Jinn of Current Events

Turkey has effectively prevented the US from opening a Northern Front against Saddam's regime. Prevarication, requests for ever-larger financial support and loans, delays of decisions, last-minute rejections of former agreements, refusal to allow use of US-built and -operated bases, and closure of the airspace, all of these actions have ultimately made the deployment of 62,000 US troops and their weapons impossible. Thus Saddam has avoided facing close to 25% of planned US forces! Among these forces is the 4th Infantry Division, with a total of 16,000 troops and more than 200 M-1A2 tanks; it is considered one of the most modern fighting forces in the US military.

Further, repeated and loud Turkish threats to invade Northern Iraq have forced the 70,000 Peshmargas (anti-Saddam Iraqi-Kurdish troops) to move towards the Turkish border in order to protect themselves, instead of moving against Saddam's troops.

In other words, Turkey has actively and repeatedly acted to undermine the liberation of Iraq. 

Guardian: The BBC's coverage of the war has come under fire from one of its own correspondents in the Gulf who has fired off a furious memo claiming the corporation is misleading viewers about the conflict in Iraq. Paul Adams, the BBC's defence correspondent who is based at the coalition command centre in Qatar, complained that the corporation was conveying a untruthful picture of how the war was progressing. Adams accused the BBC's coverage of exaggerating the military impact of casualties suffered by UK forces and downplaying their achievements on the battlefield during the first few days of the conflict. It is quite obvious that the BBC is opposed to the liberation of Iraq and overly eager to present anything that might look like a failure on the part of the coalition. 

NYT: Some of the Army mechanics captured on Sunday after they took a wrong turn in the Iraqi town of Nasiriya were apparently executed by their captors, probably in front of townspeople... The accusations came at the end of a day in which senior White House and Pentagon officials accused the Iraqis of a number of war crimes, including feigning surrender and then shooting at American forces, and using a hospital as a staging area for military operations. 

NYT: A team of five experts sent to China by the World Health Organization to investigate a mysterious respiratory illness there has not been allowed to visit the province where the disease is thought to have originated in November... One in 25 infected people die. What are the Chinese authorities hiding?