Everyone should consider adding JJ Sutherland's blog to your RSS feed. He's an NPR producer/correspondent in Baghdad, and his blogging on the city is fascinating and frightening. We keep on hearing about how the bad news is being exaggerated, and I get the fealing the opposite is true. Baghdad sounds like total hell.

His most recent entry is about US snipers and how they don't appreciate his clumsiness.

The snipers laugh and joke, but are deadly, deadly serious. One soldier tells me a story about a sniper who was interviewed on CNN a little while ago. When asked what he feels when he shoots somebody, he replied, "Recoil." There is a young man's bravado in their talk, but they do seem to have a deep self-assurance that, when called upon, they can make the shot.

Near their position, the men have this tarp blocking the view and the sun from one direction. I was looking for someone, didn't know my way around, and tried to gently pull the tarp aside to peer behind it. And it came down. The snipers were not happy.

"There's a reason we have that there," one said coldly. I panicked and tried to push the thumbtack that held it back in, but I bent the thumbtack. "I'll handle it," said the sniper who quickly took the tarp from me. I meekly walked away, incredibly embarrassed and feeling guilty.

Great, I'm in Iraq and have managed to piss off a bunch of snipers. One of them told me earlier he could make a shot at 1200 meters. Wonderful.

I was sold on his blog with his first entry from Baghdad.

The tension here is the worst I've ever seen it. Just talking to people they seem more on edge. The ongoing sectarian violence is unnerving. Dozens of bodies turn up every day, bound and blindfolded, shot in the head. The discussions I have about security are also different... a lot of, "What do we do if...?" That "if" seems to be more plausible, and on a more frightening scale.

And his entry on the executions in Baghdad is shocking.

I get a call the other night. They've found four more bodies in western Baghdad. They're bound, hands and feet. They're blindfolded. They've been shot in the head. Their bodies bear wounds from beatings and electrical burns, and someone has used a drill on their flesh. That's just one phone call. I get a few more. Every night it seems, dozens of bodies turn up, both Shiite and Sunni, often killed in the same fashion.
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It is becoming very clear to me that war can shatter a society and what it becomes as it puts itself back together can become a warped malefic grotesquerie -- a social organism that eagerly eats itself alive.

At a press conference the other day, an American general said he thinks that Iraqis feel more secure. I think most of the Iraqis I've spoken with since I've been here might have a slightly different perspective.

Check it.