For the past few years, I watched from my hotel balcony as the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad sprang up across the Tigris River, deep in the heavily guarded Green Zone.

The building cranes were impossible to miss -- for a long time, they were the only real signs of construction in this battered city.

Back in Iraq for the first time since its official opening in January, I was eager to check out the finished product, the largest embassy in the world.

 I've had several meetings at the new embassy now, both with State Department and military officials. I bought Dr. Pepper and US Weekly from the restricted-access commissary, ate enchiladas in the D-FAC (dining facility), sipped an iced latte at the cute cafe and lounged in the sparkling consular services section while trying to renew my passport. It's far more than an embassy -- it's a self-contained, Vatican-sized hamlet, albeit one with reinforced dormitories to protect its resident employees from late-night rocket attacks.

I don't yet have a "brown badge," a U.S. military-issued credential that's basically a backstage pass to the war, so my every move inside the embassy compound is shadowed by an escort, typically a media liaison from the embassy or a public affairs officer from the military. (Actually, I'm pretty sure you need an escort even with a brown badge for the embassy, though not for other U.S.-run sites.)

That means I enter the Green Zone through an Iraqi-guarded checkpoint, take a cab to the Ugandan-manned checkpoint and then wait at the entrance with the Peruvian security contractors working for Triple Canopy, a private security company that reportedly won more than $90 million in government contracts related to the Iraq war, as of 2005.

Today, I arrived at the embassy with half an hour to spare before my appointment. I couldn't enter until my escort arrived, so I passed the time talking with a Peruvian guard -- in his broken English and what little Spanish I remembered from high school.

"Are you press?" he asked.

When I confirmed that I was a journalist, he lowered his voice and looked around to see if his American supervisor from Triple Canopy was watching the interaction.

"They no respect the contract, this company," he whispered. "The contract says we work one, two, three, four, five, six, seven days, and then we should have a day off. But I work 12 hours a day for 12 days and then one day off. They no respect the contract."

He went on to tell me about his 11-year-old daughter and how it breaks his heart to be so far away from her. Over the Internet, he said, she tells him to quit and come home, that the money isn't worth the job, which from his description sounded to me like a few short steps away from indentured servitude.

"My girl, she tell me, 'Come to Peru, come to Peru, why you work 12 hours a day for 12 days?'" he said. "I told her if I say something to the company, they say, OK, go back to Peru and they bring other guards."

He shrugged and said, "What I do? I work."

My escort arrived and I disappeared into the vast embassy compound, leaving my Peruvian acquaintance outside in the sweltering Baghdad heat, halfway through his 12-hour shift.

"Adios," he said. "See you again."

A few days ago I was at a dinner party in Baghdad, chatting with an American official who wanted to know why the press corps was "so sympathetic" to the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the Iranian dissident/militant group with a base in Iraq.

Another reporter interjected: "We're not! Everybody knows they're a cult. But that doesn't mean the Iraqis should mow them over with Humvees while the U.S. watches!"

"Well," the American official asked, "what would you do?

And that's the problem. Nobody has a good answer for what to do with the MEK.

The Humvee incident my colleague referred to wasn't a hypothetical scenario -- you can see footage of it on this previous blog post. And, yes, the U.S. military did stand by as 11 MEK members were killed that day. The AP's account of the Iraqi siege says that video shows American soldiers "get into a white SUV and roll up their windows as the bloodied men plead for help." U.S. officials told the AP they no longer have a legal right to intervene.

The Mujahedin_e Khalq -- known in various circles as the MEK, MKO or PMOI -- is an Iranian militant group that's committed to the overthrow of the theocratic regime in Tehran. In 1986, the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein allowed the MEK to set up base about 65 miles north of Baghdad, in a sprawling compound that became known as Camp Ashraf. The group was disarmed following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and the residents there lived in limbo under U.S. protection from the hostile new Iranian-backed Iraqi government. Iraqi Shiite Muslim leaders, many of whom lived for years in Iran, have been eager to return the dissidents to Tehran, where they could face persecution.

The MEK's tactics have earned the group a spot on the U.S. State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. Some U.S. politicians have lobbied to remove them from the list and recruit them for intelligence-gathering on Iran. There are reports that the group already has provided the U.S. government with information on Iran's nuclear program.

Ever since the July 28 confrontation at Ashraf, life inside the camp has become increasingly untenable. Like all reporters in Baghdad, I get regular calls from the MEK. A couple of years ago, when the group was under U.S. protection, MEK members would come to Baghdad with piles of propaganda documents to support their cause. And I also visited them, when Ashraf was a tidy oasis of fountains and music concerts in the middle of a raging war.

Well, the war has finally caught up to Ashraf and the camp is no longer immune to the violence around it. Now surrounded by Iraqi forces, nobody can go in or out and food is delivered by private vendors who leave the goods at the gate. The 3,000 or so Iranian exiles still inside are virtual prisoners, cut off from the rest of the country and with no viable escape routes.

