Fish trees, of course

Andrew Keh has an article in The New York Times about fish habitats:

For people like Pete Alexander, the best gifts arrive after the holidays. That is when he receives hundreds of unsold Christmas trees deemed dross by most everyone else and makes them useful again, turning them into habitats for fish in otherwise barren lakes. “Christmas trees are perfect; just the right size and weight,” said Mr. Alexander, the fisheries program manager for the East Bay Regional Park District, which is based in Oakland, California. “And we get them free, because vendors want to get rid of them.”
The trees are taken to a different lake each year; there, volunteers bundle them and secure them to the lake bed. Within days, the newly denuded branches become covered with algae, which attract aquatic insects, fish, and, ultimately, fishermen. Similar projects are taking place around the country this year, from Helena, Montana to Hernando, Mississippi.
Bryan Ostlund, director of the Pacific Northwest Christmas Tree Association, said vendors faced a difficult task in predicting how many trees to stock each year. They often end up with a surplus.
Phil Londrico, a tree wholesaler who lives in Manhattan, said retailers he supplies are usually left with five percent to ten percent of their inventory. According to the Census of Horticultural Specialties by the Department of Agriculture, wholesalers sold more than 12.8 million Christmas trees in 2009. “That’s a lot of trees,” Mr. Londrico said.
Most retailers have their surplus turned into mulch or wood chips. In New Orleans, trees have been used to restore coastlines destroyed in hurricanes. One seller said he took some to the zoo to feed the elephants.
But aquatic habitat projects have become increasingly popular destinations for leftover Christmas trees. “They last a pretty long time; about five years in the lake,” said Lee Mitchell, a natural resource specialist for the Army Corp of Engineers, who is leading a similar campaign this year in Shelbyville, Illinois. He expects to receive five hundred or more trees. “Fish use them like crazy. And the fishermen really like them, too.” To lure volunteers for the labor, Mr. Mitchell offers an incentive. “If they help, we give them the GPS coordinates of the trees,” Mr. Mitchell said of the volunteers, many of whom are anglers. “You can go right to the spot, and it’ll be good fishing there.”

Forty years in Cuba should've been enough

colin Moynihan has an article in The New York Times about a forlorn hijacker out of the past:

The crime evoked a touch of nostalgia, tracing back to an era when political activism and crime sometimes went hand in hand. Hijackings, especially to Cuba, seemed commonplace. Luis Armando Peña Soltren was one of three men accused of hijacking Pan American Flight 281, bound for Puerto Rico but taken to Cuba on 24 November 1968. The other two men have long since pleaded guilty and served their sentences. After forty years living as a fugitive in Cuba, Mr. Soltren, now 67, received his sentence in Federal District Court in Manhattan. He walked slowly into the courtroom, with short, silvery hair and bowed shoulders. Then he stood before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein and read for fifteen minutes from a piece of paper.
Through an interpreter, he apologized to the court, to his family, and to the passengers and crew of the plane he helped hijack. Mr. Soltren, who surrendered to United States authorities in 2009 and pleaded guilty in 2010 to conspiracy to commit air piracy, interfering with flight crew members, and kidnapping, attributed his misdeeds to “lack of experience, lack of patience and lack of maturity”. He then asked the judge for leniency, saying, “I beg you to please take into consideration my age today and that I turned myself in voluntarily, completely voluntarily, to justice in this country.”
Judge Hellerstein was unmoved, sentencing Mr. Soltren to fifteen years in a federal prison without the possibility of parole. His lawyers had asked for a sentence of no more than four years. “I try to imagine how I would feel if someone put a knife to my throat or a gun to my back, and I wonder how many nightmares would follow,” Judge Hellerstein told the defendant. “I wonder even in your private moments with God whether there can ever be enough remorse.”
The proceeding resolved one of the more unusual hijacking stories in recent decades, one that Mr. Soltren said was motivated by familial ties rather than political ideology. He said that he joined a group of radical Puerto Rican nationalists in hijacking Flight 281, because he wanted to visit his ailing father in Cuba. And, he said, he returned to the United States, where prison time was all but assured, because he wanted to be with his wife, who left Cuba for the United States in 2004.
State Department officials said that the Cuban government had given its authorization for Mr. Soltren, who is a United States citizen, to leave Havana, but that no negotiations over the matter had taken place. His return was not part of any formal extradition process, the officials added. Mr. Soltren had been in contact with the United States Interests Section in Havana for some years and had expressed a desire to return, government officials said.
During the hijacking, Mr. Soltren and two other men took control of the Boeing 707, armed with knives and guns that they had smuggled aboard. They ordered the pilot to divert the flight to Havana, and as the plane approached José Martí International Airport, it received an escort from Cuban MiG-21 air force jets. Nobody was injured during the hijacking, and the crew and passengers were returned to the United States.
The others who joined Mr. Soltren on the plane, José Rafael Rios Cruz and Miguel Castro, were sentenced in the mid-1970s to fifteen and twelve years in prison, respectively, for threatening the lives of flight crew members, but served sentences of seven years and four years.
A fourth man who was not on the flight, but was described then as a leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement, was charged as a co-conspirator, but was acquitted at trial.
In a letter to Judge Hellerstein, Mr. Soltren’s lawyer, James Neuman, asked that his client serve fewer than four years in prison. He wrote that Mr. Soltren was sincerely remorseful and had begun contacting United States authorities in 1979 with the aim of surrendering. “Unlike his co-defendants, Mr. Soltren never committed any other crime and was never even arrested, before or after this hijacking,” Mr. Neuman wrote. “No conceivable justification exists for treating Mr. Soltren more harshly than his co-defendants.”
But federal prosecutors asked in their own letter for a lengthy term of imprisonment. They wrote that Mr. Soltren should not be credited with trying to return to the United States before 2009, because he ended various earlier communications with the authorities when they did not agree to conditions that he had established for his surrender. In addition, prosecutors said, Mr. Soltren had behaved violently aboard Flight 281, holding a knife to the neck of a flight attendant and pointing a .38 caliber Colt Cobra at the flight engineer. “The defendant’s crimes placed in grave danger more than one hundred people,” the prosecutors wrote, adding: “The occupants of the airplane were required to endure a period of substantial fear.”
After issuing his sentence, Judge Hellerstein permitted Mr. Soltren’s wife, Silvia González Peña, and one of his four daughters, Yanira, to speak briefly with him before he was led from the courtroom. Mr. Soltren, wearing dark-blue prison clothes, slumped in a wooden chair and appeared to blink back tears as the two women spoke to him in a mixture of Spanish and English. “I love you so much,” Yanira said. Mr. Soltren nodded and a moment later he rose and returned to a cell.

Rico says it's hard not to feel sorry for the guy (what a maroon, hijacking a plane over Puerto Rican independence), but it's a case of 'do the crime, do the time'...

Oh, great, a chink in the armor

Rico says it might just be typical Chinese bluster, but Christopher Bodeen has an artice via the AP about them having a stealth fighter:

Photos leaked online that appear to show a prototype of China's first stealth fighter jet were discussed in state media. a move that supports claims the country's military aviation program is advancing faster than expected.
Both the English and Chinese language editions of the Global Times ran front-page articles about photos of what appears to be a future J-20 fighter, along with extensive reports on the buzz the pictures have generated overseas. Photos of the plane appeared on unofficial military news websites and hobbyist blogs last week.
The Global Times did not comment on the authenticity of the pictures but, since the government wields extensive control over state media, the report's appearance and the fact that censors have not removed images from websites suggest a calculated move to leak the information into the public sphere. That would reflect the growing confidence of the traditionally secretive People's Liberation Army, which is pushing for greater influence and bigger budgets.
But the U.S. Defense Department said it wasn't worried about the reports. "It is not of concern that they are working on a fifth-generation fighter," Marine Colonel Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman, said, since the Chinese are "still having difficulties with their fourth-generation fighter."
Calls to the spokesman's office at the Defense Ministry rang unanswered.
Aviation websites said the photos were taken from outside a fence at the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute's airfield in southwestern China. The plane appeared to be undergoing a taxiing test of the sort that precedes an actual flight test.
A future Chinese stealth fighter has long been considered an inevitability. Deputy air force chief He Weirong told state broadcaster CCTV in November of 2009 that China's fourth-generation fighter, a reference to stealth technology, would begin flight testing soon and could enter service within eight to ten years.
China's aviation industry, both military and civilian, has made rapid progress in recent years, but still relies heavily on imported technology. Propulsion technology has been a particular problem, with Russian engines still employed on China's homemade J-10 fighter jets and the J-11, a copy of Russia's Su-27 fighter jet.
Stealth technology is even more difficult to master because it relies on systems to hide the presence of the plane while equipping the pilot with enough information to attack an enemy. Emissions must be hidden and the plane's fuselage sculpted to avoid detection by radar and infrared sensors.
Chinese progress in that field calls into question U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' decision to cap production of the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter at 187 planes. Supporters of the F-22 have warned of growing threats from China, as well as Russia, which has developed a stealth prototype that is already in the test flight stage.
Analysis of the J-20 photos shows it to be larger than either the Russian or U.S. planes, likely allowing it fly farther and carry heavier weapons.

Rico says it's unlikely that China will be able to build many of these (they're expensive; that's why we have less than 200 of them) but, just in case, we'll now need to fund some R&D into counter-stealth technology. (And the war continues...)

Political statement for the day

NPR had a segment on recent campaign slogans, but they missed the best (and most traditional) one:

Carthago delenda est            "Carthage must be destroyed"

Rico says, hey, if it was good enough for Cato the Elder, it's good enough for him...

