In some 24 years of government service, I experienced my share of dissonance when it came to what was said in public and what the government did behind the public’s back. In most cases, the gap was filled with scared little men and women, and what was left unsaid just hid the mistakes and flaws of those anonymous functionaries.

What I saw while serving the State Department at a forward operating base in Iraq was, however, different. There, the space between what we were doing (the eye-watering waste and mismanagement), and what we were saying (the endless claims of success and progress), was filled with numb soldiers and devastated Iraqis, not scaredy-cat bureaucrats.

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After her mother’s death, Fatima said she found “a letter next to her head saying, ‘Go back to your country, you terrorist.’” The accusation sparked outrage and brought national media attention to the murder. And yet, within days, publicity-craving Islamophobes Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer were pushing an alternative motive: that Alawadi’s death was, in fact, an “honor killing.” Geller crowed, “I surmised that the murder of Shaima Alawadi appeared to be Islamic, rooted in Islamic teachings and culture …”

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And yet it is also more than all of those things. Busch is filled with complicated and fascinating contradictions. Yes, he's the son of a famously introspective and domestic writer, who grew up in rural New York obsessed with toy guns and building massive military forts. But he studied visual arts at Vassar, where he confused everyone by joining the Marine reserves -- especially his commanders, when he accidentally announced himself in a roll call as part of the "Vassar infantry."

A man consumed with war, words and images, Busch served two combat tours in Iraq. He proved himself both exceptionally thoughtful and also terribly overconfident. In his first tour, beginning in April 2003, he was the commanding officer of a light armored reconnaissance unit, in a village near Iran. In his second tour, in an exploding Ramadi in 2005, Busch had the impossible job of trying to rebuild a town -- and gain its trust -- while insurgents and sniper fire added to the general lawlessness and lack of any power structure.

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In about a day, I would be at the exact place where the plane went down, by the sides of dozens of troops who were injured in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was chronicling a solemn moment on the 10thanniversary of the 9/11 attacks for “Recovering,” the documentary film I’m directing about troops who have turned to an unlikely recreation, bicycling, to heal from wounds such as post-traumatic stress disorder and lost limbs.

But Shanksville was far away. It was raining and cold and I kept pedaling. I was wet, breathing hard, my ass hurt and heart felt like it could burst. I wanted to stop. But that was out of the question. I wasn’t going to let the other cyclists down.

I looked down at the Garmin mileage tracker on the handlebars of my road cycle. It read: “790.”

In just 121 miles, it would hit “911.” Then the champagne would flow.

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As my colleague Peter Juul and I noted in our recent report on the war’s costs, The Iraq War Ledger, the end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future. But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy.

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"I’ve come to speak to you about the end of the war in Iraq," he told gathered troops. "Over the last few months, the final work of leaving Iraq has been done. Dozens of bases with American names that housed thousands of American troops have been closed down or turned over to the Iraqis.  Thousands of tons of equipment have been packed up and shipped out. Tomorrow, the colors of United States Forces-Iraq -- the colors you fought under -- will be formally cased in a ceremony in Baghdad."

All the specifics were true. But what about Obama's claim that the war has come to a end?

The truth is more complicated. It turns out the Obama administration is leaving behind a huge contingent from the State Department along with thousands of armed private contractors. The possibility for violence between Americans and Iraqis is very real.

To dig into the details, I spoke to Spencer Ackerman, who has been covering the issue closely for Wired's Danger Room.

The administration is saying the war is over. Is the Defense Department leaving anyone behind? 

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Upon the death of the unlamented Earl Butz, Hitchens excoriated editors who published sanitized obituaries of a man remembered solely for a vulgar racist remark made in public. Hitchens leaves a rather more varied legacy, but it's just as important not to whitewash his role in recent history.

There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn't really matter to Hitchens.)

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I don't think photojournalist-turned-filmmaker Danfung Dennis includes that officer's speech in his compassionate and unsettling documentary "Hell and Back Again" (winner of a Grand Jury Prize and a cinematography prize at Sundance) for some heavy-handed ironic effect, or to score political points. This isn't that kind of movie. There have been several powerful war documentaries about the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq (I'd put Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger's "Restrepo" and Janus Metz's "Armadillo" at the top of the list), but perhaps none with the intimate, human, tragic and sympathetic impact of "Hell and Back Again."

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But largely missing from the discussion is the fact that if Obama leaves any troops in Iraq, he will be violating one of the first major promises of his presidency. In February 2009, just a month into his tenure, Obama delivered an Iraq speech at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, declaring:

"I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. We will complete this transition to Iraqi responsibility, and we will bring our troops home with the honor that they have earned."

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The bloodbath comes less than two weeks after Iraqi officials said they would be open to a small number of U.S. forces staying in the country past a Dec. 31 withdrawal deadline.

The blasts were coordinated to go off Monday morning and included parked car bombs, roadside bombs, a suicide bomber driving a vehicle that rammed into a police station and even bombs attached to lightpoles.

The scope of the violence -- seven explosions went off in different towns in Diyala province alone -- emphasized that insurgents are still able to carry out attacks despite repeated crackdowns by Iraqi and U.S. forces.

Iraqis were furious at security officials and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

"Where is the government with all these explosions across the country? Where is al-Maliki? Why doesn't he come to see?" said Ali Jumaa Ziad, a shopowner in Kut, where the worst of the violence occurred. Ziad was brushing pieces of human flesh from the floor and off equipment in his shop.

