Two explosions struck an Interior Ministry patrol and a market in the Baghdad area on Monday evening, killing at least seven people and wounding 16, police said. The first attack was a car bomb that struck an Interior Ministry patrol in western Baghdad, killing four commandos and wounding six, Capt. Jamil Hussein said. About 30 minutes later, a bomb exploded in a market in Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, killing three people and wounding 10. July:
Gunmen also ambushed a bus in the predominantly Sunni neighborhood of Amariyah in western Baghdad, killing six passengers, including a woman, and the driver, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.
September:
A suicide truck bomb slammed into a Baghdad police headquarters on Wednesday, killing seven and wounding at least double that many, in a deadly 24 hours that saw more than 45 killings in Iraq, including two American soldiers, authorities said.
The truck bomb attack in the southern Baghdad neighbourhood of Dora came at 07:45 as policemen were coming on duty and the blast razed the building, said captain Jamil Hussein. He said the number of casualties was expected to rise.
His name is mentioned quite a bit when Sunni’s are attacked it seems.
Now all I have to go on is the earlier AP report in which Iraqi and American forces say they cannot find evidence that these six were burned alive, no proof yet that the incident didn’t happen. But if it turns out that this story is a fairy tale how much more of the information given from this Capt is suspect?
[...]
Here is the [...] press release from the military:
Contrary to recent media reporting that four mosques were burned in Hurriya, an Iraqi Army patrol investigating the area found only one mosque had been burned in the neighborhood.
Soldiers from the 6th Iraqi Army Division conducted a patrol in Hurriya Friday afternoon in response to media reports that four mosques were being burned as retaliation for the VBIED attacks in Sadr City on Thursday.
The Soldiers set up a checkpoint near the Al Muhaimen mosque at approximately 2 p.m. and found the mosque intact with no evidence of any fire at the location.
While investigating the Al Meshaheda mosque, the patrol received small arms fire from unknown insurgents. The patrol returned fire, and the insurgents broke contact and fled the area. A subsequent check of the mosque found the mosque intact with no evidence of a fire.
At approximately 3:50 p.m., a local civilian reported to the patrol that armed insurgents had set the Al-Nidaa mosque on fire by throwing a gas container into the mosque. The patrol pursued the insurgents but lost contact with them.
The Soldiers called the fire department and set up a cordon around the mosque. Local fire trucks responded to the scene and extinguished the fire at approximately 4:00 p.m. The mosque sustained smoke and fire damage in the entry way but was not destroyed.
An alleged attack on a fourth mosque remains unconfirmed. The patrol was also unable to confirm media reports that six Sunni civilians were allegedly dragged out of Friday prayers and burned to death. Neither Baghdad police nor Coalition forces have reports of any such incident.
So the Baghdad police had not received reports fo this burning either? Who in the hell is this Capt. Jamil Hussein then? Is he part of the Iraqi police or an insurgent stringer for the AP?
Who is this man? In response to doubts of this story, the Associated Press printed a rebuttal, courtesy
Flopping Aces:
The Associated Press rejects unfounded attacks on its story about six Sunni worshippers burned to death outside their mosque on Friday, November 24.
AP reporters who have been working in Iraq throughout the conflict learned of the mosque incident through witnesses and later corroborated it with police.
The AP received an email communication late Monday signed by a U.S. military public affairs officer, Navy Lt. Michael B. Dean, alleging that the police captain cited in our story “is not a Baghdad police office or MOI (Ministry of Interior) employee’’ and raising questions about whether or not he actually exists.
In fact, that captain has long been know to the AP reporters and has had a record of reliability and truthfulness. He has been based at the police station at Yarmouk, and more recently at al-Khadra, another Baghdad district, and has been interviewed by the AP several times at his office and by telephone. His full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein.
After the AP story was questioned by the U.S. military, Hussein was contacted again and confirmed that the incident took place. The AP also located additional witnesses outside the mosque in the al-Hurriyah district.
According to the witnesses interviewed by the AP, there was no U.S. military present at the time of the incident Friday, and the subsequent U.S. military statement about it cited only reports the U.S. military had received later from the Iraqi army.
The problem is, according to Curt, there is no record of any such man being in the Iraqi police, which seems odd for a man who has been in service for so long. Who is he? Was this name a psuedonym? The Associated Press has not stated so, in fact, they are stubbornly printing support for the story such as this November 28 story
Witnesses detail Iraq burning deaths:
The attack on the small Mustafa Sunni mosque began as worshippers were finishing Friday midday prayers. About 50 unarmed men, many in black uniforms and some wearing ski masks, walked through the district chanting "We are the Mahdi Army, shield of the Shiites." Fifteen minutes later, two white pickup trucks, a black BMW and a black Opel drove up to the marchers. The suspected Shiite militiamen took automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers from the vehicles. They then blasted open the front of the mosque, dragged six worshippers outside, doused them with kerosene and set them on fire.
