot platters filled with sunburned chicken cubes and steeped high with white rice, a small peak, yellow from saffron. We are about to dig in when correspondent Jane Araf pulls apart a bit of chicken with her fork. She doesn’t like what she sees. I do the same. It’s pink enough that I think maybe we could rub it on the outside of our bus for good luck. Jane tells the owner she would like hers cooked a bit more. I ask the same, so do the others. Our driver is now in a side room praying. The owner doesn’t understand.

He thinks we don’t like the food and shows us other items on the menu. I grab a platter and walk with him back into the kitchen. In the back there is rectangular charcoal pit where the meat is cooked on long metal skewers. I show him that we want the chicken put pack on the grill. A smile of recognition. "Ok, ok," he says, waving me off now, smiling. Everything is going to be ok. Until one by one, the rest of the table starts bringing their platters into the kitchen.

The cook looks angry. There’s a traffic jam in the kitchen. Our driver has finished his prayers and is now horrified that we’ve created an international incident. He looks at the pink chicken, picks it up with his finger and puts it back on the plate, shrugs, "it’s ok, it’s ok." "No," I tell him, "we all want it cooked more. Tell them it’s a cultural thing--westerners like their chicken black." Our driver's English is limited, but he’s able to get my point across. All the chicken goes back on the grill. When the platters come back out, the owner is no longer smiling. We eat quietly, pay our bill, and get back on the bus and on our way. The road is getting narrower as the hills close in to meet us.

Discuss

Kevin 1:12 AM

Thursday, March 13, 2003

I'm crossing the border from Iran to Northern Iraq (audblog)  

I'm calling in from the highly-guarded border of Iran and Kurdistan. A truck is waiting for us to transport CNN staff, our personal belongings, and our television gear into Kurd-controlled northern Iraq. We're crossing into this region to cover the northern front of a potential war with Iraq, in an area dense with oil-rich fields along the northern no-fly-zone.

audblog audio post of Kevin standing on the Iran/Kurdistan border. Discuss.

Kevin 2:34 PM

Monday, March 10, 2003

Ring Tones & Screen Savers  

Don't get me wrong. It's not boredom, but desperation that makes you consider things like this while waiting for this conflict to begin, "have we done a story on cellular phone ring tones in the Middle East," I recently asked someone. "I mean you literally can't go 30 seconds without hearing a Kylie Minogue tune or Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor emanating from someone's pocket." I was eating breakfast with a CNN engineer recently, when the strains of Camptown Ladies filled the restaurant. The microwave dish got blown over in the windstorm last night, he was told. All the doo dah day.

It is, after all, appropriate. This war, if it happens, will be the ultimate E war (for electronic) with it's satellite guided munitions, night vision goggles and pilotless drones. And not just for the military. When journalists embed with fighting units-they'll carry the gear that will theoretically allow them to report live from the front lines, and send back video and still images as quickly as they can fire up their satphones.

And so far, while we wait, we're able to stay connected. To wake up and watch President's Bush's news conference at 4 AM local time. To read the wires on the diplomatic chess match at the U.N., to email friends and family that we are rested, well-fed and safe.

But of all the images of this pre-war E war so far, this is the one that stays with me; in our workspace, personal laptops temporarily abandoned by their users--off for coffee or a bathroom break-one by one, ghostly images of wives, children, girlfriends, husbands, pets, slowly appearing from the depths of cyberspace---as screensavers.

The Defense of Kuwait

The Kuwaiti military is eager, to the point of neurotic, to get this message out: Kuwait does not just rely only on the U.S. muscle, but is actively involved in it's own defense. They're so concerned about this that they're "giving" CNN an exclusive along with Al Arabica (the new Arab satellite TV station set to compete with maverick Al Jazeera). We will be flown in a French-made Puma helicopter to Kuwait's Northern border with Iraq to see Kuwaiti troops dug into defensive positions. Then we will be flown to the southern border to see the arrival of Bahraini troops and equipment arriving, also in the defense of Kuwait, a sign of Gulf solidarity. It sounds promising, but right off the bat things start to go sour. The Kuwaiti Public Affairs officer in charge is a nice man, an earnest man, but he is new to his job-and deathly afraid of losing it. He is on his cell phone to his boss every 20 minutes or so.

