Boy, this is a hard story to hear. The damage inflicted on Iraqi society by that war will scar so many people, for so long.

These are very brave people. I was a coward, meaning I worked for a major US media outlet at the run-up to the Iraq War (low paid and unimportant), but I KNEW the case being made for that war was false and trumped up, but I was afraid to lose my job, so I hewed to the Pro-US party line of early 2003, and I'll live with that for the rest of my life.

No one threatened my life. No one threatened me with a gulag. I made a bad decision. I watched the outcome of all of our cowardly, bad decisions unfold. I did not break voice in my reporting/writing of on-air scripts (even if I had, it would have never made air, as copyeditors would have scrubbed truth out, even with meticulous sourcing, logic, reasoning). Truth was above my pay grade.

And that is NO excuse. I was a coward. Hundreds of thousands of people died in Iraq, many headless and tortured in the streets, bodies found in the mornings in Baghdad. I didn't do enough. None of us did enough.