From Holden:

In another sign that freedom is on the march, a major U.S. contractor slinks out of Iraq:

Contrack International Inc. has become the first major US contractor to pull out of the reconstruction effort in Iraq, the Los Angeles Times said Wednesday, adding that high security costs were to blame.

“We reached a point where our costs were getting to be prohibitive,” company president Karim Camel-Toueg told the paper.

Contrack, based in Arlington, Virginia, had won a 325-million-dollar award to rebuild Iraq’s shattered transport system.

US officials said Contrack’s decision to terminate work in Iraq was reached with the US government in November, but had not been publicly disclosed.

Oh, I almost forgot – Italy will begin to withdraw their troops after the January “election”.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post publishes a long article about the of torture documents uncovered by the ACLU without once mentioning the fact that the latest release includes e-mails tying illegal interrogation techniques to Bush, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.