Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist who has become known for his reports from occupied Iraq. Up until early 2003, Jamail was working as a mountain guide in Denali and writing articles on climbing for an independent Alaskan newspaper. However, with the outbreak of war in Iraq, he became infuriated by the media's apparent cooperation with the Bush administration. He bought a laptop computer, a digital camera and a plane ticket out to Iraq.
Between November 2003 and February 2005, Jamail reported on the "collateral damage" in a far more in-depth way than either the military or other embedded journalists were prepared to do. Unrelated sources corroborated the horrific stories reported by Jamail: soldiers shooting people at prayer in a Baghdad mosque, civilians in Fallujah with extraordinary burns which were later attributed to white phosphorus (the use of which on civilians is a breach of the Geneva Convention), men and women being shot as they attempted to swim to safety across the Euphrates River bearing white flags.
Jamail operates a website, http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com, as well as writing for Press Service, The Asia Times, and The Nation, amongst others. He also reports for Democracy Now! and the BBC. At the culminating session of the World Tribunal on Iraq in June 2005, he documented U.S. violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention provisions for health care in occupied countries.
Quotes from Jamail:
It was a failure of citizenship of the American people that the Bush cabal was allowed to invade Iraq. Thus, every U.S. citizen who is not doing everything in their power to end this illegal and immoral occupation as quickly as possible is complicit with the war crimes being committed in Iraq on a daily basis.
Since an informed citizenry is the basis for a healthy democracy, independent, non-corporate media are more crucial today than ever before.