[RACooper]

Interesting read in last Sunday's Toronto Star... caused no small measure of debate around the Thanksgiving dinner (well until too much wine was consumed )

I'm just throwing this out for commentary; on the content, subject, or perspective of the readers...

This unedited e-mail below, sent privately to friends by Wall Street Journal correspondent Farnaz Fassihi, was posted on pointer.org, a site run by the Poynter Institute journalism school.

In an Oct. 4 note to Editor & Publisher magazine, Fassihi said she never meant the e-mail to become public. She is now on a vacation that she and her employers say was planned long before the controversial posting.

Subject: From Baghdad

9/29/04

Being a foreign correspondent in Baghdad these days is like being under virtual house arrest. Forget about the reasons that lured me to this job: a chance to see the world, explore the exotic, meet new people in far away lands, discover their ways and tell stories that could make a difference.

Little by little, day-by-day, being based in Iraq has defied all those reasons. I am house bound. I leave when I have a very good reason to and a scheduled interview. I avoid going to people's homes and never walk in the streets.

I can't go grocery shopping any more, can't eat in restaurants, can't strike a conversation with strangers, can't look for stories, can't drive in any thing but a full armored car, can't go to scenes of breaking news stories, can't be stuck in traffic, can't speak English outside, can't take a road trip, can't say I'm an American, can't linger at checkpoints, can't be curious about what people are saying, doing, feeling.

And can't and can't. There has been one too many close calls, including a car bomb so near our house that it blew out all the windows. So now my most pressing concern every day is not to write a kick-ass story but to stay alive and make sure our Iraqi employees stay alive. In Baghdad I am a security personnel first, a reporter second.

It's hard to pinpoint when the "turning point' exactly began.

Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to 10 per cent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq?

Rest of article at:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...=1038394944443