Initially we were told we could shoot aerials, but then the clarification-but only of the Kuwaiti position. Honestly, it's hard to find in the sea of American tanks, trucks and troops amassing in the desert below us. On the ground we are taken to a couple of Bradley fighting vehicles buried in the sand. They're manned by a some Kuwaiti troops-with a few U.S. Green Berets advisors stationed with them. It's not particularly interesting video, especially with the loads of stuff we've been able to feed out of U.S. troops doing battle drills in the desert.

The Kuwaiti press officer stands by another field officer as I interview him. He interrupts every second question, even very innocuous ones. I end the interview in frustration. Then I attempt to speak with the U.S. Special Forces advisors. They agree as long as I don't show their faces. The press officer stops me, "You're here to show gulf forces," he tells me, "this story is about gulf forces.""Please don't tell me what my story is about," I say, "It will be about what I report not you."

"You can interview them when you make your own arrangements to get here," he tells me, "this is about gulf forces." We go back and forth like this for a few minutes-until he says fine, cover what you want, but CNN will not be invited on any more trips. I want to tell my partner Bill to stop shooting. I want to go back and sit in the chopper without taking another frame of video. It's a bluff. He needs this story more than I do. But you never know when you're going to need access, never know who can actually get you there. I take a breath.

"I'm sorry," I say, extending my hand to the press officer, "I was overstepping my bounds." We shake and make good. At the end of the day he shakes my hand again, tells me I'm a professional. Yes, we're both professional I think, and neither of us has a story.

Da' Bomb

For most of the journalists here in Kuwait, this is the fear and this is the joke; that for all our technology-our videophones and portable dishes, our Thurayas, and Iridiums and Neras, our digital cameras and laptop editing systems-we could end up covering this war with wind up film cameras.

It's on the grapevine that the U.S. Air Force has developed an electro magnetic pulse weapon at Kirtland Air Force that could be used in war against Iraq. The concept is devastating simple; flying over the target area, the military emits a microwave swath, which basically fries the electronics of any appliance or device in its path.

Like a giant switch, when the EMP weapon is flicked on, the lights go out. People, however, are supposedly spared-unless they happened to be wearing a pacemaker or are hooked up to other life sustaining machinery. The EMP weapon does not apparently differentiate between cell phones and hospital respirators.

Tactically, it could help to end the war more swiftly, by denying Iraq any military communications. The order to fire a chemical weapon may be eliminated along with the chain of command.

But the EMP weapon is the boogeyman of TV network news executives' dreams, since it has the same consequences for the media. With our reliance on satellites and microwave technology-TV is particularly vulnerable. Technologically we become deaf, dumb and blind-and may have to revert to technology that hasn't widely been used to cover news since the mid to late 70's.

How ironic that in the first Gulf War viewers around the world were awed by both the techno savvy and intestinal fortitude it took for CNN to broadcast from Baghdad while under a thunderstorm of thousand pound bombs. While this time the pictures on every channel could have the look and feel of the muddy film footage air lifted out of jungles during the Vietnam.

Discuss

Kevin 2:10 AM

Bridges, borders and scenes from Kuwait  

(originally published on CNN.com, Friday, February 28, 2003, Link)

U.S. Marine Sgt. Jesse Jokinen is wearing his helmet and full body armor. But instead of an M-16 rifle, he carries a level. Instead of a hand grenade hanging from his vest, there's a retractable tape measure. Jokinen is with the 8th Engineers Battalion.

Some U.S. commanders say if there's war with Iraq, there's a good chance that Iraqi forces will blow up bridges, dams and anything else that could slow down an American assault. It will be this battalion's job to make sure tanks, trucks and troops can move on their path. That means building bridges, and fast.

So today, in the desert an hour outside of Kuwait City, Jokinen's active duty Alpha Company engineers will compete against Michigan reservists from Bravo Company for practice -- and a little press coverage. They will try to be the first to assemble a medium-girder bridge across a 90-foot-wide pit in the sand.

