Salam joins the Guardian

Salam joins the Guardian
: The Guardian’s story on Salam Pax has run at last — and with it the announcement that starting next week, Salam will write a fortnightly column called the Baghdad Blog for the Guardian (under what byline, we wonder?).

The story says surprisingly little, tells us nothing new, does not dig into Salam’s stories or opinions, and does not identify him (only saying that Salam is his real first name).

There is a shocking edit in the story. The Guardian quotes the story of the Guardian interview from Salam’s own blog but deletes choice words — as if we’re not going to look at the blog and find this dubious edit.

Blog version:

A day before that I sold my soul to the devil. I talked to Rory from the Guardian.

Look, he paid for a great lunch in a place which had air-conditioning and lots of people from foreign. It was fun talking to him but when Raed saw me after