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The closing days of a Presidential campaign will always find foreign coverage taking a back seat. The Congo story should have been an exception but CBS and NBC both fell down on that job. At least NBC mustered a Friday Hot Spots feature from Richard Engel in Baghdad. He updated us on the impact of the 2.5-mile-long, 12-foot-high concrete wall the divides the Shiite neighborhood of Sadr City. On the side patrolled by the US military, $53m have been spent on playgrounds, schools, clinics and on a mural on the wall itself; on the other side, thousands of followers of Muqtada al-Sadr ritually burn the American flag. The construction of the wall involved the killing of 1,000-or-so militia fighters, mostly targeted by Apache helicopter gunships, and the deaths of six GIs.
In a non sequitur, NBC's Engel quoted Ambassador Ryan Cocker thus: "al-Qaeda has been degraded but it has not been defeated." Engel did not explain why Crocker was under the misapprehension that Sadr City had anything to do with al-Qaeda.
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