Best wishes to Jane for a safe trip and a safe stay in Iraq. I look forward to reading your reports.

Berkeley blogger Jane Stillwater has been approved to embed with the U.S. Marines and will leave for the Iraq war zone Oct. 6.
In March, the 65-year-old grandmother filed 17 reports on her blog, jpstillwater.blogspot.com, from a borrowed computer in the Combined Press Information Center in the U.S.-protected, fortified Green Zone in Baghdad.

This time, she will be embedded with the Regimental Combat Team at Camp Ripper and will spend time in Asad and Fallujah, according to an e-mail Stillwater received Friday from the center’s media embed coordinator, Spc. Michael Sherman.

“I’m just totally excited. … I’m just really jazzed,” said Stillwater, who is not a professionally trained journalist but is a colorful writer and a probing interviewer.

Stillwater said she is going to Iraq because she has dedicated her life to spreading a message of peace. She also said she hates injustice and corruption in any form, especially injustice and corruption paid for by U.S. taxpayers.

As with her last trip, she said she secured press credentials with the help of a small Texas newspaper, The Lone Star Iconoclast. She also writes for the Web sites OpEdnews.com and the Black Commentator.

More at Contracostatimes.com