AAP "Event"...Jill Carroll home...World bank in Baghdad

Good Morning. Well, it looks like Air America Place is still down. Apparantly, the Domain Name Server that is run by our hosting company suffered some kind of major failure over the weekend. I don't pretend to understand these things, but the way it was explained to me, this is like the "internet phone book". You type in the name, and the server will 'match it up' to a specific numeric IP address and connect you up. Since the server isn't working, anyone attempting to access the site by name is out of luck. You can, however, still connect numerically. This is a bit fragile, so some of the links don't work, and there have been some login issues. But we are still there. If you can't get in that way, do drop by Air Rational Guard. We've had problems with AAP in the past, and Admiral Rican has graciously offered his own site as a backup for us.


Moving on to other news, in the very small "Good News from Iraq" department...kindapped Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll arrived home in Boston yesterday, safe and hopefully sound...

Nearly three months after she was abducted at gunpoint from a Baghdad street, journalist Jill Carroll had a joyous reunion with her family in Boston yesterday, beginning what is likely to be a long recovery from her ordeal and an adjustment to her newfound celebrity.

Passengers on the Lufthansa 747 jumbo jet that brought Carroll back to the United States shortly after noon said she was alternately laughing and marveling at the world outside her window after spending 82 days as a hostage in rooms where she could not see outside. She was also surprised to see her own face on the cover of a newspaper that the flight attendant handed her.

''I finally feel like I am alive again," Carroll told reporters from her newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, who accompanied her on the crowded flight to Logan International Airport. ''To be able to step outside anytime, to feel the sun directly on your face, to see the whole sky. These are luxuries that we just don't appreciate every day."

Minutes after arriving, the 28-year-old was whisked away in a police-escorted limousine from the tarmac to an undisclosed location to meet her father, mother, and twin sister. Before Carroll's abrupt release Thursday, they had received little news about her well-being since the kidnappers' threat to kill Carroll by Feb. 26 had passed.

Carroll has said little about her plans, aside from requesting ''quiet time" with her family.

Other journalists have written books about their experiences in Iraq, including two by reporters who either were kidnapped or nearly kidnapped. However, Micah Garen, a documentary filmmaker who wrote a book about his 10 days as a hostage in Iraq in 2004, said Carroll probably has more immediate concerns right now.

''There is just nothing like that reunion with your family," said Garen, whose loved ones -- like Carroll's -- waged an extensive campaign to win his freedom. ''We immediately left the next day and went to a quiet place in Rhode Island by the water for a week. . . . You really want to be isolated from the media craziness and spend time with your family and get back to normal."

Garen cautioned that ''normal" may return only gradually as Carroll reflects on what she has been through and how it has changed her life. Carroll's friend and translator, Allan Enwiya, was killed in the abduction, while Carroll has said she lived in isolation throughout her captivity, often under threat of harm. On a practical level, Garen said, she will not be able to work anytime soon in Iraq, both because of the danger and that she would be so widely recognized.

''Suddenly, overnight, the job that you really love -- reporting overseas -- is taken away from you and you don't know why," he said yesterday. ''People think that all these great things will come out of this but, in reality, you're taking many steps back." Continued...

Finally this morning...how'd you like to do some banking in Baghdad? The World Bank apparently would. The thinking is that because they're funding most of the Iraq reconstruction, having a bank and personnel on the ground would only make things easier. But wait, there's more! Guess who's in charge of the World Bank these days? That's right, Paul Wolfowitz, at one time the number two man in the Pentagon, who planned this entire war. Well, isn't that conveeeeeeeenient? Wonder how much of that "reconstruction money" is reconstructing his bank account?

WASHINGTON -- The World Bank's president, Paul Wolfowitz, is considering expanding bank operations in Iraq, which would put his agency at the center of rebuilding from a war he helped plan as the Pentagon's former number two official.

Senior bank officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because no final decision had been made, said key donor countries including Britain, Japan, Germany, and Denmark are pressuring Wolfowitz to establish a Baghdad office.

The development agency has not had an Iraq office since an Aug. 19, 2003, bombing at UN headquarters in Iraq killed a bank employee. A consultant, with a staff of seven Iraqis, is paid by the World Bank to look after its affairs in Iraq.

No World Bank staff would be forced to accept an Iraq assignment, the officials said.

In recent weeks, Wolfowitz sent a fact-finding mission to Iraq, and he was examining security matters and several reconstruction-related issues, officials said.

The possibility of a new World Bank office revives attention to Wolfowitz's role as an architect of the Iraq war. Many critics have accused the Bush administration and the Pentagon in particular of failing to plan for a post-invasion Iraq, as violence rages three years after Saddam Hussein's ouster.

Michael O'Hanlon, a reconstruction specialist at Washington's Brookings Institution, said Wolfowitz's history with Iraq ''complicates everything." ''He is a very smart man," O'Hanlon said, ''but he is also obviously very controversial in his basic support of the Iraq invasion."

Wolfowitz's predecessor as World Bank president, James Wolfensohn, resisted pressure from US lawmakers to return bank reconstruction specialists to Iraq after the 2003 bombing. Continued...

So, there's a mixed Monday for you. We hope to have the issues with Air America Place resolved sometime today, but since we're dependent on our hosting company to fix this, we're not so sure.