Acineto…who?

Today I direct your attention to only two articles, and trust me, they’re plenty.

In the Los Angeles Times‘ Mysterious foe preys on war’s wounded, Jia-Rui Chong begins:

The young Army medic would not stop bleeding.

He had been put on a powerful regimen of antibiotics by doctors aboard the hospital ship Comfort in the Persian Gulf. But something was wrong.

He was in shock and bleeding from small pricks where nurses had placed intravenous lines. Red, swollen tissue from an active bacterial infection was expanding around his abdominal wound. His immune system was in overdrive.

How odd, thought Dr. Kyle Petersen, an infectious disease specialist. He knew of one injured Iraqi man with similar symptoms and a few days later encountered an Iraqi teenager with gunshot wounds in the same condition.

And with that we’re off on a fascinating search for a critter called Acinetobacter baumannii. (For oog-y photos, look here instead). Acinetobacter (Latin for “motionless,” pronounced “ass in EE toe back ter”) is a bacterium that, maybe because it lacks flagella or cilia, likes to hang out with similarly-immobilized humans — especially, it seems, soldiers and civilians who wind up in U.S. military hospitals with wounds from Iraq or Afghanistan.

September 16 and Ike

Today let us consider, looking for meaning in the Blackwater shooting incident of September 16, five new letters to the New York Times and one old speech. Before we do, though, I suggest you also read, in the Washington Post, Sudarsan Raghavan and Karen DeYoung’s “5 Witnesses Insist Iraqis Didn’t Fire On Guards.”

This account both reinforces the point of Leila Fadel’s story for McClatchy yesterday — the “astounding amount of violence attributed to Blackwater” – and refers to yesterday’s post at ABC’s The Blotter, containing what are said to be sworn statements from the Blackwater crew and the first still photos of Sunday’s events (both the carbomb near the financial compound a mile away and Nisour Square itself). A few points to note in WaPo/ABC/McClatchy:

* If the large dun-colored building at left in ABC’s carbombing photos is indeed the “financial compound” the American diplomats were visiting, WaPo’s “25 yards” rather than NYT’s “a few hundred yards” better states its distance from the bombing. On the other hand, I think these shots also tend to support the “American official” in Washington who wondered to NYT why the diplomats were or should have been evacuated at all. The substantial-looking building apparently sustained little if any damage from the explosion, so why leave its safety so quickly? (Yes, I know: easy for us to wonder from here.)

* Those water bottles Blackwater crews famously throw at Iraqis to say “get the f*ck out of our way”? According to McClatchy, they’re frozen — so do a great job on windshields and windows (and, um, hearts and minds).

* Love that merc-speak in the Blackwater statements:

“I turned and engaged the car with approximately 20 to 30 rounds from my M4 rifle. After I no longer felt the threat to my life, I turned back to cover my sector” (yeah, that doctor and her baby were such a mortal threat to you, buddy, you turned ‘em right into a single lump of charcoal)

“Fearing for my life and the lives of my team members, I fired several well aimed rounds center mass at the threat” (a man getting out of a car)

“I fired one shot from my SR-25 at the closest threat. He went down and did not fire anymore” (nor, whaddya bet, had he ever)

Blackwater: worse and worse

The tales of Blackwater out this morning are so horrendous, I almost hesitate to refer you to them. But they carry the label “Made in USA,” so you should know. Let’s deal with the hardest first . . .

McClatchy’s Leila Fadel begins,

On Sept. 9, the day before Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Congress that things were getting better, Batoul Mohammed Ali Hussein came to Baghdad for the day.

As Ms. Hussein (a customs clerk from Diyala who had just dropped off and picked up paperwork) emerged from the customs office near Khilani Square, writes Fadel, a Blackwater-guarded convoy of U.S. Embassy SUVs appeared. When the Blackwater guards yelled at some construction workers to get out of the way, the laborers instead threw rocks — and the Blackwater crew opened fire.

Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater security guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she’d held in her arms fluttered down the street.

In the next minutes, four other Iraqis were shot dead. And so began eight violent days that would lead Iraqi officials to call for Blackwater’s banning from their country.

