You'd have to read deep into two New York Times articles on Iraq to find two interesting tidbits. The first, from a dispatch about a successful hostage rescue mission and a concurrent spate of car bombings, revealed that Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, a US military spokesman, has sidestepped the controversy about the numerical strength of the insurgency (Daily Kos) by reducing it to the pronoun "he."

Said the Times, in the eighth paragraph:

"As you're well aware, today he surged," acknowledged Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the military spokesman, using his preferred pronoun to describe the amorphous insurgency. "He still has that capability."

Though he sometimes mentions "insurgents" in briefings, Lynch really does talk this way.

From a March 16 briefing:

…
we're seeing about six IEDs or VBIEDs per day. And they're all well-placed and well-timed on the part of the insurgency. Remember, he's trying to inflame sectarian violence.

March 9:

You got an enemy out there who wants to derail the democratic process and discredit the Iraqi government, and he sees right now a window of vulnerability for the Iraq people and he's attacking that window of vulnerability. And he's specifically targeting civilians. He is trying to tear Iraq apart at the seams to keep it from unifying as a nation. And what we've seen him use over the last 11 days are VBIEDs.

March 2:

You got to think like the enemy. He still wants to derail the democratic process and discredit the Iraqi government. He's going to do whatever he can to inflame sectarian violence. And during the period of time when there was a ban of vehicle movement in Baghdad, he used that period of time to prepare for surge operations. And we've seen those surge operations over the last three days.

The other tidbit came in paragraph 26 of an article about the Iraqi military's mistreatment of detainees. Nine paragraphs earlier, the presence of an Iraqi division's only medic at Camp Justice was cited by a US official as evidence that the Iraqi commander there is becoming more humane. But then came this bombshell, raising questions of what was staged for the Times and what was real, and of just how the Iraqi military trains its medics:

The Iraqi division's intelligence chief "said we have to treat detainees, since they're subjected to visits by the press and human rights groups," said the medic, Hazem, 32, who declined to give his full name for security reasons. "He said to me, 'Your main job is to treat the patients, not to check if they're terrorists.' If I know they're terrorists and I'm told to kill them, I'd kill them. But I do what my job requires."

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