John Martinkus could have been beheaded but was safely released. In Iraq's propaganda war, some journalists are better alive than dead.AUSTRALIAN journalist John Martinkus said he was going to be killed by the Iraqi terrorists who grabbed him on Sunday — until he convinced them he was on their side. "I was not hurt and treated with respect once they established my credentials as an independent journalist who did not support the occupation," the SBS filmmaker told Reuters. An SBS producer, Mike Carey, confirmed on 3AW yesterday that Martinkus told the terrorists he sympathised with them — "as you would" to save your life. As I sure would, too. And then, added Carey, his captors got onto the internet to check him out.
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Did they? I guess they liked what they saw, then, or Martinkus would be as dead as the two Macedonian brickies who were beheaded in Iraq that very weekend. In fact, it would have been easy for the terrorists to think Martinkus, brave as he is, was more useful to them as a sympathetic reporter than a dead infidel. Whatâs more, his release on Monday, 20 hours after being kidnapped in Baghdad, while great news, is just the latest warning that the terrorists trying to kill democracy in Iraq think Western journalists are useful idiots, if not friends.
You might consider that, the next time you read Iraq is going to hell, the terrorists there are really "the resistance", and the American "occupiers" are hated and should pull out.
Martinkus was in Iraq to film another documentary for SBS, which has run an undeclared jihad against the United States and the liberation of Iraq. Not so undeclared, actually. Just before the war to topple Saddam Hussein, the then SBS deputy chairman, Neville Roach, publicly begged "journalists . . . in every article, every editorial, every report, (to) highlight the murder and mayhem that our nation is about to release".
So frenzied has its demonisation of this war since become that SBS this year twice showed a French "documentary" â The World According to Bush â that claimed US President George W. Bush was a religious crazy, "idiot" and "political whore", who was conned into attacking Iraq by a handful of "calculating" Jews, even while secretly pocketing pay-offs from their Muslim enemies.
The terrorists who snatched Martinkus would have loved it.
Of course, the work of Martinkus himself is far more honest and responsible. But itâs also clear his sympathies follow the SBS line and are not, it seems, primarily with the Americans and Iraqis trying to make Iraq democratic.In fact, Martinkus has appeared recently at rallies and film evenings organised by anti-war groups and the far-Left Socialist Alliance. He also spoke at this yearâs Melbourne Writers Festival, arguing Iraq was worse off for having been freed and his book, Travels in American Iraq, makes Iraqâs liberation seem an occupation instead â and one heading for civil war.
But worse, in a Bulletin article Martinkus described even Ansar Al Sunna, an al-Qaida-linked terrorist group responsible for suicide bombings and on-video beheadings of both Iraqis and foreigners, as merely "one of Iraqâs many resistance groups", breezily claiming its members were just "ordinary Iraqis frustrated and humiliated by the occupation".
Resistance? An al-Qaida ally that blows up scores of Iraqis and beheads even Nepalese cooks and Turkish drivers is a resistance, like those brave men and women who fought the Nazis?
Martinkusâs captors would have loved that best of all. No wonder they let him go.
But some of his colleagues in Iraq are even more useful to the terrorists. Take Michael Ware, the Australian journalist now working for Time magazine. Ware, who is often interviewed by the ABC, has such close links to Iraqâs worst terrorists that they use him to pass on their propaganda to the West â snuff videos of civilians and hostages being shot, beheaded and blown up.
Ware knows how he is helping these killers â or "militants", as he calls them. "Theyâre trying to tell the Western public, `This is what your boys are dying for, this is what they are up againstâ," he told CNN. "They are letting us know that, `We can kill your boys and we are not going awayâ."
It is only because he is useful to the terrorists by passing on their tapes and threats that Ware survives, as he admits. "Iâve seen into their eyes. I find them terrifying. I mean, these are very committed men. And at any moment they could turn on me. I could suddenly be decided heâs more valuable to us on a video being terrorised than he is, you know, discussing our movement and what weâre showing him."
Other journalists also seem to owe their lives to being similarly useful. Nine weeks ago, two French journalists â Christian Chesnot and George Malbrunot â were kidnapped by Iraqi terrorists who are yet to let them go. France, which tried to save Saddam from the Americans and has done nothing to help Iraqâs democrats, has seemed to have so far kept the two men alive through negotiations. But Yasser Arafat, the terrorist boss of the Palestinian Authority, helped by calling for the release of these journalists, assuring their captors theyâd helped the Iraqi and Palestinian causes.
Why is it that so many terrorists think Western journalists in Iraq are on their side and not on Americaâs? Or on free Iraqâs?
Mind you, itâs not entirely new. Saddam Hussein, too, could count on journalists to push his cause. Many correspondents then in Baghdad seemed too scared to tell the truth about his rule or too silly to realise the Iraqis praising their dictator would die if they didnât.
After the war, CNN admitted having censored reports of Saddamâs brutality to protect its Baghdad staff, and the ABCâs Mark Willacy conceded heâd also faced a dilemma: "Do you fully report what youâre seeing and what youâre hearing or do you hold back in case you get deported?"
Most bizarrely, at the height of the war Peter Arnett, then of Americaâs NBC network and Melbourneâs 3AW, went on Saddamâs TV station to claim Americaâs "first war plan has failed", and praise Iraqis for being "responsive to the Governmentâs requirements of discipline".
Sadly, what was true then seems just as true today. Reporters in Iraq tend to see the worst of America and the best of its enemies.
But donât take my word for it. Ask the interim prime minister of freed Iraq, Iyad Allawi, who last month accused Western journalists of not reporting progress in Iraq, saying: "The winning, itâs unfortunate, is not being portrayed in the media."
Or better still, ask the terrorists just how useful our journalists are to them. 
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