“Immune to good advice”

Good morning.

In an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Mark Sauer quotes retired major general Paul Eaton describing the Bush Administration as “immune to good advice.” Lord knows, that applies in spades to BushCo — and equally, it seems, to one of its favorite pals, Pervez Musharraf.

Musharraf’s weekend crackdown on opposition politicians left 200 or more in detention (to the express dismay of the U.S. and others) and has now, again, run him up against his strongest foe. Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry today ordered the detainees’ immediate release. No word yet on its efficacy, but the AP says Chaundry “issued the decision after summoning police and government officials to explain who signed an order to close roads into the capital to prevent a planned lawyer-led protest against the filing of Musharraf’s nomination papers.”

An earlier version of the story, now disappeared, described a man’s distress at being unable to deliver his ill father to an Islamabad hospital. “I hope your father doesn’t die,” a commander told him, “but I have my orders … .” Since Pakistanis can’t vote directly for or against him — an electoral college made up of the National Assembly, Senate, and provincial assemblies does that — no problem here for Perve.

“We will elect him while in uniform. It’s being done in line with the law and the constitution,” the chief minister of Punjab province, a senior leader of Musharraf’s party, told Reuters. (And just in case the law and the constitution aren’t enough, it’s also being done within “a ring of police monitoring traffic passing through checkpoints and riot police standing by,” including around the Supreme Court.)

Yesterday, the AP quoted the Pakistani attorney general’s announcement that, should he lose the election, Musharraf will stay on as army chief. Naturally, Malik Mohammed Qayyum’s assurances (“There will be no martial law. There will be no emergency”) didn’t particularly ease riot-police-surrounded minds and certainly “failed to sway members of the opposition coalition.”

Meanwhile in Myanmar Burma . . .

Over the past few days Burma has suddenly jumped into the headlines, not to mention the photos and interactive graphics — along with the (London) Times‘, the Washington Post has especially good ones here and here (buttons at bottom) — as well as professional and amateur live-blogging.

The eyecatchers are vermilion or maroon and olive-drab: Buddhist monks being protected — where possible — by hand-holding civilians, lest they be shot at and clubbed by soldiers of a military junta running one of the two most corrupt countries in the world. Some papers dateline their coverage with the ancient name “Rangoon, Burma,” others adopt the junta’s nomenclature, “Yangon, Myanmar.” Whichever, the story is government mayhem perpetrated on nonviolent citizens — including, most famously, Nobel Peace Prizewinner Aung San Suu Kyi.

While her fellow Peace laureates the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu joined international calls for a peaceful resolution of the crisis, George W. Bush yesterday at the U.N. announced tighter economic and travel sanctions on Burma/Myanmar — narrowing them, for the first time since their establishment in 1997, according to WaPo, to specific individuals and their families. If the sanctions’ targets don’t like this, well, cherchez la femme:

Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch has consulted with administration officials on the matter. “Even though the generals in Burma are profoundly isolated from their own people and the world, they still have to bank somewhere and that makes them vulnerable,” he said. “There’s a vulnerability that’s never been exploited by the international community. If they can’t bank anywhere, they can’t buy things, including guns.”

Malinowski added that leaders of the junta may be surprised to find their access to cash cut off.

“It will have an impact,” he said, “when the wife of the leading general walks into his bedroom in the morning and starts screaming at him, ‘What happened to our money?’ “

Burma has occupied a prominent spot on the White House radar screen since first lady Laura Bush became personally upset about the situation. In recent weeks, she has called on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to urge more action on Burma and summoned reporters to condemn the government — unusually public moves by the first lady.

“Worse than Abu Ghraib”

Good morning.

What a novel experience to see, as between the State Department and the Department of Defense, the Pentagon wearing the whiter hat. But since these are George W. Bush’s State and DoD – Condi Rice’s shop as opposed to Bob Gates’s – the situation, though novel, is no real surprise.

