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A trio of reports were filed on Iraq, each with a different angle. ABC's Miguel Marquez (subscription required) went to Baghdad's Shorjah Market, the site of a gruesome terrorist bombing (text link) in February. Since then the market has been secured: it is surrounded by concrete barriers; all shoppers are frisked; merchants must cart their wares in by hand. The areas surrounding the market have seen 48 deaths by "bomb, gun and mortar" since February, but not one in the secure zone. Merchants in the Jamiyah neighborhood are being subsidized to reopen their businesses. So far 700 storekeepers have applied for funds. Shops are open--but empty. "Large scale violence between Sunnis and Shiites has stopped here but there are still criminal gangs. Most people in Jamiyah are still too afraid to leave their homes.
On NBC, Lisa Myers followed up on yesterday's report by CBS' David Martin on the immunity granted to Blackwater USA bodyguards when they were initially questioned by the State Department about last month's killing of 17 civilians in Baghdad's Nisoor Square. Myers' unidentified "official" source told her that the grant of immunity was a "mistake," offered "without the approval of the State Department's top managers." Her source told her "such guarantees were often offered during investigations in Baghdad over the last two years." The FBI is continuing its investigation to develop an unimmunized account of the killings and at the corporate level Blackwater USA announced that it is cooperating with the feds. Some operatives, however, "are now refusing," Myers was told.
CBS chose to focus on the Mosul Dam on the Tigris River, built in 1984 and now "perilously close" to collapse, according to the USArmy's Corps of Engineers. Allen Pizzey, astonishingly, explained that the dam was "built on a type of rock that dissolves when it comes into contact with water." If it breaks it will let loose a 60 foot high wall of water onto the city of Mosul 45 miles to its south and 15-foot floods would reach as far as Baghdad. "Biblical proportion," was how Pizzey put it.
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