More on old men

Rico says his friend Bob sends along this splendid joke:

An old prospector shuffled into town leading a mule. The old man headed straight for the only saloon to clear his parched throat. He walked up and tied his old mule to the hitch rail. As he stood there, brushing some of the dust from his face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.
The young gunslinger looked at the old man and laughed, saying: "Hey, old man, have you ever danced?"
The old man looked up at the gunslinger and said: "No, I never did dance. Never really wanted to."
A crowd had gathered as the gunslinger grinned and said: "Well, you old fool, you're gonna dance now," and started shooting at the old man's feet. The old prospector, not wanting to get a toe blown off, started hopping around like a flea on a hot skillet.
When his last bullet had been fired, the young gunslinger, still laughing, holstered his gun and turned to go back into the saloon.
The old man stepped to his pack mule, pulled out a double-barreled shotgun, and cocked both hammers. The loud clicks carried clearly through the desert air, and the crowd stopped laughing immediately.
The young gunslinger heard the sound too, and turned around very slowly. The silence was almost deafening. The crowd watched as the young gunman stared at the old timer and the large gaping holes of those twin barrels.
The barrels of the shotgun never wavering in the old man's hands, he quietly said: "Son, you ever licked a mule's ass?"
The gunslinger swallowed hard and said: "No sir, but I've always wanted to."

There are a few lessons for us all here:

Never be arrogant.
Don't waste ammunition.
Whiskey makes you think you're smarter than you are.
Always make sure you know who has the power.
Don't mess with old men; they didn't get old by being stupid.

I just love a story with a happy ending, don't you?

Rico says it's a lovely notion, and one he heartily endorses it, but when was the last time you saw a flea, much less one in a skillet?

Amazing, big or small

Jim Robbins has an article in The New York Times about the flight of birds:

The flying abilities of even the most prosaic bird put airplane maneuvers to shame, and experts at the University of Montana Flight Laboratory are cognizant of that every day. “Birds can do some pretty spectacular things,” said Kenneth P. Dial, a biologist who, in 1988, founded the lab at a field station near the University of Montana. “They can go from forty miles an hour to zero and land on a branch that’s moving, all in a couple of seconds. It’s inspiring.”
Dr. Dial and Bret W. Tobalske, a biologist and the director of the lab, are obsessed with trying to bridge the gap in flying abilities between humans and birds. At a laboratory filled with wind tunnels, high-speed cameras, lasers, surgical equipment, and a device that generates clouds of olive oil, they and several graduate students try to divine the secrets of bird flight.
In a quiet field, Dr. Dial, 57, with a shaved head and goatee, stands out with his evangelical zeal about understanding bird flight. He has hosted a television show on adventures in bird-watching, and is so enthusiastic about flight that he and his son, Terry, also a biologist, are planning to fly around the world as pilot and co-pilot.
Dr. Dial’s nearly thirty years of studying the functional morphology of all kinds of birds have led him and others at the lab to numerous insights into ecology, biodiversity, airplane design, aerospace, and even paleontology. In a recent paper, Dr. Dial and a graduate student, Brandon E. Jackson, presented a novel idea about how some dinosaurs used their proto-wings; a possible step in the evolution of flight. They based their paper on the observation of day-old Australian brush turkey chicks.
The laboratory, at Fort Missoula, was once a stable for the United States Cavalry. What makes it unique as a lab, though, is its location in the wilderness of western Montana, with bald eagles, peregrine falcons, meadowlarks, ducks, and other wild birds in the mountains and rivers right outside the door.
Dr. Dial says some of his most important observations have been made watching a bird glide by while he is fly fishing, and then heading back to the lab with a new theory to test.
After observing woodpeckers in the lab’s wind tunnel both flying and “bounding”— gliding missilelike with their wings tucked, a behavior not previously identified in these birds— Dr. Tobalske was able to see the same gliding a few hundred yards out the door, which confirmed it was not a product of lab conditions.
One key to the insights here is a small, dark room with two thousand-frames-per-second cameras, developed by the military to study ballistics, which slow high-speed action in high resolution. Wild birds in flight are misted with a fog of vaporized olive oil, which is illuminated by a green strobing laser operating in tandem with the camera. The system allows researchers to track the movement of misty air around the birds, showing where they are generating lift and drag. It led to the discovery here of a vortex on the leading edge of bird wings, which adds to a bird’s lift.
The birds, ranging from delicate diamond doves to burly ravens, have crystal sensors surgically implanted in their pectorals and elsewhere that measure muscle contractions as they fly. “Pectorals are the motor for eighty percent of flight,” said Dr. Tobalske, which explains why they are the largest part of the anatomy. “That’s how birds generate enormous power and can resist fatigue, and why some can fly from one pole to the other” without stopping.
Birds are also put in wind tunnels and photographed at high speed so researchers can see in detail how they perform at twenty miles per hour or more. They are also fitted with tiny masks that measure metabolism.
CT scans are used on birds to tease out the hidden physics of flying. Using technology developed at Brown University, researchers scan birds’ bones and combine that with three-dimensional X-rays taken in flight. Together they create a very real animation of a bird in flight. “It gives you three-dimensional joint movement,” said Ashley Heers, a doctoral student doing the work.
Dr. Tobalske said, “These tools allow us to see things that have always been dreamed about.”
The lab has won National Science Foundation funding for 25 years, and published dozens of papers.
“This has been a classic area of research since Leonardo da Vinci,” said Richard O. Prum, a professor of ornithology and ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale. “Functional morphology is being left behind in a lot of places, but it’s important and they are doing some great stuff.”
Work at the Montana lab, Dr. Prum said, has led people to realize how complex flight is and how many different things are happening when a bird flies. “What they have discovered is that bird flight is like Muhammad Ali boxing, with fifteen different movements,” he said. For example, birds clap their wings together at the peak of the upstroke during takeoff— that’s the clatter of a pigeon taking off in the park— and rotate their wings on the way down to get lift. “The wings suck in air, like a fan,” Dr. Tobalske said, “and create a jet of air below it traveling at ten miles per hour.”
The most astounding fliers, in Dr. Tobalske’s opinion, are the world’s 9,000 or so species of hummingbirds, which, largely because of their size, have mastered flight like no other bird. The calliope hummingbird weighs only as much as two paper clips, yet it migrates annually between Canada and Mexico.
In fact, a major theme in research here is how the morphology of the bird influences its behavior. The smaller the bird, for example, the more agile the flying: a swan may need the equivalent of two football fields to take off and get lift, while a hummingbird can rise like a helicopter. “It’s like a Porsche that can drive circles around a semi,” Dr. Tobalske said. “The smaller the bird, the more viscous the air is,” he said, which is partly why hummingbirds can maneuver so well and for so long. They have evolved with greatly shortened wing bones, as well as large pectorals that allow them to beat their wings eighty times a second. “A hummingbird can hover like a helicopter for one and a half hours, nonstop,” Dr. Tobalske said. “No other bird can do that.” By comparison, pigeons produce one-tenth the number of strokes.
Implanted sensors show that a hummingbird’s wing flaps so fast that the brain is generating the muscle signal for the downbeat of its wing while the wing is still going up. These new, deeper views into winged flight have affected other studies. Almost as an aside, the study of birds— which are widely believed to be descendants of some dinosaurs— has led Dr. Dial to a novel hypothesis: the one-day-old Australian brush turkey, he says, may behave as theropods once did. Theropods were early winged and feathered dinosaurs that walked mainly on their hind legs and were incapable of flight.
Ground-nesting birds like the brush turkey are precocial: they hit the ground running when they are born, a crucial defense from predators. A day-old brush turkey can run straight up a rock wall or a tree, an ability that diminishes as the bird gets older. A key to this early skill is flapping its small wings. This is not to try to fly, Dr. Dial said, but to serve the same role as a spoiler on a race car: to keep the bird on the ground so it can generate more force with its feet and climb steep walls. Dr. Dial calls it “wing-assisted incline running” and has high-speed videos of ground birds running up walls.
When the birds arrive atop a rock, and any threats have passed, they jump to the ground using their wings to slow the descent; that is how Dr. Dial believes flight may have begun. “This form of behavior— independence, locomotor capacity, parental care, and development— could be similar to the life history of the theropod,” he said.
Dr. Prum called the idea intriguing. “He’s demonstrated the phenomena exists and it’s plausible,” he said. “But other plausible alternative claims are out there.”
As far as birds informing human flight techniques, Dr. Dial said he believes that the future of human flight will incorporate birds’ remarkable shape-shifting abilities. “Birds are constantly morphing, and morphing on different levels,” he said. “A bird can look like a bullet, and two milliseconds later looks like a hang glider,” Dr. Dial said. “We have a lot more to learn about that. Imagine a 747 blasting off its wings and tail to become a bullet.”

