AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to move to an example of terrible pain and agony, Fallujah, and how little we saw. Recently, I was listening to Richard Clarke, author of Against All Enemies, who was the counterterrorism czar saying, “Fallujah, Fallujah, if we saw those pictures.” And it's not just about pictures, it's word pictures, too. Reporters can describe. Aaron Glantz. You went to Fallujah. You reported for us and for Pacifica Radio about the people on the ground, and not just talking U.S. soldiers, Iraqis as well. We rarely see their pain. Can you talk about that? I'd like to even play a clip of one of your reports.

AARON GLANTZ: I was in Iraq in April and May of 2004 when the United States military was bombarding Fallujah. This is very typical, actually, under the occupation that there will be some, you know -- I mean, smaller crime against U.S. people like this killing of these four Blackwater Security figures and their hanging on the old Fallujah bridge. And it will bring a tremendous response by the U.S. military and the killing of hundreds of people is what happened in Fallujah. I was in Baghdad at that time and, at first, I thought it was unsafe to go to Fallujah, so I would interview refugees fleeing the city. I interviewed a 12-year-old boy who talked about how a U.S. military sniper shot his 11-year-old best friend, as he stood in front of his school. I interviewed a man who talked about how his father was in his own house and that that house was bombed by the U.S. military. I spoke with so many people. I spoke with a man who had a bullet in his -- right below his collar bone because U.S. military snipers in Fallujah were aiming for the neck, and they had just barely missed as he went to go get food aid from a neighborhood mosque.

And I think at some level I thought that these stories that I were hearing were exaggerations, that the situation couldn't possibly – in fact, even sitting in Baghdad, I thought the situation in Fallujah could not possibly be as bad as these refugees were telling me, even as Al Jazeera was broadcasting from the hospital, showing us images of the women and children in the hospital. But when I went to Fallujah, after the bombing had stopped, I saw that the city had just been devastated. Whole streets had been destroyed. I saw shopping centers that had collapsed, mosques that had been bombed, and the story that sticks out the most for me, is of this woman, and I think this is the clip that we're going to hear, who was buried in the front lawn of a neighbor's house because as she was trying to flee the city in her car, the Americans bombed it.

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to that after break. We're talking to Aaron Glantz, a Pacifica reporter, spent a good deal of time in Iraq and now has a new book, How America Lost Iraq. Sidney Schanberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, did a piece in The Village Voice about the pictures that we are not seeing. James Rainey, on the line with us from The Los Angeles Times on that issue, as well, "Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories."

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times; Sidney Schanberg, now writing for The Village Voice, Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, covered Vietnam, Cambodia and other war zones; Aaron Glantz, author of How America Lost Iraq. Let's turn for a moment to that piece that Aaron did from Fallujah.

AARON GLANTZ: A team of local volunteers in surgical masks lift the rotting corpse of a middle aged woman from a shallow grave in the front yard of a single family home. The owner of the house explains the woman has been lying dead in his front yard for three weeks. He says an American warplane bombed her car as she fled the city with her husband, who is buried in the garden of the house next door. The destroyed remains of the car still smolder a few meters away from his front door. “We couldn't give her a proper burial,” he says, “because every time we would go outside, American snipers would shoot at us. They even shot at us when we retrieved her carcass from the car after the Americans bombed it.”

The head of the medical team asks to speak anonymously, because his clinic's ambulance was shot by U.S. Marine snipers twice during the siege. One of the clinic's volunteers was killed. “The Americans are dogs. They try to kill anybody who works humanitarian aid. They attack humanitarian aid worker, doctor or ambulance to kill them.”

In the meantime, the aid worker says many corpses continue to rot under buildings, which collapse on top of them, amid a hail of American firepower. The volunteers place the woman onto a gurney and take her away in a small pickup truck. In a half an hour, she is buried in the municipal football stadium, alongside 600 others killed in the last month by the U.S. military.

