Jayne Stahl recently conducted a Q & A with me related to my new book on Iraq and the media and the results are posted at Alternet.org.  The link is below.

We get into some of the key issues in the book, relating to all sorts of media failures, as well as the toll on civilians and veterans, lessons not learned (not so far), and much more.

Here's a brief excerpt.  

Yet another veteran of the Iraq war committed suicide over the weekend.  

The subject of U.S. military veterans suicides, which I have been covered at E&P for nearly five years,  has finally become a hot media topic in recent days, peaking last week with hearings in Congress concerning the surprisingly high suicide rate (about 1000 attempts per month) and the Veterans Affairs apparent efforts to obscure the true numbers.  

The San Francisco Chronicle is out today with a shocking report:  In California in 2006, 666 veterans committed suicide - 21 percent of the 3,198 suicides that year, according to the California Department of Public Health. Yet that year, the 2.1 million veterans in the state represented only 6 percent of the state's 37.1 million residents.

A week of hearings in Washington on the alarming spike in suicides among veterans of the Iraq war, and an official cover-up of the numbers, has ended with both the Veterans Affairs chief and Dr. Ira katz, the V.A. mental health director whose advice on the matter was "Shh," still holding their jobs.  

Meanwhile, the returning soldiers "are dropping like flies."   That's how one soldier characterized the spike in suicides among servicemen coming home from war, according to Greg Dobbs, who is completing a documentary on PTSD for HDNet and wrote an op-ed on Saturday for the Rocky Mountain News of Denver.

Finally, an editorial in The New York Times today addresses the V.A. suicide scandal.  

As noted in previous posts here, the shocking New York Times article last month by David Barstow exposing the Pentagon's use of retired military officers to carry their talking points on the Iraq war in the media has received relatively little follow-up--or response--from the news outlets involved, principally TV and cable networks.  One popular blogger who has kept the issue alive is Salon's Glenn Greenwald.

The Pentagon, earlier this week, released dozens of documents that Barstow forced out by his inquiries, including transcripts of some of the meetings with the "media generals" (who are further compromised by working for companies with defense contracts) and even some audio.   Greenwald, yesterday and today, has been going through some of it and offering some startling quotes about the collaboration.

We know you can't wait for the upcoming HBO film on the 2000 Bush-Gore finish, aptly titled Recount, but here's a preview - coming in The New York Times Magazine this Sunday.

Director Jay Roach (previously known for Meet the Parents and Austin Powers films) says Democrats who hear about the film "always" ask him, "Can't you change the ending?"

Despite his prankish film background,  he says Recount is "not a comedy at all" and does not feature any new catch-phrases such as "yeah, baby, yeah."

"It's only 2006," I wrote way back in March of that year over at Editor & Publisher, "and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has already written off Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential race. She  warned that Democrats "are racing like lemmings toward a race where, as one moaned, 'John McCain will dribble Hillary Clinton's head down the court like a basketball.'"

But she yearned for Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. At 44, Obama, she pointed out, was already a year older than John F. Kennedy when he became president.

"The weak and pathetic Democrats seem to move inexorably toward candidates who turn a lot of people off," she advised. "They should find someone captivating with an intensely American success story... and shape the campaign around that leader....

Michael Gordon, the military writer for The New York Times who contributed false stories about Iraqi WMD in the runup to the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2002, has written several articles in the past year about Iran's alleged training of Iraqi insurgents -- or supplying them with weapons to kill Americans.  He produced another major report on this subject for Monday's Times -- based solely on unnamed sources -- which is quite at odds with an account from McClatchy's Baghdad bureau.  

Gordon asserted that "Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran... An American official said the account of Hezbollah's role was provided by four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately.  The United States has long charged that the Iranians were training Iraqi militia fighters in Iran, which Iran has consistently denied, and there have been previous reports about Hezbollah operatives in Iraq.

As the scandal of suicide attempts by Iraq veterans expands -- in the face of Veterans Administration denials -- another horrific case has emerged, once again only gaining attention because of a local newspaper.  I have been tracking these accounts for almost five years and only recently has the problem, with an estimated 1,000 attempts a month now reported, gained wide media, and to some extent official, attention.

The latest story came Saturday in a story by Patrick McCreless in The Cullman Times of Cullman, Ala.  The headline is similar to so many others lately: "Family pushing for changes after soldier's suicide."

It tells how Dorothy Screws "witnessed her only son, U.S. Army Pvt. Tommie Edward Jones, commit suicide right before her eyes six weeks ago in Colorado. She says the Army, which promised to be there for Screws and her family to deal with the loss, has yet to provide assistance."

Last night, I was surprised and happy to find a photograph of my new friend Cheryl Harris at the top of  The New York Times’ web site.  She was hugging her young son, Ryan Maseth, an Army sergeant who was dressed in his uniform and cap.  The were both smiling broadly.  A few months later he was dead.  The military told her this past January that he had foolishly carried an electrical appliance into a shower in Baghdad.  

That was a lie.  

It turned out the fault was an improperly grounded water pump.  With a little help from me,  she found out that at least 10 other military personnel have been electrocuted in Iraq in recent years.  Now she is suing the contractor KBR, though there is evidence that the military and the Defense Contracting Management Agency are also to blame for being lax in its own inspections.  The Times article today carries word of early alerts about this (see link below), which were ignored.

Yesterday I took the subway down to the vicinity of the old World Trade Center site for the first time in  a couple of years for an interview about my new book at the Dow Jones headquarters directly across the highway.  It's always shocking to see the scale of the site and the lack of progress in turning it into -- anything.  It's still a giant hole, which only serves to remind you what is missing there besides the twin towers.  That is, some 3000 lost souls.

