The lighter side of liberation? From today's USA Today: apparently, a patrol came upon a private zoo in Baghdad on Thursday, and found some starving animals. But beasts cannot live by MREs alone:

Apparently, the MREs didn’t satisfy the animals. The soldiers ended up pulling live sheep from a nearby pen and pushing the animals into the lion compound. While the soldiers looked on, the young lions pounced on and killed two of the sheep, fending off the cheetahs and the bear for the spoils.

There are some more anecdotes, including a report on a raid on a schoolhouse and a patrol through the “Saddam City” shanty town, named for its ex-slumlord.

CNN’s chief news executive, Eason Jordan, reports on 13 years of intimidation, torture, and attempted murder of CNN reporters and photographers on Friday’s New York Times Op/Ed page. A stomach-turning sample (apparently reported at the time; however, I don’t remember reading about it):

Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for “crimes,” one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family’s home.

But remember, kids, since Saddam’s thugs didn’t rip babies from incubators he’s actually not a bad guy.

Andrew Hagen has an excellent post on this story.

I will say (snarky comments on the BBC aside) that I’m not sure what CNN could have done differently; it’s not fair for critics to expect them to hang innocent people out to dry in a totalitarian state. Maybe if Bernie and Peter hadn’t been so enthusiastic about hanging out in Baghdad twelve years ago some of it might have been avoidable, but it’s a big might.

Jeff at Caerdroia calls CNN’s behavior a “betrayal of trust,” and he makes a credible, damning case:

Yet through all of this behavior, for over a decade, CNN would have us believe that they did everything they could to bring us the truth? Shame! Shame on CNN. They cannot now be trusted with any news from any nation willing to brutalize its own people, because they have shown that in such a situation, they will sell out any principle for the opportunity to get stock footage and meaningless interviews. Worse yet, by not reporting these events, CNN encouraged them to continue, and thus became complicit in torture, attempted murder and suppression of the truth.

If they had avoided all local entanglements, they wouldn’t have gotten themselves in this mess in the first place. A policy like that might kill the market for local stringers in totalitarian states, but it would beat the alternative of getting the local stringers killed by a mile.

The more I think about this (including reading the Glassman piece), the more pissed off I am at CNN. I'm with D.C.—they’re coming off the dial at the Lawrence household. By TNR’s account, it appears that CNN reporters were lucky not to be caught on-air fellating Saddam Hussein. If Gulf War I put CNN on the map, Gulf War II should take them off it.

Links via the Command Post. More linkage via Technorati.

Howard Bashman of How Appealing asks:

By the way, am I the only one who prefers “an URL” to “a URL” (Dixie Chicks excluded)?

The short answer: probably not.

My general rule: use an when the vowel sound is pronounced at the beginning of the subsequent word, and a otherwise. In the case of “H”: an hour, but a hat. “Y” is also potentially problematic, although usually in English it is not pronounced as “i” at the beginning of a word—but one might refer to, or call one’s self, “an Yglesias fan.”

But letters at the beginning of abbreviations could be a bigger issue: “A”, “E”, “I”, and “O” have clear vowel sounds at the beginning, while “U” is pronounced like yew, with the “yuh” sound for y. So “a URL” seems more appropriate to me, if you speak it as a collection of letters—e.g. U-R-L. However, if you pronounce it like the name or title “Earl,” an would work better, and there seems to be a good number of people (techies and non-techies) out there who do.

Incidentally, common British practice would uppercase an abbreviation to be spoken as initials—e.g. USA—and capitalize an abbreviation prounounced like a word—e.g. Nato—but that’s not used west of the pond, so there’s no obvious guide except knowledge of the language. Some also argue that the latter type of abbreviation is the only type that can be called an “acronym,” a position I am agnostic on.

Kevin Drum is apparently upset because the media had the audacity to actually show the action in TV footage of the Saddam statue toppling, and attributes this to “the duplicitous role of the media” in a U.S. government propoganda effort (apparently influenced by the non-existent U.S. minders brought in by the Marines to replace the Iraqi ones that fled that morning).

Then again, maybe they zoomed in because you can’t see anything worth photographing in a wider shot. But that wouldn’t fit a conspiracy theory, so I’ll just have to be skeptical about that.

Josh Chafetz at OxBlog finds that things may not be as they first appear in Atriosland. Imagine that!

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (via Jim Treacher):

You would think there would be very few people anywhere who would be upset by today’s news from Baghdad. But, as has become obvious, beyond those who merely and honestly sought peace or greater consensus, there remain groups who were invested in the idea that the Coalition couldn’t, or shouldn’t, succeed.

In other words, not a really good day to be French.

(Unless, of course, you’re The Dissident Frogman or Merde in France.)

CNN just ran videophone footage, narrated by Martin Savidge, of Marines attempting to blow up a statue of Saddam Hussein (apparently identical to the one pulled down near the Palestine Hotel; they must have mass-produced them somewhere). After an attempt to pull it down with a tank failed, they tried plan B: C4.

When the smoke cleared, there was a gaping hole in the crotch area of the statue. Savidge couldn’t stop laughing. Somehow, I think the Iraqis will be content to leave it be.

Unsurprisingly, the Command Post is on this too.