Iraq

Kevin Sites, the cameraman who filmed a U.S. Marine shooting a wounded prisoner in Fallujah, has written a detailed and powerful account, addressed to the soldiers, of what he saw and his decision to release the footage. "This week I've even been shocked to see myself painted as some kind of anti-war activist," he writes. "Anyone who has seen my reporting on television or has read the dispatches on this website is fully aware of the lengths I've gone to play it straight down the middle. ... .

"While some charge that embedded reporters are often too protective of the military, [U.S. Representative] Sylvestre Reyes (D-Texas) feels they are dangerous loose cannons, and says it's time to consider revoking their privileges," reports Editor and Publisher. During a House Armed Services Committee discussion of the videotaping of a U.S. Marine shooting an injured Fallujah insurgent in a mosque, Reyes said, "We don't want to know everything that's going on in the field. ...

"George W. Bush has been criticized for disdaining fact in favor of faith in his own instincts. But he is savvy about the dangers that information can present to his authority over the government and the American people," writes Robert Parry. "That is why the first priority of his second term has been the elimination of the few government sources of information that could challenge the images he wants to project to the public. Bush doesn't want the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency portraying his Iraq and other foreign policies as abject failures or reckless adventures.

Robert Blackwill, the top White House advisor on Iraq, "has taken a lobbying post at Barbour Griffith & Rogers three months prior to slated elections there," reports O'Dwyer's.