Yesterday we learned that Rice is not only stonewalling Congress’s probe of Iraqi corruption but also trying to obstruct its investigation of Blackwater. The Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung dates the Iraqi-corruption strand (okay, yeah, a pun) from

late last month when the Nation magazine published an account of an internal memo by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. The 82-page draft document, which was subsequently widely leaked, said the Iraqi government was “not capable of even rudimentary enforcement” of its own anticorruption laws and would not meet “any reasonable timeline” for improvement.

On Sept. 10, [House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Henry] Waxman requested copies of all State Department reports on the subject and interviews with “knowledgeable” department officials. Saying it received no response, the committee then issued subpoenas on Sept. 20 for the documents and three officials.

Interviews with the officials were finally scheduled for yesterday, but on Monday night, Waxman’s letter said, the State Department sent an e-mail warning the committee of “redlines” that should not be crossed in the unclassified sessions. They included: “broad statements/assessments which judge or characterize the quality of Iraqi governance or the ability/determination of the Iraqi government to deal with corruption, including allegations that investigations were thwarted/stifled for political reasons; [and] statements/allegations concerning actions by specific individuals, such as the Prime Minister or other [Government of Iraq] officials, or regarding investigations of such officials.”

Woddysay?

Good morning.

Trying to keep track of what’s going down in and about Iraq became much harder on September 1, when the invaluable IraqSlogger site erected a $60/month subscription wall. Now, to us peons, all that’s visible there (after you enter http://www.iraqslogger.com in the address field twice, to get past a subscription ad) is the homepage with, at best, a few lines of the freshest stories and the headlines of earlier ones. Sometimes — as yesterday afternoon when the following appeared — this is frustrating beyond words.

Maliki: Shhhhhhhhhhh
Iraqi PM Asks That His Comments at NY CFR Not be Reported or Repeated

In an extraordinary move, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki insists that his comments at an hour-long forum at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York not be reported by any media or repeated by any participant in the meeting to anyone who might relay his comments to the …

Oh, for just a word or three more. To the ”… Iraqi people”? “… Bushies”? “… opposition forces”? “… world at large”? Woddysay?

Whatever it was, it almost worked. Besides Slogger, apparently only two other news outlets mention this speech, and only the Washington Post devotes a whole story to it, Karen DeYoung reaching page A15 with:

Civil war has been averted in Iraq and Iranian intervention there has “ceased to exist,” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said yesterday.

“I can’t say there is a picture of roses and flowers in Iraq,” Maliki told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “However, I can say that the greatest victory, of which I am proud . . . is stopping the explosion of a sectarian war.” That possibility, he said, “is now far away.”

DeYoung then straightfacedly records a number of other implausible statements, noting that Maliki

deftly dodged questions about last week’s incident in which employees of Blackwater, a private U.S. security firm, allegedly killed 11 Iraqi civilians. While “initial signs” are that “there was some wrongdoing from Blackwater,” he said, he will await the results of a U.S.-Iraqi investigation. He dismissed a statement by the interior minister in Baghdad that Blackwater will be banned from Iraq, saying the positions of the ministry and his office are “the same.”

He also, sez here, dismissed the Iraq-as-South-Korea-II scenario, claiming that Iraq and the U.S. are beginning to negotiate “a long-term multilateral treaty and not necessarily a long-term presence for troops.” He fears neither the Iranians nor the tribal Sunnis, etc., etc. In fact, to hear DeYoung tell it, though he toted no roses and flowers, his whole speech wafted a distinctly floral scent.

Only from the AP do we get an alternate version that perhaps explains Maliki’s concern for verbal security. Tucked into the middle of a report about his speech to “about 150 Shiite Muslims” at New York’s Khoei Islamic Center is this passage:

Before visiting the Islamic center, al-Maliki attended a session sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. An Iraqi official, who attended the event, said the Iraqi delegation was wary about the forum given the criticism al-Maliki has faced in the U.S. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the event was closed to the media.

At the council, al-Maliki, asked about the country’s various problems, took a jab at the Bush administration, saying that the build-up of Iraq’s forces after the collapse of Saddam’s regime, was not handled properly, the official said.

The Iraqi prime minister also said that the U.S. was in charge of all the ministerial portfolios and the now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority was behind the decision to specify that various top posts, such as the presidency and the premiership, be held by Kurds and Shiites, respectively, while a Sunni was to hold the defense portfolio.