The Iraqi government wants to return them to Iran, which the group has said it will accept only with "preconditions" that protect them from retaliation. (For example, one of the MEK's preconditions is "freedom of speech." Anyone who's been watching the post-election turmoil in Iran knows that no such right exists there.) Human rights workers would like to resettle MEK members into other countries, perhaps in Europe or Canada, but no willing nation has emerged. What the group really wants is to stay in Iraq, which, of course, it can't.

So back to the question posed at the dinner party: What to do with the MEK?

The MEK and its well-oiled publicity machine aren't waiting silently for an answer: Hundreds of MEK members and supporters -- in Iraq and abroad -- are on about the 50th day of a hunger strike. They're demanding the release of 36 detainees in Iraqi custody, the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Ashraf, and for U.S. protection until the UN offers another protective force. Disturbing photos of the hunger strikers in Iraq show people who appear to be days away from death: concave cheeks, sunken eyes and IV drips.

As the American official was getting at: Why should we have sympathy for members of a former militant group who are starving themselves?

Sympathy is up to you. But if a minority population -- no matter how dubious its cause -- is under siege and threatened with death as a result of being left vulnerable in a U.S.-led war, the issue at hand is responsibility, not sympathy.

Muntadhar al Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at former President Bush last year in an act of protest that gained international notoriety, was freed from an Iraqi prison Tuesday after nine months behind bars. Here's the full text of the speech al Zaidi gave at a news conference Tuesday afternoon at the offices of his employer, the Baghdadiya television station.

The translation is by McClatchy special correspondent Sahar Issa.

In the name of God, the most gracious and most merciful.

Here I am, free.

But my country is still in captivity.

Firstly, I give my thanks and my regards to everyone who stood beside me, whether inside my country, in the Islamic world, in the free world. There has been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: What compelled me to confrontation is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

And how it wanted to crush the skulls of (the homeland's) sons under its boots, whether sheikhs, women, children or men. And during the past few years, more than a million martyrs fell by the bullets of the occupation and the country is now filled with more than 5 million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. And many millions of homeless because of their displacement inside and outside the country.

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazidi his daily bread. And the Shiite would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ, may peace be upon him.

And despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than 10 years, for more than a decade, our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression until we were invaded by the illusion of liberation that some had.

(The occupation) divided one brother from another, one neighbor from another, and the son from his uncle. It turned our homes into neverending funeral tents. And our graveyards spread into parks and roadsides. It is a plague. It is the occupation that is killing us, that is violating the houses of worship and the sanctity of our homes and that is throwing thousands daily into makeshift prisons.

I am not a hero, and I admit that. But I have a point of view and I have a stance. It humiliated me to see my country humiliated. And to see my Baghdad burned. And my people being killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remain in my head, and this weighs on me every day and pushes me toward the righteous path, the path of confrontation, the path of rejecting injustice, deceit and duplicity. It deprived me of a good night's sleep.

Dozens, no, hundreds, of images of massacres that would turn the hair of a newborn white used to bring tears to my eyes and wound me. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacres of Fallujah, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. In the past years, I traveled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the screams of the bereaved and the orphans. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.

And as soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily tragedies of the Iraqis, and as I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined Iraqi houses, or the traces of the blood of victims that stained my clothes, I would clench my teeth and make a pledge for our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the tears of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: Do you know how many broken homes that shoe that I threw had entered because of the occupation? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? And how many times it had entered homes in which free Iraqi women and their sanctity had been violated? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my rejection of his killing of my people. My rejection of his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure, and casting out its sons into a diaspora.

After six years of humiliation, of indignity, of killing and violations of sanctity, and desecration of houses of worship, the killer comes, boasting, bragging about victory and democracy. He came to say goodbye to his victims and wanted flowers in response.

Put simply, that was my flower to the occupier, and to all who are in league with him, whether by spreading lies or taking action, before the occupation or after.

I wanted to defend the honor of my profession and suppressed patriotism on the day the country was violated and its high honor lost. Some say: Why didn't he ask Bush an embarrassing question at the press conference, to shame him? And now I will answer you, journalists. How can I ask Bush when we were ordered to ask no questions before the press conference began, but only to cover the event. It was prohibited for any person to question Bush.

And in regard to professionalism: The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism were to speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.

I take this opportunity: If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I wish to apologize to you for any embarrassment I may have caused those establishments. All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day.

History mentions many stories where professionalism was also compromised at the hands of American policymakers, whether in the assassination attempt against Fidel Castro by booby-trapping a TV camera that CIA agents posing as journalists from Cuban TV were carrying, or what they did in the Iraq war by deceiving the general public about what was happening. And there are many other examples that I won't get into here.

But what I would like to call your attention to is that these suspicious agencies -- the American intelligence and its other agencies and those that follow them -- will not spare any effort to track me down (because I am) a rebel opposed to their occupation. They will try to kill me or neutralize me, and I call the attention of those who are close to me to the traps that these agencies will set up to capture or kill me in various ways, physically, socially or professionally.

And at the time that the Iraqi prime minister came out on satellite channels to say that he didn't sleep until he had checked in on my safety, and (said) that I had found a bed and a blanket, even as he spoke I was being tortured with the most horrific methods: electric shocks, getting whipped with cables, getting hit with metal rods, and all this in the backyard of the place where the press conference was held. And the conference was still going on and I could hear the voices of the people in it. And maybe they, too, could hear my screams and moans.

