More On Defections

The captured were mostly these Iraqi Air Force we've been talking about:

Most of those captured were air force cadets, the employee said. Those who were Sunnis were given civilian clothes and sent home; the Shiites were marched and trucked off to the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s old palace in Tikrit, where they reportedly were executed.

Lots of caveats about how reliable the images are, and the reports themselves. That's good -- the journalists may have learned a thing since the American part of the war, where they tended to take insurgent claims of massacres at face value. Often if we sent an infantry unit out there to see if there really were heads piled up like the newspapers said, there was nothing of the sort. But the report, in the international press, multiplied the effect of their propaganda.