In one of the few instances of the Justice Department strong-arming journalists since the Nixon Administration, U.S. attorneys in Miami have convened a Federal grand jury to discover the identities of two reporters’ sources. In the process, Federal Government lawyers on the case have dragged The New York Times, Spin magazine and big-time First Amendment lawyer Victor Kovner into a possible freedom-of-speech imbroglio.

The reporters are Murray Waas, a former Village Voice writer now freelancing for Spin, and Douglas Frantz, an investigative reporter for The New York Times. The story they have worked on involves the U.S. Government; a major defense contractor called Teledyne Inc.; the sale of 130 tons of an explosive chemical compound called zirconium; an allegedly shifty Chilean arms maker named Carlos Cardoen; cluster bombs; and, in the role of the heavies, the Iraqis.

Mr. Waas first delved into what became known as “Iraqgate” when his story, “Gulfgate: How the U.S. Secretly Armed Iraq,” ran in the Dec. 18, 1990 issue of The Voice. In 1992, he and Mr. Franz teamed up for the Los Angeles Times to write more than 100 stories on U.S.-Iraqi skullduggery; as a result of the series, both were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting that year. Mr. Waas followed up the series with a piece in the Nov. 2 1992 issue of The New Yorker, which he co-wrote with Craig Unger. (Mr. Unger, a former deputy editor of The Observer, is not editor in chief of Boston magazine.)

Since 1992, Messrs. Waas and Frantz have continued to follow their own respective leads on the U.S.-arms-sales-to-Iraq track. Trudging down this path once more for Spin this past spring, Mr. Waas stumbled upon something new: A Federal grand jury, he found, was trying to root out his and Mr. Frantz’s respective sources.

The Federal grad jury investigation came as a result of Mr. Waas’ research into the case Edward Johnson, a former Teledyne salesman who was convited on April 4, 1995, of selling 130 tons of zirconium to Mr. Cardoen, the Chilean arms dealer who turned around and sold it to Iraq in the form of cluster bombs. In his research, Mr. Waas got hold of a transcript of some testimony from a Federal grand jury investigation. When Frank Tamen—the assistant U.S. attorney who had the case against Teledyne and Mr. Johnson in Federal court in Miami—found out about Mr. Waas’ having gotten his hands on the testimony, he was reportedly not pleased. And now the search is on, at the Federal level, to find the leaker who gave Mr. Waas the goods.

According to a source close to the case, Mr. Tamen has concluded that the defense attorneys—William Linklater and Mark Oates represnting Teledyne, and Gerald J. Houlihan representing Edward Johnson—are the men who may have done the leaking. In a move that would seem designed to kill the same bird with two stones, Mr. Tamen has asked a judge to charge all three defense attorneys with criminal contempt of court for allegedly passing the grand jury material to Mr. Waas. In addition, he has convened a separate Federal grand jury investigation essentially to do the same thing—find the source who leaked the grand jury minutes to Mr. Waas. While they’re at it, the grand jury has been charged with the task of ferreting out the source of a classified C.I.A. report leaked to Mr. Frantz, parts of which were quoted in an article he wrote about the Teledyne case on May 17, 1994 in The New York Times. Mr. Frantz had no comment on the matter.

According to sources, Mr. Tame claims he has no evidence to show that the Teledyne defense attorneys and Mr. Johnson’s defense attorney leaked the grand jury minutes to Mr. Waas. A hearing has been tentatively scheduled for Dec. 14 in Federal District Court in Miami and a Federal magistrate has been designated by the judge to preside over the matter to determine if the three defense attorneys should be held in criminal contempt. Mr. Waas has been subpoenaed by the defense counsel to testify.

Mr. Waas has not, however, been called in front of the grand jury convened expressly to root out his and Mr. Frantz’s respective sources. But he said he had received a call from Mr. Tamen.

“The prosecutor called me up—and this is pretty mind-boggling—the prosecutor called me up and asked me if I would tell him who the source was and testify, which was quite bizarre,” said Mr. Waas. “It was amazing. I mean, have we got the Justice Department or the Keystone Kops here? That’s just unbelievable that he would have the audacity to call me up and ask me to identify the source and then testify against the source.”

According to Mr. Waas, the central issue in the whole story is whether the Government “knew about, authorized, approved of or acquiesced” in the sale of cluster bombs to Iraq and whether it had a convert policy to help Iraq. The Government denies it.

Mr. Waas seemed concerned that he could go to jail for refusing to reveal his sources. But Mr. Kovner, who will represent Spin’s reporter in the criminal contempt-of-court hearing, was confident that Mr. Waas would not be put away. (Mr. Kovner is also representing Business Week in its efforts to overturn an injunction prohibiting the magazine from publishing information it obtained from sealed court documents while researching a story on a lawsuit involving Procter & Gamble and Bankers Trust.)

“There is an applicable shield statute in Florida which protects a journalist from compelled disclosure of a confidential source,” said Mr. Kovner. “Murray will not reveal any source to whom he has given a commitment of confidentiality. If anybody seeks to do that, that will be an unsuccessful behavior.”

