DeeKnow’s Grotto

If like me you've mostly given up on watching the evening news on television due to its general absence of depth and objectivity, and if you're looking for a more independent, on-the-ground, fly-on-the-wall sort of coverage on the situation in Iraq, then you'd do well to check out Chris Allbritton's web diary Back-To-Iraq

Over the last two years he's made a couple of extended independent-journo type excursions into Iraq and reported on his take on things to his own private website. His reporting is free of the usual editorial reivew that output from these sort of operators usual receives. Last week he finally reached Baghdad again to look at the current state of affairs, and this is some of what he's had to say...

The city might not be as dangerous as it appears on television back in America, but then again, it might be. I can’t tell yet, and I’ve not been able to interact with many Iraqis yet. The few that I have have been sullen and not very friendly. Not like last year.

He goes on to say...

the Iraqis are, as expected, fed up with the American presence ....  one of the main concerns is not Abu Ghraib, or violence in the south, he said, but corruption in the oil-for-food program ... The searches, the guns, the humvees in the streets, they’re all reminders of what the Iraqis consider the petty humiliations of Saddam’s time.

None of which is really all that suprising, but his writing (and the comments left by others) makes for relatively interesting reading on the situation. Bookmark it, its worth keeping an eye on.

11:43:13 PM