Managing The News In Iraq

Tim Grieve at Salon's "War Room," which has been redesigned from when I last visited and is now great, has a post up about how well the Bush Administration has stopped the flow of information coming out of Iraq:

In an interview with Foreign Policy, Rod Nordland, the magazine's chief foreign correspondent and former Baghdad bureau chief, says that conditions in Iraq are "much worse" than they're described in the U.S. press.

The reason? The Bush administration does a "great job of managing the news," and the military has begun to crack down on embedded reporters who might otherwise offer a clear assessment of facts on the ground. "Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously," Nordland says. "They want to know your slant on a story -- they use the word 'slant' -- what you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they don't like what you have done before, they refuse to take you. There are cases where individual reporters have been blacklisted because the military wasn't happy with the work they had done on embed."

The correspondent quoted in the piece, Rob Nordland, does say that some of the news does trickle out, because it's simply impossible to put a band-aid on the Liberty Bell without anyone noticing the big crack.

"It is certainly hard to hide the fact that in the third year of this war, Iraqis are only getting electricity for about 5 to 10 percent of the day," Nordland says. "Living conditions have gotten so much worse, violence is at an even higher tempo, and the country is on the verge of civil war. The administration has been successful to the extent that most Americans are not aware of just how dire it is and how little progress has been made. They keep talking about how the Iraqi army is doing much better and taking over responsibilities, but for the most part that's not true."

I mean, statistics are statistics, they're out there and the reporters covering this occupation can find them. For example, there's this startling story about the rise in bodies at the Baghdad morgue:

The central morgue said Tuesday that it received 1,595 bodies last month, 16 percent more than in May, in a tally that showed the pace of killing here has increased since the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Al Qaeda's leader in Iraq.

Baghdad, home to one-fourth of Iraq's population, has slowly descended into a low-grade civil war in some neighborhoods, with Sunni and Shiite militias carrying out systematic sectarian killings that clear whole city blocks.

To a large extent, control of the capital means control of the country, and Baghdad is at the center of efforts by American military officials and the new Iraqi government to stem the tide of violence.

After Mr. Zarqawi was killed on June 7 in an American airstrike, a security plan was put into effect, with thousands of troops operating new checkpoints throughout the city, but it has had little effect.

The truth is that lots of civilians are dying, as are troops and policemen and security personnel. The country's infrastructure output is still negligible. Mosques are being bombed as US troops are making a major incursion into Sadr City. These latest scandals about rape and murder by US forces are so severe that the Prime Minister had to ask for better training of OUR "reckless" troops (Maybe letting neo-Nazis in the force might have something to do with that).

The President, for a couple days in a row now, has acknowledged that Iraq is tough sledding. Why won't he allow America to see it?