The sun rises over Downtown Brooklyn. (DBP)

At the ready. (Andrew Hill/OSC)

When Tucker Reed finally stepped up to the lectern inside the new BAM Fisher Building on a Thursday morning at the end of July, the crowd could barely handle any more news about just how stupendous Downtown Brooklyn was, is and will be.

Karen Brooks Hopkins, entering her fourth decade at BAM, welcomed the crowd into the brightly lit practice space on the third floor of the two-month-old red brick theater, tucked in behind BAM’s original performance hall. This would be the linchpin of the latest, greatest cultural district in the city. Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president and cheerleader-in-chief for 11 years now, warmed up the crowd with his typical act. "Everywhere you look, things are looking up in Downtown Brooklyn," he barked. This was, is, will be the center of the universe.

Next came State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, whose grandmother grew up on Albany Street in Crown Heights. He had made sure to wear his Brooklyn lapel pin, a gift Mr. Markowitz bestows on everyone he meets. Though he was a Long Island guy, Mr. DiNapoli was an adopted son of this former outer borough, at least for the day, for the good news he was bringing: economic growth in Downtown Brooklyn had outpaced the rest of the city over the past decade, according to a new report prepared by the comptroller’s office. This was, is, will be an economic powerhouse.

On the same streets where Jay-Z had once slung crack (and would soon be headlining the Barclays Center he ostensibly helped build), legitimate businesses had replaced illicit ones, and they were thriving. Thousands of new residents had moved in, filling the striking and unspectacular condo-turned-rental-in-the-downturn towers along Flatbush Avenue. National brands including H&M, Sephora, Target and Shake Shack were replacing the pawn shops and cellphone outlets on the Fulton Mall.

It’s not your bubbe’s Brooklyn anymore. It’s Tucker Reed’s.

Having just turned 32, Mr. Reed has been making a name for himself since the middle of the last decade, when he launched the DUMBO Business Improvement District (BID). The event at BAM was his big coming out. Since January, Mr. Reed has run the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a BID of BIDs, overseeing the MetroTech office park, Fulton Mall and the Court-Livingston-Schermerhorn corridor, an L-shaped spine of older office buildings, mostly filled with government agencies and legal firms. It is the city’s third-largest business district, after Midtown and Lower Manhattan, but it is still trying to define its identity after decades of fitful, relentless redefinition and rebirth.

On this day, Mr. Reed was the man with the plan. After a little over six months on the job, he had developed a strategic framework for Downtown Brooklyn, the first major vision statement since the Bloomberg administration’s rezoning of 22 blocks along Flatbush Avenue in 2004. The partnership, with its $6 million annual budget, was created in part to oversee the development on the horizon

“Just look out this window and you can see the changes to the built environment,” he said, gesturing through the floor-to-ceiling glass. “If the first phase of the partnership was focused on facilitating the execution of public-private projects, the next phase will be on synthesizing these disparate investments into a Downtown Brooklyn mosaic.” (He has a soft spot for management speak.)

Mr. Reed smiled his broad, boyish grin, his handsome blue eyes glinting. He wore a navy suit that barely contained his impressive bulk, still in good shape a decade after his time as a defensive end ended with two torn ACLs. Under this was a white shirt, pink houndstooth tie and a crimson pocket square with blue trim. Put together, dressed to impress.

It is hard to believe that three years earlier, Mr. Reed, with his quick smile and charming character, was instead donning a flak jacket and fatigues every day to go to work. It was not the streets of Brooklyn but Baghdad he was rebuilding as an adviser for the State Department. He had traded in a war zone for lofts and brownstones. Still, the job was basically the same, except for the IEDs.

Tucker Reed grew up in Newtown, Conn., trading on both his physical and mental intelligence. When not practicing his blitz on a tackling dummy, he was practicing for the coming season’s play. Junior year, he played Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof.

Newtown is a town of about 25,000 just outside of Danbury, where Mr. Reed spent most of his time growing up except for regular trips down to Manhattan to catch a Giants game or go to the theater or a museum. It was a journey his 94-year-old grandfather made seven days a week until about six months ago, traveling to the Illustration House, a small Chelsea gallery that he ran for the past four decades with Mr. Reed’s uncle. It was through him, and a Brooklyn-bred grandmother “who never left the city too far behind” that Mr. Reed gained much of his appreciation for New York and for the arts.

“It makes for a richer life a more well-rounded experience,” Mr. Reed said. “I never deluded myself beyond the karaoke floor that I’d have a future in the arts or entertainment, but it certainly informs a bunch of the fun work I get to do now with cultural organizations.”

Mr. Reed was raised by his mother, a fact he credits with stoking his self-reliant spirit. The family lived what he calls a modest, working-class life, which drove Mr. Reed to overachieve in his pursuits but also to want to give back. “You like to think that if you are a good person, and you are trying to do the right thing, that there are people out there to help, and for government to help as well,” he said. “That wasn’t always my experience, so I’d like to think that I have a responsibility to improve people’s lives.”

He decided to attend nearby Wesleyan, which, in addition to all the artsy kids from afar there to start electronica bands and celebrate Zonker Harris Day, attracts a number of locals looking for a good school (which is not to say that Mr. Reed shied away from the more-than-occasional drink, as a former member of the football team, who now works at a financial firm in Downtown Brooklyn, explained).