Since AP characterizes this as an “unusually sharp rebuke,” doncha wonder what else may have accompanied it, and exactly how red the PM’s face became? Who questioned him, and how vigorously? Does “the U.S. was in charge of all the ministerial portfolios” refer only to CPA days or now as well? And how come the AP and WaPo seem to have heard such different speeches? Who was AP’s source, who WaPo’s, and what were their agendas? Why did apparently only those two attempt to access the speech at all?

Now, it may well be that what Nouri al-Maliki says matters little by now (see Pat Lang here, here, and — though a bit OT — here), but he’s still the prime minister of Iraq, and I think we deserve to know woddysay.

lotus

Six stories

Good morning.

This is an experiment: today my subject matter will simply be the first headline to attract my eyes in each of the six papers I daily follow, in the order I espy them. So let’s see what we’ve got here:

The New York Times:

Graft in U.S. Army Contracts Spread From Kuwait Base
By GINGER THOMPSON and ERIC SCHMITT
Maj. John Lee Cockerham was considered an unlikely success story in his hometown, but now he faces corruption charges related to contracts in Iraq.

His name may ring a bell for you, but we didn’t know until this lede story that John Lee Cockerham is one of 18 siblings who grew up without electricity or running water in northwest Louisiana, or that

[t]he congregation at New Friendship Baptist Church [of Castor, LA, pop. 200] celebrated his last promotion with a parade. At his sons’ baptism, he told fellow worshipers that he hoped to instill in his children the values he had wrested from hardship.

Less than 24 hours later Major Cockerham was behind bars, accused of orchestrating the largest single bribery scheme against the military since the start of the Iraq war. According to the authorities, the 41-year-old officer, with his wife and a sister, used an elaborate network of offshore bank accounts and safe deposit boxes to hide nearly $10 million in bribes from companies seeking military contracts.

A Pakistan where people matter

Good morning.

Though there’s plenty more on Blackwater and Iraq out there this morning (notably, in the New York Times, John F. Burns‘

As the Blackwater machines cleared the landing zone’s fence that day, the American officer leaned toward a companion and, over the thwump-thwump of the Black Hawk’s rotors, voiced his contempt. “If I’ve got one ambition left here,” he said, “it’s to see one of those showboats fall out.”

and, in the Sunday Times of London, this) — I’ve been wanting to spread some ketchup on Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan for days. Since last we looked, it’s been a busy place:

Enough to give you a headache

Good morning.

As it evolves, this Blackwater story not only becomes more remarkable, more chilling, more horrifically representative of the entire Iraq occupation, it also continually demonstrates the widely-varying usefulness of our news-suppliers.

Yesterday the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad — “in consultation with the Iraqi authorities” (though the spokeswoman so claiming “would not elaborate on whether the Iraqis had approved,” according to the New York Times) — sent its Blackwater guards rolling out of the Green Zone again, grinding to dust any last pretense of Iraqi sovereignty. NYT’s Andrew E. Kramer can’t tell us whether the resumed convoys signaled “some political compromise between the State Department and the Iraqi government, … or whether it simply meant that American officials felt they could not afford to remain grounded.” “There was,” he writes, “no official Iraqi response.”

Really? The Washington Post’s Joshua Partlow and Sudarsan Raghavan got one:

Bassam Ridha, a senior adviser to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, conceded that the Iraqi government, at least for now, cannot follow through on a ban on Blackwater, even though the firm has been operating without a license for more than a year. “The reality of the matter is we can’t do that,” Ridha said.

Toujours la même chose: though NYT’s editors have written more completely and honestly about the Iraq story than WaPo’s, in reporting-on-the-ground it’s always tended to be the other way around. Partlow and Raghavan lede:

Iraq’s probe into a deadly shooting by Blackwater USA in Baghdad last weekend has expanded to include allegations about the security firm’s involvement in six other violent episodes this year that left at least 10 Iraqis dead.

The incidents include the killing of three guards at a state-run media complex and the shooting death of an Iraqi journalist outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, chief spokesman for the Interior Ministry.

