Telling Details

As someone who spent the early days of the War on Terror glued to my TV, looking back on that time brings to mind two things: endless Bowflex commercials, and Steve Harrigan's eerie, green-tinged night-vision communiques from Afghanistan. I've only recently discovered that Mr. Harrigan has a blog, which is every bit as fascinating as his battlefield reports. In Tuesday's entry, he describes some of the things that don't make it into the reports of his print-journalist colleagues in Baghdad:

In today's article about the beheading of an American hostage one key detail does not even make it into the story: the reporter and his translator watched the murder together on an internet website. While watching it, the translator threw up.

As Steve points-out, this telling little detail deserved to make it into that reporter's story. We've heard an endless amount about the activities of the Al-Zarqawi acolytes. Shouldn't we also have a chance to see how an ordinary Iraqi responds to that?