August 03, 2005

Antiwar.Com's Take on Steven Vincent

Antiwar.Com informative article on murdered American journalist Steven Vincent is headlined "Death of a Hawk: Steven Vincent, RIP." Mr. Vincent was killed in Basra, Iraq on August 2, 2005.

Posted by Munir Umrani at 08:01 PM | Comments (0)

AP: Vincent Wanted To Be The Next Jack Kerouac

Verena Dobnik of the Associated Press reported August 3, 2005 that American freelance Journalists Steven Vincent, who was killed August 2, 2005 in Basra, Iraq, "apparently had feared the worst. In July, his New York friend, Steven Mumford, heard from Vincent, who had been his roommate in Baghdad last year," she wrote.

Ms. Dobnik quoted Mr. Mumford as saying: "He wrote me an e-mail that he had a lot of information which, if published in a major venue, he could get killed for it."

And so he did, after publishing a piece in the July 31, 2005 issue of The New York Times headlined "Switched Off in Basra." It was published August 1, 2005 in the International Herald Tribune (IHT), which is owned by the New York Times Company. The IHT headline is "The Islamists who police Basra's streets".

For more, see "Journalist killed in Iraq modeled himself after Jack Kerouac." Mr. Kerouac was an American writer, novelist and poet of the "Beat Generation," a term he reportedly introduced into the American lexicon.

Posted by Munir Umrani at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)

Mr. Vincent's Last Month in Iraq

Dan Murphy, a Baghdad correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, said, In three articles" for The Monitor "over the past month, Steven Vincent deftly captured the criminal-induced confusion of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, the jockeying for power between rival militias within government departments, and the growing use of political assassination that foreshadowed his own murder Tuesday," August 2, 2005 in Basra, Iraq.

Mr. Murphy's account of Mr. Vincent's last days alive in Iraq is quite interesting. I was struck by this:

In a city like Basra - where members of the city's most notorious kidnap-for-ransom gang are now major political players, and Shiite gangs have taken to ad hoc beatings and harassment of women to enforce their views of Islamic law - there is a long list of possible suspects in the Vincent murder: The police, or a faction within the police; a Shiite militia either angry at his reporting or for his association with an Iraqi woman; or common criminals, who run kidnap-for-ransom rackets.
As I read this, the following questions entered my mind: If you know the above to be true, and you are a foreigner living in a city thousands of miles from home with no protection, why poke your nose into situations that could get you killed?

Was it hubris? Was it the thought that the Iraqis wouldn't dare harm a white American journalist no matter what I write about them? Was it a death wish? Was it none of these? Just asking.

See "Tragic end to a war reporter's bracing story" for more of Mr. Murphy's vivid account of Mr. Vincent's work in Iraq.

Posted by Munir Umrani at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)