Getting a get

Rico says it's an overly-complicated situation, as these things usually are, but Mark Oppenheimer has the story in The New York Times:

This should have been a good New Year’s for Aharon Friedman, a 34-year-old tax counsel for the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spent time with his 3-year-old daughter, and could have been thinking about the influence he will have starting Wednesday, when his boss, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, becomes chairman of the powerful tax-writing committee.
Instead, Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video showing about two hundred people protesting outside his Silver Spring, Maryland apartment on 19 December. They were angered by Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get.
The Friedman case has become emblematic of a torturous issue in which only a husband can “give” a get. While Jewish communities have historically pressured obstinate husbands to give gets, this was a very rare case of seeking to shame the husband in the secular world.
Holding signs saying, “Do the right thing” and “Free your wife”, the crowd included religious women with their heads covered, men in skullcaps and a rabbi with a bullhorn who shouted, “Withholding a get is abusive”.
Another rabbi took the unusual step of writing to Mr. Friedman’s employer, asking that he lean on Mr. Friedman to grant the Jewish divorce.
Mr. Friedman and Ms. Epstein have been civilly divorced since April and share custody of their daughter, but they are still married according to Jewish law. And without a get neither he nor Ms. Epstein can remarry within the faith. She is considered an agunah, or chained woman.
Although the majority of men in Jewish divorces grant their wives a get with little fuss, the husbands who refuse (it is estimated there are several hundred agunot in the United States today) can provoke a clash between religious folkways and secular divorce law. Usually these conflicts are resolved quietly, within the religious community. But Ms. Epstein’s frustrated supporters took to the streets.
Like most marriages that end badly, this one began hopefully. On 23 April 2006, Aharon Friedman of Brooklyn married Tamar Epstein, seven years his junior, of suburban Philadelphia. The next year, they had a daughter.
According to court records and interviews with Ms. Epstein, her lawyer, and Mr. Friedman, who refused to be quoted publicly, Ms. Epstein said in March of 2008 that she wanted a divorce. Her husband said he hoped to reconcile but, the next month, she moved with their daughter to her parents’ home in suburban Philadelphia.
Both parties wanted their divorce resolved by a beit din, a Jewish court. But both also availed themselves of civil court: Mr. Friedman to get an emergency order to have his daughter returned to Maryland (it was denied), and Ms. Epstein, thereafter, in a countersuit for divorce. Both have since filed numerous other civil motions in a messy case.
An Orthodox rabbinic court in Baltimore still had not ruled when a Maryland civil court heard the case, in June of 2009. It issued its custody order two months later, and in April of 2010, the divorce became final.
All parties have said that Mr. Friedman is angry about the custody order, which grants him three weekends a month with his daughter, two of them in Philadelphia, beginning at 6 p.m. on Fridays. As a religious Jew, Mr. Friedman will not drive from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, so he cannot see his daughter until Sunday.
The custody order is “a joke”, said Yisroel Belsky, a prominent Brooklyn rabbi. “The court decided in a bullheaded way not to respect the Shabbos,” or Sabbath, he said in a interview. And the Rabbinical Council of Greater Washington issued a statement saying that the parties had not yet exhausted the rabbinical courts, suggesting it was premature to blame Mr. Friedman for withholding the get.
But other rabbis have argued that it is Jewish custom to give a get once divorce terms have been settled, and with no possibility of reconciliation. “Even if one party acts wrongly to the other, it is never correct either for the husband to withhold a get or for the wife to refuse a get when a marriage is clearly over,” writes Rabbi Jonathan Reiss, who is not involved in this dispute.
Ms. Epstein eventually sought help from the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot, or ORA, an Orthodox group in New York. The group organized the 19 December rally outside Mr. Friedman’s apartment. After videos were posted on the Internet, Washington Jewish Week ran an editorial with the headline Unchain This Woman.
Ms. Epstein, still living with her parents and working as a nurse, said: “It’s been over two and a half years since we separated, all I want is to be able to move on and rebuild my life for my sake and my daughter’s sake. And I’ve been held hostage.”
On 20 December, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Washington, who supports Ms. Epstein, wrote to Jon Traub, the Republican staff director of the Ways and Means Committee, accusing Mr. Friedman of “psychological terrorism”. Rabbi Herzfeld urged Mr. Traub to “tell Aharon to give the get immediately,” and warned that “it is appropriate to also rally in the vicinity of Aharon’s work place.”
Rabbi Herzfeld said Mr. Traub told him, in a phone call, that this was not a matter for the Ways and Means Committee. But, for Ms. Epstein’s supporters, this is a matter for everyone. Rabbi Herzfeld told The New York Times, “I don’t think the Messiah can come, as long as there is one agunah in the world.”

Divorced himself, and from a Jewish woman (though a non-religious one), Rico says he hereby gives her any get she wants...

More wog politics

Adam Nossiter has an article in The New York Times about the situation in the Ivory Coast:

African leaders came to Abidjan, the capital of this West African nation, for the second time in less than a week, pressing Laurent Gbagbo to cede power after losing an election in November, and hoping to settle a political crisis that threatens to reignite civil war. But the day ended with no apparent resolution. A diplomat close to the negotiations commented on the attempt: “Nothing. Nothing. You can call this failure Number Two.”
After a day spent shuttling between Mr. Gbagbo, who has rebuffed international calls to step down, and the man foreign powers say defeated him at the polls, Alassane Ouattara, there was no change in the potentially explosive standoff. Mr. Gbagbo was still in his presidential palace in this steamy, once-prosperous economic hub, and Mr. Ouattara was still blockaded in a lagoon-side hotel with his shadow government, the roads leading to him guarded by Mr. Gbagbo’s well-armed security forces.
The discussions with the African leaders— President Thomas Boni Yayi of Benin; President Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone; President Pedro Pires of Cape Verde, and Kenya’s prime minister, Raila Odinga— continued late into the night. Participants largely refused to characterize the talks as they departed in a motorcade for a final meeting with Mr. Gbagbo.
But the diplomat said the leaders had asked Mr. Gbagbo to step aside, with amnesty, to set a good example for democracy in Africa. Mr. Gbagbo refused. “He responded that he was the democratically elected president,” the diplomat said on the condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to speak for the group. “He said he was the legitimate president of Côte d’Ivoire, and that was not negotiable.”
During the talks, Mr. Gbagbo repeated his earlier proposal to hold an international commission of inquiry into the election, a move the visiting leaders rejected, the diplomat said.
The United Nations has certified election results, which gave Mr. Ouattara a nearly nine-point winning margin, and virtually all foreign governments have accepted them. The United Nations has recognized a new ambassador from Ivory Coast, appointed by Mr. Ouattara. Mr. Gbagbo, however, has insisted that hundreds of thousands of votes in the north of this divided country were fraudulent. A close ally of his on Ivory Coast’s constitutional council declared Mr. Gbagbo the winner.
Perhaps reflecting the lack of movement, those who took part in the discussions were unusually tight-lipped. “We’re shuttling between the two leaders,” said James Victor Gbeho, president of the Ecowas Commission, a regional grouping of West African states, on Monday night. “We’re traveling from one to the other. I can’t say anything about them.”
“Later, later,” said Mr. Boni, the Benin president, as he prepared for yet another visit to Mr. Gbagbo. The president of Sierra Leone, Mr. Koroma, also refused all comment. Ecowas has threatened to use military force to remove Mr. Gbagbo if he did not relent. Last week, defense chiefs from some of the fifteen nations in the group held a planning session in Nigeria.
There has been no sign that diplomacy would change Mr. Gbagbo’s mind. On Monday night, state television broadcast an extensive interview with him in which he dismissed United Nations declarations chastising him, playing on an anti-French, nationalist note that has benefited him politically. “All the U.N. resolutions, it’s France that wrote the drafts,” Mr. Gbagbo told the interviewer. He has tried to kick out the United Nations peacekeeping force here, and mobs supporting him have attacked United Nations patrols. On Monday night, Mr. Gbagbo refused to allow United Nations soldiers to escort the visiting heads of state as they came to see him for a last, unsuccessful discussion.
Mr. Gbagbo’s refusal to budge has placed the burden of action on the international community, which risks a loss of credibility if Mr. Gbagbo remains in place. But diplomats are also worried about causing more conflict in the country, which remains divided after a 2002 civil war.
“The stalemate continues,” said a senior Western official here. “Gbagbo seems insistent on staying on, regardless of the consequences for him and his country.”

Rico says you can put Western clothing on them, you can even teach them to speak French, but you can't make them European...

Wogs... if it doesn't work, break it

Josh Boak has an article in The Washington Post about Afghanistan, after:

Roads, canals, and schools built in Afghanistan as part of a special U.S. military program are crumbling under Afghan stewardship, despite steps imposed over the past year to ensure that reconstruction money is not being wasted, according to government reports and interviews with military and civilian personnel.
U.S. troops in Afghanistan have spent $2 billion over six years on 16,000 humanitarian projects through the Commander's Emergency Response Program, which gives a battalion-level commander the power to treat aid dollars as ammunition.
A report slated for release this month reveals that CERP projects can quickly slide into neglect after being transferred to Afghan control. The Afghans had problems maintaining about half of the 69 projects reviewed in eastern Laghman province, according to an audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
The spending in Afghanistan is part of the $5 billion provided to U.S. military commanders for projects in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2004. The new report is the latest to identify shortcomings and missteps in the program, whose ventures have included the Jadriyah Lake park in Iraq, planned as a water park, but now barren two years after a U.S. military inauguration ceremony.
The dilapidated projects in Afghanistan could present a challenge to the U.S. strategy of shifting more responsibility to Afghans. Investing in infrastructure, notes President Obama's December review of the war, "will give the Afghan government and people the tools to build and sustain a future of stability."
"Sustainment is one of the biggest issues with our whole strategy," said a civilian official who shared details from a draft of the report. "The Afghans don't have the money or capacity to sustain much." The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the Defense Department is preparing a response to the audit.
Photos in the report show washed-out roads, with cracks and potholes where improvised explosive devices can be hidden. Among the projects profiled is a re-dredged canal that filled with silt a month after opening.
Multiple reports by the Government Accountability Office have noted a lack of monitoring by the Pentagon. And because formal U.S. oversight stops after a project is turned over to Afghans, it is difficult to gauge how projects are maintained countrywide.
When asked whether the Afghans have trouble sustaining projects, the U.S. military issued a statement saying it does not have the information to provide an immediate answer.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, said in Senate testimony last year that CERP is "the most responsive and effective means to address a local community's needs." He previously relied on the discretionary fund as the commanding general in Iraq, where $3.5 billion has been spent through the program. Over the past two years, Petraeus has pushed for stricter controls to stop any fraud and waste.
In response to "insufficient management", CERP guidance for Afghanistan was revised in December 2009, according to a statement by the military. The new guidance emphasizes the need to meet with Afghan leaders when choosing what to fund. It does not, however, require U.S. troops to continue inspecting projects after they are placed under Afghan control.
Under the guidance, an Afghan governor, mayor, or bureaucrat must sign a letter promising to fund maintenance and operations. But an October SIGAR audit of projects in Nangahar province found that only two of the fifteen files examined contained a signed letter. Nor is there formal reporting to the national or provincial Afghan governments of what was spent and built, the audit said. That makes it difficult for Afghans to know what they are supposed to maintain.
The provincial and district governments that take over the projects do not have the money to sustain them, because they cannot collect taxes and they depend on the national government for funding, said Major David Kaczmarek, the civil affairs officer for Task Force Bastogne in eastern Afghanistan. To teach the local governments how to request additional funds from Kabul, Kaczmarek helped launch a program in the summer that uses CERP dollars for the operation and maintenance of some projects.
The U.S. military tracks CERP projects with poorly maintained computer databases. Before October of 2009, the database did not consistently record the villages or districts where projects were undertaken, according to military and civilian personnel who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the master database is classified.
A civilian official who examined the contents of the database for a government assessment said the military cannot account for the spending without knowing the villages and districts that were project recipients. "Let's say the project is not working," the official said. "Why would we want to fund that project again the next year? Very little evaluation was done to decide what we fund next."
The organizational problems have also frustrated attempts to study the effectiveness of the $2 billion spent on CERP. A paper co-written by Princeton University professor Jacob Shapiro found that CERP funding helped reduce violence in Iraq. Shapiro and his colleagues have struggled over the past nine months to conduct a similar study for Afghanistan because of the database. "There's not a sense of how the program may or may not be working in Afghanistan," Shapiro said.
Lieutenant Colonel Brian Stoll tried to clean up the database while serving in Kandahar last year. He champions CERP as a way to build confidence in the Afghan government, despite the mess he found. Projects dating to 2006 had never been closed out, said Stoll, who updated the files while working 12-hour days to audit ongoing projects in southern Afghanistan. "We never got it all cleaned up," Stoll said. "It was like a hydra; you get part of it cleaned up, and you find some more along the way."