AMY GOODMAN: Aaron Glantz in Fallujah. Your thoughts as you hear the report now back here at home and with the kind of images that we're getting in the United States.

AARON GLANTZ: One of the images that people who are watching on television just now saw, in addition to this rotting corpse in the front yard, is of the football stadium in Fallujah, which had to be turned into a mass graveyard, and that the whole grass of that football stadium had to be ripped up and replaced with graves. And this is, remember, in May of 2004, and since then America in November, which both Bush and Kerry agreed with, launched another massive bombing campaign where many innocent civilians were also killed.

I came back to America in May of 2004, and I found that people here in this country were not talking about Fallujah. They didn't know about Fallujah. People knew about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal because of the photos that were played on CBS News and published in The New Yorker magazine, but people had no idea about what happened in Fallujah, and this was the key issue on the ground in Iraq, the mass slaughter of civilians at the hands of U.S. military, all shown on satellite television to everyone throughout the country. And I almost felt I was listening earlier the comment that you just want to purge yourself and you just want to scream, you know, when you are in that situation. And, you know, I would come back and people thought I was somewhat extreme in my own statements and the statements that I played, like “the Americans are dogs” by that doctor, but you know, when you are in the situation, there's very little else that you can say.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to this point of what the media does broadcast or what the media -- the images that the print press shows, and ask James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times about your own paper, the comment of Sidney Schanberg, that the images are out there. I mean, we just watch Al Jazeera, we just see the other press around the world. They have got the horrific pictures the U.S. sanitized, as you yourself pointed out. What about The Los Angeles Times?

JAMES RAINEY: Well, I think there's no doubt that our paper, I mean, that's what our studies showed, that during that six months there weren't any U.S. dead shown, and I think there were ten wounded servicemen and women from the U.S., which was the same number The New York Times showed, and that was far and away more than any of the other papers. I guess, if you judge based on these eight publications, the L.A. Times and The New York Times showed a lot, but they were few compared, of course, to the total number of casualties, which was, you know, I think we're up to 1,700 dead, counting the Western allies and, you know, thousands wounded. So, there were very few pictures.

AMY GOODMAN: Sidney Schanberg.

SIDNEY SCHANBERG: I think part -- when we talk about the press, I think we sometimes forget that the role of reporters, reporters both at home and at the scene -- at the scene, I think there's no issue -- but reporters sometimes have to speak truth to editors and to push, because it's -- we are not just, you know, mute bystanders. We know that. So, if we think that something isn’t being covered, even if we're sitting in the newsroom in New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles, we should be saying to the editors, “Why aren't we running these pictures?” Because the timidity is unacceptable. Yes, you will get complaints from some people saying these pictures are over the top and gory and so forth. That will always be the case, but the pictures are necessary, and we are leaving information out of stories, information in those pictures.

AMY GOODMAN: Aaron Glantz, what about the journalists that do get the images?

AARON GLANTZ: Well, I think there is the coordinated campaign at this time by the U.S. military and to some extent the new Iraqi government to prevent these stories from getting out. Al Jazeera, after broadcasting from the hospital in Fallujah in the May 2004 siege, was kicked out of the country and is still banned from Iraq. And if you watch Al Jazeera today, they will regularly read an announcement urging people to call and complain about the fact that they're banned from Iraq. An Al Arabiya reporter, who went to Fallujah and was working on a documentary on Fallujah, was arrested by the Iraqi police a few weeks ago and held on bogus charges, and he was released, interestingly, when he gave over his tapes. A CBS News stringer covering the insurgency in Mosul was shot by the U.S. military, and after the military took him to the hospital, they didn't release him. They found in his camera that he had been filming the resistance, and so they incarcerated him. So, there is something going on on the ground in Iraq to make sure that these images that were broadcast nationally and across the Arab world during the 2004 siege of Fallujah, that radicalized the population so much, that even as we have these mass sweeps, as you were saying today in West Baghdad, with more than 400 Iraqis arrested by the U.S. military, to make sure that people even on the ground in Iraq do not see those images.