Mr. Reed not only played football to help pay his way through school but also joined the National Guard. After those two torn ACLs in sophomore year, Mr. Reed was given a medical discharge, a stroke of bad luck that may well have saved his life—Mr. Reed graduated in 2002, which would have almost certainly have put him on the front lines in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Still, Mr. Reed found time for his other pursuits, taking a role in the student government and acting in, among other pieces, 7 Minutes in Heaven, the first original piece by his dormmate Lin-Manuel Miranda, who later achieved fame with In the Heights. During the summers, he ran an ice cream shop on an island off the coast of Maine with another college buddy.

After graduating with a bachelors degree in government, Mr. Reed spent a year on the island teaching high school social studies while also making time to travel to India, Nepal and Bangladesh. The following year, Mr. Reed arrived in New York on a Coro public service fellowship, which took him through a number of internships at City Hall and the community lending division at JPMorgan. In 2004, Mr. Reed officially joined the Bloomberg administration in the Department of Small Business Services. He spent a little over a year there integrating two older departments that had now been combined into one while also focusing on expanding and reforming the Workforce1 career centers.

It was Rob Walsh, commissioner of the department, who recommended Mr. Reed to Jed Walentas, the DUMBO scion and up-and-comer in his own right taking over his father’s empire in DUMBO. The Bloomberg administration had become staunch advocates of businesses improvements districts—their number has nearly doubled in the past decade—and Mr. Reed was tapped to launch this latest effort. “He has this rare understanding of both the public and private sector and how to get them to work together,” Commissioner Walsh said.

Mr. Reed used to jog over the Brooklyn Bridge many mornings from his apartment in Carroll Gardens, and he was always struck by how many tourists would walk over from Manhattan and immediately turn back around. “My goal was to put DUMBO on the map,” Mr. Reed said. In the span of two years he had, converting a nonexistent advocacy group into one of the foremost BIDs in town.

He built the first pedestrian plaza in the city, at Pearl Street, opened the archway under the anchorage to the Manhattan Bridge, formerly a DOT storage lot, and launched a program to install free wifi in the neighborhood. He presided over a landmarking of DUMBO that preserved its character, then pivoted to a rezoning that carved out room for new development.

“He just has an instinctual understanding of how urban spaces work,” Mr. Walentas said. Meanwhile, a tech sector blossomed and a residential market boomed into the poshest in the borough.

For all the good Mr. Reed had done in the city in his five years here, he still had a longing for greater fulfilment. “I felt like everything that was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan was really the challenge of my generation, and I wanted to be a part of that in some way,” Mr. Reed said. He found a posting for an adviser to a provincial reconstruction team, a small group of 100 civilian and military experts assigned to Division Headquarters in Baghdad.

Mr. Reed arrived in Iraq in May 2008. After five years of war, the situation on the banks of the Tigris was unspeakably worse than along the East River, yet both had undergone a considerable building boom that now needed managing.

“The mandate was, get as many projects built as possible, and let's really start to demonstrate that the tide was turning and and conditions were improving,” Mr. Reed said. “But it was like community development gone wild.” He said it was common for a local battalion commander to be out on patrol, run into a sheikh, ask him what they needed, and voila, a school or hospital would materialize out of nowhere—with no one to run or even necessarily fill it. This not only created underutilized resources but a new vulnerable infrastructure that if not defended and put into could use could become a nest for insurgents.

“There was a lot of the best intentions that were meeting just a kind of discoordinated effort, and not through the fault of anyone specifically, but, I think, through the fault of being in a war zone,” Mr. Reed said. It was a year after the military surge, and things had begun to improve, but untold amounts of work remained to be done. Mr. Reed makes mention of 18- to 20-hour workdays.

“He’s kind and generous, but holds people accountable for their actions,” Lou Ann Linehan, a diplomat in the Basra consulate who was Mr. Reed’s superior in Baghdad, said in an email. “He fills up the room with his personality. He does not suffer fools.”

One of his fondest projects—something only a New Yorker could cop to—was helping to rebuild the sanitation network. “You’re working on trying to restore the most basic level of service where you’re training people to follow a set route, come at a dependable time each day to build the trust of the customer so they know if I go and put my garbage out at 5 o’clock it’s going to be picked at 5 o’clock, and that’s the most basic level of service because the place had evolved into complete chaos,” Mr. Reed recalled. “People aren’t really caring about garbage when you’re worrying about if you’re going to get blown up.” Yet that is part of the reason regular trash removal was so important—the ubiquitous piles of garbage were a popular hiding place for IEDs.

This was a matter of personal import, as well, since Mr. Reed was venturing out into these same streets three to four times a week from the relative safety of the Green Zone. In talking about his time in Iraq, Mr. Reed is careful to be matter-of-fact, not wanting to sound boastful or self-important. His posting is something he felt obligated to do, but it was also just another job to do and do right. “There was the physical danger aspect to it, which, when you're in the situation, you kind of push to the back of your mind, because if you don't, it will drive you crazy,” Mr. Reed said of the challenges of working in a war zone.

