Another great fauxtograph. After the Americans accuse them of supplying arms to the insurgents, the Iranians come back with the old You too! beloved of school children the world over.
The Fars news agency published an article saying that home-grown terrorists are being supplied by the US and they have a photo to prove it. The LA Times swallows it and regurgitates it. Charles Johnson and friends demolish it.
Ten myths about the Iraq War dealt with on Strategy Page. 1-No Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
(via Instapundit)
2-The 2003 Invasion was Illegal
3-Sanctions were working
4-Overthrowing Saddam Only Helped Iran
5-The Invasion Was a Failure
6-The Invasion Helped Al Qaeda
7-Iraq Is In A State of Civil War
8-Iraqis Were Better Off Under Saddam
9-The Iraq War Caused Islamic Terrorism to Increase in Europe
10- The War in Iraq is Lost
The reporting on the death last Friday of Abir Aramin shows how sloppiness and laziness can count for so much in particular circumstances. The 10-year-old Palestinian girl from the West Bank town of Anata, near Jerusalem was struck in the head during a clash between stone-throwing Palestinians and Israeli border police, who responded with rubber bullets. She had evidently gone out to watch during a school break.
AP stated that she had died because of an Israeli rubber bullet. Agence France Presse said she had been "wounded in her head by shrapnel from a stun grenade fired by the Israeli force". The New York Times was less specific: she died from wounds sustained when "she was hit by fire from the Israeli border police".
This Monday, however, Ha'aretz reported that the autopsy "with a pathologist hired by Aramin's family in attendance" had ruled out rubber bullets as the cause of death.No bullet wounds were found on her body, and the skull injury that caused her death was a large one, whereas rubber bullets, even if they do not penetrate, usually make small wounds.
That is, she may have been hit by a (Palestinian) rock, just as Mohammed Al-Dura was probably hit by a Palestinian bullet.
What I find interesting is not what the three Western news outlets reported (what the relatives had said, basically), but that in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on the same day that they published the results of the autopsy, there was an article that, in passing, mentions the little girl's death and assumes that the Border Police were responsible.
So, not only do the Western news outlets not correct their story, but an Israeli journalist accepts the 'witness' account despite what his own newspaper was printing that day to contradict it. Out of such things are made fatal myths.
All this and more from CAMERA.
(via Augean Stables)
Michelle Malkin did some digging on her recent visit to Baghdad. She was looking for confirmation of an AP story that was built on the testimony of an Iraqi policeman called Jamil Hussein. The story told of 4 mosques burnt down, 6 Sunnis set on fire and a total of 18 dead. Politically, the story had importance because of the timing; it occurred the day after Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad's main Shiite district and the Western press were pushing the line of a city gone completely out of control. It was another note in the crescendo that would climax with Get out, get out!!!
Malkin checks on what can be checked on, and the AP story just doesn't check out. She has photos of all four of the 'destroyed' mosques, with shots of the damage that actually occurred and an explanation as to how it occurred.
Lt. Col. Steven Miska, commander of the Dagger Brigade at Forward Operating Base Justice, states the obvious: Part of it is, if you're relying on Iraqi reporters, well, what are their biases? What clans are they from and tribes? Why are they telling me this? What's his underlying motivation? And if you quote a police chief, well, those guys have underlying motivations, too . . .
Curt at Flopping Aces (who started the investigation) has plenty to say, and there'll be video at Hot Air tomorrow.
I've gone out and found police chiefs on the street and said, 'What happened here?' Something just blew up and he told me, 'Well, U.S. airplanes just bombed this building.'
I said, 'What are you talking about? It was freakin' insurgent rockets that just hit the building, I picked them up on radar.' But he just told the reporter on the street that U.S. warplanes bombed the building and killed 13 people.
So, rumors on the street Iraqis will take at face value. Trying to get them to do investigations is like pulling teeth out of their head.
The AP/Jamil Hussein affair gets weirder by the day. AP said that the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior had found him, but now it seems that they've found the man who called himself Jamil Hussein, but who is actually Jamil Gulaim "XX". Where XX stands for his real second middle name and his real surname, neither of which is Hussein. So, did AP know he was using a pseudonym, and if so, why didn't they say so?
Lots on this from the blogger players in this game of dodgems: Flopping Aces and Confederate Yankee.
Michelle Malkin has been invited to Iraq by Eason Jordan (late of CNN before he started telling stories about the brutality of American soldiers). They're going to look for Jamil Hussein, AP's source for all their best Chaos and Violence stories. He seems to be still unavailable for commment.
(via Instapundit)
I've just come across this one. You will remember that after the November 23rd bombings in Sadr City, the Shi'ite reaction seemed to confirm that sectarian violence had become so implacable and widespread that 'civil war' seemed the only proper label. Two of the stories that built that picture were picked up by AP and spread across the world. According to one, four Sunni mosques had been burnt to the ground; the other told of 6 Sunnis handcuffed, tortured and burnt alive.
Curt at Flopping Aces looked a little deeper, his curiosity piqued by the source of both these sources, police Capt. Jamil Hussein. It turns out that Capt. Hussein has been a very fruitful source for AP at least since April reporting on nine incidents of violence, all, as it happens, involving violence by Shi'ites on Sunnis. It also turns out that not only was there no confirmation of this last incident from any other source (and it was contradicted by the US military), but that police Capt. Hussein's existence is ... problematical. As is another of AP's much quoted sources.
Go here for Curt's full investigation and here for Jules Crittenden's commentary. Pajamas Media's Blog Week in Review has Richard Fernandez and Glen Reynolds to comment on the AP Affair.
(via Instapundit)