Wasn't this a movie already?

The AP has an article at the Guardian about a bank robbery in Buenos Aires:

Thieves dug a hundred-foot-long (30 metre) tunnel from a neighbouring building into an Argentinian bank and emptied the contents of up to 140 safety deposit boxes. Authorities said three thieves entered a Banco Provincia branch in the Buenos Aires district of Belgrano on New Year's Eve when it was closed and spent the weekend opening and emptying between 130 and 140 of the branch's 1,408 boxes. The robbery wasn't discovered until the bank reopened on Monday.
Bank executives didn't say how much the thieves got away with, because clients are not obliged to tell authorities what was in their safety deposit boxes. The thieves rented a building next to the bank in June and spent months digging the tunnel, which emerged in an area where safety deposit boxes are located, prosecutor Martin Niklison said. The tunnel had lights, ventilation and reinforcement. "It was a really impressive job," Niklison said, adding that officials had not ruled out that the thieves had an accomplice on the bank's staff. Anti-seismic alarms sounded at various times but police couldn't get into the bank to find out the reason why, the prosecutor said.
Hundreds of bank clients gathered in front of the state bank yesterday to demand the withdrawal of their savings and blocked a nearby street to protest the slow pace at which authorities were confirming whose boxes had been robbed.
"The message we want to give [clients] is that we are going to protect their interests after this incident," a Banco Provincia vice-president, Gustavo Marangoni, told TV channel C5N.
Many Argentinians began putting their savings in bank safety deposit boxes instead of bank accounts following the country's 2001 financial crisis, when many depositors lost savings.

In 2008, Jason Staham starred in The Bank Job, with the same MO. In the Top Ten Robberies list, the 'break into the bank and get the safe deposit boxes' figures in two of the ten.

Recycling with a vengeance

The AP has an article at ABC News about changes in recycling:

Get a new flat-screen TV for Christmas and wondering what to do with that old console? If you're in Vermont, or 23 other states, it won't do to haul it to the landfill. Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina have new laws banning electronic waste from landfills. That brings to 24 the number of states with similar measures.
Most cover everything from computers and televisions to personal digital assistants, game consoles and stereo components. And most call on manufacturers to help pay for recycling programs. Walter Alcorn of the Consumer Electronics Association says the industry supports recycling. He says its only worry is about a patchwork of laws in 24 states.

Still a good thing

Peter Maass has an article in The New Yorker about some Iraq-war history:

