Three stories on Iraq in today's New York Times, all on A10.
Damien Cave gets the longest, entitled "Bombs Imperil G.I.'s Searching for Captured Comrades." You learn that the search has already claimed lives (a US soldier stepped on a bomb in Rushdimullah on Thursday, yesterday apparently another US soldier stepped on a bomb outside Latafiya). Davey Petraues thinks tossing out words like "tangled" make him sound tough and saying that they "think" they "know" (it's like a really bad episode of Friends -- "They don't know that we know they know we know") who captured the soldiers. Davey tells Cave, "We know who that guy is." So why are the 3 US soldiers still missing? File it under "When Tough Talk Goes Soft." (He also offers a belief that I'm not going to repeat because I don't trust his gut and don't think creating "suspense" does the family and friends of the missing any good.) (Brendy Nelson couldn't have come up with a worse soundbyte.)
Kirk Semple's "Gunmen in Iraqi Army Uniforms Kill 15 in Eastern Village" tells readers that Baquba was the site of an attack yesterday when reported Sunnis, wearing army uniforms, were waived through by Shi'ite guards and then commenced on a killing spree. You also learn that the Green Zone was attacked while Tony Blair was visiting, that 20 corpses were discovered in Baghdad, that the heavily fortified Green Zone is under "near-daily" rocket and mortar attacks (shades of the British base in Basra) and that "Many officials working in the enclave have begun wearing body armor outside their offices."
David S. Cloud rounds out the charmed ones with a story about the death of a suspect killed by the US military. What do you say to that? Well the Iraqi prisons are overcrowed! Cloud gives you a timeline (an 'official' timeline by and for officials) but forget about digging deep, he doesn't even scoop shallow.
New content at The Third Estate Sunday Review:
Truest statement of the week
A Note to Our Readers
Editorial: Who's failing?
TV: The lows and the really lows
1 Book, 10 Minutes
So you wanna be a war resister
The Nation Stats
Yo George
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