Very tragic news for North Carolina. As reported earlier today, a group of contractors in Iraq was attack in Falluja, they were burned, dragged, and hanged. Very awful, and reminiscent of Somalia.
And apparently, the group was from a North Carolina contractor. The Times:

Later, Blackwater Security Consulting, based in Moyock, N.C., said "early evidence" indicated that the victims may have been company employees. Blackwater, which hires former members of the military to provide security training and guard services, has been providing convoy security for food deliveries around Fallujah.

Further:

The steadily deteriorating security situation in the Falluja area, west of Baghdad, has become so dangerous that no American soldiers or Iraqi security staff responded to the attack against the contractors.

There are a number of police stations in Falluja and a base of more than 4,000 marines nearby. But even while the two vehicles burned, sending plumes of inky smoke over the closed shops of the city, there were no ambulances, no fire engines and no security.

Instead, Falluja's streets were thick with men and boys and chaos.

Boys with scarves over their faces hurled bricks into the burning vehicles. A group of men dragged one of the smoldering corpses into the street and ripped it apart. Someone then tied a chunk of flesh to a rock and tossed it over a telephone wire.

"Viva mujahadeen!" shouted Said Khalaf, a taxi driver. "Long live the resistance!"

Nearby, a boy no older than 10 put his foot on the head of a body and said: "Where is Bush? Let him come here and see this!"

Many people in the crowd said they felt as if they had won an important battle. Others said they thought that the contractors, who were driving in four-wheel-drive trucks, were working for the Central Intelligence Agency.

"This is what these spies deserve," said Salam Aldulayme, a 28-year-old Falluja resident.

From this I get two major impressions:
1) we'd better get it together in security. Afghanistan has been a mess in that respect--it will be really really bad if Iraq follows suit.
2) not only is security a mess, the street perceptions recorded in the article are a mess. the contractors were no doubt doing things to help every Iraqi- building infrestructure, and such. but many of these folks have blind rage. we've got to work in every way to get through, and temper the rage. it doesn't solve the problem to just act like only a few groups are anti-US, and everyone else is in love with us. my gut says lots of people in iraq are in a grey area- not sure how they feel. these people could find themselves, carried away by passion, in a riot anf hanging charred bodies. on the other hand, they could, in candid contemplation, find themselves wanting to make a government really happen in Iraq- and they could be convinced that the US and UN are there to help.
We've got to strive for that latter conclusion.