This account of one of the most horrific alleged attacks of Iraq's sectarian war emerged Tuesday in separate interviews with residents of a Sunni enclave in the largely Shiite Hurriyah district of Baghdad.
The problem we're having here is that news bureaus such as the Associated Press, CNN, Reuters, etc want to cover the news in Iraq but it's sometimes dangerous for their staff and expensive to maintain people overseas. Local people have offered to gather and report news, and these news groups leaped on the chance, calling them "stringers" or local help. Cheaper to maintain, these stringers get news to these news organizations while they maintain a skeleton staff in the area who largely stay at hotels and do not go out for the stories.
And as we've seen for months and even years is that at least some of these stringers cannot be trusted, that they are deliberately lying in some cases and at the very least using the reports as propaganda for the side of the terrorists and death squads. Reports of magical missiles in Lebanon that punch rusty holes through the roof of ambulances and explode inside doing no damage to the vehicle and cauterizing wounds on one person inside have surfaced. Doctored photographs have been revealed. And now the mystery burn victims who cannot be discovered.
Is this Jamil Hussein such a source, a stringer who is feeding the AP lies? The Associated Press is not helping matters with the way it is changing stories. Gateway Pundit
notes this:
Here is the original report from the AP published in the Jerusalem Post on the Six Torched Sunnis that was republished in hundreds of papers:Revenge-seeking Shi’ite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near an Iraqi army post. The soldiers did not intervene, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.
The savage revenge attack for Thursday’s slaughter of 215 people in the Shi’ite Sadr City slum occurred as members of the Mahdi Army militia burned four mosques and several homes while killing 12 other Sunni residents in the once-mixed Hurriyah neighborhood, Hussein said.
Here is the Multi National Forces Iraq press release the next day on April 25, 2006 in response to this original AP report:Contrary to recent media reporting that four mosques were burned in Hurriya, an Iraqi Army patrol investigating the area found only one mosque had been burned in the neighborhood.
Soldiers from the 6th Iraqi Army Division conducted a patrol in Hurriya Friday afternoon in response to media reports that four mosques were being burned as retaliation for the VBIED attacks in Sadr City on Thursday.
The Soldiers set up a checkpoint near the Al Muhaimen mosque at approximately 2 p.m. and found the mosque intact with no evidence of any fire at the location.
So the AP later transformed their account of events slightly in their November 25, 5:45 PM report:The U.S. military said Saturday that Iraqi soldiers securing Hurriyah found only one burned mosque and were unable to confirm residents’ and police accounts that six Sunni Arabs were dragged from Friday prayers and burned to death.
Notice, this wasn’t a correction.
The initial report: four mosques burned. The eventual report, without correction or note of any change? One mosque slightly burned in a doorway. One of the eyewitnesses quoted is a mystery man who is not who he claims to be, one has been quoted in the past as making strong anti-American comments, and one is accused by his own congregation of being a former member of
Saddam Hussein's Secret Police. It's not that these guys cannot possibly be telling the truth, but it is enough doubt raised about their veracity that the AP's response should be "well let's investigate the truth" not "we're right!"
I understand the resentment that the legacy media has against the new media such as blogs. I understand the defensiveness that the AP might have after being attacked so many times for running bogus media this summer. The job of a news organization, however, is to find and print the truth. If you are being bamboozled by someone, if a source is lying or distorting information for you, if your tipster is manipulating you, your anger should be directed at
them, not at people who notice the problems.
In the past, a news organization would protect a source only until they turned out to be wrong or misleading, then they "burned" them by cutting them off and revealing who they were. The difference here? The only change I can see is twofold: it's cheaper to keep using these guys instead of real reporters doing real jobs (and hard to get real reporters to get out and do the job), and quite simply they prefer this version of the events and want to push that angle, so a few lies can be accepted as long as the desired story gets out.
Now, back to Protein Wisdom after all that setup. Jeff Goldstein looked at this story and the reaction by commenters and pundits, combined with the attitude of many leftists about Iraq and the Baker Study group. It seems like many are born again Kissingerians, "realists" in foreign policy, those who embrace the good old days of President Bush the elder, when we cut off Iraq and let the Kurds die for daring to revolt against Saddam Hussein.