They also speak to a former senior adviser to the Interior Ministry intelligence directorate that oversees private security, whose advised caution about Khalaf’s statements raises a chicken-or-egg issue:

He said Iraqi authorities frequently made charges against private security firms, including Blackwater, that were not supported by evidence. [Matthew] Degn said the inflated accounts heightened the powerlessness Iraqi officials felt over their inability to control Blackwater.

Having passed along Degn’s victim-blaming, WaPo’s reporters then detail some of Khalaf’s allegations, including that the Iraqi government has “videotapes of some attacks, license plate numbers of Blackwater vehicles involved and eyewitness accounts implicating Blackwater.” Khalaf’s ministry has drafted legislation, they add, to place strict controls on foreign security firms, which legislation a Shiite member predicts parliament “would unite behind.”

Such may make Iraqi parliamentarians feel better for a spell, I suppose, but in the meantime, reports the Los Angeles Times’ Ned Parker, their and the Americans’ views of the state-of-play have little in common.

A senior Iraqi lawmaker, Sami Askari, said officials would be informed of Blackwater’s whereabouts, but [spokeswoman Mirembe] Nantongo denied that the embassy would be providing them precise details of their missions.

“This time they will be restricted; they will be required to inform the Iraqi government about their movements until the end of the investigation,” said Askari, an advisor to Maliki.

Parker re-interviews Brookings’ Peter Singer, finding him still skeptical that the joint Iraqi/American commission announced earlier this week will be able to pull off much in the way of change. “Based on the past track record, I don’t have a lot of evidence to base that hope on, but maybe this [event] changes the game,” Singer tells Parker, adding that State’s insistence on conducting its own investigation parallel to the Iraqi inquiry is “utter silliness. All it does is guarantee we will have two versions of the story, and further the disconnect and sense of double standards.”

Parker’s own skepticism shows through in his subtle use of quotemarks as he reports Condoleezza Rice’s statement Friday that she has “ordered a ‘full and complete review’” of security procedures for U.S. diplomats and issued “‘directives’ to State Department officials to study all facets of security practices.” In her announcement, he notes, Rice also “made a point of defending Blackwater personnel”:

“We have needed and received the protection of Blackwater for a number of years now, and they have lost their own people in protecting our own people — and that needs to be said — in extremely dangerous circumstances,” she said.

“No doubt,” you can hear Parker murmur as he returns to Singer’s opinion that Blackwater’s behavior has done nothing but bind Iraqis to extremism (“It has hindered rather than helped us in the counterinsurgency”). He then adds support from a Shiite cleric in Najaf (“It is important that these companies be regulated by the law, and therefore an apology from Rice is not enough. Thousands of Iraqi children, women and elderly have been killed — as the Americans put it — by accident”) and from an anonymous civilian contractor (“We think it’s hard to give Blackwater the benefit of the doubt. Even among their peer group, we are also tired of having guns pulled on us and being generally abused”).

Near the end of his story, Parker mentions yesterday’s teleconferenced-from-Baghdad boasts of Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, Jr., that “[t]he level of violence is way, way down,” and that “about 8% of neighborhoods [in Baghdad] are being ‘retained,’ or held, by Iraqi forces, with U.S. forces in those areas taking a supervisory role.” Agence France Presse’s coverage of the general’s oooin’-'n’-wowin’ adds more specifics:

[He] said violence has declined sharply in the city and more than half of its 474 neighborhoods, or “mahalas,” are under the joint control of US and Iraqi forces, up from about 19 percent in June.

But the percentage of neighborhoods that have moved to what the military terms the “retain” phase of the security operation, in which Iraqi forces are in the lead and US troops are on standby, has remained stubbornly small.

“This is dynamic, and 8.2 percent is where we stand today,” said Fil, who commands the US-led Multi-National Division in Baghdad. That compared to seven percent in June. [Emph. mine]

“Dynamic” — wouldn’t you love to have heard Fil’s exact inflection of that word? Wonder if he deployed an exclamation point to escort it (which would be sorta silly, but with these people, you never know). Anyhow, surely Fil’s performance was somehow more convincing than the one that BushCo’s Dana Perino left on tape at TPM yesterday.

