Personae non gratae....

Less than 24 hours after issuing a press release criticizing the U.S. military's handling of humanitarian aid in Iraq, Voices in the Wilderness personnel have been banned from meeting with the U.S. Civil Military Operations Center ( CMOC) or with international journalists working out of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. (One email makes it sound like they've been kicked out of the hotel all together.)

An excerpt from their press release:

CMOC also reported that they spent several days locating hospitals, power plants, and water & sanitation plants in order to do needs assessments. Apparently no one in the U.S. military thought to ask the United Nations, or other international organizations working in Iraq, for any of this information prior to, or even after, the fall of Baghdad. The World Health Organization and the Red Cross have been working in Iraq for years. The United Nations Development program has been working to assist Iraq in restoring electricity since 1996. Locations and assessments of civilian infrastructures are not secret information - except in the Pentagon's world. Why didn't anyone ask for this information? Why wasn't a plan for rehabilitation developed prior to the war?

When told that of rumors of a cholera outbreak in Hilla, CMOC even asked Voices in the Wilderness where that neighborhood was located in Baghdad - unaware that Hilla is a major Iraqi city located approximately 1 hour south of Baghdad!

As VIW points out, curtailing freedom to critique U.S. policies in Iraq right off the bat does not bode well for the establishment of democracy there.