Not to be a “meany-meany name caller”, but it now appears there is some question regarding the veracity of the “rampaging Shia militia” story that many on the left—including some of our delightfully doctrinaire commenters here (see, for example, this comment by john, who can barely contain his glee at the prospect of a good ethnic burning)—would very much like to be true. Because if incidents like these are true, you see, our anti-war friends can then rend their garments and pretend they care for the well-being of anyone or anything other than vindication for their own failed ideology, which, from what I can see, tends to mutate depending upon what their political opponents are up to.
I mean, anybody here think either actus or monkyboy were GHW Bush supporters? Or that they were fans of Kissingerian realism? Realpolitik?
He links this concept to Coleridge's idea of "willful suspension of disbelief" and the desire to believe things because they fit what one's political leanings desire. I mentioned this in my series on Bias, and it certainly is a tendency we all need to fight. When you or I do so, it's unwise and improper. When a news organization does it, it's fraudulent and immoral.
For those who continue to suggest that the mainstream press has a negligible impact on elections, consider that the majority of Americans who bothered to pay any attention whatsoever to this story will be left with an account of horrific sectarian violence against women and children—and the belief that sectarian strife in Iraq is not only inexorable and savage, but pandemic.
Underlying this reportage, then, is an unseemly subtext: that Arabs in Iraq—and perhaps even Arabs in general—are incapable of working toward a free society, one that, through a series of ratified political documents and elections, has merely pretended to be taking its first tentative steps toward the acceptance of a baby pluralism. Consequently, the blood and treasure spent in Iraq has never been worth the cost, and—our failure now all but imminent thanks to a genetic or systemic flaw in the Arab constitution—we should therefore be looking for a way to retreat with honor. Or perhaps a way to reinstall Saddam Hussein. You know, to stabilize things.
Commenters responded to these thoughts:
What is even more disturbing is that actus, m-bot,john, et al. berate American efforts to try and install consensual government in place of a bloody-handed dictator. You know, they deride and berate ‘neo-cons’, which foreign policy is Wilsonianism. With the history of the first half of the Twentieth Century, the failure to support democracies at the expense of the fascist dictators of Europe, and now they turn on an attempt to push back the dictators and bring in democracy?
Where do their loyalties truly lie? With oppressed humanity, or with the boots (no mattter the color - red, black - makes no difference) that are pressing down on humanity?
Just that should make one pause, and wonder why should any of their objections be taken seriously.
-by MikeyNH
Maybe what we need, Mikey NTH, is a handy menu of selections posted in the sidebar for our trolling leftist liars to conveniently select from:
1. War is itself evil. We condemn the Iraq effort.
2. War is not evil. The neocon Pubbies are chickenhawks. Democrats are courageous and have A Plan.
3. There is no threat. Wholesale pullout = peace.
4. Although there is no threat, if there were, it’d be because the West earned it.
5. Except Europe. Europe is merely being assimilated by the Religion of Peace.
6. Europe is not being assimilated.
7. There are no nukes.
8. There are nukes, but of the non-threatening variety.
9. Bushco invented war for oil.
10. If Bushco didn’t invent this war for oil, he did it for the Religious Right. Liberal Christian values suck; any alternative philosophy does not suck, its violence, intolerance, bigotry, oppression and other failings notwithstanding.
11. Iraq bad, Afghanistan good. Or, if you prefer, Afghanistan bad, Iraq good, especially under SH, except for that part where we all agreed he was a murderous tyrant and and made completing the Iraq mission in the win column Bushco’s responsibility.
12. Either way, we all voted for it before we voted against it. We were duped into virtually unanimously approving an effort we (a) knew was bogus, (b) didn’t know was bogus, (c) knew we didn’t know if it might be bogus, and/or (d) didn’t know we knew it might not be bogus. Or not.
13. Brown people. (a) Don’t deserve democracy, (b) can’t handle democracy, (c) vote but don’t know what for, (d) deserve the full support of The Democrat Plan, (e) deserve no support with Bushco in office, at least as far as our political futures are concerned. Depending on outcomes, we’ll decide on the principle of the thing later.
14. Violence. Under Republicans, bad and our fault. Under Democrats, unavoidable and the Republican’s fault.
15. Media = conservative lackeys.
16. Media = enlightened liberalism.
17. Winning under Bush = bad.
18. Winning under [insert Democrat here] = good.
19. Miscellaneous: Nork nukes no threat/big threat depending on (a) outcome and (b) party affiliation of sitting POTUS. Repeat as needed for all other totalitarian regimes, collectives, experiments, and theories.
20. Capitalism simply blows dead weasels.
21. Tyranny did not kill an average of a million a year for the last century. Nyah, nyah, nyah. And brown people still can’t do democracy.
