From US Embassy in Iraq, a Grim Report -Buried by Bush Visit

[Rose Siding]

From the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, a stark compendium of its local employees' daily hardships and pressing fears
Sunday, June 18, 2006; Page B01

Hours before President Bush left on a surprise trip last Monday to the Green Zone in Baghdad for an upbeat assessment of the situation there, the U.S. Embassy in Iraq painted a starkly different portrait of increasing danger and hardship faced by its Iraqi employees. This cable, marked "sensitive" and obtained by The Washington Post, outlines in spare prose the daily-worsening conditions for those who live outside the heavily guarded international zone: harassment, threats and the employees' constant fears that their neighbors will discover they work for the U.S. government.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/16/AR2006061601768.html

We can't know who in the embassy is part of the CIA's Baghdad station, but if the same standard is applied to those who produce less that sunny news, someone better start packing.

Last month Silverstein at Harpers reported-

A number of current and former intelligence officials have told me that the administration's war on internal dissent has crippled the CIA's ability to provide realistic assessments from Iraq. “The system of reporting is shut down,” said one person familiar with the situation. “You can't write anything honest, only fairy tales.”

The New York Times and others have reported that in 2003, the CIA station chief in Baghdad authored several special field reports that offered extremely negative assessments of the situation on the ground in Iraq—assessments that later proved to be accurate. The field reports, known as “Aardwolfs,” were angrily rejected by the White House. Their author—who I'm told was a highly regarded agency veteran named Gerry Meyer—was soon pushed out of the CIA, in part because his reporting angered the See No Evil crowd within the Bush administration. “He was a good guy,” one recently retired CIA official said of Meyer, “well-wired in Baghdad, and he wrote a good report. But any time this administration gets bad news, they say the critics are assholes and defeatists, and off we go down the same path with more pressure on the accelerator.”

http://www.pamspaulding.com.nyud.net:8090/graphics/seenoevil.jpg

[kenny blankenship]

1. "reporting is shut down,...only fairy tales."

which is the recipe for generating hundreds of Hadithas. We dream the fairy tale, Iraqis live the nightmare.

[niceypoo]

2. Its the ferry tales that are slowly suffocating the GOP

Idiot Rove in action. Americans see through the "ferry tales" now.

[Rose Siding]

3. Maybe, but the press is reporting on the bush "recovery"

while this gets a Saturday paragraph.