The great Charles Hanley reminds me why I grew up admiring journalists:

War is “an abomination, an evil,” and will one day be banished to the dustbin of history, but only if reporters are able to get to the truth, said Hanley.

For 161 years The AP has been committed to a single mission: communicating facts, said Hanley. “It’s the closest thing to a straight news source. There’s no advertising, no hyperventilating over exclusives,” he said.

But in times of war its efforts are sometimes stymied by military and government bureaucracies that want to control the story. That is the case in Afghanistan and Iraq where the military has adopted corporate-like public relations models. Read more…

From Baghdad, the great Charles Hanley reports that the U.S. has "stepped up attacks in Iraq, dropping bombs at more than twice the rate of a year ago."

And the darnedest thing happens when you drop 237 bombs onto a country in 4.5 months:

At the same time, the number of civilian Iraqi casualties from U.S. airstrikes appears to have risen sharply, according to Iraq Body Count, a London-based, anti-war research group that maintains a database compiling news media reports on Iraqi war deaths.

The rate of such reported civilian deaths appeared to climb steadily through 2006, the group reports, averaging just a few a month in early 2006, hitting some 40 a month by year's end, and averaging more than 50 a month so far this year.

Good thing they run that database out of London, because it's un-American to count the blown-up bystanders. Read more…