"In Iraq," the driver answers, "broken is the normal."

[Rose Siding]

Drivers shuttling Westerners around this beleaguered city change course frequently to throw off kidnappers. But this about-face is sudden and unnerving. Our driver is taking us the wrong way up a highway off-ramp....

"Is this normal?" I ask. "I mean, driving the wrong way like this?"

"In Iraq," the driver answers, "broken is the normal."
...
A 25-year-old whiz who keeps our computers running arrives at work one day and announces that his morning commute took him past a car stalled on one of the bridges crossing the Tigris.

"I look over, and the guy is leaning back in his seat," he says, dragging heavily on the first of many cigarettes. "Bullet in his head."

A colleague reports a similar scene on the way to the airport. But with two dead.

Another interpreter, in his early 50s, delivers a report from his troubled neighborhood in Baghdad. "There were three bodies piled on the street last night. This morning they were still there. Nobody moves them."

LAT

There have been other moving, in depth pieces in which the reporters chronicle the conditions of their professional Iraqi associates. Where else can they turn, really, for news to report?

In this one, the Times' Rainey explains that many of them -drivers, interpreters, reporters- either have left, have plans to leave, or are desperate for money to leave Iraq. When they've gone what information, beyond the Barbara Starr-satisfying Pentagon briefings, will there be left to impart to us, the financiers of this catastrophe?

Another interpreter tells Rainey that notices were posted at his home explaining that women ("over 12") would be targeted if they didn't wear a veil:

"Maybe," I suggest, "it would be safer now if your wife wore the hijab?"