I have referred to this story before and am including the opening grafs below:

http://www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=19021&s2=28 

URGENT APPEAL TO SAVE IRAQ'S ACADEMICS. 
A little known aspect of the tragedy engulfing Iraq is the systematic liquidation of the country's academics.  Even according to conservative estimates, over 250 educators have been assassinated, and many hundreds more have disappeared.  With thousands fleeing the country in fear for their lives, not only is Iraq undergoing a major brain drain, the secular middle class - which has refused to be co-opted by the US occupation - is being decimated, with far-reaching consequences for the future of Iraq.
Already on July 14, 2004, veteran correspondent Robert Fisk reported from Iraq that: "University staff suspect that there is a campaign to strip Iraq of its academics, to complete the destruction of Iraq's cultural identity which began when the American army entered Baghdad."
The wave of assassinations appears non-partisan and non-sectarian, targeting women as well as men, and is countrywide.  It is indiscriminate of expertise: professors of geography, history and Arabic literature as well as science are among the dead.  Not one individual has been apprehended in connection with these assassinations.
[full story at url above]

The MSM have not touched this one, for obvious reasons. Nor have they touched the increasingly transparent connections between the Bush team's own actions and 9/11. Nor have they touched the increasingly transparent financial benefits of administration cronies and supporters from the invasion of Iraq.

If you think that last sounds far-fetched, then (1) you must be ignoring the entire petrochemical industry, including oil; and (2) you have overlooked the importance of SHIPPING, re Iraq and Kuwait. More on these later.

I greatly respect writer Geov Parrish, but his list of the year's under/unreported stories is rather tame. Good thing we still have Leavenworth. Wonder when the White House will start making little moves to close it . . .

Meanwhile, by all means go see the excellent movie Syriana. Art can sometimes do a better job of reporting than any number of editors or producers who majored in marketing in the Eighties.  Probably the newspapers of Dickens' time did less to represent the squalor of London than Dickens' novels, too.

On an unrelated topic: one of the First Daughters was showing inconvenient signs of independence and compassion, and -- guess what! -- she has been pursued and caught by a rightwing stripling who formerly interned for Karl Rove. Used and co-opted? Similarly, a couple of our Washington personalities have turned up with new rightwing wives (dumping their previous families) over recent years, provided courtesy of the same quasi-social networks that brought us the Iraq war among other evils.  Looks like no more elementary-school teaching ideals for Jenna Bush, for the foreseeable future, unless someone alerts her . . .