Bill Ardolino has his third Examiner piece up from Iraq. It’s about recruiting Iraqi police. Quotable, from a discussion with one of the recruits:

I asked another fellow what he thought of the Americans. He said he thought bad and good things. His negative opinion focused on collateral damage — he said that “when the Americans are fired upon, they fire back and kill civilians.”

The positive: “If it weren’t for the Americans, Fallujah would have been destroyed a long time ago.”

Bill has accompanying pictures in this post.

I get more out of his pieces than I do from any dozen standard Big Media pieces on Iraq. One big reason is that he just tells it like it is, with no Grand Theme or overwhelming spin that I can detect. His pieces are colored by the fact that he is embedded, but he’s forthright about that. It’s just more genuine reporting than I’m used to seeing from traditional media

Good stuff.