When he got homesick, he would watch Rick Burns's New York documentary, and it helped inform his view of the city when he returned. “I watched the whole series while I was over there again, there is some quote in there from Fitzgerald talking about how New York burns with all the effervescence of the sun,” he said. “With all that ligh,t how could you not want to be a part of it?”

After only six months, Mr. Reed had been promoted from an adviser to chief of staff, but after seven more, he found himself exhausted. It was time to return home to the bright lights.

The day after his big announcement, a clear, muggy Friday morning, Tucker Reed was giving a tour of his downtown domain, strolling through the leafy confines of the MetroTech Plaza, having just walked over from the noisy scene on the Fulton Mall. The two are closer than even locals realize, and in many ways they remain worlds apart, though upscale developments on both sides—a French bistro recently opened in MetroTech—draw them ever closer. Mr. Reed considers this his top priority.

“For me, one of the big things is the Downtown Brooklyn experience,” he said. “We want to create a destination, with everything so close together, but it can be very confusing since there’s not a grid, there’s no easy path.” Everything from smartphone apps to digital kiosks is in the works.

After returning from Iraq, Mr. Reed spent a few wayward months figuring out exactly what to do with himself. He moved into his girlfriend’s Midtown studio—she had departed their Carroll Gardens apartment when he headed overseas—and mostly spent his time decompressing, visiting with family and friends and traveling around the country. He passed the foreign service exam and considered moving to Washington, but eventually took his old friend Jed Walentas up on an offer to join Two Trees.

He spent two years as a project manager working on everything from the new Mercedes House project on the Far West Side to liaising with City Hall and managing philanthropic efforts on behalf of the Walentases. Much as he enjoyed his work in the private sector, he jumped at the opportunity to take over the partnership when Joe Chan, its founding director, stepped down last fall.

“I had met him during a tour with Jed once, and I remember being impressed, but when he came in for an interview for the job, we knew immediately he was our guy,” Forest City Ratner executive vice president MaryAnne Gilmartin said. “His resume just blew us away.

It was a tumultuous time at the BID, where competing interests among the areas long-time developers often ran up against each other. On top of that, a scathing report from City Comptroller John Liu charged the partnership with mismanagement of funds, spending lavishly on executives while local needs were ignored.

Much as he did in Iraq, Mr. Reed focused on finding common ground among the competing parties, stressing their shared interests: let’s capitalize on the 56,000 college students, more than in Cambridge; better wayfinding, connectivity and open space are key; tech, tech, tech. He made of point of meeting with all 120 partnership members, not just the big shots on the board, though he has also conscripted them into monthly one-on-ones.

If there are any skeptics, they are among the groups that have long been critical of the partnership, most notably Families United for Racial and Economic Equality. Mr. Reed met the group within the first few months of taking over and even agreed to go on a walking tour of the neighborhood, which impressed the member of FUREE. But when he released the strategic plan, they were disappointed. "We worry it's largely lip service," Patrick Gomez, a FUREE board member said. "So far these policies have mostly benefited the luxury developers, and the elite business interests that dominate the boards of the Partnership. We look forward to working with the Partnership to promote development that uplifts the long-time residents, local small business owners and workers who have contributed to the area's success."

While Mr. Reed is willing to work with local groups, he was clear that it is not his first priority. “We are not a city agency, a housing advocate, a workforce development provider or an enforcement organization,” he responded

Despite such objections, Mr. Reed is upbeat. At the end of the tour, standing in front of Shake Shack—regarded by some as the clearest sign of the changes to Downtown Brooklyn—Mr. Reed surveyed his domain. “Within 10 or 15 blocks, it’s really all here, from Brooklyn Bridge Park to the BAM to the Barclays Center,” Mr. Reed said. “We have to think about how to knit it together. It’s not about going to the office or going to the Fulton Mall anymore. You’re coming here to see a show, to shop, to work, to live. You really don’t have to leave the area—you can do it all.

Cooper.

Truth is almost always stranger than fiction, but rarely scarier. This is certainly the case with The Devil’s Double, a deeply alarming film about the tormented life of Latif Yahia, the Iraqi Army lieutenant who looked so much like Saddam Hussein’s son Uday that he was summoned to Baghdad in the days leading up to Desert Storm and assigned the dreaded role of “fiday”, or “body double.”  What followed was a life fouled by corruption and madness at the hands of a lunatic. The centerpiece is a dual performance by popular British actor Dominic Cooper both powerful and nuanced.

Latif does not want the job, but if he refuses to stand in for the psychotic Uday his entire family will be executed. The impersonation is so accurate and the resemblance so uncanny, even Saddam sometimes fails to recognize him, and in addition to the danger of death every time the sun rises, there are also perks. Overnight, Latif goes from filthy soldier to Brioni suits, Versace silk pajamas and Rolex watches. He also trades K-rations for lavish banquets of caviar and champagne that turn into X-rated orgies. But while enduring both the praise and punishment dished out by the dictator’s sadistic son, he also witnesses some of the most criminal atrocities known to man. Saddam Hussein had two sons who were vital cogs in his reign of terror—Uday and his younger brother Qusay, both executed in 2003— but Uday was the homicidal psychopath of the duo. During his days in Saddam’s palace Latif witnessed depravity, debauchery, immorality, genocide and worse. Every attempt to escape failed, while Uday continued to thrive with his father’s protection—kidnapping, torturing, and raping underage schoolgirls he plucked off the street, choking on cocaine and wallowing in pornographic exploits with both sexes. While American bombs get closer, he even ravages a virginal bride on her wedding day, driving the disgraced girl to suicide.

