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RAMADI, Iraq: Sunni merchants watched warily from behind neat stacks of fruit and vegetables as Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno walked with a platoon of bodyguards through the Qatana bazaar here one recent afternoon. At last, one leathery-faced trader glanced furtively up and down the narrow, refuse-strewn street to check who might be listening, then broke the silence. "America good! Al Qaeda bad!" he said in halting English, flashing a thumb's-up in the direction of the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq.

Does it give the Dem leaders of Congress pause to realize that the enemies of the United States in Iraq, the people killing our troops, are banking on their political success? Harry and Nancy shouldn't dismiss this as the raving of a right-wing blogger. It is in fact the considered view of someone they surely see as a respected, nay, an authoritative source: no less than the Baghdad bureau chief of the New York Times, John Burns. Burns was a guest on this morning's "Today." In the set-up piece, NBC White House correspondent Kelly O'Donnell rolled a clip of precisely...

Far be it from me to put in a plug for "Today," but I do hope Nancy Pelosi & Friends were watching this morning. Congressional Dems might be quick to dismiss what President Bush predicts would be the upshot of a date-certain pull-out from Iraq. But perhaps they would not so blithely disregard the observations of one of the most experienced and respected reporters on Iraqi matters . . . a New York Times staffer, no less. During this morning's first half-hour, "Today" aired a segment devoted to answering the question "What if US Troops Withdraw?" In the first part,...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 5 - Amid the wrenching testimony of a survivor who told of the atrocities wrought by Saddam Hussein's secret police, the presence of a former American attorney general on Mr. Hussein's defense team in the trial court on Monday seemed to be one of the day's less bewildering things. Ramsey Clark, one of America's more renowned contrarians, made a mark notable even by his own singular standards on Monday when he delivered a lecture to the judges on the elements essential to a fair trial, including adequate physical protection for the defense lawyers. Earlier, flushed and indignant,...

In a February speech in Washington, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, often regarded as an eventual Oval Office candidate, voiced her concern about "some of the pullbacks in the rights" she said were given to Iraqi women under Saddam Hussein. Not even Sen. Ted Kennedy, who has attacked President Bush for engaging in a "senseless war in Iraq," has gone so far as to praise Hussein as a supporter of women's rights. Hillary Clinton did try to qualify her softening of the dictator's horrific image by noting that these women's rights were "on paper." However, she went on to give...

<p>At the Brookings Institution in Washington on Feb. 25, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton charged that, with Saddam Hussein gone, there have been "pullbacks" in the rights Iraqi women enjoyed under his rule. Not even such bellicose critics of the war as Sen. Ted Kennedy have claimed that the regime change has cost women in Iraq the leading defender of their rights.</p>

Today: March 20, 2004 at 4:55:47 PST Fears Impacted U.S. Reporting on IraqBy MIELIKKI ORGASSOCIATED PRESS BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) - Competitive pressures and a fear of appearing unpatriotic discouraged journalists from doing more critical reporting during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, according to reporters and others at a conference on media coverage of the war. The journalists on the panels at the University of California at Berkeley this week blamed the Bush administration for leaking faulty information, but said the media also has itself to blame for not being more skeptical about the case for war. "The press...

 OUR ORWELL: Is there any journalist one trusts more than John F. Burns to tell us what is going on in Iraq? Somehow, Burns is untainted with the cynicism and reflexive anti-Americanism of many of his journalistic peers, and yet is open to the nuances of a complicated and often surprising world. His despatch from Iraq today in the NYT is peerless. Not just beautifully written, deep while never seeming less than conversational, it makes a couple of really important points. First off: The amiability that greets a Westerner almost everywhere outside the Sunni triangle, and even there when American...

SEPTEMBER 18, 2003 Praise and Pans for John Burns Book Excerpt Generates Tons of Mail NEW YORK -- This past Monday, E&P Online published an oral history with John Burns, the New York Times correspondent, from the new book Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq (The Lyons Press). Among other things, Burns charged that some reporters in Baghdad curried favor with Saddam Hussein's regime by neglecting to fully expose its many brutalities. Our excerpt inspired wide coverage of Burns' charges in other media this week, and more e-mails to E&P Online than any article in memory, with many hailing...

John Burns, the great New York Times reporter, offers us a brutally blunt assessment of how badly Western correspondents covered Saddam Hussein's regime. His report, excerpted by The Wall Street Journal and Editor & Publisher, is spreading rapidly on the Internet and is bound to have an impact on the public's already low respect for most journalists. The compulsively candid Burns, until recently the New York Times bureau chief in Iraq, wrote his comments for the new book "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq" (The Lyons Press), a collection of first-person accounts by journalists in Iraq. Burns, who has...

<p>The following is an excerpt from John F. Burns's contribution to the book "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq," published this week by The Lyons Press. Mr. Burns is a correspondent for the New York Times.</p> <p>From the point of view of my being in Baghdad, I had more authority than anybody else. Without contest, I was the most closely watched and unfavored of all the correspondents there because of what I wrote about terror whilst Saddam Hussein was still in power.</p>

Veteran New York Times correspondent John Burns claims foreign journalists covering the Iraq war while Saddam Hussein was still in power did not present a true picture of the regime's tyranny because they believed they needed to curry favor with officials in order to gain and maintain access. JohnBurns's comments were excerpted by Editor and Publisher magazine from the newly published Lyons Press book, "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, an Oral History," by Bill Katovksy and Timothy Carlson. The Times reporter said he put Iraq in a category of totalitarian states all its own, with the possible exception...

War called 'justified' New York Times foreign correspondent John Burns is on record in interviews and in his own stories about dangers in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. In a new oral history, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner went on to say: "This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights. Alone. This was a grotesque charnel house." Interviewed May 1 in Baghdad for "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq," Burns added, "There were probably fewer people [who] died in the six weeks since this war began than would have died if Saddam Hussein's killing...

6pmLeaked emails add to NY Times' woes Ciar ByrneThursday May 29, 2003The GuardianCan the headlines get any worse for the New York Times? Once a beacon of US broadsheet journalism, the Times has already been rocked by charges of plagiarism, and now its rival the Washington Post has heaped on fresh embarrassment by reporting an unseemly squabble between two senior journalists on the paper.According to leaked emails seen by the Washington Post, the Times' Pulitzer prize-winning Baghdad bureau chief, John Burns, was in high dudgeon when another Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, Judith Miller, filed an interview with Iraqi exile leader Ahmed...