“‘k folks, let me just punch in some stuff into the remote…”…Roger standing in his sitting room, holding a clunky grey plastic remote control that has solid number pads, a bit like a 1980s push dial phone, and he punches in a series of digits…there’s a pause of a few seconds and then we can hear a mechanical grinding noise above us…and clunks on the ceiling of his sitting room that we’ve gathered in… as his satellite dish rotates into position for the CNN material that’s being beamed up via satellite from the field of conflict in Kuwait and the Iraqi border…early ’91…

“…alright, here’s the CNN feed…it’s essentially what they’re sending across from the Gulf to Atlanta…they’ll top and tail it and do god knows what else…we’ll click back to CNN proper…on air… in about 20 mins, but let’s look at this stuff that’s going across…it’s raw footage…rough stuff in more sense than one…cheezuz..the barrel of that tank is almost on the horizontal…that’s very close quarters action…how much of this will pushed back up through CNN is hard to determine…so often there’s just a total disconnect from the content and meaning of what the Frontline camera guys are capturing and the sanitised, condenced shite that’ll make it to air…a whole new meaning to ‘final cut’…

…Right, there’ll be a sat transfer to White City shortly…the BBC book regular spots…there’s a limited timeframe, ya know…window… and there’ll be new material coming across that’ll form part of an update that’ll be broadcast on the 9 o’clock news…that’s if the feed’s not fucked up…”

Next up was footage that can only have been shot from a helicopter – the camera is pointing down to the ground from the air – an aerial overview of what appears to be a motorway…but hang on, the cars and trucks are all aligned in the same direction on both carriageways…weird…oh, hang on a sec…shit, shit, shit…looks as if some of the traffic’s on fire, there’s smoke bellowing from cars and trucks…the camera angle rises to show a perspective of a vehicle strewn motorway, stretching far into the horizon, the vanishing point…the scene captured in this sequence was hell on earth…imagine the M25 at rush hour being incinerated…this was original ‘raw’ footage of the Road to Basra…intercepted by Roger’s clunky rooftop dish…perched above his flat in ladbroke grove…

Current Wikipedia entry on the Road to Basra, aka HighWay of Death:

The Highway of Death refers to a six-lane highway between Kuwait and Iraq, officially known as Highway 80. It runs from Kuwait City to the border town of Safwan and then on to Basra.
During the United Nations coalition offensive in the Gulf War, retreating Iraqi military personnel and others escaping Kuwait were attacked on Highway 80 by American aircraft and ground forces on the night of February 26–27, 1991, resulting in the destruction of hundreds of vehicles and the deaths of many of their occupants. The scenes of devastation on the road are some of the most recognizable images of the war, and were publicly cited as a factor in President George H. W. Bush's decision to declare a cessation of hostilities on the next day.

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 Many Iraqi forces however successfully escaped across the Euphrates river and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that upwards of 70,000 to 80,000 troops from defeated divisions in Kuwait might have fled into the city of Basra.

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The road was repaired during the late 1990s, and was used in the initial stages of the 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S. and British forces, and previously it had been also used during the 1990 Invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi armored divisions.

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Funky, pre-gentrified Ladbroke Grove, West London,  was a fascinating place to live in the late 80’s and early 90’s…an eclectic population of  West Indian, Portuguese and boho English…street markets selling dried chillies, cheap daffodils, addictive custard tarts, scratched records, pre-loved books…a soundscape of dub-reggae-doorstep ghetto blasters, laughter, arguments, spruikers…little underground drinking dens and a local gypsy-cab service that would home deliver ‘erb and pizza from dusk ’til dawn…”Errr, dat you egain Roger? Ok, ok…Winston back at ya in twenty, innit…layters…”

I was lucky enough to live amongst and befriend a few of the ladbroke grove crew, including ‘resting’ photojournalist, unassuming dude and ‘erbalist, ‘Roger’. He’d spent a chunk of the early ’70’s working for Der Spiegel and also Stern magazine, war-reporting from Vietnam under a pseudonym – he took a bold decision to break away from the constrained, rather conformist press pack and went off track and seriously undercover to Laos, with nothing but his cameras and a local guide. They stumbled upon a series of jungle helicopter bases and photographed uniformed military personnel loading and then flying around bales of…opium…this interpretOr saw his pics and Bolex shot Laos footage (I was, coincidentally, doing post-grad at the London College of Printing at the time), and Roger’s material the real deal…more on this in future interpretOr posts…

Anyways… ‘ladbroke-grove-rOger’s’ satellite news service emerged around the time of Gulf War One…very, very pre-Wikileaks…the US government was feeding news agencies, including the rapidly ascending newcomer CNN, with its then startling innovation, the VNR…short for Video News Release. Essentially, VNRs were manufactured, manipulated and often sanitised video footage reels that were dispatched on a daily basis to the newsdesks at CBS, NBC, ITV et al.

One evening, Roger and I were chatting with my Kuwaiti girlfriend and we were all very worried about her family and the paucity of info on what was actually brewing in the Gulf. The ‘VNR’ derived coverage was nothing more than crappy propaganda and Roger had a startling brainwave that was to lead to a very local solution to a rather global problem…and ‘ladbroke-grove-rOger’s’ satellite news service was born…

…click below for…

‘ladbroke-grove-rOger’s’ satellite news service: part twO

The words of Gina Rinehart during her recent speech at the Sydney Miners Club have been reverently reproduced by the Australian media almost as though they were reporting on Moses’ sermon on the mount.

Gina claimed that mining companies will invest in Africa rather than Australia because of Australian mining and carbon taxes, and because, “African workers are happy to work for less than $2 a day”.

It would appear that Gina is using Tony Abbott to do her research because in the days preceding Gina’s statement 34 striking miners at the Lonmin mine were shot dead by police while protesting at their starvation wages. To my eye the miners on my TV screen were not looking happy.

It should be noted that the miners who have on average 8 dependants want their monthly wage to rise from 5400 to 12500 Rand and have been on strike for weeks.

The strike is rapidly spreading to other African mines including Lonmin’s Karee mine where manager Jan Thirion said that if workers get their way “….we might as well shut down mining in South Africa”. Despite the low wages, rising costs and lower commodity prices many African mines are struggling to operate at a profit and African mining share prices have dropped by around 20% in some sectors.

It would appear that Gina Rinehart is not only wrong about mining investment pouring out of Australia and into South Africa, the reverse is true. My first question is why would she distort the truth about mining investment in Australia?

Clearly Ms Rinehart was having a go at two targets. The first being Australian workers who refuse to leave their homes in NSW to work in the Pilbara whereas “Africans are happy to work for less than $2 a day”.

The second target is the Gillard Government for imposing taxes that compensate Australians for the value of minerals that miners are extracting from Australian soil, as well as the pollution damage caused by the extraction process.

My next proposition is, if Gina truly believes mining companies are moving to Africa to take advantage of Africans working for starvation wages, or to benefit from not having to pay taxes to compensate for the minerals extracted or the damage to the environment, would we not be better off without such cruel morally corrupt companies in Australia?

It would seem that Gina would be ill advised to move her mining operations to South Africa where the mining industry is in chaos due to ongoing and spreading riots over poor pay. It would also appear that low wages has not made African mines more profitable or productive. The only positive for the miners is that the police seem prepared to kill striking miners to force them back to work.