Ultimately, Latif makes the near-fatal mistake of falling for Uday’s favorite palace concubine (Ludivine Sagnier) while trying to save her. Her eventual betrayal is final proof that in Iraq, the moon is not the only harsh mistress. The film’s weakness is a choppily edited script by Michael Thomas that exploits the perversions while ignoring the politics, reducing history to a few newsreel shots of George Bush and the first Gulf War. New Zealand director Lee Tamahori (Die Another Day) leaves nothing to the imagination in terms of sex and violence, but leaves everything out about the political arena where it took place. Iraq was a country in Hell. The Devil’s Double was shot at a Radisson resort in Malta. Consequently, it plays more like Caligula than The Hurt Locker.

Still, you won’t find yourself yawning. It’s a great double stretch for an actor and Mr. Cooper plays both the smoldering Latif and the bombastic Uday with combustible energy. Childish, savage and impulsive, Uday has buck teeth and combed flat hair, while Latif is more like an Oxford student on a Middle Eastern holiday. Some objections have been voiced about an Anglo-Saxon actor playing an Iraqi, but who cares? Stripped half-naked, smoking cigars, waving guns and strutting like a peacock, Mr. Cooper gives a dazzling display of self-assurance as Uday and a remarkable display of restraint as Latif. The Devil’s Double is eons removed from his 2006 breakthrough performance as a cocky prep school lothario in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, and a far cry from his usual fluff like Mamma Mia! and Captain America. Without the ballast he provides, this would be an action epic without the stature and a runaway train without the brakes.

rreed@observer.com

THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE

Running time 108 minutes

Written by Michael Thomas

Directed by Lee Tamahori

Starring Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Raad Rawi

3/4

In July 2007, The New Republic published "Shock Troops," the first of three "diary" entries from a pseudonymous soldier then serving in Iraq, which contained explosive allegations about the conduct of military personnel. Conservative enemies of the magazine, led by the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb, led a vigorous campaign to discredit the author, Scott Beauchamp, a 24-year-old army private.

Mr. Foer initially stood by the pieces, as Mr. Goldfarb and others sought to prove that the magazine had another fabulist on its hands—this time, one that proved the lefty publication's secret troops-hating agenda. The ugly fight dragged on for months, with The New Republic taking a beating as it labored to verify Mr. Beauchamp's pieces—an effort compounded by an awkward weeks-long period of radio silence from Mr. Beauchamp. (I wrote a short piece about it here.) The soldier, though, had a pretty good excuse: unlike the other participants in the media dust-up, he was risking his life every day by fighting a war on behalf of the United States. His main point of contact at the magazine was his wife, Elle Reeve, a fact-checker with whom he had eloped in May 2007.

An embattled Mr. Foer eventually retracted the pieces in the coda to a bizarre 6,828-word first-person article. Mr. Beauchamp had by then returned to safety in Germany, although a second tour brought him back to Iraq on Thanksgiving Day, 2008.

This afternoon, Mr. Beauchamp snuck onto Gchat during a class at the New York Institute of Technology, where he is studying nursing with plans to become a physician's assistant, to talk to The Observer about his experiences with Mr. Foer. (I've edited his words for capitalization, spelling and punctuation.)

"While I certainly wish him the best of luck with whatever he does next, I obviously still feel very strongly about how he defended me, my wife, himself and the magazine," Mr. Beauchamp wrote. "I feel like Frank Foer put my wife and I in an impossible situation."

Mr. Beauchamp is still stung by the magazine's having asked him and his wife, Ms. Reeve, to re-report his pieces after their accuracy was challenged—and then retracted them anyway.

"Fourth-rate milblogs got guys not only to Iraq, but to our base. And TNR couldn't do that?" he wrote. "I don't understand why TNR didn't send someone over. I don't understand why they took the army's word, when it was literally my battalion investigating itself, which makes no sense. ... [And] I don't understand how he wouldn't even offer any sort of apology after my first sergeant was convicted of murder, for executing Iraqis, during this same period."

Come again? It's true. Conservative bloggers had attacked Mr. Beauchamp for impugning the character of troops in his unit. In April 2009, Master Sergeant John Hatley was convicted of brutally executing four Iraqi prisoners. (Ms. Reeve wrote about the crimes here.)

The Observer asked Mr. Foer to respond to Mr. Beauchamp's recollection of events. "I think the coverage of Scott Beauchamp was an object lesson in media stupidity," Mr. Foer wrote in an email. "Every single major American news organization made a huge deal about possible embellishments in his description of plausible incidents-and ignored the actual war crimes committed in his unit."

