I can one-up you. I followed the straight-from-the-mouth reports from USAID and the pentagon. When they'd publish their electricity numbers, I'd drill for the data directly. Electricity is at pre-war levels? Where's the data on pre-war levels. You have a timeline to restore electricity? Don't I remember people from the UN going in and talking about their electrical grid? And something about us refusing to send parts because of concerns of what bad things they could be used for? Didn't the UN draft reports about what parts were needed for the electric grid and all the problem points? Hmm, I'll look it up. Wow, look, I found it.
So when they said they'd get the power turned back on super-duper-fast, I wondered why absolutely no one but me seemed to have read the UN report that stated it would be down for a long time. And when everyone was scrambling for 3 years to get parts to the major Baghdad electricity plant, I wondered why I was the only one who had access to the UN list for the needed parts.
I also seemed to be the only one aware that our private contractors were posting requests for repair guys on monster.com.
I don't think of myself as an investigative journalist. But the only people I could find that were scrutinizing the things I was were underpaid stringers.
I got really angry because an Iraqi doctor wasn't able to get drugs for his hospital. I actually spent a few days tracking down the U.S. guy we appointed to that issue, best I could do was the guy that had just gotten replaced. I contacted him, actually spoke to the guy. He said they were working on the list of what was allowed to be imported, so technically none of the hospitals could import drugs because they were all technically illegal. Since they were all technically illegal no one wanted to stick their necks out to import them. I think it took them about a year to work out the paperwork. But there was a shitload of problems below that. Then I called a "fixer" to see what the best way would be to get them in, even if I could convince someone to illegally send them. She said not to bother, everything would get stolen anyway.
I still feel lonely about it. Don't know why those aren't the type of things that get reported. Nobody was reading the USAID site but me anyway, it seemed. Not that anyone should, the spin on that thing was sickening.