WHY AREN'T AMERICAN JOURNALISTS COVERING IRAQ ANYMORE?

Why don't American journalists cover the Iraq war anymore? Is it "Iraq Fatigue," as so many say? Or is it because the big corporate owners of the major media in the United States have collectively decided the Iraq war is not "newsworthy"anymore?

Why does it take a journalist from a newspaper in Great Britain to report on Fallujah, Iraq where U.S. troops are trying to restore some kind of order to the city?

This blogger has found he can't depend on the U.S, media for anything that is happening in Iraq. To find out what is happening in Iraq, you have to have a long list of foreign web sites who everyday publish reports on what is taking place in Iraq.

These are legitimate news stories, but the mainstream media in the United States has turned their back on events in Iraq.

The sad part of it is the United States is now carrying the ball virtually all alone in Iraq and the U.S. still has 160,000 troops in Iraq. Virtually all of the "coalition of the willing" have pulled up stakes and headed home.

So a story like this one from The Independent in Great Britain http://tinyurl.com/2toxfd is especially interesting on two fronts. The first is it is news and the second is not a single American journalist ventured into Fallujah, Iraq to find out firsthand what is going on in the Iraqi city.

We will continue to bring readers of our blog, CORKSPHERE http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ stories and news accounts of what is happening in Iraq.

It seems like the only real AMERICAN thing to do inasmuch as so many young American lives are invested in Iraq.

Bill Corcoran, editor of CORKSPHERE, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/

Return to Fallujah

Three years after the devastating US assault, our correspondent enters besieged Iraqi city left without clean water, electricity and medicine

http://tinyurl.com/2toxfd

By Patrick Cockburn
The U.K. Independent

The last time I tried to drive to Fallujah, several years ago, I was caught in the ambush of an American fuel convoy and had to crawl out of the car and lie beside the road with the driver while US soldiers and guerrillas exchanged gunfire. The road is now much safer but nobody is allowed to enter Fallujah who does not come from there and can prove it through elaborate identity documents.

The city has been sealed off since November 2004 when United States Marines stormed it in an attack that left much of the city in ruins.

Its streets, with walls pock-marked with bullets and buildings reduced to a heap of concrete slabs, still look as if the fighting had finished only a few weeks ago.

I went to look at the old bridge over the Euphrates from whose steel girders Fallujans had hanged the burnt bodies of two American private security men killed by guerrillas – the incident that sparked the first battle of Fallujah. The single-lane bridge is still there, overlooked by the remains of a bombed or shelled building whose smashed roof overhangs the street and concrete slabs are held in place by rusty iron mesh.

The police chief of Fallujah, Colonel Feisal Ismail Hassan al-Zubai, was trying to show that his city was on the mend.

As we looked at the bridge a small crowd gathered and an elderly man in a brown coat shouted: "We have no electricity, we have no water."

Others confirmed that Fallujah was getting one hour's electricity a day. Colonel Feisal said there was not much he could do about the water or electricity though he did promise a man that a fence of razor wire outside his restaurant would be removed.

Fallujah may be better than it was, but it still has a very long way to go. Hospital doctors confirm that they are receiving few gunshot or bomb blast victims since the Awakening movement drove al-Qa'ida from the city over the past six months, but people still walk warily in the streets as if they expected firing to break out at any minute.

Click on link above to read the full account.