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•  "Dammit, make a decision." Panetta expresses his frustration with Iraq's delay in making a decision on whether to ask the U.S. to keep some of its 46,000 troops in the country past the end of the year.
•  "This damn country has a hell of a lot of resources," Panetta told troops in Baghdad. The New York Times counted "16 cheerful 'damns' and 'hells'"during 28 minutes of remarks.
• During the same speech, he described the operation to kill "that son of a bitch" Osama bin Laden.
• Panetta told reporters that the United States would keep 70,000 troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2014. The White House has pledged to bring many more service members home by then and aides were quick to say that Panetta had misspoken.
• As President George W. Bush did before him, Panetta suggested the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003 was related to the presence of al-Qaida there, telling troops in Baghdad that "the reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked." This is something the Obama White House has denied.

What could possibly account for Panetta's seemingly of-the-cuff manner? The Defense Secretary had a suggestion on MSNBC on Monday night: "I'm Italian, what the frick can I tell you?"

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The Royal British Legion said that it was dropping the newspaper as a partner in campaigns related to veterans' issues and had suspended all other ties until the allegations are resolved.

The Legion said it was also reviewing its advertising in other News International papers, including The Times and The Sun.

The Legion acted after The Daily Telegraph reported that telephone numbers of relatives of dead military personnel had been found in files amassed by a detective formerly employed by the News of the World.

"We can't with any conscience campaign alongside News of the World on behalf of armed forces families while it stands accused of preying on these same families in the lowest depths of their misery," the Legion said.

"The hacking allegations have shocked us to the core."

The detective, Glenn Mulcaire, served a prison sentence after being convicted in 2007 of hacking voice messages in phones of the royal family.

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• Writing in response to the deadly blasts on the London Underground in July 2005, Cole criticized "Bush and Blair's incompetently pursued war on terror." he wrote, "If Americans look closer... they will realize that Bush's incompetent crusade has made the world more dangerous, not less."
• Similarly, Cole skewered the Bush administration when newly elected Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari seemed to be developing close ties with Iran. "All the sorts of contracts and deals that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had imagined for Halliburton, and that the Pentagon neoconservatives had hoped for Israel, were heading instead due east," Cole noted at the time.
• Then in March 2006, as violence in Iraq was peaking, Cole wrote that "bloody events in Iraq have undermined American authority in that country and in the Middle East more generally."
• He was also fiercely critical of Bush's rhetoric on Iraq. When the president avoided describing the situation there as a "civil war," (a term the Iraqi prime minister employed), Cole emphasized how wrong Bush was.
• Similarly, Cole noted that Saddam Hussein's execution, decreed through what he described as "the bumbling of the U.S.-backed regime," was little more than an act of revenge that turned the dictator into a martyr.
• And Cole broadened his sights beyond Iraq. He wrote scathingly about Bush's approach to Israel and Palestine and was quick to point to the problems with how the then-President responded to Hamas' victory in legislative elections in Gaza in 2006. "How do you like your democracy now, Mr Bush?" Cole wrote.

Evidently, with a voice as influential as Cole's, calling the focal point of an administration's foreign policy "a colossal misadventure" makes waves; the White House and the CIA may not have taken heed of his writing, but -- if recent reports are to be believed -- it certainly caught their attention.

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Thousands of years ago, people in the region used sun-dried bricks to build homes and walls. Those bricks had a lifespan of about 20 years before they began to crumble, at which point locals just built anew atop the old foundation. Do that for a while, and soon enough your buildings are sitting on a small hill.

At night, the tell area was very dark, as we avoided artificial light in order not to give passing insurgents easy targets. In that darkness, you could imagine the earliest inhabitants of what was now our base looking at the night sky and be reminded that we were not the first to move into Iraq from afar. It was also a promise across time that someday someone would undoubtedly sit atop our own ruins and wonder whatever happened to the Americans.

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Two Iraqi security officials say a barrage of at least three rockets hit an Iraqi base in eastern Baghdad on Monday morning and killed the five American troops.

Earlier, the U.S. military said in a brief statement that five troops were killed but gave no additional details about where the incident occurred or how they died.

The Iraqi officials say the Americans were staying on the Iraqi base as advisers and the rockets hit near their living quarters.

The Iraqi officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Five American troops were killed Monday in central Iraq, U.S. officials said -- the single largest loss of life for the American military in Iraq in the past two years.

The military said in a brief statement that the five were killed Monday, giving no additional details about where the incident occurred or how they died.

The incident was under investigation and the names of the deceased were being withheld pending notification of the next of kin, the military said.

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Trump's is not the first, and will not be the last political book that was rendered ridiculous or blatantly incorrect before or very shortly after its release. It's not even the only one released this year! Here are some of our favorite sad, wrong books:

"Where's the Birth Certificate?" by Jerome Corsi, 2011

Oh, there it is! Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn't have realized that your entirely pointless search for the "long-form" birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book's publication.

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You get the point. Towel off and read on.

What is it about the military that turns normally thoughtful journalists into war pornographers? A reporter who would otherwise make it through the day sober spends a little time with some unit of the U.S. military and promptly loses himself in ever more dramatic language about bravery and sacrifice, stolen in equal parts from Thucydides, Henry V, and Sergeant Rock comics.

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