In the morning, I was left in the cold of winter, tied up after they soaked me in water at dawn. And I apologize for Mr. Maliki for keeping the truth from the people. I will speak later, giving names of the people who were involved in torturing me, and some of them were high-ranking officials inthe government and in the army.

I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains. All I wanted was to defend my country, and that is a legitimate cause confirmed by international laws and God-given rights. I wanted to defend a country, an ancient civilization that has been desecrated, and I am sure that history -- especially in America -- will state how the American occupation was able to subjugate Iraq and Iraqis, until its submission.

They will boast about the deceit and the means they used in order to gain their objective. It is not unusual, not much different from what happened to the Native Americans, who once inhabited America, at the hands of colonialists. Here I say to them (the occupiers) and to all who follow their steps, and all those who support them and spoke up for their cause: Never.

Because we are a people who would rather die than face humiliation.

And, lastly, I say that I am independent. I am not a member of any political party, something that was said during my torture -- one time that I'm far-right, another that I'm a leftist. I am independent of any political party, and my future efforts will be in civil service to my people and to any who need it, without waging any political wars, as some said that I would.

My efforts will be toward providing care for widows and orphans, and all those whose lives were damaged by the occupation. I pray for mercy upon the souls of the martyrs who fell in wounded Iraq, and for shame upon those who occupied Iraq and everyone who assisted them in their abominable acts. And I pray for peace upon those who are in their graves, and those who are oppressed with the chains of imprisonment. And peace be upon you who are patient and looking to God for release.

And to my beloved country I say: Even if the night of injustice is prolonged, it will not stop the rising of a sun and it will be the sun of freedom.

One last word. I say to the government: This is a trust that I carry from my fellow detainees. They said, 'Muntadhar, if you get out, tell of our plight to the omnipotent powers' -- and I know that only God is omnipotent and I pray to Him -- 'remind them that there are dozens, hundreds, of victims rotting in prisons because of an informant's word.'

 They have been there for years, they have not been charged or tried. They've only been snatched up from the streets and put into these prisons. And now, in front of you, and in the presence of God, I hope they can hear me or see me. I have now made good on my promise of reminding the government and the officials and the politicians to look into what's happening inside the prisons. The injustice that's caused by the delay in the judicial system.

Thank you. And may God's peace be upon you.

I wanted to get reacquainted with Baghdad a bit before I started posting observations that either overstated or understated the security gains here. After three weeks here this time (it had been a year since my last visit), I agree that it is a city transformed from the blood-drenched capital of a couple of years ago, at the height of the sectarian war.

Baghdad, of course, is still no cakewalk. Just check out McClatchy's daily rundown of violence; there are still violent attacks every day against both soldiers and civilians. As U.S. commanders have said, Iraq just has to reach "an acceptable level of violence." I've never been sure who gets to decide what that is. A senior military official I spoke to today said the fight now is concentrated along the "belts and borders," the rural areas around big cities and along the restive frontiers with Iran and Syria. (In that order, he stressed.)

The overall number of attacks has dropped dramatically and people can move about much more freely, so why does every Iraqi I meet still hold a pessimistic view of the future? Because they know the roots of the violence -- U.S. military occupation, sectarianism, ethnic strife, rampant corruption -- are still alive, and each of those problems is only expected to worsen in the run-up to the January general elections.

Even taking into account the deadly bombings that targeted government ministries last month, "the situation," as they say, is better than it's been in ages. It feels as if everyone is sucking up all the freedoms they can in fear of it suddenly changing.

In fact, it could've changed very quickly earlier this week, when a homemade bomb stuffed inside a hollowed-out religious book was discovered inside the women's section of the gold-domed Shiite shrine in the neighborhood of Kadhemiya. Relieved police told us the bomb was faulty and didn't detonate properly. This time. We've seen the savage aftermath of blown-up shrines (remember Samarra?) and it's nothing Iraqis would like to relive.

So, just in case this new and improved Baghdad doesn't endure, I'm joining my Iraqi friends and colleagues in exploring every inch of the city while we can. That means grilling fish along the Tigris, visiting favorite art galleries, dining after dark at co-workers' houses, and conducting interviews in formerly off-limits neighborhoods where unspeakable brutalities have occurred.

A long drive earlier this week took me through neighborhoods that even on my last visit in July 2008 were still dicey: Hurriyah, Tobchi, Yarmouk, Mansour. The vibrancy of these once-deserted streets was dizzying: watermelon vendors, signs for new restaurants, sheep traipsing through traffic, blast walls converted into ad space for car dealerships, three young men crammed onto one motorcyle, Iraqi soldiers hitching rides from checkpoint to checkpoint with complete strangers.

My friend and driver, Abu Feisal, pointed out a checkpoint manned by uniformed and professional Iraqi soldiers. Not so long ago, he said, "we didn't know who is at this checkpoint. Mahdi Army? Al Qaida?"

As if summing up Abu Feisal's hopes for his tired and traumatized city, a huge billboard advertising a French cigarette brand appeared as we turned a corner. The text read: "Liberte toujours."