On 9 April 2003, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan McCoy, commander of the 3rd Battalion 4th Marines, awoke at a military base captured from the Iraqis a few miles from the center of Baghdad, which was still held by the enemy. It had been twenty days since the invasion of Iraq began, and McCoy had some personal chores to take care of; washing his socks, for one. Afterward, he walked over to a group of Marines under his command who were defacing a mural of Saddam Hussein. As I watched, he picked up a sledgehammer and struck a few blows himself. The men cheered. Then he began preparing for the serious business of the day: leading the battalion into the heart of the city. He expected a house-to-house brawl that would last several days.
The battalion’s tanks were followed by Humvees with the barrels of M-16s pointing from every window. But only a few potshots were fired at the Marines, and small groups of Iraqis and their children were on the streets waving. On the radio, McCoy’s men told of being served tea. “We’re not getting resistance, we’re getting cakes,” McCoy remarked.
As the battalion neared the center of the city, Colonel Steven Hummer, the regimental commander, ordered it to the Palestine Hotel. The hotel was in Firdos Square, but neither the hotel nor the square was labelled on McCoy’s map. All he had was a grid coördinate for an area that was a square kilometre.
The hotel was filled with international journalists, and by three in the afternoon some who had remained in Baghdad during the invasion were probing the city, freed of government minders who had controlled their movements until then. A few of them ran into McCoy as he was examining his map. McCoy turned to Remy Ourdan, a reporter for Le Monde. “Where is this damn Palestine Hotel?” he asked. Ourdan indicated the road to take.
Not far away, Captain Bryan Lewis, the leader of McCoy’s tank company, spotted a car with TV scrawled on its side and shouted from his turret, “Is this the way to the Palestine?” A Danish photographer named Jan Grarup pointed down the avenue; they were heading the right way. Lewis motioned for Grarup to come along, in case further directions were needed. Grarup hopped onto the turret and led the tanks to Firdos Square.
After the Marines arrived, a small group of Iraqis gathered around a statue of Saddam Hussein in the middle of the square and tried to bring it down with a sledgehammer and rope. More photographers and television crews appeared. An American flag was draped over the statue’s head. Eventually, a Marine vehicle equipped with a crane toppled the statue. The spectacle was broadcast live around the world.
Some have argued that the events at Firdos were staged, to demonstrate that America had triumphed, the war was over, and the Iraqis were happy. After all, the Marines had seized the only place in Baghdad where a large number of foreign reporters could be found; at least two hundred were at the Palestine. And U.S. officials were suspiciously quick to appropriate the imagery from Firdos. A few minutes after the toppling, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, “The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad, are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.”
Propaganda has been a staple of warfare for ages, but the notion of creating events on the battlefield, as opposed to repackaging real ones after the fact, is a modern development. It expresses a media theory developed by, among others, Walter Lippmann, who after the First World War identified the components of wartime mythmaking as “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and out of these three elements, a counterfeit of reality.” As he put it, “Men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities [and] in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.” In the nineteen-sixties, Daniel J. Boorstin identified a new category of media spectacle that he called “pseudo-events,” which were created to be reported on. But Boorstin was theorizing primarily about political conventions and press conferences, not about events on a battlefield.
The 2004 documentary film Control Room featured al-Jazeera journalists who argued that the toppling of Saddam’s statue was merely “a show... a very clever idea,” and that Iraqis had been brought to the square like actors delivered to the stage. Skeptics have also questioned whether the crowd was as large or as representative of popular sentiment as U.S. officials suggested. Might it have been just a small group of Iraqis whose numbers and enthusiasm were exaggerated by the cameras? Did the media, which had, with few exceptions, accepted the Bush Administration’s prewar claims about weapons of mass destruction, err again by portraying a pseudo-event as real? And were lives lost as a result of this error?
I had followed McCoy’s battalion to Baghdad for the Times Magazine. I was what the military called a “unilateral” journalist, driving unescorted into Iraq on the first day of the invasion in an SUV rented from Hertz in Kuwait. A few days into the war, I happened to meet McCoy at a staging area in the Iraqi desert north of Nasiriya, and he agreed to let me and a number of other unilaterals follow his battalion to Baghdad. On 9 April, I drove into Firdos with his battalion, and was at his side during some of the afternoon.
My understanding of events at the time was limited. I had no idea why the battalion went to Firdos rather than to other targets. I didn’t know who had decided to raise the American flag and who had decided to take down the statue, or why. And I had little awareness of the media dynamics that turned the episode into a festive symbol of what appeared to be the war’s finale. In reality, the war was just getting under way. Many thousands of people would be killed or injured before the Bush Administration acknowledged that it faced not just “pockets of dead-enders” in Iraq, as Rumsfeld insisted, but what grew to be a full-fledged insurgency. The toppling of Saddam’s statue turned out to be emblematic of primarily one thing: the fact that American troops had taken the center of Baghdad. That was significant, but everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television— victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq— was a disservice to the truth. Yet the skeptics were wrong in some ways, too, because the event was not planned in advance by the military.
How did it happen? Three days earlier, Marine Regimental Combat Team 7, under the command of Colonel Hummer, arrived at the Diyala Canal, which loops around eastern Baghdad. The center of the city was less than eight miles away, but the regiment did not have orders to seize it. The plan was to stay along the Diyala and send small units on quick raids into the city.
The task of planning the raids was given to two majors on the regiment’s staff, John Schaar and Andrew Milburn. Until Diyala, they had not even examined a map of the city, but they quickly concluded that the raids were a bad idea. “We did a little study and thought this was really stupid,” Schaar told me not long ago. Raiding units risked becoming trapped in the city, creating an Iraqi version of Black Hawk Down. Schaar and Milburn also concluded that Iraqi forces could not withstand a direct assault by the regiment; for nearly three weeks, the regiment had blasted through every Iraqi unit in its path.
They then divided central Baghdad into twenty-seven zones, with each battalion responsible for occupying four or five zones (several low-priority zones were unassigned). Schaar and Milburn had received from divisional headquarters a list of about thirty sensitive sites, a hodgepodge that comprised embassies, banks, detention centers, potential nuclear facilities, and hotels, including the Palestine. The most important targets were in four central zones across the Tigris River from the Republican Palace, which the Army had already seized. Schaar recently sent me a photograph of the twenty-seven-zone invasion map. The map has six thumbtacks marking key targets. One of them, in the central zones, was the Palestine Hotel.
According to Schaar, there was never any doubt about which battalion would be assigned the central zones. “Three-four” —McCoy’s battalion— “got tagged to that because they were the sharp guys,” he told me.
Bryan McCoy, who has a stocky build and a blunt Oklahoma manner, became known as the regiment’s toughest battalion leader. During the drive to Baghdad, McCoy mentioned Sherman’s famous dictum that war is cruelty. “My idea of a fair fight,” he said, “is clubbing baby harp seals.” When McCoy returned from Iraq, he disdained the well-equipped fitness center at the regiment’s training base, in California, and built a prisonlike gym that had no air-conditioning or fancy exercise machines, the better, he believed, to accustom his men to the rigors of battle; they weightlifted with sandbags.
The Marine Corps is the smallest branch of the U.S. military and the most precarious, because one of the key missions it fulfills —amphibious landings— does not require a separate branch. The Army knows how to conduct amphibious landings, and has done more of them in the past century than the Marines. Moreover, the future of warfare is not likely to revolve around landings on the shores of Tripoli. As McCoy remarked to me one day, “Our existence is always threatened.”
This circumstance makes the Corps particularly aware that it must be successful in the halls of Congress as well as on the fields of battle. For that reason, perhaps, Marines tend to be friendlier toward the media than other branches of the military; they recognize the value of good stories and images. It is not surprising that the most famous war photograph in American history —the flag-raising at Iwo Jima— depicts Marines.
McCoy, who has written a monograph on military leadership, The Passion of Command, understood the importance of the media. That was one reason he had agreed to let me and ten other unilateral journalists follow his battalion, which already had four embedded journalists. The reporters worked for, among others, the Times, Time, Newsweek, the Associated Press, and several photography agencies. McCoy occasionally joined us for coffee in the morning, giving us briefings about the battles along the way to Baghdad, and he made it clear to his men that we were to be welcomed. When he threw a grenade at an Iraqi position one day, a photographer was at his side, and the photograph was widely disseminated.
McCoy heard about the Palestine Hotel from the journalists in his battalion. One of the photographers, Gary Knight, of Newsweek, had mentioned it to him on several occasions, because a colleague was having a hard time there; Knight’s editors wanted McCoy to know that journalists at the hotel were in peril. “As we got closer to Baghdad, it got ramped up,” Knight recalled last year. “It was, like, ‘Can you try and persuade the Marines to get to the Palestine?’”
The photographer Laurent Van der Stockt, working with me for the Times Magazine, also mentioned the Palestine to McCoy, often while sharing his stash of Cuban cigars with him. Van der Stockt would tell the Colonel what he was hearing from Remy Ourdan, with whom he spoke almost every day on his satellite phone. Ourdan had stayed at the Palestine throughout the invasion, hiding his phone behind a ceiling panel and using it surreptitiously at night or in the early morning, when he would crouch on his balcony and talk in whispers to his editors in Paris.
On the morning of 9 April, as McCoy was washing his socks, Van der Stockt wandered over while talking to Ourdan on the sat phone. Ourdan told Van der Stockt that Iraqi forces had abandoned the center of Baghdad. For the first time, there were no security forces at the Palestine or in the area around it.
“Colonel, my friend at the Palestine is saying there is nobody in front of us; the city is empty,” Van der Stockt said.
McCoy nodded, but said the battalion wouldn’t get to the center so fast. The Army had met fierce resistance in the western part of the city. The next few hundred yards were of far greater importance to him than a hotel several miles away. Besides, Marines do not take orders from French journalists.
Van der Stockt told Ourdan that they wouldn’t be seeing each other that day. “But tell the Colonel that Baghdad has fallen!” Ourdan said. “There is no more resistance. The city is open!”
The battalion moved out, and, to McCoy’s surprise, faced little opposition. Simon Robinson, a reporter for Time, was in the back of McCoy’s vehicle when the regiment’s commander, Colonel Hummer, ordered the battalion to the Palestine. Robinson vividly recalls the order, because it prompted him to lean forward to remind McCoy that reporters were there. When he did, he saw a satisfied expression spread over McCoy’s face. “He was fully cognizant that he was about to move into an area where there were a lot of journalists and there were going to be opportunities,” Robinson told me.
In 1999, Marine General Charles Krulak wrote an influential article in which he coined the term “strategic corporal”. Krulak argued that, in an interconnected world, the actions of even a lowly corporal can have global consequences. “All future conflicts will be acted out before an international audience,” Krulak wrote. “In many cases, the individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy and will potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well.”
At Firdos Square, it was a thirty-five-year-old gunnery sergeant, Leon Lambert, who bore out Krulak’s thesis. Lambert’s background was typical of that of many youths who enlist in the military. His father was a car mechanic with five children. Leon had to get a dishwashing job when he was twelve. One of his brothers joined the Army, another the Air Force. Lambert went for the Marines. By 2003, after almost sixteen years of service, he commanded an M-88 Hercules, a tow truck for tanks that is equipped with a crane.
At 4:30 P.M., as the M-88 rumbled into Firdos not far behind the lead tank, Lambert noticed the statue of Saddam. Installed a year earlier to celebrate the leader’s sixty-fifth birthday, it was the sort of totem that American troops had been destroying across Iraq. On the first day of the invasion, I had watched in the Iraqi border town of Safwan as a Humvee dragged down a billboard of Saddam. Erasing the symbols of regime power is what conquering armies have done for millennia.
Lambert radioed his commander, Captain Lewis, whose tank was carrying the Danish photographer.
“Hey, get a look at that statue,” Lambert said. “Why don’t we take it down?”
“No way,” Lewis responded. He didn’t want his men distracted.
There was no hostile fire, or even hostility, other than some shouts from American and West European “human shields”, who had remained in Baghdad to symbolically stand in the way of the invaders. The Iraqi forces had fled. Lewis’s tanks blocked the streets leading to Firdos while armored personnel carriers disgorged the infantry, which fanned out. Within minutes of the marines’ arrival, Firdos had been secured.
When McCoy’s Humvee stopped in front of the Palestine, he was surrounded by reporters. In addition to the journalists at the hotel, others who had followed U.S. troops to Baghdad began pulling up in their dusty SUVs. One of the reporters, Newsweek’s Melinda Liu, introduced McCoy to the hotel’s manager, who nervously greeted his new boss and led him into the hotel. Striding inside, McCoy held his M-16 at the ready.
Outside, a handful of Iraqis had slipped into the square. Lambert got on the radio and told Lewis that the locals wanted to pull down the statue.
“If a sledgehammer and rope fell off the 88, would you mind?” Lambert asked.
“I wouldn’t mind,” Lewis replied. “But don’t use the 88.”
Higher authorities were unaware of these developments. McCoy, Hummer, Rumsfeld, President Bush; they hadn’t a clue about the chain of events that Lambert had triggered with a wink, a nod, and a sledgehammer.
One after another, Iraqis swung Lambert’s sledgehammer against the statue’s base. In a much photographed moment, a former weight lifter got into the action, but only a few inches of plaster fell away. The rope, thrown around the statue’s neck, was not sufficient to topple it, either.
“We watched them with the rope, and I knew that was never going to happen,” Lambert told me recently. “They were never going to get it down.”
At the Palestine, McCoy briefly talked with reporters in the manager’s office. Then he walked outside to Firdos Square and saw Lambert’s rope flopped around the statue’s neck as various Iraqis futilely wielded the sledgehammer. Cameras were everywhere. “A military operation was developing into a circus atmosphere,” McCoy recalled when I interviewed him last spring at his home in Tampa, where he serves at Central Command.
