Things We Never Hear About Iraq

I mentioned yesterday that Nouri al-Maliki's relative died in a US airstrike, in an incident that is straining relations between the US and Iraq at a time when the status of forces agreement is being negotiated. This is getting almost no coverage in the American media, and really that's not an isolated circumstance.

For instance, Spencer Ackerman has uncovered a security assessment from an Iraqi contractor that is wildly different with the official "We're winning!" line that we're fed from the military and the conservative noise machine:

The following charts appeared in GardaWorld's June 30 intelligence briefing for its clients and were obtained by The Washington Independent. On page 2 of the briefing, GardaWorld prints two charts tracing the trajectory of security both Iraq-wide and in Baghdad specifically. Take a look at the Iraq-wide chart:



As you can see, the incident level spikes and ebbs, but responsible statisticians will see -- as signified by the black bar -- that the daily incident frequency is basically flat since October 1. If anything, it's ticked up somewhat, from about 50 daily security incidents in October to about 70 through the winter and coming in at around 60 presently.

Then there's the very long Pentagon study finally admitting that the war planning was botched at best, nonexistent at worst, and commanders who requested more troops were totally rebuffed (but remember, Bush always listens to the commanders on the ground).

We probably won't hear too much about this, either. From Reuters:

The Iraqi government sued dozens of companies, including oil giant Chevron Corp., for more than $10 billion on Monday, saying they paid kickbacks to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's government under the U.N. oil-for-food program.

The civil lawsuit, filed in U.S. federal court in Manhattan, seeks to recover damages from companies investigated by a U.N.-commissioned inquiry, claiming they cheated the Iraqi people out of benefits of the $67 billion U.N. program.

What's hilarious about oil-for-food is that the only individuals who have been indicted thus far in the probe are two American oilmen, also implicated in this lawsuit. For all the talk of the dreaded UN, it was the multinationals bribing Saddam all along.

It's amazing what you can find out about Iraq if you dig on the Internet for hours and hours instead of passively consuming broadcast media. Must be why everyone's so well-informed...