21. [Optional: Insert any other relativity that diverts the reality of any given reality here. Use liberally. No pun intended.]
-by 6Gun
This Iraqi Captain doesn’t necessarily need to even be stringing for an insurgent group. It’s just as possible he’s merely guilty of relating secondhand gossip.
You know how it works: one mosque is burnt, no people killed. However, by the tim the story is retold for the 100th time 8 blocks away, it’s 4 mosques burnt and 6 people (women and children no less) killed. Pretty soon you have a Lancet study.
-by Seth Williams
Pretty soon you have a Lancet study.
or cannibals in the Superdome.
-by maggie katzen
Meany-meany name-caller!
Next, you’ll be suggesting that the LA Times refuses to report on the military’s denial of unverified stories by an anonymous stringer, or that the AP has assigned someone with a visceral hatred of Israelis to cover Israel.
And monky, you would respond if you had a response, even if it’s as laughably bizzare as the balloon fence. But it’s nice to see you admit to going completely off-topic in other threads, poo-flinger that you are. Hehe.
-by Karl
So is it really any surprise that sanctimonious liberal progressives would find the Other that they champion in theory so perfectly distasteful in fact?—at least, before the savages have been assimilated and incorporated into the landscape of the soft-socialist’s utopian plantation...?
No. Leftist racism is no surprise at all. The Middle East is entirely full of poor, oppressed brown people whose lives would be simply wonderful if not for the meddling hand of the western hegemonic military-industrial complex. And the fact that they’re all filthy savages.
Yep, that’s the morally superior left.
-by Pablo
I have yet to see the American Left exhibit one single instance of concern or compassion for those innocents in the Middle East who suffer under extreme oppression. Even the Left in the UK is mystified (see the Euston Manifesto).
Hussein was very much on a par, morally, with Stalin and nary a peep from the Left. Perhaps they believe the bullshit they spew: that those in the Middle East are unprepared for, and ill-suited to, democracy. As a concept, it goes far to salving their consciences for neglecting their fellow man. That’s the only reason I can conceive: dehumanize them so you don’t have to feel any responsibility for them. That, or it’s an extreme manifestation of moral relativism and despair.
Apparently, there is no degree of human suffering that can interrupt the American Left’s love affair with its own navel.
-by Ahem
It’s understood, I think, but we know that any corrections to the narrative will be buried, either late in the newscast or way down deep somewhere in the paper.
“Oh, by the way, that story we reported? Totally wrong. Our bad. And now, waterskiing squirrels!”
This is incredibly serious stuff, and we have a media machine such that the majority of the players are not serious.
-by cranky-d
Wonder what these guys would think of all the criticism coming from thousands of miles away.
-by Umm...
One might posit that they would have the utmost contempt for their “fellow journalists” who’ve decided that the truth is not worth the risk, and have decided simply to report whatever stories are fed to them by their “trusted” local sources.
That is, assuming that they understand that the criticism is levelled not at them, but rather at the craven propagandists who slurp up as much bad news as they can from the safety of their stateside skyscrapers and “local” four-star hotels, and broadcast it far and wide before even pausing to consider whether it’s the whole truth.
Which distinction should be obvious even to somebody killed more than a year ago, however elusive it may be to Jeff’s current crop of trolls.
-by Squid
Balloon Fence Boy: Rest in Pieces
What is it with trolls and the love of the one - two sentence snipe, either barely on topic or, as in Um’s case, completely off target. Who gives a hairy flying crap what dead journalists would have thought of the criticism? How about actually engaging in the arena of ideas, challenging assumptions, boldly making an argument! Trolls are the laziest creatutes on God’s green earth, either parsing sound bites or practicing their digital war cries.
While we’re at it; we’ve become entangled in the digital war Bizarro world, where propaganda and outright lies benefit the enemy to accomplish ... what? Does anyone on the left realise how infinitly small and despicable they become when they take such righteous glee in creating a maximally negative myth that denigrates our military and our country? This “working against national interest as a noble endeavor” meme is not only tiresome, it’s positively dangerous.
You have the houses of Congress! Now try to be part of the solution rather than the arbiters of critical history.
-by BJTexs
The news media is historically called the 4th estate in the USA because it is considered almost a branch of government: Judicial, Executive, Legislative... news reporting. The idea is that the reporting of events and ideas gives the people the power they need and the information they desire to vote and influence government. If this power is misused, then we have a fourth corrupt estate, a branch of "government" beyond checks and balances that deliberately is manipulating the people toward a specific end. And a republic cannot do well with this rot at its core.
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