Other commanders had already concluded that toppling the dictator’s likeness might help get the point across and had tried it elsewhere. A few days into the war, British tanks mounted a raid into the heart of Basra, in the south of the country, where they destroyed a statue of Saddam. The Brits hoped the locals, seeing a strike against a symbol of regime power, would rise up against Saddam. As the British military spokesman, Colonel Chris Vernon, told reporters, “The purpose of that is psychological.” The statue was destroyed, but the event wasn’t filmed and drew little attention. Similarly, on 7 April, after Army soldiers seized the Republican Palace in Baghdad, their commander, Colonel David Perkins, asked his men to find a statue that could be destroyed. Once one was found —Saddam on horseback— a nearby tank was ordered to wait until an embedded team from Fox News got there. On cue, the tank fired a shell at the statue, blowing it up, but the event had little drama and did not get a lot of television coverage. No Iraqis were present, and just a few Americans, and the surrounding landscape was featureless.
The situation at the Palestine was different. “I realized this was a big deal,” McCoy told me. “You’ve got all the press out there and everybody is liquored up on the moment. You have this 'Paris 1944', feel. I remember thinking, The media is watching the Iraqis trying to topple this icon of Saddam Hussein. Let’s give them a hand.”
McCoy also considered the “buzzkill”, as he phrased it, of not helping. “Put your virtual-reality goggles on,” he continued. “What would that moment have been if we hadn’t? It would have been some B reel of Iraqis banging away at this thing and eventually losing interest and going home. There was a momentum, there was a feeling, this atmosphere of liberation. Like a kid trying to whack a piñata and he’s not going to get it with a blindfold on, so let’s move the piñata so he can knock it. That was the attitude: keep the momentum going.”
Captain Lewis, the tank commander, walked over to McCoy and asked whether the Marines should finish the job for the Iraqis. McCoy asked if the Iraqis had requested help; Lewis told him they had. A Marine asked whether the battalion was authorized to tear down statues; McCoy responded that it would not be a problem. He got on the radio with Colonel Hummer, who had set up a regimental command post behind the partially destroyed Information Ministry, to update him on the events. Hummer did not have aerial reconnaissance from Firdos, or even a television. While the rest of the world was watching the scene in the square, the colonel who authorized its climax was blind to the event.
Hummer, in a phone interview recently, explained what happened: “I get this call from Bryan and he says, ‘Hey, we’ve got these Iraqis over here with a bunch of ropes trying to pull down this very large statue of Saddam Hussein.’ And he said, ‘They’re asking us to pull it down.’ So I said, ‘Okay, go ahead.’ And I didn’t think much of it after that.”
Before signing off, Hummer instructed McCoy to make sure no one got killed by falling debris.
McCoy then issued a brief order to Lewis: “Do it.” He also told Lewis not to get anyone killed in the process. The M-88, with its crane, was the perfect tool. Lambert, who had started everything by handing out the sledgehammer and the rope, was told to finish the job.
Before dawn on 11 September 2001, a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant named Tim McLaughlin arrived at the Pentagon, where he was a general’s assistant. After taking care of some paperwork, he went down to the gym, changed into running clothes, and jogged across Memorial Bridge, along the Jefferson Memorial, until he heard a deep, soft thud. He rushed back to the Pentagon. As people streamed out of the building, McLaughlin made his way into it. The corridors were deserted and were filling with smoke; he could barely see his hand.
A few days later, as a personal token of appreciation for his service in the military, a congressional staffer who worked for Senator Charles Schumer and was a friend of the McLaughlin family presented McLaughlin with a flag bought at the Senate stationery store. Two years later, when McLaughlin was packing to leave for Iraq under McCoy’s command, he put the flag in his duffel.
During the invasion, McLaughlin tried to raise the flag several times. On the first attempt, he was preparing to hoist it on top of a building, but realized that there was too much shooting going on. Another time, Lambert’s M-88 rolled over the flagpole that McLaughlin was about to use. McLaughlin’s efforts became an inside joke in his tank company. When McCoy ordered the toppling in Firdos Square, Captain Lewis told McLaughlin to fetch his flag for the mother of all flag pictures. Soon it was handed up to Corporal Edward Chin, who had climbed atop the M-88’s crane and was hooking a chain around the statue’s head.
“I remember thinking, What am I going to do?” Chin told me. “I didn’t want to just wave the flag.” At that moment, the wind blew the flag and it stuck to the statue’s head. “That worked for me. I later realized the flag was upside down. That is actually a symbol of distress.”
McCoy, too busy to keep an eye on the statue, wasn’t looking when the flag went up. People watching television from their sofas in America saw it before he did. When he finally looked up, his first thought was Oh, shit! An American flag would seem like a symbol of occupation. He instantly ordered it taken down.
Around this time, McCoy’s superior, Colonel Hummer, got an urgent order from his commander, Major General James Mattis, who had apparently received an urgent order that Hummer assumes originated at the Pentagon: Get the flag down. Now.
With the breeze keeping the flag in place, Chin had returned to his rigging work. As he was finishing up, he took the flag down of his own volition. It had been on display for just a minute and a half. There had not been time for the orders to reach him.
One of the battalion’s lieutenants, Casey Kuhlman, had also realized that the American flag would not be a welcome symbol for Iraqis and other Arabs. Kuhlman had acquired an Iraqi flag during the invasion. “I grabbed it and started going up to the statue,” he recalled. “And I didn’t get but ten or twenty metres when an older Iraqi man grabbed it from me and it sort of got passed through the crowd and then went up. I thought, My souvenir is gone. But this is a little bit better than a souvenir.” His flag helped create one of the Firdos myths.
Staff Sergeant Brian Plesich, the leader of an Army psychological-operations team, arrived at Firdos after the sledgehammer-and-rope phase had begun. He saw the American flag go up and had the same reaction as Kuhlman: get an Iraqi flag up. Plesich, whom I interviewed last year, told his interpreter to find an Iraqi flag. The interpreter waded into the crowd, and soon an Iraqi flag was raised.
Plesich assumed that the Iraqi flag had got there because of his initiative, and in 2004 the Army published a report crediting him. The report was picked up by the news media and circulated widely on the Web, fuelling the conspiracy notion that a psyops team masterminded not only the Iraqi flag but the entire toppling. Yet it was Kuhlman who was responsible for the flag. Plesich’s impact at Firdos was limited to using the loudspeakers on his Humvee to tell the crowd, once the statue had been rigged to fall, that until everyone moved back to a safe distance the main event would not take place.
By the time it was over and the sun was setting at Firdos Square, Sergeant Lambert and his M-88 crew had become so famous that even Katie Couric wanted an interview. Lambert had to hide from the spectacle he had unleashed. “God’s honest truth,” Lambert told me. “We went inside the 88, we locked the hatches, and the only time we would come out was when we were directed to.”
The Palestine was built in the early nineteen-eighties for tourists, who were then visiting Iraq in large numbers, and it was run by the Méridien hotel chain. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, in 1990, and was slapped with international sanctions, the Méridien got rid of its outlaw franchise. The Palestine, with more than three hundred rooms and seventeen floors, stayed open under state control, but was outclassed by the al-Rasheed Hotel, which stood on the other side of the Tigris and was surrounded by government ministries and Presidential palaces. For years, the al-Rasheed was favored by foreign journalists who wanted to be close to the action, but they moved out just before the invasion, to get away from the bombs that would presumably destroy the government district. When the Shock and Awe campaign began, a couple of hundred reporters watched from their balconies at the Palestine.
Like everyone else, Pentagon officials viewed television reports from Baghdad which often noted that the Palestine was the point of broadcast. It was at the hotel that the Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, known as Baghdad Bob, held many of his extravagant press conferences.
During the aerial bombardment of Baghdad, the Palestine was not hit, and, once ground troops had moved into the city, most commanders in Baghdad were made aware of the Palestine’s do-not-bomb status. But the commanders failed to convey the information to the soldiers in every unit, and this caused the casualties that contributed to the dispatch of McCoy’s battalion to Firdos Square.
On 8 April, the day before McCoy’s battalion arrived at Firdos, an Army tank that was on the al-Jumhuriya Bridge, over the Tigris, fired a shell at the Palestine, killing two journalists and injuring three others. The tank’s crew mistakenly thought that a camera aimed at them from a balcony was a spotting device for Iraqi forces. Journalists at the Palestine were outraged; some thought it was a deliberate attack on the media. Subsequent investigations by the military and reporters found that, although key officers on the ground, including brigade and battalion commanders, knew that the Palestine should not be fired on, they did not know the hotel’s precise location, because, as McCoy was to learn, it wasn’t marked on their maps. The tank’s crew did not know that journalists were in the building.
The killings increased media pressure on the Pentagon to insure the hotel’s safety; calls and emails to Pentagon officials reached a furious pitch, and at a Pentagon press conference a few hours after the attack the Palestine was a major topic. The media demanded that the Pentagon see to it that no further harm came to the journalists at the Palestine.
Some journalists considered the hotel to be a death trap. When the photographer Seamus Conlan came across American troops in the hours before McCoy’s battalion showed up, he asked for a rescue mission. “I was sure that today was going to be the day that we got killed by Saddam’s enraged and retreating militiamen,” Conlan later wrote. “A Marine officer assured me that every journalist in Baghdad was telling him the same thing.”
The media have been criticized for accepting the Bush Administration’s claims, in the run-up to the invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The WMD myth, and the media’s embrace of it, encouraged public support for war. The media also failed at Firdos Square, but in this case it was the media, rather than the government, that created the victory myth.
Because the world’s media were based at the Palestine, television networks had the equipment to go live the moment the Marines arrived there. It was certainly a legitimate and dramatic story—proof that Baghdad was falling under American control. But problems with the coverage at Firdos soon emerged, including the duration, which was non-stop, the tone, which was celebratory, and the uncritical obsession with the toppling.
One of the first reporters to broadcast from Firdos was David Chater, a correspondent for Sky News, the British satellite channel whose feed from Baghdad was carried by Fox News. (Both channels are owned by News Corp.) Before the Marines arrived, Chater had believed, as many journalists did, that his life was at risk from American shells, Iraqi thugs, and looting mobs. “That’s an amazing sight, isn’t it?” Chater said as the tanks rolled in. “A great relief, a great sight for all the journalists here... The Americans waving to us now: fantastic, fantastic to see they’re here at last.” Moments later, outside the Palestine, Chater smiled broadly and told one Marine, “Bloody good to see you.” Noticing an American flag in another Marine’s hands, Chater cheerily said, “Get that flag going!”
Another correspondent, John Burns, of the Times, had similar feelings. Representing the most prominent American publication, Burns had a particularly hard time with the security thugs who had menaced many journalists at the Palestine. His gratitude toward the Marines was explicit. “They were my liberators, too,” he later wrote. “They seemed like ministering angels to me.”
The happy relief felt by some journalists on the ground was compounded by editors and anchors back home. Primed for triumph, they were ready to latch onto a symbol of what they believed would be a joyous finale to the war. It was an unfortunate fusion: a preconception of what would happen, of what victory would look like, connected at Firdos Square with an aesthetically perfect representation of that preconception.
Wilson Surratt was the senior executive producer in charge of CNN’s control room in Atlanta that morning. The room, dominated by almost fifty screens that showed incoming feeds from CNN crews and affiliated networks, was filled with not just the usual complement of producers but also with executives, who wanted to be at the nerve center of the network during one of the biggest stories of their lives. Surratt had been told by the newsroom that Marines were expected to arrive at Firdos any moment, so he kept his eyes on two monitors that showed the still empty square.
“The climax, at the time, was going to be the troops coming into Firdos Square,” Surratt told me. “We didn’t really anticipate that Hussein was going to be captured. There wasn’t going to be a surrender. So what we were looking for was some sort of culminating event.”
On that day, Baghdad was violent and chaotic. The city was already being looted by swarms of people using trucks, taxis, horses, and wheelbarrows to cart away whatever they could from government buildings and banks, museums, and even hospitals. There continued to be armed opposition to the American advance. One of CNN’s embedded correspondents, Martin Savidge, was reporting from a Marine unit that was taking fire in the city. Savidge was ready to go on the air, under fire, at the exact moment that Surratt noticed the tanks entering Firdos Square. Surratt vividly recalls that moment, because he shouted out in the control room, “There they are!” He immediately switched the network’s coverage to Firdos, and it stayed there almost non-stop until the statue came down, more than two hours later.
I asked Surratt whether, by focussing on Firdos rather than on Savidge and the chaos of Baghdad, he had made the right call. “What were we supposed to do?” Surratt replied. “Not show what was going on in the square? We did the responsible thing. We were careful to say it was not the end. At some point, you’ve got to trust the viewer to understand what they’re seeing.”
The powerful pictures from Firdos were combined with powerful words. On CNN, the anchor Bill Hemmer said, “You think about seminal moments in a nation’s history... indelible moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.” Wolf Blitzer described the toppling as “the image that sums up the day and, in many ways, the war itself.” On Fox, the anchor Brit Hume said, “This transcends anything I’ve ever seen... This speaks volumes, and with power that no words can really match.” One of his colleagues said, “The important story of the day is this historic shot you are looking at, a noose around the neck of Saddam, put there by the people of Baghdad.”
A visual echo chamber developed: rather than encouraging reporters to find the news, editors urged them to report what was on television. CNN, which did not have a reporter at the Palestine, because its team had been expelled when the invasion began, was desperate to get one of its embedded correspondents there. Walter Rodgers, whose Army unit was on the other side of the Tigris, was ordered by his editors to disembed and drive across town to the Palestine. Rodgers reminded his editors that combat continued and that his vehicle, moving on its own, would likely be hit by American or Iraqi forces. This said much about the coverage that day: Rodgers could not provide reports of the war’s end because the war had not ended. But he understood the imperatives that kept CNN’s attention pinned on Firdos Square. “Pictures are the mother’s milk of television, and it was a hell of a picture,” he said recently.
