"In the Twilight Zone" Baghdad's Green Zone, Almost Hunter Thompson

[Botany]

Great reporting .... too bad it is a German Mag. This will make the MSM when?
Not as edgy as HST but this reminds of his great piece in Rolling Stone about being in
Phnom Penh as the communist were ready to take over.

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,406441,00.html

The days when journalists could move around Iraq just by keeping a low profile -- traveling in beat-up old cars, growing an Iraqi-style mustache, and dyeing their hair black, or when women reporters could safely shroud themselves in a black abbaya and veil -- are gone. When Jill Carroll of the Christian Science Monitor tried such tactics this January, she was kidnapped while trying to get to an interview with a Sunni politician, Adnan al-Dulaimi.

snip

The Green Zone is a 4.5-square-mile compound in the middle of Baghdad surrounded by an eight-mile-long, Christo-like running fence of blast walls. Someone dubbed it "the largest gated community in the world." The easy way to enter it is to "chopper in" to the zone's helicopter pad -- code-name "Washington" -- from Baghdad International Airport or one of the many other U.S. military bases that now form a growing American archipelago throughout Iraq. Indeed, all day and night choppers carrying military brass, diplomats, security specialists, contractors, and VIP civilians rattle a few hundred feet over Baghdad.

snip


At the gate itself, you are greeted by signs in English and Arabic: "Do Not Enter or You Will be Shot," "Stop Here and Wait," or "No Cell Phone Use at Check Point." (The fear, of course, is that an insurgent with a cellphone will detonate a bomb by remote control.)

snip

Inside the Green Zone, one encounters a world that is nowhere to be found outside. The zone has its own taxi service. There are women joggers; men in rakish safari hats; 30-year-olds in neckties who have vaguely described jobs "advising" the Iraqis on political and administrative matters; sweating women in halter tops, short skirts, and flip-flops. And almost everyone has an identity pouch hung around his or her neck with double transparent windows for all those important plastic ID cards. If most of the wearers weren't so tall, white, and overweight, they might be confused with those tagged refugees who are found in U.S. airports waiting in groups to be put on mercy flights to a new host city.

[kenny blankenship]

1. this article was run at Salon.com today as well

that's not MSM but it is in English with lots of American readers.

[Botany]

2. great

What have me made in Iraq?

[kenny blankenship]

3. in 2 dimensional form it looks approximately this way

I say approximately because the "Green Zone" marked by the white arrow near the center of the map, has to be exaggerated in size to be visible.
Creating the Red Zone is what we spent all the really big dollars on.