Commentary
By Gary Kopycinski
eNews Park Forest is poised to enjoy its first-ever 100,000+ visitor month after an article by Dahr Jamail went viral this week, thanks to a link from an evidently busy Web site.
Readers may have noticed that ENEWSPF was heavily-trafficked on December 26 and 27 as our host was required to reboot our database server and we shut off a module or two to tame the CPU demands on our servers.
The topic was not an easy one, and the title was a tad bit provocative: Rape Rampant In US Military.
For those of you who have not read Dahr before, he is very good, and certainly controversial — only because he is a journalist.
Choosing to not be an embedded reporter in the Iraq war, this Texas-native Republican-born man decided to go to Iraq on his own dime and report.
Just report. As a truly independent journalist.
And report he did.
He interviewed Iraqis and American soldiers. He told their stories without embellishment, without party allegiance. Beside the many articles he published (many of which are available on eNews Park Forest), Jamail published Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, a book which should be required reading for anyone covering the Middle East, in Iraq or beyond. I would recommend it to anyone interested in journalism, whether in high school, college, … or beyond.
Jamail reports for Inter Press Service and is a regular contributor to TomDispatch. He has also published in Le Monde Diplomatique, the Independent, the Guardian, the Sunday Herald of Scotland, the Nation, and Foreign Policy in Focus, among others. To visit his website, click here.
December 2010 could be our first-ever 100,000+ visitor month. Could be….
If present trends continue.
We are grateful to Dahr Jamail, and the Web site, fark.com, for the added traffic.
And we thank our faithful readers for coming back, again and again and again…
