Apologies - this is the full version
JA

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,173-1518168,00.html



March 10, 2005

Terror confessions on TV grip Baghdad
By Catherine Philp
On-screen admissions are used in the propaganda war



THE grim-faced young man looks shiftily in front of him, glancing from time
to time at the lens recording his discomfort. A disembodied voice barks out:
"Tell us about the crime you committed."

The man clears his throat and begins to mumble. "We attacked the National
Guard with machineguns and killed two of them. Then we beheaded one of
 them." He stumbles for a moment, as if forgetting his lines. Then the
interrogator prompts him with more details of his story and he continues
with the tale of how he joined the insurgency and the attacks he carried
out.

This is Terror in the Grip of Justice, the latest television hit in
entertainment-starved Iraq where it is too dangerous to venture out at night
and street life ends at last light. It is also the latest weapon in the
Government's propaganda war against the insurgents, aimed at exposing them
as the enemies of ordinary Iraqis and cautioning those tempted to join them.
Every night at 9pm thousands tune in to the state-run al-Iraqiya channel to
see the "confessions" by insurgents paraded before the camera and
interrogated.

The authorities insist that the confessions are genuine and obtained without
duress, although some of the scripted-sounding accounts suggest otherwise.
The series began several weeks ago with purported Syrian and Egyptian
insurgents admitting that they joined the insurgency after training from
Syrian intelligence.



Last week, to counter suggestions that the alleged offenders were anything
but real, the programme-makers invited victims' families to hurl abuse at
the suspects and detail their bloody crimes.

In one riveting episode this week, a gloating interrogator, barely able to
disguise the venom in his voice, sought to cast a motley bunch of alleged
insurgents as criminals unworthy of the name of Mujahidin (fighters in a
holy war), a word with honourable connotations in the Arab world.

A suspect who confessed to receiving payments from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's
insurgent group in turn for killing policemen was asked how he spent the
money. "On booze and clothes," he said.

"You call yourself a holy warrior but you drink?" spat the interrogator.
"You discredit the name of jihad."

Then, like Jerry Springer delivering his "final thought", the interrogator
addressed his own homily to those at home: "For those who say we are
discrediting the jihad, I swear by God, if it was a real jihad, we would be
leading it. You see how they are killing innocent people and raping under
the cover of jihad? The real jihad is not raping and killing, it's
rebuilding this country all together."

Terror in the Grip of Justice has become the most watched show ever on
al-Iraqiya, an unpopular channel set up and funded by the Americans and,
according to Iraqis, watched only when they want to find out some official
government information such as when a public holiday will be. The Americans,
who no longer supervise the station's output, say they have no hand in the
show which was conceived by the Interior Ministry to demonstrate the
authorities' fight against the insurgency.

Insurgents have begun a propaganda counter-offensive, denouncing the tapes
as fakes and threatening to impose "God's justice" on the station's
employees - a threat apparently made real with the killing of Raeda Wazan,
an anchor- woman, last month.