Citizen Reporter

I have a tendancy to stay up til 2am. Actually I tend to stay working on things til 2am, and then I flip on the TV and catch up on either BBCnews, France’s TV5, the occasional Dutch NOVA program, or yes.. like last night – CNN.

My excuse for CNN watching is that its low on the channel list and I can only surf channel up or down. Plus I’m mesmorized by the fact that Larry King has a show that people watch, cause he is perhaps the most useless man on television.

So it’s 2h30am last night… and I’m starting to fade, and the good-looking british-thai anchorwoman tells the audience to be careful, as the following report would have images that might disturb us. – I perked up. Disturbing? On CNN? Would could it be?

The segment was spending a “day” (5 minutes) in an Army hospital in Baghdad. And on this day, injured soldiers with bloody hands and feet and yellow skin were being helicoptered in one-after-another. The doctor would talk to the patients and honestly tell them he may not be able to “save the leg”. There was a good amount of pain sounds; moaning, crying, shouting. All the while I kept thinking — this is on CNN?!

Earlier I had read that the Baghdad morgue was reporting 1,000 deaths per day. And as I rode to frisbee practice, Radio Open Source had journalists working in the “green zone” talking about how everynight there are gunbattles and kidnappings, and every morning you see the bodies in the streets.

I know people compare this to vietnam sometimes. I know other people hate comparisons. However you choose to look at it, I watch reports from all over the world, including from inside Iraq, and what’s going on is truely sad and could have been avoided. Like parents so often (at least they used to!) teach their children, violence is not the way to solve problems.