<img alt="Murdered US journalist Steven Vincent. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images" src="http://blogs.theguardian.com/news/archives/images/svblog.jpg" width="200" height="325" /
Murdered US journalist Steven Vincent.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
"Not for the first time, I felt I was living in a Graham Greene novel, this about about a US soldier - call it The Naive American - who finds what works so well in Power Point presentations has unpredictable results when applied to realities of Iraq. Or is that the story of our whole attempt to liberate this nation?"
This is an extract of US freelance journalist Steven Vincent's blog, which confronted the realities of life in Iraq as seen through the eyes of an American who wholeheartedly backed the US mission in Iraq. More extracts were published today in the Guardian's G2 section.
Vincent has become the 30th journalist to be killed in Iraq so far this year. He was a freelance writer from New York, living in Iraq while working on a book on life in post-liberation Basra.
He was also one of a handful of journalists using blogs as an alternative outlet for their writing.
Vincent's blog provided a chance for him to flesh out the details of the reports he filed for National Review, the New York Times and elsewhere. In one post he expresses his frustration with the way extremism continues to grip the city of Basra:
To the despair of many secular-minded residents, the British are doing a cracker-jack job of teaching Iraqi police cadets close-order drills, proper arrest techniques and pistol marksmanship, without, however, including basic training in democratic principles and a sense of public duty. As a result, our Anglo allies may be handing the religious parties spiffy new myrmidons to augment their already well-armed militias.
It appears that a comment piece he wrote for the New York Times led to his murder, says Kathryn Jean Lopez in the National Review. In a tribute to Vincent, she explains the suspected reasons for his murder and suggest that his July 31 piece, which highlighted corruption in the Baghdad police lay behind the killing . Vincent was clearly concerned for his own safety in the months leading up to his death.
David Enders, another freelance journalist working in Iraq, <a href=""wrote on his blog:
[Vincent] had mentioned to me how afraid he was to publish certain things while he and the Iraqi woman he worked with remained in Basra, so I was somewhat surprised to see his most recent piece, on the control of Islamic parties w/in the Basra police.
"Vincent was a brave man who wanted to tell the truth, despite the deadly risks," writes Lopez. There are a few freelance journalists who continue to take such risks: and Dahr Jamail, Michael Yon and Christopher Allbritton all have blogs (add any more you can think of to the comments below. After Vincent's killing, it is not hard to see why there are so few.