Mr. Foer continued: "I understand why Scott is angry. He should be pissed at the way his case was covered. But my treatment of the incident was very nuanced—and I stand by it. I spent several thousand words trying to present a careful, nuanced narrative of events."

The two men haven't spoken since the retraction.

"I haven't really talked about it much with anyone since I got out of the army," Mr. Beauchamp wrote. "I think some of my friends were even sick of talking about it. But it's something that Elle and I think about every day. I wonder if Frank does."

"I honestly don't know much about his career outside of what happened with Elle and me," Mr. Beauchamp continued, "but I do hope that if he considers my writing for TNR a low point in his career"—here he seemed to be referring to Mr. Kurtz's tweet—"that he blames himself, and not my wife and me."

Today Mr. Beauchamp lives in Brooklyn, while his wife, Elle Reeve, keeps an apartment in Washington, where she works for The Atlantic. He still dabbles in writing; as if his life did not contain enough twists already, he happened to sit for a job interview with Russian spy Anna Chapman in March 2010, an episode he wrote about for The Daily Beast.

He is still just 27 years old. "Hopefully there's more to come," Mr. Beauchamp wrote The Observer. "And hopefully none of it involves Frank Foer OR the United States Army."

The prize is obviously an incredible honor in and of itself, but Keith Johnson at The Wall Street Journal explains how it would have come in handy in a way one would probably never expect. The story begins with Johnson and Vargas Llosa riding in a convoy through Iraq near the Jordanian border, as it turns out the Vargas Llosa's daughter was a freelancing photographer during the Iraq war. When the party got held up by patrols due to a problem with Johnson's visa, Vargas Llosa tried to use his stature as a writer of eminence to secure safe passage. But he wasn't quite decorated enough for the officials, Johnson wrote. 

Vargas Llosa tried to pull rank, for all of us.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked a Jordanian lieutenant colonel in desert fatigues running the border post. “Three times I have been short-listed for the Nobel Prize,” he said.

“But you didn’t win it, did you?” he asked. “Don’t worry, even for someone like you, we can make arrangements,” he added.

In the end, those arrangements amounted to hours more waiting under the punishing sun, with Vargas Llosa increasingly irate and looking for air conditioning, and me increasingly contrite.

Now that his Nobel is secure, Vargas Llosa hopefully won't have as much trouble crossing borders. The one-time Nobel favorite Cormac McCarthy, however, doesn't have the same luxuries afforded to those who win — though he does know a thing or two about borders. 

nfreeman@observer.com

Twitter: NFreeman1234

• The Wall Street Journal called the speech an example of "Oval Office Ambivalence" and editorialized: "But to our mind-and we suspect to the foreign ear-he also focused too much on the 'huge price' and burdens of the last seven years, rather than on what our troops accomplished, or on the strategic opportunities that their sacrifice now allows. He gave short shrift to Iraq as a potential democratic example in the autocratic Middle East, or as an ally against Iran's regional ambitions. Nor did he say whether, or even how, our ultimate success in Iraq had informed his own decision to surge troops to Afghanistan."
• Politico's Glenn Thrush termed Obama's speech "subdued": "[The] president's address - delivered from the same desk where Bush told the nation the invasion of Iraq had begun, justified by faulty intelligence that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction - was clearly meant to portray Obama as a leader true to his word and a competent Commander-in-Chief." The same site's Roger Simon noted, "For almost the entire speech, Obama remained impassive. He was not awesome."
• In the Times Maureen Dowd called the Oval Office the President's "redecorated man cave" and proceeded to weave the Office's recent redecoration into her editorial on the President's speech. Dowd thinks the President has lost some of his oomph: "Given the cunning tableau created on the Mall over the weekend by Glenn Beck and Palin, in their artful and frightening mix of theology and Tea Party ideology, the president might be better served by a carpet that prompts him to get his groove back. [...] The first thing the once inspirational orator should embroider around the rug, the maxim that sums up so much of what's wrong with the administration now, is the immortal line from Cool Hand Luke: 'What we've got here is failure to communicate.'"
• Fox News contributor Ellen Ratner, forgetting that she works for Fox News, was impressed: "To say that [Obama] was eloquent was an understatement. His call to President Bush was a very classy move and it was clearly designed to bring Americans together and promote healing."
• Reuters' "Snap Analysis" of the speech called the President "careful": "As expected, Obama chose his words carefully and avoided the 'Mission Accomplished' moment that came to haunt President George W. Bush. Bush was ridiculed after boldly declaring the end of major combat in Iraq in 2003. More than 4,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis went on to die in the years of insurgent and sectarian violence that followed."
• Salon's Joan Walsh was surprised by Obama's statement about George Bush, of whom the current President said "no one could doubt President Bush's support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security." Walsh opined that it would be "lovely if Bush repaid Obama's stretching the truth a bit there by speaking out to Republicans who falsely believe Obama is Muslim, that he wasn't born here, or to the 52 % of Bush's party who say our president supports the imposition of Islamic law in this country." But, she said, she won't hold her breath. Which is probably wise.

