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From W.NYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

More and more, the news from Iraq brings word,

not just of insurgent attacks on passers-by and daylight, but of targeted violence in the shadows,

midnight abductions by men in uniforms, death squad some say, with ties to the Shiite-dominated interior ministry. On Wednesday, 50 members of a Sunni

security company were kidnapped in such a raid. In a separate incident that day, police found 24

bodies in Baghdad, all of them strangled or shot at close range. On Thursday, an article in the

Washington Post claimed that a cover-up was underway.

According to an unnamed health ministry official, the government's majority Shiite party

had ordered the health ministry to stop counting execution-style shootings

and tally only deaths by bombing and other insurgent attacks.

If true, it explains the Post's earlier report that more than 1,300 Iraqis

had been killed in sectarian fighting after the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samara.

...