³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

You may have read yesterday's piece in the blogging "hippy grandmother" (sic) from Berkley, CA who "spent a year living off peanut butter sandwiches" so she could afford to got to Iraq.

Well Jane is now cooling her heels with the press pack in Baghdad, and though she's still waiting for her chance to embed with troops, she's certainly seen plenty of action. Today she had a lucky escape as suicide bombers struck at the heart of Iraqi politics:

"After I had written and filed my story this morning, I returned to the convention center in order to see if I could give a copy of it to my two female Parliamentarian interviewees. I entered the front of the building and climbed the stairs to the second floor but after a visual search of the many delegates gathered there to caucus between sessions, I was unable to find who I was looking for and so I left.

An hour later an apparent suicide bomber somehow managed to enter the restaurant and set off an incendiary device which, according to Reuters, injured over a dozen delegates, some of them seriously. Two delegates were allegedly killed. " ()

We spoke to Jane from the press HQ. An interview for Drive (audio about 1hr in) and a longer interview that will run on Pods and Blogs. Having spoken with Jane it's interesting to hear her describe how being in Iraq has changed the way she views the situation; I don't think George Bush will be on her Christmas card list anytime soon, but she acknowledges Iraq is more complex than she first thought.

Jane's story resonates with another interview I did today with former Marine infantry officer (and Harvard grad) , of the hit Iraqi TV show Seth recorded the programme with his Iraqi translator Mohammed both are now out of the army and in the US. The show was pretty honest about the problems faced by Iraqi's, and Moulton and Mohammed sometimes found themselves at odds with the US military and the Iraqi government. Ordinary people appreciated the honesty to the extent that Seth says jokingly that he misses being asked for his autograph by fans. Autograph hunters are not something concerning Mohammed at the moment, he is worried that he will have to go back to Iraq soon. From the little I know of the situation there, his . Seth for his part thinks western organisations and military should do more to look after Iraqi's they work with once their employment ends.

I finished both these interviews with the conviction that Jane, Seth and Mohammed, genuinely want to tell what they see as the truth about Iraq even at some personal cost to themselves, even if it conflicts with their background, beliefs or their employers views. Of course, what they see as the truth will differ, but whether we describe ourselves as professionals or amateurs, citizen journalists or broadcast journalists, it is surely this commitment that matters, how we describe it is largely irrelevant.