Nabbing a killer

Run out now and buy your Sun-Times for “Night Raid in Mosul,” by Colby Buzzell, who was there, with his combat buddies skulking through alleys at night past houses where people watched TV, he carrying a battering ram which they used to break into a house where slept a family.  The man of that house was their target.  They used a smell detector and found dynamite smell on his hands and took him away, the wife and presumed mother of their kids wailing, “Don’t take him away.  I don’t want to be alone.”

But taking this guy away, maybe eventually to Guantanamo, made Mosul safer for many mothers who do not want to be left alone either, many others having wailed at night like this one because of his dynamite.

It’s a gripping tale of getting ready for the raid and completing it, from a book, My War: Killing Time in Iraq (G.P. Putnam’s Sons).  The piece is not on the Sun-Times site, which is why you have to buy hard copy.  It’s the lead story in this week’s Controversy section, edited by Tom McNamee, the sort of Ernie Pyle-style reporting you won’t find in Chi Trib, where instead the focus is on wailing mothers without context: a pacifist tilt.

This one ends with a quote from George Orwell, of Animal Farm and 1984 fame:

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Yes.

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Correction to the above:

"Nabbing" has:

. . . . The piece is . . . the lead story in this week’s Controversy section, edited by Tom McNamee, the sort of Ernie Pyle-style reporting you won’t find in Chi Trib, where instead the focus is on wailing mothers without context: a pacifist tilt.

It should have said, in view of James Janega's reporting to which I have called attention, "reporting you almost never find in Chi Trib," or come to think of it, in Sun-Times either. 

Also, in addition to "pacifist tilt," I might have said "Viet Nam syndrome tilt," which is practically speaking the same thing these days, but it's such a hackneyed phrase.