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I had originally come across this news story back in November, 2003. I copied the link and put it aside, waiting to see what the final outcome would be. Well, I haven’t heard anything more about Kirk von Ackermann, 37, a Californian working in Iraq as a contractor who mysteriously disappeared in October leaving behind his vehicle and all his possessions, including $40,000 in cash. Who is he and what was he really doing driving around alone in Iraq; and most of all, does anyone know if he has been found?

The media reported von Ackermann has been missing for more than a month. His car was found abandoned between the cities of Tikrit and Kirkuk. Inside the vehicle authorities discovered his satellite phone, a laptop computer and a briefcase containing approximately $40,000, which suggested that he had not fallen prey to a robbery. Fears are mounting that he’s been abducted or possibly killed. “You heard rumors that he had some sort of connection … somehow to the war or to counterintelligence,” said Farbstein…

The Army is reportedly conducting an “aggressive” investigation in conjunction with Iraqi police, but so far little progress has been made in the case. Authorities initially thought von Ackermann had been kidnapped but no ransom demands have been made.

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In his famed 2002 State of the Union ‘Axis of Evil’ speech, President Bush stated: “Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears, and show us the true scope of the task ahead…we have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities — detailed instructions for making chemical weapons … surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world.”

However, according to a Boston Globe Story today:

A top nuclear-safety official has said he wasn’t aware that any American nuclear power plant diagrams were found in Afghanistan, despite a terrorist threat cited by President Bush in his State of the Union address two years ago. Edward McGaffigan Jr., a member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, responding to an environmental group’s query, said this month that he testified in 2002 after the speech in at least one closed congressional hearing that he was not aware of any evidence that `diagrams of American nuclear power plants’ had been found in Afghanistan.

McGaffigan’s statement has led some groups to assert that Bush either misled the country or mishandled the intelligence about the threat, because the NRC would be expected to play a pivotal role in safeguarding America’s nuclear facilities. … read more

Beautiful: just as Anthony Gancarski jumps aboard the Bush train, Bill freaking O’Reilly hints at jumping off. For a guy who thinks himself the second coming of Vladimir Nabokov, he might not be that bright.

President Karzai certainly has pressing political reasons to control the exponentially increasing harvests of opium poppies which are supplying his opposition with the wealth necessary to maintain militias, purchase weaponry and threaten the stability of the country. But a new crisis is looming on the horizon which Afghanistan has not had to deal with in the past: drug addiction and a lack of treatment facilities.

Interestingly, the Taliban government was quite successful in stopping opium production during the last year or so of their rule, as this UK study shows. But with the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghanistan is now beginning to experience a public health crisis of drug addition, which may be compounded with a rise in AIDS/HIV and other diseases from shared needles.

Until recently, the use of heroin – a 20th Century invention which can only be made with specialist chemicals – was relatively rare in Afghanistan, largely because most of the processing was done outside the country. That has changed with the return of millions of refugees from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. Many became regular heroin users there and they have brought the practice and the demand home with them. It is difficult to get accurate figures, but one estimate is that Kabul alone has at least 20,000 heroin addicts.

Just two years after the fall of the Taleban – who banned opium poppy cultivation – the country’s illegal drugs trade has grown so big many believe it now threatens Afghanistan’s stability. Last year, the trade generated $2.3bn in revenue for traffickers, almost as much as the country received in aid.
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One of the best critiques I have read of the media and how they helped lead us into war. From the New York Review of Books’ feature story, “Now They Tell Us” by Michael Massing.

If nothing else, the Iraq saga should cause journalists to examine the breadth of their sources. “One question worth asking,” John Walcott of Knight Ridder says, “is whether we in journalism have become too reliant on high-level officials instead of cultivating less glamorous people in the bowels of the bureaucracy. “In the case of Iraq, he added, the political appointees “really closed ranks. So if you relied exclusively on traditional news sources—assistant secretaries and above—you would not have heard things we heard.” What Walcott calls “the blue collar” employees of the agencies—the working analysts or former analysts—were drawn on extensively by Knight Ridder, but by few others.

The contrast between the press’s feistiness since the end of the war and its meekness before it highlights one of the most entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism: its pack mentality. Editors and reporters don’t like to diverge too sharply from what everyone else is writing. When a president is popular and a consensus prevails, journalists shrink from challenging him. Even now, papers like the Times and the Post seem loath to give prominent play to stories that make the administration look too bad. Thus, stories about the increasing numbers of dead and wounded in Iraq —both American and Iraqi—are usually consigned to page 10 or 12, where they won’t cause readers too much discomfort.

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