There are 450 journalists looking for something to do in Kuwait, where days are filled with hummus and humdrum. This is not only a legitimate story, it's manna from heaven. From a TV reporter's perspective, all the elements are there: An extreme environment, colorful personalities and competition. It might as well be an episode of "Survivor."

I will shoot Alpha Company, and my partner, Bill Skinner, will shoot Bravo Company, as the Marines use almost nothing but thick crowbars and their bare hands to turn 49,000 pounds of metal into something you can drive a truck across. When their work is done, we will assemble our own bridge of videotape, chronicling this drama that precedes the main one we've come to witness.

'This donkey is speaking our language'
Kuwait has about 2.2 million residents, but only 35 percent of the population are Kuwaitis. The majority are "guest workers" from nations like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. They clean houses, raise children, run retail shops and even help administer the government. But it is rare for them to be given citizenship.

CNN's head driver in Kuwait is a well-dressed man from southern India named Younus. He is a great example of how far a guest worker will go to succeed here. Smart and savvy, Younus speaks six languages and knows Kuwait better than most natives. He has been here for 15 years. He's the eldest son in his family, so for him, coming to Kuwait was predetermined.

"We have a saying in India," he tells me, "that the oldest son must die." Sacrifice his life for the rest of the family, that is.

Another CNN driver, Mushtaq, is on the same path. He is younger than Younus and has been here only nine years, but he knows what it takes to make it in Kuwait.

He makes sure I know he's not just a driver. He tells me that he studied computers before coming here to work. He wears hip, yellow-tinted sunglasses with small square frames, and his favorite movie is James Dean's last one, "Giant." He says the film shows how you can have all the money in the world and still not be happy. He has a fiance; back in India whom he only sees once a year.

As he drives me to a hardware store to buy a tarp and some batteries, he tells me that he has killed his anger for the indignities he often suffers.

"They think of us as animals," he says to me. "When they call me over, they say, 'hamar, [donkey] come here.' But I speak Arabic so well, it surprises even them," he says with a laugh. "They look at me and whisper to each other; 'Hey, this donkey is speaking our language. How can this be?'"

It tastes like chicken
Today is the 42nd anniversary of Kuwait's independence from Great Britain. The Ministry of the Interior has hired four buses to drive journalists three hours to the highly fortified border with Iraq.

It has not been a particularly good week in the Kuwaiti desert. Yesterday, Interior officials arrested three Kuwaitis they say were plotting to attack U.S. troops here. And this morning, at 1 a.m., an American Black Hawk helicopter crashed in the desert, killing the crew of four.

At the northern border, 500 yards away, beyond three layers of razor wire and an electrified fence with enough voltage to knock a man down, lies the Iraqi town of Umm Qasr. A series of whitewashed concrete structures, it does not seem particularly threatening. One journalist asks Colonel Nabeel Faraj, the commander of the border police, if they have trouble with people sneaking across. Yes, he tells us: Alcohol smugglers, refugees, even Iraqi spies seem to make it into Kuwait, despite the 165 miles of fence.

Farther south, we are driven to a man-made oasis. If it weren't for the semi-trucks parked nearby, it might be a page out of the Arabian Nights. In a traditional war dance, Kuwaiti men, wearing flowing robes crisscrossed with pistol holsters, bang drums and wave swords, chanting in Arabic, "We will be victorious." It is a colorful picture. The media swarm.

A bit later, we are taken inside a tent the size of NBA basketball court. The desert floor is covered with colorful, handmade rugs. To both the left and the right, at least 100 silver serving trays hold a feast of meat, chicken, rice and vegetables. Other tables are piled high with fruits, flan, tarts, custard and chocolate mousse.

In the center of the tent, chefs are carving up the main dish. It is the size of a small cow or a giant hog, but of course, pork would not be served here. The color is that of dark meat turkey, but this is clearly a larger animal. There is the remnant of a long neck and the stump of a tail. It is, we are told, roasted camel.

Later, a colleague asks us what it was like. I had the punch line ready. "It tasted like chicken," I say.

"But," Skinner adds, "a kind of greasy, duck-like chicken."

"So it tasted like duck?" asks our colleague.