These are just quick snapshots of responses to the President's address. However, no compilation of responses like this would be complete these days without a contribution from noted Politebrity (Celebutician?) Sarah Palin, who tweeted the following: "Obama speech tonite may make u dig out ur old Orwell books so rewritten history can be deciphered, depending on who gets credit 4 Iraq surge."

Digging out Animal Farm to check the Orwell and Enigma decryption equipment to decipher the rest of the tweet right now, Governor.

For the extreme Left, he’s the President who is still fighting a war in Iraq, an escalating war in Afghanistan, and possibly thinking about taking out Iran’s nuclear capability. For the extreme Right, he’s a foreign born egomaniac who is getting ready to allow gays to serve in the military and planning to cut and run from all American military engagements. However, it is instructive to read the President’s Nobel Prize citation and see how Obama is being perceived abroad:

“Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the United States is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.”

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population,” 

My favorite part of the news stories about the Prize is the way the President was informed of this award. Due to time zone differences, American Nobelists are typically informed of their win in the middle of the night. Not this time.  According to Nobel Committee Chair Thorbjoern Jagland , the Committee decided not to inform Obama early because it didn't want to wake him up. "Waking up a president in the middle of the night, this isn't really something you do,"  Yes, he might think the nation was being attacked.. Deploying  the air force would not be the correct response to winning a peace prize.

Of course, Obama is not the first sitting American President to win the Prize. Teddy Roosevelt won in 1916 and Woodrow Wilson in 1919. The move by the Nobel committee serves to reinforce the central position of American diplomacy and the continued importance of the American Presidency. With Europe, China, India, and Russia emerging as world powers, the United States continues to retain its critical position, with the world’s most powerful military and a huge if struggling economy. Of equal importance is America’s central position in the world’s media, on the web and in the popular imagination. Images of America are communicated throughout the world and continue to dominate the world’s collective bandwith.

It matters what the American President does, how he does it and what he says. When President George W. Bush swaggers on to an aircraft carrier to declare “mission accomplished” it says one thing. When President Barack Obama goes to Cairo to hold out an olive branch to the Muslim world, it says something quite different. While being popular outside the United States may not be the main objective of the American President, Machiavelli aside, being feared and loathed is not always the best way to promote American interests in an interdependent global system.

A number of polls this summer show that the United States is more respected abroad than it was during the Bush Administration and it is clear that the Obama team sees diplomacy as well as the military as tools for advancing American interests. Obama is a masterful communicator and a compelling figure on the world stage. While it is too early to know if all of this promise will translate into performance, the Nobel Committee seems to be betting on our still new President. I admit that I am too. Obama has written his own story and termed it the Audacity of Hope. I think the Nobel committee has added its voice to that story- making the case for the persistence of hope. I think it is a wonderful gesture, worthy of the traditions of this important prize.

An ABC News producer in Iraq had just posted some breaking news from Baghdad. According to a press release from the U.S. military, five American troops had just been shot and killed inside Camp Liberty. The names of the dead were being withheld. The incident was under investigation. Details were fleeting.

Just a few weeks earlier, on her 20th reporting trip to Iraq, she had spent an afternoon at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, interviewing soldiers for a piece she was still working on about the recent dramatic spike in the number of suicides in the U.S. military.

Reading the post at her home in the Washington, D.C. area on Monday morning, Ms. Raddatz had a hunch. Yet another U.S. soldier might have snapped. She shot back an email to her colleagues. “This is a big deal,” she wrote. “Sounds like either a soldier shot fellow soldiers, or a contractor or a local.”

In the end, Ms. Raddatz’s instincts turned out to be correct.

Some nine hours later, on the evening news shows, CBS’s Katie Couric, NBC’s Brian Williams and ABC’s Charles Gibson all reported that—in the worst case of soldier-on-soldier violence since the start of the war—an unnamed American was now in custody after killing five of his colleagues and wounding three others. The killing spree, they reported, had taken place that afternoon inside a clinic dedicated to treating soldiers with psychological problems.

On Monday evening, CBS illustrated the story with a computer animation of a soldier bursting into a room and blasting away with a handgun. It looked like a video game. On NBC, Brian Williams fleshed out the story by interviewing a celebrated war veteran about the stress of combat in the studio in New York.

ABC News, on the other hand—in an impressive display of news-gathering—showed actual footage from inside the clinic. As it turns out, during her recent trip to Baghdad, Ms. Raddatz had spent an entire afternoon interviewing the clinic’s staff members for her report on how the military was coping with the recent uptick in suicides.

“It was just days ago that Lieutenant Colonel Beth Salisbury showed ABC News the very same combat stress control center where today’s horrific shooting took place,” Ms. Raddatz reported on Monday evening. “Salisbury, who runs the center, was not hurt in today’s shooting. But of the dead, two were on her clinical staff, and three were soldiers waiting for treatment.”

Ms. Raddatz went on to break the news that the soldier in custody was on his third deployment. “The sergeant being held for the murders is married and based in Germany,” she added. “ABC News has learned he had been having problems during his deployment. Initial indications are that he did not seek mental health treatment voluntarily, but that his unit had referred him for care.”

