'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

A bountiful WaPo

Every so often the WaPo brings out an issue that's filled with great news (from the journalistic viewpoint that is, meaning "news stories that are well reported and well written"). Like today. Here are some of these stories:

* The Bushadministration has been intensively tapping Mohamed ElBaradei's phone calls with Iranian diplomats,

and is scrutinizing them in search of ammunition to oust him as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to three U.S. government officials. (Dafna Linzer, p.A1.)

* Baghdad ER doc Luai Rubaie told Anthony Shadid that,

He sees maybe 100 cases a day, twice as many as before the invasion in March 2003. Back then, he estimated, one in 1,000 was a victim of gunfire. Now half the cases are the consequence of the city's strife. (pp. A1, A30.)

"It's a museeba," Rubaie said -- a disaster.

* It strikes me this is a big story, that I don't think has received enough attention. It's in the paper on p.A28. Brad Graham, reporting from Baghdad, tells us that:

In an effort to reduce the amount of military cargo hauled in vulnerable ground convoys across Iraq, the U.S. Air Force has begun airlifting much larger quantities of materiel to bases around the country...

Additionally, U.S. cargo aircraft are ferrying more materiel from base to base within Iraq. In the past month, the amount of military items hauled daily by air has jumped from about 350 tons to about 450 tons... according to Col. Mark Ramsay, deputy director of air mobility at the Combined Air Operations Center here...

So far, the Air Force has been able to handle the extra load without bringing in more than the 60 C-130 cargo planes it already has in the region. This is because some of the burden has been borne by larger C-17 and C-5 planes that fly the long-haul routes from the United States and Europe.

The bigger planes, which can carry three times or more the load of a C-130, have in the past simply dropped their pallets at one of the major hubs in Iraq and headed back. Now, some of the aircraft are being kept in the region for several days and used for short-haul trips...

According to officers here, plans being drawn up for review by Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of all U.S. forces in the region, call for an even greater increase in supplies delivered by airlift -- up to about 600 tons a day. Such a rise could put a serious strain on the existing air fleet, officers said.

"I would kid you if I said I'm not worried about sustainment," [Lt. Gen. Walter E. Buchanan III, the senior commander of U.S. aircraft in the Persian Gulf region] said in an interview. "I can surge, but I have to develop a system that I can sustain this with because we don't know how long this is going to go on."

Graham also tells us that Buchanan was told by his superior officer that, "What General Jumper did was basically give me clearance to, in his words, throw away the rule book... He is not worried about efficiencies, and so I'm not either."

We learn later in the piece that much of the tonnage of what currently needs to get trucked into and then around the country is fuel, and water:

To address the water issue, senior U.S. logistics officers are looking at options that include buying bottled water from the Iraqis or constructing bottling plants in Iraq.

It kind of boggles the mind that the forces are trying to conduct all their operations inside Iraq while relying on drinking water being trucked in from outside... D'you wonder that running this occupation is turning out to be so darned expensive?

And of course, with all the new reliance on airlift, it's about to get more so.

* Then here, even deeper into the paper (p.A32) it seems clear that one of Anthony Shadeed's stringers has been able to have an actual face-to-face interview with Abdullah Janabi, the Sunni Muslim cleric who "headed the Shura Council of Mujaheddin, an 18-member group of clerics, tribal sheiks and former Baath Party members who assumed control of the city of 250,000 shortly after Marines aborted their first attempt to capture it in April."

Janabi, Shadeed reminds us was one of three insurgent leaders who worked out of Fallujah from April till last month. The others were the infamous Abu Musaeb al-Zarqawi and Janabi's fellow-Iraqi Omar Hadid.

Despite reports that Hadid had been killed, Janabi insisted in the interview reported by Shadeed that he was not dead: "He is fighting with his men."

Shadeed, who wrote under a Baghdad dateline and was therefore presumably in Baghdad while reporting and writing the story, said that Janabi spoke "from a village near Fallujah". That could imply that Shadeed did a phone interview with him.

But Shadeed also tells us that Janabi was "wearing a T-shirt, jeans and a checkered headscarf. As in a previous interview last month, he had a belt of explosives around his waist." Which means either that Shadeed elicited these sartorial details from Janabi during the phone interview (unlikely?), or that one of the three, probably Iraqi, stringers credited at the end of the story had actually seen him face-to-face and was able to report the sartorials.

So, Janabi still in touch one way or another with the western media. How do you spell "broke the back of the insurgency" again?

(AP is now reporting that, "American warplanes pounded Fallujah with missiles Sunday as insurgents fought running battles with coalition forces in the volatile western Iraqi city." Also, Fallujah:

erupted in more violence Sunday, starting when American and Iraqi forces clashing with guerrillas in several suburbs and ending with U.S. airstrikes on suspected insurgent hideouts.

"The strikes were conducted throughout the day and were called in by troops in (armed) contact with and observing the enemy moving from house to house,'' spokesman Lt. Lyle Gilbert said...

Fallujah resident Abdullah Ahmed said the fighting started after U.S. soldiers brought 700-800 men into the city to clear rubble from damage caused by November's offensive.

"The clashes started as soon as the young men entered the city,'' Ahmed said. "The American troops were surprised and decided to launch military operations.''

So I guess we can say that Fallujah is another "Mission Accomplished" for the Bushies that didn't quite work out?)

* Finally, still from today's WaPo, the story about how another member of "The gang who couldn't shoot straight," Colin Powell, got egg all over his face in Morocco when, basically, all the pro-Washington Arab potentates present told him "no way, Jose" on democratizing their countries...

However, if the potentates seemed a little resistant to the message, some of the democrats inside Egypt didn't seem to be. AP is now reporting from Cairo that:

About 1,000 people gathered downtown Sunday, many with their mouths covered by yellow stickers reading "Enough,'' to protest the possibility that [strongly pro-US] President Hosni Mubarak might run for a fifth term or that his son, Gamal, might succeed him...

Hosni Mubarak, 76, has been president since 1981, when he replaced the assassinated Anwar Sadat. His current six-year term ends in October, and he has not said whether he will run again.

Some participants said the largely silent action - held in front of Egypt's Supreme Judiciary Court - was the first purely anti-Mubarak protest since he came to power...

The protest drew Islamists, nationalists, leftists and liberals. The Egyptian Movement for Change, a group of political parties and intellectuals, organized the protest to demand a constitutional change allowing more than one presidential candidate.

Interesting, indeed.