Q Why do you have to have private contractors who have, on the face of it, a lousy record?
MS. PERINO: Well, I think that there is because — I think that is because there is a need. I don’t know why it was originally set up that way….

(There’s much more on this tape and transcript, which I suggest you check out even though it gets no better.)

What DOES get much better is the report from Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor of The Guardian, that “the Iraq boom for private security firms is coming to an end, even without the Blackwater shooting row, according to those in the trade.”

“It will not be the same again,” said Andy Bearpark, former director of operations and infrastructure for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and now director-general of the recently formed British Association of Private Security Companies. The $18bn (£9bn) the US paid out for Iraqi reconstruction will not be repeated, he said.

Richard Fenning, chief executive of Control Risks, the British company which has 200 employees in southern Iraq, mainly protecting officials from the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, echoed the point. “The situation has deteriorated. American money has dried up on reconstruction. So there is a lull,” he said. “It sounds counterintuitive, but Iraq has got too dangerous for security companies to boom there.”

Hence, write MacMacAskill and Norton-Taylor, the need to diversify:

Companies are looking at work in other countries, such as Afghanistan and Sudan. Blackwater is diversifying into training US law enforcement officers. Some companies may also move into helping protect humanitarian work, though aid organisations are nervous about this.

John Hilary, War on Want’s director of campaigns and policy, said: “There is a massive difference between the provision of security and paramilitary services and the hearts and minds work of delivering humanitarian aid. They are not compatible industries.”

I’ll say. So perhaps you won’t be surprised by this USAToday report:

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said Friday. …

The officials could not say whether the investigation would result in indictments, how many Blackwater employees are involved or if the company itself, which has won hundreds of millions of dollars in government security contracts since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is under scrutiny.

In Saturday’s editions, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that two former Blackwater employees — Kenneth Wayne Cashwell of Virginia Beach, and William Ellsworth “Max” Grumiaux of Clemmons, N.C. — are cooperating with federal investigators.

And guess what? This seems to involve those weapons that General Petraeus let go missing, which then ended up in the hands of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) for the Turks to complain about. And guess what else? The investigation

was first brought to light by State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who mentioned it, perhaps inadvertently, this week while denying he had improperly blocked fraud and corruption probes in Iraq and Afghanistan. [Emph. mine]

(As Pat Lang likes to say) Dommage! But un autre dommage (besides my French) is what Juan Cole (and McClatchy) reported yesterday:

The US kidnapped another Iranian from Iraqi Kurdistan, alleging that he is an officer in the Quds Force section of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and an arms smuggler. The Kurdistan Regional Authority says that he is Aghai Farhadi, a trade representative of Kirmanshah Province in Iran.

Either the US suspicions about Farhadi are baseless, or the Kurds are the major conduit for Iranian arms into Iraq. Five other Iranians were kidnapped from Irbil by the US military. Farhadi would not be doing what he was doing in Sulaimaniya unless he was the guest of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. If he was smuggling in arms, he was smuggling them to the Peshmerga, the Kurdish paramilitary, which is allied with the United States. Presumably this means that the Peshmerga is either transfering the weapons to the Badr Corps or selling the arms off on the Iraqi black market. If this scenario is correct, then it is pure propaganda for [BushCo] to complain so loudly and bitterly about Iranian meddling in Iraq, when it is being facilitated by some Kurds, who are in turn putative US allies.

Iranian arms, Petraeus-Blackwater arms — gosh, who can keep ‘em all straight? (Probably not NYT.)

In case you’re wondering why this post is appearing somewhat later than usual, it’s because I’ve had to cut away from it from time to time to deal with a poisonous headache. Now that the post is finished, my headache has lifted, but I worry that following all these twists may have transferred it to you. If so, I apologize. This is a danger we encounter in paying attention to Iraq — a negligible one compared to that of encountering Blackwater.

UPDATE: See McClatchy’s Feds probe Blackwater weapons shipments and Blackwater incident referred to Iraqi magistrate, as well as NYT’s Security Firm Faces Criminal Charges in Iraq.

lotus