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NBC aired a couple of items on Iraq. From Arlington Cemetery, Roger O'Neil covered the funerals of the dozen soldiers who were shot down in a Blackhawk helicopter in January. NBC's Martin Savidge profiled them--three colonels, two captains, six sergeants, one corporal--at the time. O'Neil noted that the crash so commingled their bodies that "individual identification was impossible." The cemetery's Old Guard buried the twelve in a single coffin. When Ricardo Sanchez, the retired general, called the Iraq War a "failure" he became "the highest ranking former top military commander in Iraq to openly criticize the war," according to NBC's Jim Miklaszewski. Sanchez called the National Security Council in George Bush's White House "derelict in the performance of their duty" and added that "in my profession, these types of leaders would immediately be relieved or court-martialed." Miklaszewski called the Pentagon for comment and obtained the anonymous suggestion that "Sanchez is clearly bitter over his forced retirement" even though "the facts on the ground in Iraq seem to support much of the criticism."
CBS had Elizabeth Palmer file from the Green Zone in Baghdad in advance of Lara Logan's interview with Erik Prince, the boss of the paramilitary Blackwater USA, on Sunday's 60 Minutes. Palmer found a couple of US diplomats to recall the conduct of their Blackwater bodyguards. "The worst thing that has ever happened to me," was how political aide Adam Hobson described riding in a convoy while his guards opened fire on an Iraqi car full of civilians, killing one. Former diplomat, now college professor, Janessa Gans recalled that "it was weird getting from Point A to Point B and nothing will stand in our way…If there was a hint of anyone approaching we view that as a terrorist threat." Mused Palmer: "When those terrorist threats turned out to be civilians, scared, hurt or even killed by Blackwater, she says it defeated the purpose of the mission."
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