December 16, 2010

Journalist who threw shoe at Bush throws book at Iraqi prez

by

According to an Associated Press wire story, “The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at former President George W. Bush said Tuesday he is suing Iraq’s prime minister for his detention and alleged torture during the nine months he spent in custody.”

At a signing for his book about the experience, The Last Salute to President Bush, Muntadhar al-Zeidi made the announcement that he would be suing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a Swiss court. “The signing was timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the shoe throwing incident, which became one of the iconic images of the Iraq war,” notes the AP report. At the time of the incident, Al-Zeidi was immediately arrested and “spent nine months in prison, including three in solitary confinement,” and was “beaten and electrocuted for three days by interrogators, some of them related to al-Maliki,” he says.

So why did he do it? He says trying to cover the joint press conference, where Bush stood beside al-Maliki, filled him with “revulsion.”

“In these moments, everything I had seen and heard about the massacres against Iraqis this man had committed came to my mind … and I felt a thunder in my body,” he writes in the book — all profits from which, he says, “will go to a charity foundation he has set up for Iraqis who suffered from U.S. occupation.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

MobyLives