In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
When you aren't free to speak your mind, but thought you were, and you speak the truth... you may risk your job. Another day in Bush's America
A Wall Street Journal reporter write a letter telling the true story in Iraq and may have been told not to report again until after November 2nd.This week, one of her lengthy note's recipients took it upon himself or herself to circulate Fassihi's e-mail to others. Within days, it had spread across the Web, a painfully bleak and clearly heartfelt appraisal of the Iraqi morass:
"Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest," she wrote. "Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.
"Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am housebound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets. I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in anything but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling. And can't and can't … "
What 'turning point'?
Fassihi went on to write, "It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began…. Was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni Triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite Present Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come."
Iraqi officials have stopped releasing civilian casualty figures, she wrote, because the "numbers are so shocking." The insurgency, Fassihi wrote, "is growing stronger, organized and more sophisticated every day. The various elements within it — Baathists, criminals, nationalists and Al Qaeda — are cooperating and coordinating…. One could argue that Iraq is already lost beyond salvation. For those of us on the ground it's hard to imagine what if anything could salvage it from its violent downward spiral.
"The genie of terrorism, chaos and mayhem has been unleashed onto this country as a result of American mistakes and it can't be put back into a bottle."
There is more, equally pained, equally persuasive.
- rob 5:31 PM - [PermaLink] -
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