CBS reporter Lara Logan needs our help. And I want desperately to help her.

One would assume that Ms. Logan, as CBS chief foreign correspondent, has a fair amount of influence as to what stories she gets to cover, and that most of her important stories, once produced and delivered, will be broadcast. But when the story comes out of the mean streets of Baghdad, and doesn’t fit the officially-sanctioned narrative of Iraqis and US soldiers working arm in arm to help protect thankful Iraqi citizens, even chief foreign correspondents sometimes need to ask for help in getting it seen.

The segment in question–”Battle for Haifa Street”–is a piece of first-rate journalism but one that only appears on the CBS News website–and has never been broadcast. It is a gritty, realistic look at life on the very mean streets of Baghdad, and includes interviews with civilians who complain that the US military presence is only making their lives worse and the situation more deadly.

“They told us they would bring democracy, they promised life would be better than it was under Saddam,” one told Logan.“But they brought us nothing but death and killing. They brought mass destruction to Baghdad.”

Several bodies are shown in the two- minute segment–”some with obvious signs of torture,” as Logan points out. She also notes that her crew had to flee for their lives when they we were warned of an impending attack. While fleeing, another civilian was killed before their eyes.

All of us who have been paying real attention to this conflict know that the news coming out of Iraq has often been sanitized, despite what the White House and FOX news would have you believe, and that we have been protected from seeing just how horrible conditions truly are in Iraq.

Now I am not one of those people who surfs the net looking for images or video of actual deaths or people getting hurt doing ridiculous pranks. But I am also someone who would rather be shown the truth about what is going on in Iraq in my name, and hte name of my country.

I firmly believe that if we were privy to the same images that the Iraqi people live with on a day to day basis, that we would have left that country over two years ago. We do not have the stomach to see the kind of carnage that is a daily part of these poor peoples lives. And it is clear to most of us by now that if we brought our troops home we could rapidly decrease the violence that makes life so impossible for this country.

So after reading this story perhaps you could post it to your blog, or contact CBS and let them know that this is an important story that Americans need to see.

If Lara Logan was brave enough to film the footage, then we should be brave enough to watch it.