"Yeah," I add, "but it didn't walk like one."

Temporary immunity
In the bridge-building competition, Jokinen has coaxed his company to a commanding lead. Although some of the individual pieces weigh as much as 600 pounds, the Marines muscle them into their tongue-and-groove slots, sliding in giant connecting pins and locking them together with metal clips.

It is an impressive display of speed, precision and engineering. Marines swarm like ants, lifting, hauling, banging and slamming. Then, one hour and 59 minutes into the competition, the Alpha Company hops aboard its five-ton truck and drives across the chasm. The Marines are proud and sweaty, and rightly so. They have won a temporary immunity in this round of "Survivor."

The next time might not be so decisive.

Discuss

Kevin 2:09 AM

Canaries in the coal mine  

(originally published on CNN.com, Wednesday, February 26, 2003, Link)

We have two birds in our CNN workspace, Anthrax and Smallpox. Parakeets. But for us, canaries in the coal mine. Tiny, organic early warning systems against a chemical or biological attack.

Here in our offices overlooking the tranquil Persian Gulf, despite the flurry of activity, it does not seem to me as if we are on the threshold of war.

That's partly because from here, right now, I can't see the Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and Paladin howitzers and the 100,000 American troops amassed in the Kuwaiti desert.

I can't see the military staging areas, Camp New York and Camp Virginia -- named after the states hit in the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Here, facing the morning sun in the east, I see only the rippling blue water and the needle-piercing orbs of the Kuwaiti Towers.

The backdrop of the towers provide what we call in TV news the perfect visual cliché, a landmark, like the U.S. Capitol or the Kremlin, which immediately cues viewers to what city or country they're seeing.

In every live shot from Kuwait City, behind every reporter, you will see the Kuwaiti Towers. We even have an emergency number posted on the wall to call if the tower lights go dark.

NBC training
Before we can do much of anything in Kuwait, we must complete an NBC course. This is not a course taught by our competitors at the NBC television network. NBC stands for Nuclear, Biological and Chemical.

CNN has invested tens of thousands of dollars to train and outfit war zone employees to survive such an attack. It costs $500 to equip an individual with a complete NBC protective suit and respirator.

Our instructor, a good-natured Brit named Ian, has taught us nerve agents are undetectable, that blister agents smell of garlic, and that a choking agent will remind you of freshly cut grass -- right before it ruptures your lungs and drowns you in your own fluids.

Ian tells us the risk for smallpox in the region is small. But it is one that concerns me the most -- even though with treatment the survival rate is 65 percent. In class he shows us slides of victims who have contracted the disease. It looks as if their skin has come to a rolling boil. While the illness may not be permanent, the scars are forever.

In class, I've also learned to put my mask on, clear it and get a proper seal in 4.2 seconds. In a chemical attack, I would have 9 seconds before going unconscious.

I have covered three wars and a half-dozen conflict zones in my career. This is the only one in which I've learned to fear botulism more than bullets.

Hurry up and wait
While they're waiting for an event to begin, journalists tend to cannibalize their surroundings, to cover the environment and stories tangential to the main event.

In between trips to the desert to watch U.S. troops drill for war, we cover whatever we can -- a story about American expatriates living in Kuwait, what it looks like inside the Kuwaiti Towers, even what it's like to be a war correspondent.

Some people have been here for months, some for weeks, others for days -- all waiting for whatever is to happen.

At one point, war seemed certain. Now, after major splits with the European alliance and massive global peace demonstrations, the momentum, but not the military buildup, has seemed to stall a bit.

A small gift
We have a meeting in our offices on Saturday morning. Afterward, we are all invited by the staff at our hotel (all guest workers from India, Bangladesh, the Philippines) to pick numbers out of a bowl.

We take the numbers to another room where we are given a present corresponding to the number. A gesture of appreciation for being able to labor on our behalf.

Some of us get picture frames, necklaces, clocks or candles. My gift is a small ceramic sculpture: Two doves perched on a bed of roses. I put it in our workspace -- near the parakeets.

Discuss

Kevin 2:03 AM

Sunday, March 09, 2003

 

This post marks the beginning of my blog.

Kevin 11:46 PM