One of them was my good friend, Jon Albert.  

So any visit is extremely painful, while also reinforcing what most of us New Yorkers did not feel -- that we should attack a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack.  

Yesterday, amid all of the Mission Accomplished "nostalgia" and reports on the April death toll in Iraq hitting a new recent high of 50, one particular fatality in Afghanistan nearly escaped attention.  I did an item about it over at Editor & Publisher which did get widely linked, but I will now bring it to you here.  

Meanwhile, let's keep in mind that as of May 1, according to the Pentagon, at least 425 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan since late 2001.  Of those, the military reports 292 were killed by hostile action.

Now here's the latest casualty in Afghanistan:

Surely you remember "Banner-gate": the controversy over the White House's shifting explanations for the now-infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that President Bush stood before in his carefully plotted photo-op exactly five years ago.

Knowing what's coming, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said on Wednesday,  "President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission. And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."

You think?  

Let me be the first to wish you Happy Mission Accomplished Day, which arrives in less than 24 hours.  In a just world, the media will provide as much coverage tomorrow about what has transpired in Iraq since that not-so-magical moment on the aircraft carrier as they did on the day itself, but they won't, so it is up to others (i.e. us) to do it.

Feel free to dust off  all the great quotes from that day, such as Chris Matthews gushing over Bush, "He won the war.  He was an effective commander.  Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics."  As Bush spoke before the Mission Accomplished banner, American casualties stood at 139 killed and 542 wounded.  That was nearly 4000 lives lost ago, and a Rand Corp. study released this month reveals that we now have 300,000 vets with mental problems of some sort.

Even after covering the tragic final chapters in the lives of so many U.S. military personnel in Iraq or veterans back home, I found the brutally frank opening line in an obituary from four days ago particularly haunting: "Donald P. Christy, Lt. Col, USAF, passed away April 21, 2008 in Colorado Springs after an extended bout of anxiety and depression."

Further on, the obit mentioned that in 2004 "Don served a tour of duty as the Deputy Commander at Baghdad Airport in Iraq" -- which, as we now know, must have been one of the most stressful jobs in all of Iraq at that time, in light of insurgent attacks and the controversy over the prison on that site and interrogation techniques practiced there.

Fans of Al Gore -- and certain cable TV pundits only interested in a wild news event and ratings -- have raised the scenario for months, but the idea has been widely mocked.  Now, as the media turn on Obama, after turning on Hillary, and we lament that the mud will fly and anger rise for many more weeks,  is the idea of a brokered convention really so implausible?  See Bob Herbert's column in The New York Times on
Saturday for the kind of pox-on-both-their houses that seems to be all the rage.

I'm not saying the brokered convention is now likely,  or desirable -- please, no hate mail --  but if Hillary does very well from now until June, and the fight gets even nastier, try to imagine what the media atmosphere might be like after that.  With Clinton already fostering an anti-Obama attitude, and Obama backers ready to resent the nomination being "stolen" by Hillary, it's likely that the media, and some Democratic pols, will be promoting the idea of a convention showdown.

Elizabeth Edwards' op-ed in The New York Times today aptly holds the title, "Bowling 1, Health Care 0,"  as it criticizes the media obsession with Barack Obama’s bowling form and score during the past three weeks.   My research shows that while cable news gasbags such as Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews, and the entire Fox crew, were the worst offenders, the Times itself has carried dozens of references in its news pages and blog entries.  

Maureen Dowd even had to run an embarrassing correction after she alleged that Obama had improperly accepted the donation of  bowling shoes from  Sen. Bob Casey,  when it was the other way around.   Scarborough, of course, said Americans wanted a real macho man in the White House, perhaps forgetting his unceasing attacks on Bill Clinton’s mannish behavior in office.

But all you need to say is: Which president was the most avid bowler?  And, of course, the answer is: Richard Nixon.  He even paid $400 out of his own pocket to lease automatic pin-setters and even during Watergate went down the basement to roll off some tension.

Tonight, George W. Bush will enjoy or endure his final White House Correspondents Association dinner.  His aides report that he will be in self-mocking mode, even using some jokes he discarded last year because of the Virginia Tech tragedy.  We can hardly wait?  Check C-SPAN tonight, if you dare.

This seems like an apt moment to recall Stephen Colbert's now-famous routine at this dinner two years ago.  It was so critical, and effective, that the association reacted by trotting out Rich Little, who most people thought had passed away, for last year's dinner, which was a total flop.

What most forget is that Colbert pointed daggers at the press as well as the president -- and many in the media responded by panning his performance in the days that followed.  

As you may recall, Barack Obama in the infamous ABC debate last week, responded to probing of his Bill Ayres connection by mentioning that Hillary Clinton's husband had pardoned two former Ayres-related radicals also associated with the Weathermen. It got new attention today from Newsday but I have a connection myself: The murders linked to the two pardoned prisoners took place about a mile from my home near Nyack, N.Y.

Every few days I drive past the spot, which holds a marker in tribute to the two law enforcement officers who died in what is known here as "The Brinks Crime" or "Brinks Murders." And believe me, this clemency is still a tremendously sensitive subject in this part of the state, and among all police and other law officers, peaking in the years 2000 and 2001, but still hot today whenever it is mentioned.  So it is preposterous for Clinton to claim that she had never really heard about the case -- if you recall, she was running for senator from New York in 2000.