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In 2003, Dahr Jamail decided that he was tired of just listening to news reports on Iraq and packed his bag to see exactly what was going on. The independent U.S. reporter then added to the overall coverage of the war with his published reports, photos, and videos about just what was happening in Iraq.

We first wrote about Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches in August, 2006. Since then, his job has expanded beyond his site to include a new book, "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq." Despite his increasing popularity, Dahr found time to chat with us about his experience in Iraq and his belief about the necessity of unbiased information...

Before this site, what work did you do as a journalist?

Prior to beginning my work reporting from Iraq, I lived in Alaska and spent my summers working as a mountain guide and volunteer rescue ranger on Denali. I mention climbing because just before autumn of 2001, I was on a climbing trip in Pakistan near K2. After our climb, a few of us headed to the border of Afghanistan where we snapped photos of Taliban without really knowing what we were photographing. I returned home with these photos, along with a book about U.S. policy in that country during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s.

I was doing some freelance journalism for a weekly newspaper in Anchorage, and my stories focused primarily on mountaineering trips until the events of September 11th. At that time I began writing about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan during the Reagan administration—how billions of dollars were covertly funneled into the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Soviet military. This was the closest thing to war reporting that I experienced prior to venturing to Iraq. Read the full profile...

The television drama "M*A*S*H" ran to hundreds of episodes and finished off with the most watched finale in American TV history. Now, an "interactive essay" from the Magnum Photo Agency uses images from the series to frame a slideshow of two military medical units operating in Iraq today. Grainy, black-and-white shots of Klinger, Hawkeye, and Radar contrast with color photographs of U.S. soldiers picking through rubble, blue-smocked military doctors bending over examination tables, Iraqi men on their knees, and uniformed men and women looking dead exhausted. Like the show, some sections reveal the unexpected aspects of life outside the military ER: men digging in to a bag of Doritos, smoking a cigar, laughing. But then the music shifts, the image clouds, and we're back in the Humvees, on conflict-torn streets, and in an all-too real war.

Many believe that the only information they can really trust is what they see with their own eyes. In 2003, Dahr Jamail decided that he was tired of just listening to news reports on Iraq and packed his bag to see exactly what was going on. As he's one of the few independent U.S. journalists in Iraq, his published reports have been picked up by a variety of news outlets, such as the Guardian, the Independent, The Nation, and The Sunday Herald. Video and photos from Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon show yet another facet of the complicated events of war. And his blog is a window into one person's opinions and commentary on the experience of being in the middle of the conflict. We're all bound to have differing views on any political situation, but the broad vantage of independent reporting can only add to our opportunities for getting to the heart of the matter.