Live television loves suspense, especially if it is paired with great visuals. The networks almost never broke away from Firdos Square. The event lived on in replays, too. A 2005 study of CNN’s and Fox’s coverage, conducted by a research team from George Washington University and titled As Goes the Statue, So Goes the War, found that, between 11am and 8pm that day, Fox replayed the toppling every 4.4 minutes, and CNN every 7.5 minutes. The networks also showed the toppling in house ads; it became a branding device. They continually used the word “historic” to describe the statue’s demise.
Anne Garrels, NPR’s reporter in Baghdad at the time, has said that her editors requested, after her first dispatch about Marines rolling into Firdos, that she emphasize the celebratory angle, because the television coverage was more upbeat. In an oral history that was published by the Columbia Journalism Review, Garrels recalled telling her editors that they were getting the story wrong: “There are so few people trying to pull down the statue that they can’t do it themselves... Many people were just sort of standing, hoping for the best, but they weren’t joyous.”
Gary Knight, the photographer who followed McCoy’s battalion to Baghdad, had a similar problem, as he talked with one of his editors on his satellite phone. The editor, watching the event on television, asked why Knight wasn’t taking pictures. Knight replied that few Iraqis were involved and the ones who were seemed to be doing so for the benefit of the legions of photographers; it was a show. The editor told him to get off the phone and start taking pictures.
Robert Collier, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, filed a dispatch that noted a small number of Iraqis at Firdos, many of whom were not enthusiastic. When he woke up the next day, he found that his editors had recast the story. The published version said that “a jubilant crowd roared its approval” as onlookers shouted, “We are free! Thank you, President Bush!” According to Collier, the original version was considerably more tempered. “That was the one case in my time in Iraq when I can clearly say there was editorial interference in my work,” he said recently. “They threw in a lot of triumphalism. I was told by my editor that I had screwed up and had not seen the importance of the historical event. They took out quite a few of my qualifiers.”
British journalists felt the same pressure. Lindsey Hilsum, the Baghdad reporter for Britain’s Channel 4 News, was instructed by her editors to increase her coverage of Firdos, even though she believed the event was trivial. She told the authors of a study titled Shoot First and Ask Questions Later that the toppling was a small part of a nine-minute story that she transmitted to London on 9 April; in her view, it was “a small, symbolic event for American television.” As she put it, “In London, where they had been watching, they said, ‘No, you have to make that section much larger.’”
Robert Capa once said, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” and generations of journalists have followed his maxim. But the opposite can also be true: the farther away you are, the better you can see. At Firdos Square, the farther from the statue you were, the more you could understand.
Very few Iraqis were there. If you were at the square, or if you watch the footage, you can see, on the rare occasions long shots were used, that the square was mostly empty. You can also see, from photographs as well as video, that much of the crowd was made up of journalists and Marines. Because of the lo-fi quality of the video and the shifting composition of the crowd, it’s hard to give a precise number, but perhaps a quarter to a half consisted of journalists or Marines. The crowd’s size— journalists, Marines, and Iraqis— does not seem to have exceeded several hundred at its largest, and was much smaller for most of the two hours. The Iraqis who were photogenically enthusiastic— sledgehammering the statue, jumping on it after the toppling— were just an excitable subset of all Iraqis there. “I saw a lot of people watching with their arms crossed, not at all celebrating,” Collier noted.
Closeups filled the screen with the frenzied core of the small crowd and created an illusion of wall-to-wall enthusiasm throughout Baghdad. It was an illusion that reflected only the media’s yearning for exciting visuals, and brings to mind a famous study carried out more than half a century ago, when General Douglas MacArthur, who had just been relieved of his command by President Truman, visited Chicago for a parade and a speech that were expected to attract enormous public support. The study, conducted by the sociologists Kurt and Gladys Lang, found that the Chicago events, as experienced by people who attended them, were largely passionless. But, for television viewers, the events were dramatic and inspiring, owing to the cropped framing of what they saw.
The Lang study illuminates another distortion that occurred in Baghdad: the extent to which listless crowds lit up when cameras were turned on. In Chicago, the Lang researchers saw crowds shift to the places that cameras pointed toward; people were taking their cues from the lenses. “The cheering, waving, and shouting was often but a response to the aiming of the camera,” the study noted.
Just after 5pm local time, Fox News showed about a dozen Iraqis walking into the empty square; these were the first civilians on the site. They were followed and surrounded by an increasing number of journalists; within a minute of the Iraqis arriving at the statue’s base, journalists appear to nearly outnumber them. In the first act of iconoclasm, two plaques on the statue’s base were torn off by the Iraqis and hoisted in front of the photographers and the cameramen, in much the same way that a prizefighter raises a championship belt above his head as pictures are snapped.
Would the Iraqis have done the same thing if the cameras hadn’t been there? At key moments throughout the toppling, the level of Iraqi enthusiasm appeared to ebb and flow according to the number and interest of photographers who had gathered. For instance, when Lambert’s sledgehammer made its first appearance, photographers clustered around as one Iraqi after another took a few shots at the base. Not long afterward, many photographers and cameramen drifted off; they had got their pictures. The sledgehammering of the statue soon ceased, too.
An hour after the first Iraqis entered the square, the toppling was at a standstill, because the rope and the sledgehammer were useless. Neither Iraqis nor journalists cared any longer. Many of the Iraqis had moved into the street and gathered around the Humvee that carried Staff Sergeant Plesich and his psychological-operations team, because loudspeakers on Plesich’s Humvee were broadcasting in Arabic. These were the first words in Arabic that the Iraqis had heard from their occupiers, and the Iraqis were indeed cheering.
But the area around the base of the statue was virtually empty. Though television anchors talked excitedly about the statue, Iraqis at the square were no longer paying attention to it. Then Lambert’s M-88, having received a green light from Colonel McCoy, lumbered into view, entering from the left of the television screen. On Fox, journalists can be seen hurrying toward the M-88 and the deserted statue. Iraqis do the same, like bees returning to a hive. By the time the M-88 reached the statue’s base, the crowd of Iraqis, journalists, and Marines had reassembled for the next act. As the Lang study noted of the MacArthur celebrations, “The event televised was no longer the same event as it would have been if television had not been there.”
The journalists themselves, meanwhile, were barely photographed at all. The dramatic shots posted on web sites that day and featured in newspapers the next morning contained almost no hint of the army of journalists at the square and their likely influence on events. One of the most photographed moments occurred when the statue fell and several dozen Iraqis rushed forward to bash the toppled head; there were nearly as many journalists in the melee, and perhaps more, but the framing of photographs all but eliminated them from view.
“It’s one thing if you don’t want a photographer in the picture and there’s one photographer in a crowd of a thousand,” Gary Knight, who now directs the Program for Narrative and Documentary Studies, at Tufts University, told me. “But when you’ve got three hundred journalists sitting on vehicles, sitting on tanks, it’s really important contextually to include that information. Most of the imagery that was published didn’t have that context, and so it was misleading.”
At the square, I found the reality, whatever it was, hard to grasp. Some Iraqis were cheering, I later learned, not for America but for a slain cleric, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, whose son Moqtada would soon lead a Shi'a revolt against American occupation. I met an apparently delighted Iraqi who spoke English, and he told me that his name was Samir and that he felt “free at last”. About an hour later, after the statue came down, Samir was cornered by a group of men who accused him of being a spy for Saddam and were shouting, “Kill him!” A Marine had to intervene to save his life.
The subsequent years of civil war, which have killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people, have revealed the events at Firdos to be an illusional intermission between invasion and insurgency. For instance, one of the stars of the spectacle —the weight lifter who sledgehammered the statue— was Khadim al-Jubouri, a motorcycle mechanic who had worked for Saddam’s son Uday but had fallen out of favor and spent time in prison. When he heard that American troops had arrived, al-Jubouri went to Firdos Square. As anniversaries of the event come around, he gets interviewed by journalists. In 2007, he told the Washington Post that, since the toppling, seven relatives and friends had been killed, kidnapped, or forced to flee their homes. Al-Jubouri was happy when the sledgehammer was in his hands, but since then his life had deteriorated. “I really regret bringing down the statue,” he told the Guardian. “Every day is worse than the previous day.”
Among the handful of studies of Firdos Square, the most incisive was George Washington University’s, led by Sean Aday, an associate professor of media and public affairs. It concluded that the coverage had “profound implications for both international policy and the domestic political landscape in America”. According to the study, the saturation coverage of Firdos Square fuelled the perception that the war had been won, and diverted attention from Iraq at precisely the moment that more attention was needed, not less. “Whereas battle stories imply a war is going on, statues falling— especially when placed in the context of truly climactic images from recent history— imply the war is over,” the study noted.
The study examined CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC from 20 March to 20 April, cataloguing the footage used each day, what the footage showed, and what was said by anchors and reporters. The study focussed particular attention on Fox and CNN, because they broadcast non-stop news. It found that, in the week after the statue was toppled, war stories from Iraq decreased by seventy per cent on Fox, sixty-six per cent on ABC, fifty-eight per cent on NBC, thirty-nine per cent on CBS, and twenty-six per cent on CNN, even though, in that same week, thirteen U.S. soldiers were killed and looting was rampant.
The George Washington University study and other examinations of Firdos, like Ugly War, Pretty Package”, a book by the Boston University associate professor Deborah Jaramillo, suggest that the bullishness of the post-Firdos era stemmed, at least in part, from the myth created at the square. Without the erroneous finality of the statue falling, this argument goes, the notion of “Mission Accomplished” would have been more difficult to assert; the Bush Administration would have had a harder time dismissing an insurgency that, for a fatal interlude, it all but ignored. Conventional wisdom blames the failure in Iraq on the Coalition Provisional Authority, which has been heavily criticized for its inept management of the occupation. But if the C.P.A. inherited a war rather than a victory, the story of what went wrong after Firdos needs to be revised.
In a way, statue topplings are the banana peels of history that we often slip on. In 1991, when pro-democracy forces led by Boris Yeltsin stood up to a coup by Soviet hard-liners in Moscow, a crowd outside KGB headquarters forced the removal of a statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who had led the KGB’s notorious predecessor, the Cheka. The statue was lifted off its pedestal by a crane; its demise seemed to symbolize the end of Soviet-era oppression. Yet, within a decade, a KGB functionary, Vladimir Putin, became Russia’s President, and former KGB officials now hold key political and economic positions.
Throughout the 1990s, Svetlana Boym, a Soviet-born professor of comparative literature at Harvard, visited the Moscow park where Dzerzhinsky’s statue was left on its side, neglected and stained with urine. But over the years, as the power of the security state revived, the statue became the object of fond attention; eventually, Dzerzhinsky was raised to his feet and placed on a pedestal in the park. By studying a statue at not just a dramatic moment but during the course of its existence—construction, toppling, preservation—one can sometimes trace a nation’s political evolution, but it takes patience. In The Future of Nostalgia, Boym’s book on history and memory, she described Soviet-era monuments serving as “messengers of power... onto which anxieties and anger were projected.” The Princeton architectural historian Lucia Allais, who has examined the destruction of monuments during the Second World War, mentioned to me one of the most famous topplings ever: the statue of King Louis XV in Paris, in 1792, during the French Revolution. The action was portrayed by its authors as a liberation from the power of the monarchy, but they put in its spot a symbol of a new sort of power: the guillotine. These monumental destructions “are usually acts of monumental replacement, which hide continuities of power... behind the image of rupture,” Allais wrote to me in an email.
Not long ago, Tim McLaughlin, the officer whose flag was placed on the statue at Firdos, unpacked a wooden trunk that stored his military gear after he left the Marines to attend law school. We were at his childhood home, in Laconia, New Hampshire. McLaughlin is tall and large, but his head seems small for his frame, like a child’s on a grownup’s body. He majored in Russian at Holy Cross, and his favorite story, by Chekhov, is about a widowed carriage driver who can find no one to share his sorrows with; at the end of a cold night, the driver pours out his heartache to his loyal horse.
In the trunk, McLaughlin found a copy of the Constitution that was on his Pentagon desk on 11 September 2001; it was stained with ash from the fire. He pulled out a sealed envelope that had a Marine Corps insignia on the front. Inside was a letter to his parents, to be opened in the event of his death during the invasion. It was a reminder of the dread that gripped the McLaughlin household in those days. McLaughlin had kept a list of notable events during the invasion. One day’s entry said, “Killed lots of people.” Another day: “Drove through house.” Yet another: “Lunch with villagers.” He opened a diary from which silty grains of sand sprinkled out. On one page, exhausted from fighting and lack of sleep, he had written “disoriented” or “disorienting” four times.
The flag that McLaughlin carried to Iraq lay on the bed, folded in the military manner, crisp and tight. It was returned to him after it was taken down from the statue at Firdos Square; his parents had fetched it from a safe-deposit box at the local bank for my benefit. “It’s just a flag,” McLaughlin said, unfolding it. “A whole lot of fuss has been made over it, but it’s not the most important thing to me.”
The diaries explain why:

