On-the-ground-reality TV (continued)

Coulthart is similarly vexed by the lack of attention US media paid to the American use of cluster bombs last year — and how the damage they’ve done has engendered extreme ill will towards the American occupiers, particularly in the Doura section of Baghdad. Condemned by most international humanitarian organizations, cluster bombs explode and then spray smaller explosive bomblets over a vast area; all too often some of the bomblets don’t immediately explode, causing civilian casualties later on. Featured prominently in Iraq — On the Brink is Aida al-Ansari, an English-speaking Doura resident whose son and 25 others were killed when a US warplane cluster-bombed her neighborhood as American forces were fighting their way into Baghdad last spring. While a handful of stories mentioned the Doura bombing last year, there’s been no follow-up since — another missed opportunity, as the Sunday crew discovered, to understand the roots of growing Iraqi anger at the occupation.

When Coulthart visited the Doura neighborhood this year, he discovered al-Ansari, who still has the shrapnel-torn, bloodstained jeans her 16-year-old son, Fahad, was wearing when he died on the operating table at a local hospital, bereft of any anesthetic to ease the pain. Almost a year later, Coulthart reports, "grief among Fahad’s family and friends has now hardened to anger" directed at the US government. "They hate them," al-Ansari tells him of the Americans, explaining that "they don’t hate the people, but they hate Bush and the Army."

"Did they hate the United States before this war?" Coulthart asks.

"No," she responds. "They were — everybody used to dream to go to United States to work or to do something."

"Has anyone from the Coalition ever come to you or to this community and apologized for what happened?" he asks.

"No. No one."

The documentary also includes another type of footage rarely seen on American television. Though ABC originally aired it briefly (and though a handful of Web sites have shown it at various lengths), Iraq — On the Brink includes the full night-vision footage taken from the gun cameras of a US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter that shows the killing of three men, one of whom appeared to be hiding a rocket-propelled grenade. Though it’s impossible to verify just what the man has, the crew is nonetheless instructed by radio to "Smoke ’em," and then coolly fires through the dark at each suspected insurgent in turn. In this sort of video-game-style footage, we’re used to seeing the destruction of bunkers and buildings, not human figures.

However shocking it is to watch, the action is actually permissible under the US Army’s rules of engagement; indeed, it was likely that reliable intelligence led the helicopter to stake out the scene in the first place, and as helicopters are notoriously vulnerable to rocket-propelled-grenade and other shoulder-fired-missile attacks, it’s not entirely surprising that the Apache fired away. Rather, says Coulthart, the importance of the footage is that it reflects what many non-American Coalition military units said to his crew: that they’ve grown increasingly concerned about the political ramifications of the Americans’ take no-prisoners/show-no-mercy approach. "When it came up in conversation with one Coalition officer," says Coulthart, "he shook his head and said, ‘The Americans have gone feral, and no good will come of it.’"

Iraq — On the Brink also captures the brusque aloofness of CPA administrator J. Paul Bremer, the shiftiness of Ahmad Chalabi, the still-being-uncovered hidden horrors of Saddam’s regime, and the bravery of the Baghdad Police Department’s bomb squad in defusing scores of bombs each day. (The Americans use remote-controlled robots to neutralized explosives threatening US troops; the Iraqis display what Coulthart calls a "splendid madness in heroism" as they are left to defuse bombs by hand, with no protective gear.)

WHILE COULTHART thinks the documentary makes for an accurate and timely snapshot of post-Saddam Iraq, he exhales a rueful sigh at the mention of Abu Ghraib — a sigh that reflects a sense of both self-recrimination and angst born of the economics of foreign correspondence. When his crew was en route to meet Teeples and his Third Armored Cavalry soldiers in Iraq’s western desert, their route took them past Abu Ghraib. As Coulthart recalls, no discussion was required to stop the van; the scene they beheld "was like something out of Dante’s Inferno." "We all knew what it was and what it stood for, this thing with mythological status in Iraq where all this death and misery took place," he says. "Part of what was striking was that, frankly, it wasn’t looking much different now — barbed wire, troops with menacing gun emplacements, lines of people trying to get in to see relatives.

"While we’re filming overlays, up walks this mother, who tells us this horror story about her sons essentially being abducted from their home in Um Qasr by the Americans in the middle of the night. I did the interview, of course, but didn’t run it in our story because it seemed a little off our focus. You’re so focused on the story you tell yourself is the story — in part because the cost is so high and the budget is so tight. It cost us $1500 a week to be there, and unless we deliver results, it’s harder in the future to get the support this kind of work requires."

Indeed, Coulthart says, those sorts of cost considerations actually kept the cluster-bomb segment from appearing on Sunday for a year. "Most of that we shot last year, but we had to focus on the story we were supposed to be telling, which was mostly about Chalabi," he says. Determined to advance the dormant story on his latest visit to Baghdad, days of street reporting led the crew to al-Ansari, whose experiences ultimately made for a much more informative and affecting piece of journalism.

Yet the fact remains that a disturbing reality went unreported for a year, essentially due to constraints on time and money. "And with Abu Ghraib, it was the same situation again," Coulthart sighs. "Though we had the luxury of more time and more flexibility than anyone who covers Iraq day in and day out, we felt like we couldn’t shift our focus. And the irony was, here was this story of a lifetime right under our noses. There were people standing in queues trying to see their sons, waiting eight hours a day and often being told to come back the next day, and then the next and the next. Looking back on it, I’m not only kicking myself now, but am kind of ashamed. I’m sure that if we had scratched the surface and had taken the time to systematically interview people coming out to Abu Ghraib trying to figure out what had happened to their loved ones, we could have dug something up then."