Dan Murphy The Christian Science Monitor

I had gone and watched a movie with a buddy in Mansur one night, fall or early winter of 2004, and we wanted to go over the bridge. The bridge that you go over to go toward the airport, and there was an American vehicle checkpoint set up basically blocking the way you wanted to go on the bridge. It would have meant a twenty-minute detour for us. There were three or four cars that would pull up and they would turn around; it was late at night.

So we stopped and rolled down the window and a private walks over and I said, “I’m an American reporter, can you let me through, ’cause this is going to take another twenty minutes and it’s dark and a little dangerous and we’re just going over there.” The guy says, “Shut the fuck up.” I say, “Look man, I don’t want to make trouble for you,” and while I’m talking to him he’s got his flashlight and he’s moving it in frenetic circles over both of my eyes. I said, “Look, really man, I’m just trying to get home. Is there any way we can just get through?” And he says, “Now you’ve done it! I’m pulling you over and I’m making you wait here while we search your whole car.”

So we comply. We got out of the car, stand away from the car as we were told to, open the trunk, etcetera. And this is my friend’s driver, an Iraqi driver who I had just met that evening, so I felt pretty bad that I had gotten him into that situation. And the pimply private comes over and he says to me, “Yeah, how do you like that? You see what you get when you fuck with me?” Like two feet from my face. And not to my perfect credit, I basically called him a word that will famously get you thrown out of any baseball game that has ever been played. You can figure that out for yourself. Not a pleasant word. And that was it. He goes and talks to his commanding officer, who comes over and within two minutes has me zip-tied, handcuffed, roughly searched, and interrogated for fifteen minutes. We go through this and I’m calm, as I usually am, and eventually they’re like, I guess we can’t arrest an American for using language that we don’t like. They untie me, and we drove off and go home.

About a week later, we get an e-mail addressed to The Christian Science Monitor Baghdad bureau chief, and I was chief at the time, and it’s a letter written by the general in Baghdad at the time. The letter goes on to say we’ve had a lot of complaints about the conduct of our troops in the field and we try to hold ourselves to a high standard and correct problems when they are brought to our attention by the press, but we think you have to be equally responsible and aware of the terrible behavior of your people. For instance, this guy Dan Murphy was stopped and was politely asked to step out of his car and he refused and launched into a profanity-laced, anti-American tirade, and he was so agitated and physically wild that we had to restrain him for his safety and our own. And etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. That was completely fantasy. It was lies. And I have no doubt that the general who wrote this letter believed it; he had attached the incident report written by the soldiers who were involved in this little incident.

Basically, I responded and said I happen to be that guy, and I will tell you exactly what happened, and of course [the report] has no truth because these things have no truth. And he apologized and said, “These things get garbled in transmission, sorry.” Now, does this incident matter in the big scheme of things? No. Did the guys on that patrol lie because they thought that maybe arresting Americans for using one naughty word isn’t the thing they should be doing? Maybe. Was what he was told by the soldiers in the field, who of course might have an incentive to lie, believed wholeheartedly by this general? Absolutely. Does it lead me to believe — given the source from the podium in the Green Zone and elsewhere over three years now — that these sorts of reports are far from the whole truth? Absolutely. Have there been military investigations that have proven the same? Absolutely. I think you get the point of the story.

Sam was particularly taken with Dan Murphy's testimony. My response was that, like any organization, the military has a few bad seeds (Abu Gharab anyone?). His reply was: "Hey man, more "moral waivers" and bottom third asfab scorers than ever before. It's like great society II." Which turned into a debate on the draft, and so the great circle presses foward.

Caroline Hawley BBC

My big worry is that the audience sometimes doesn’t know what they are missing because we as journalists didn’t all know what we were missing, because we were unable to function as we would anywhere else in the world. You are unable to just go and chat with people in coffee shops. You’re unable to just drive up to a town an hour north of Baghdad, a mixed Shiite and Sunni town, and chat with people about sectarian division. You are unable to do all the things that you felt you should have been doing. And my worry always was that we didn’t know how much we were missing.

And finally:

Anne Barnard The Boston Globe

The most personal thing I have to say about this probably is that when I first came into Iraq, it was really a feeling that a Band Aid had been ripped off the skin of Iraq — that everything was raw, everything was new. It might be a little painful or disorienting, but people were starting to talk, and people were spilling out these stories. People had many hopes and many fears, and it was the most dynamic experience I’ve ever experienced as a reporter, or personally. There’s a lot of sadness when I look back on that, when I look back on what might have been. And not to give the wrong impression — readers should know that Iraqis still are, in fact, going to work every day and going to the market. But the overarching fear and uncertainty I’m sure they didn’t know would last has lasted three years and counting.

But Iraq had suddenly broken open and all these things — both therapeutic and really ugly — were bursting out of people, and literally these bodies were bursting out of the ground. And people were digging up, on their hands and knees, digging up the ribs and the femurs of their relatives that had been buried by Saddam. They were finding them in these graves. At the time you had this idea that it was going to be like the end of the Soviet Union, and people were going to start reexamining their own personal choices in having condoned or supported or tolerated that regime, and that that would be a healthy process for the country.

But instead, the ugliness of what came out from things that were buried, physically and metaphorically, was just too much. There was so much anger that had to come out. And when you combine that with the failures of the American occupation to provide a safe environment for those things to be worked out, you got the situation that we have today.

One that I've learned from the anti-war elements in this country is that I simply cannot stand uninformed, ideologically driven commentary passed off as fact (Iraq is bad, mmmkay). That's why I feel so strongly about getting the MSM's side of this story, as we in the military constantly challenge their professionalism and journalistic ethics. It may not fit our party line, so to speak, but it does elevate the debate above petty name calling and snarking.

The entire piece is worth a read in its entirity.