The gripping footage, accompanying her report, showed Ms. Salisbury, dressed in combat fatigues, walking past a concrete barrier into the clinic, past the check-in desk, past the waiting room and down a narrow corridor with fluorescent lights and plywood walls decorated here and there with what looks like the artwork of patients.

“Their weapons are taken for safety,” Ms. Salisbury tells the camera. “And we secure those here for the safety of our staff and themselves.”

When The Observer caught up with Ms. Raddatz by phone on Tuesday morning, those words seemed to be haunting ABC’s veteran war correspondent.

“You look back on these transcripts, and what they were saying at the time—the part about the guns?” said Ms. Raddatz. “To me, that was one of those moments where I was like, oh my gosh. This is the only place on the base where they wouldn’t have weapons. Where they wouldn’t be able to defend themselves.”

One eerie aspect of war reporting is that if you do it long enough, sooner or later the violence of battle is likely to catch up with some of your past subjects. Such has been the case for Ms. Raddatz recently. “When I left Kabul last time, I had interviewed the head of training for the Afghan army,” said Ms. Raddatz. “I interviewed him in his office at the base in Kabul. The next day there was a suicide bombing there. It blew out all the windows in that room and the paintings on the walls.”

On Tuesday afternoon, while continuing to report out the developments in Baghdad, Ms. Raddatz learned that one of the soldiers captured by ABC’s footage inside the clinic (footage which had not yet aired)—a naval commander with a Ph.D. in social work—was one of the victims killed in the shooting.

Ms. Raddatz found herself looking at a January 2009 entry on his classmates.com profile. “I have begun another deployment this time to Iraq where I will work in a combat stress center,” he apparently wrote. “Our son returned from Iraq in October. … Our son-in-law is in Iraq expecting to return late Feb early March.”

“I imagine he treated the guy,” said Ms. Raddatz. “And the guy probably stormed right back into that very office.”

Then she excused herself. She needed to finish her follow-up story for World News that night.

fgillette@observer.com

But Brookings Institution fellow and Iraq expert Michael O'Hanlon, who challenged the Democratic orthodoxy during the presidential campaign by positing that the increase in American troop levels could potentially lead the United States to winning real stability in Iraq, and who in February pointed out the dangers of a rapid exit from Iraq, thinks that the blame for the violence rests more with Baghdad than with American policy.   

"I don't think it's a Washington mistake," O'Hanlon told me. "I think it's a Maliki mistake."

The problem, as O'Hanlon sees it, is that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, has failed to keep his promise to give stable government jobs to the Sunnis that comprised the Sons of Iraq forces, who left the insurgency and helped American forces fight the Sunni extremists in groups like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.  O'Hanlon said he wasn't suggesting that the Sons of Iraq were behind the violence—"I certainly hope not" he said—but he believed that their political grievances led them to be "less prone to crack down" on extremist groups.

"I actually resisted reaching this kind of a conclusion back in March when, you may recall, there were other little attacks and trends that were spikes themselves," said O'Hanlon. "We do have to worry about over-interpreting each and every little thing.  But this week is becoming worrisome, and it's worth asking the question whether there's at least the beginning of a new trend."

O'Hanlon emphasized that, while the violence might rise above the "level of statistical noise," it was in no way a return to the bloody days of 2006, when such attacks were so commonplace as to find themselves reported on the back pages of international sections.

"I don't think it's the end of the world," he said. "But I think it's meaningful and the right way to think about it is a trend we've got to address, rather than just hoping that it just goes away.  And that's primarily through trying to cajole Maliki into restoring the Sunni-Shia bargain he had begun to build in the last couple years."

The Obama administration, O'Hanlon said, could help pressure Maliki to bring the former Sunni insurgents into the government, even though their procurement of good government jobs in an economic downturn would prove to be deeply unpopular with Shiites. The way the United States could do that, O'Hannlon said, was through subtle diplomatic channels rather than high profile grandstanding.

"The way you affect this is not by having Hillary Clinton or Bob Gates, or David Petraeus or Barack Obama grab a podium in Washington and the nearest speech site and lay down harsh language," O'Hanlon said.  "I think it actually is more through the ambassadorial-level work.  Because you want a more subtle form of pressure.  You don't want to make implausible and non-credible threats, like if you don't reach out, the country is going to blow up and we're not going to be there to help you.  You don't want to say stuff like that.  That's sort of melodramatic.  What you want to remind the guy of is that the violence stopped - to some extent, or it went down - when the Sunnis began to believe they could work with the system."

The Senate confirmed the Obama administration's pick for ambassador to Iraq, Chris Hill, earlier this week.  

O'Hanlon considered misguided any placement of blame for the violence on the Obama adminitration's decision to draw down troops and move them to Afghanistan.

"You know, we haven't drawn down that much yet," he said. "We certainly ended the surge, but we haven't drawn down that much.  We're still at around 14 brigades.  And so if we were a year from now and we were pulling out a brigade a month and we were down to nine brigades, then it would be harder for me to make this argument.  But I think we're being quite gradual as it is, so far, anyway.  So I don't think that can explain it."

He added, "I would lean more toward pinning this one on Maliki".