Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [27]
In one Kurdish town, Bremer’s security detail got into an argument with Iraqi journalists. The journalists stormed out, refusing to cover Bremer’s press conference. Bremer was going to sneak out the back and escape, but his advance man realized what a mess that would be, so he sent his boss out to the Kurdish journalists and Bremer held an impromptu meeting with them in the hallway. In the crowd, a teenager who’d just finished telling me how great America was had his hand slapped back by Bremer’s security detail when the boy tried to hand the ambassador a small Kurdish flag.
On our way back to Baghdad, I was told I could sit next to Bremer in his Black Hawk. It was a photo op: me sitting next to the big man. The truth was, with the crush of the rotor, conversation was nearly impossible. Besides, Bremer was wearing ear plugs, and clearly had no interest in talking with me. I ended up just smiling at him a couple of times and watching as he signed commendation letters to hundreds of Coalition Provisional Authority personnel. An aide handed him batches of the letters, which he scribbled his signature on, his White House cuff links catching the late-afternoon sun. There were three Blackwater gunmen seated around us, and perhaps a dozen more in the choppers that followed. The guard next to me had a Maori tattoo on his arm and was reading a well-worn paperback. At first I couldn’t see what it was, but as he turned a page, I caught a glimpse of the title: How to Win Friends and Influence People.
THE DAY BEFORE Baghdad’s 2005 interim presidential elections, Iraqi security forces are on heightened alert. Getting anywhere in the city is difficult because of all the roadblocks, and I spend a lot of time working out of the cluster of small houses that CNN rents in a heavily guarded neighborhood.
Sometimes the city doesn’t feel that dangerous, but just when you think this, a bomb goes off or someone gets kidnapped. Sitting in the office you see the numbers come across your computer screen, an endless string of press releases that never make it on air: Three policemen kidnapped. One Iraqi soldier killed. A grenade tossed into a store. A surgeon shot to death outside his home. No names, just bodies. So many small acts of terror that, after awhile, you lose track of them all.
Most reporters stay at one of several large hotels. When I first came to Iraq, in June 2004, CNN stayed at the Palestine, but the security situation there kept getting worse, so we relocated. On the roof of the Palestine is a labyrinth of makeshift shacks, rented out by news agencies. Each allows reporters standing in them to have a backdrop of Firdos Square, where the Saddam statue was torn down. At night on the roof, with the bright camera lights in your face, you make a tempting target, and sometimes a security guard has to stand in the shadows, just off to the side, watching the street for signs of snipers.
There’s a dingy gift shop in the lobby of the hotel, with tacky trinkets, dust-covered knives, and cheap tins. I once bought a few boxes with Saddam’s picture on them, but most of the Saddam items were snatched up long ago.
The Palestine’s elevators are snail slow, and while waiting for them, people exchange death tolls like pleasantries. The first time I rode in the elevator, a South Korean woman with Birkenstocks and a DV camera whispered to a tanned American with a silver pompadour, “Did you hear? Three Iraqis were killed. IED.”
“Yeah, two policemen got killed in Mosul,” he responded.
When I stayed in the Palestine in 2004, our security guards warned us one morning of a potential attack. “We have a report some