The News From A True Citizen Journalist In Iraq

When I hear talking heads commenting on how the surge is working, and how the media isn't covering any of the good news from 'Eye-rack' (what the hell is so hard to pronounce?), my head wants to explode in frustration. So desperate to be vindicated in some way for their support of this devastating war, yet unable to produce any tangible (and believable) evidence themselves, they continue to live in a bubble of denial.

I wonder how they'd feel if they had to live in Iraq (outside the Green Zone), or if they were the manager of this clinic cited in a book by Dahr Jamail called "Beyond the Green Zone - Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq" that I just read about over at Firedoglake:

"The boxes of medical supplies we brought into the clinic were torn open immediately by desperate doctors. A woman entered, slapping her chest and face, and wailing as her husband carried in the dying body of her little boy. Blood was trickling off one of his arms, which dangled out of his father’s arms. Thus began my witnessing of an endless stream of women and children who had been shot by the U.S. soldiers and were now being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front, and weeping family members carriying in their wounded."

"Standing near the ambulance in frustration, Maki [the manager of the clinic] told us, They (U.S. soldiers) shot the ambulance and they shot the driver after they checked his car, and knew he was carrying nothing. Then they shot him. And then they shot the ambulance. And now I have no ambulance to evacuate more than twenty wounded people.[...]"

Gee, I didn't hear about this on the news either.

Those have to be some thick bubbles these people are hiding in.

Lets make two lists, one with the 'good' news, the other with the bad. If you survive to complete the first part you'll already have a jump on the second.

And a large part of it depends on your perspective. How much good news do you have to report if you're one of the 2+ million displaced Iraqis? Probably more than if you're still living in Baghdad. How much good news do you think Maki has to report?

It seems that the only ones reporting "good news" are the officers who still support Bush, or the ones that know from experience that anything other than good news will put you on the fast track to "retirement". Oh, and Fox'ers.

Truthdig - Interviews - Jeremy Scahill on Soldiers of Fortune

The MSM doesn't talk about this nearly enough, if at all. I'll bet my life that the majority of Americans don't have any idea that this is going on. The number of private soldiers, how much they're getting paid (by the US taxpayers) and how they don't have to play by the same rules as our military troops also Blackwater's close relationship with the administration. Face it, war is good for their business!

This is INSANE. [We] have to stop this. And I'll say it again, the ones with the keys to stopping this runaway bus are the Republicans. If it wasn't for the majority of Republicans voting with the president every time the Democrats put together bills trying to change course in Iraq, we could start to find the least disastrous way to withdraw from this quagmire.

Every death in this war is on the Bush supporters heads .

Link to Truthdig - Interviews - Jeremy Scahill on Soldiers of Fortune