Company volley into buildings. Killed 4 soldiers trying to run away...
My position is good to cut off back door exit. Kill dismounts in grove (3-7?) then 1 swimming across canal. 2 just about in canal...
Covered canal w/.50 cal—killed 2 more.

McLaughlin also wrote of shooting at a fast-moving car that he considered suspicious. After his bullets killed the driver, McLaughlin realized that an innocent man had perished. A few days later, wishing to avoid the same mistake, McLaughlin didn’t fire when he spotted a group of suspicious Iraqis just ahead of the battalion. Moments later, the Iraqis got off the first shots in an ambush that killed a marine.
The war icons that McLaughlin cares about are not made of metal. They are made of flesh and blood.

Surprisingly, the guy's still alive

The Huffington Post has a splendid post from the Wikileaks collection:

According to a recently released cable obtained by WikiLeaks, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was slapped in the face by Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari. According to the cable, Ahmadinejad surprised the Supreme National Security Council by taking a liberal posture on opposition protests. The president allegedly argued that people felt "suffocated", and that allowing more social and personal freedoms, as well as more freedom of the press, would help to defuse the situation.
Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari apparently disagreed. The cable, dated 11 February 2010, reads:

According to source, Ahmedinejad's statements infuriated Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari, who exclaimed "You are wrong! In fact, it is you who created this mess! And now you say give more freedom to the press?!" Source said that Jafarli then slapped Ahmedinejad in the face, causing an uproar and an immediate call for a break in the meeting, which was never resumed.
Source said that SNSC did not meet again for another two weeks, after Ayatollah Janati succesfully acted as a "peacemaker" between Jafarli and Ahmedinejad. Source added that the break in the SNSC meeting, but not the slap that caused it, has made its way on to some Iranian blogs.
The source, who is located in Azerbaijan, is described later in the cable as "a former non-Marxist revolutionary activist". The source goes on to say that political strife is growing within the Islamic Republic, stating that "recent speeches reflect an ongoing effort to split Supreme Leader Ali Khameini from the Ahmedinejad group."

Rumors of dissension within the Iranian political elite have been leaking out of Iran in recent months, with criticism of the president allegedly coming from all sides. As the Los Angeles Times reported in September:

In Tehran these days, the outspoken hard-line politician is under withering attack from all political directions. His detractors in recent weeks have included assorted fundamentalist clergymen who have accused him of interfering in religious affairs, a judiciary that humiliated him by delaying the release of American hiker Sarah Shourd, the editor of a right-wing newspaper handpicked by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the moderate head of the powerful Assembly of Experts, and a member of parliament who condemned him for praising the pre-Islamic Persian king Cyrus, who is an icon of secular nationalists.

Most recently, Ahmadinejad abruptly fired his foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, in a move that was seen as directed at Khamenei. The cable notes that some politicians in Iran believe that the president will not be able to finish his term.
ran has denied allegations that the president was slapped. According to ynet.com:

Spokesman Ramezan Sharif said the report was published as part of an attempt to divert attention from the "kidnapping and torture of General Reza (Asghari)." General Reza Asghari is the former Iranian deputy defense minister who disappeared in Istanbul in 2006, reports Ha'aretz. Iran has accused Israel of kidnapping the general.