|
Banned
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by ubertuber
Host,
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a person that thinks the US has license to kill, imprison, and torture anyone we want, but I am rather apathetic about whether troops beat Zarqawi before he died, or even if they killed him by beating him..... .....He was someone who either killed innocents well or poorly, and for that I think he was fair game.
I guess I'd just rather see us pursue questions that are a little more meaningful...
|
ubertuber, If I was confident that the government had given us enough information to make realistic determinations about Zarqawi, or about anything else related to Iraq, or the unrelated "war on terr-urrrr", I would not react to this "news" the only way, under the circumstances, that I find myself reacting. I'm taking this tale in, as I would a "cartoon". I don't know what to believe, and I don't know how anyone else knows, either....not with this "history:
Quote:
http://www.counterpunch.org/weiher04182006.html
April 18 , 2006
Who is That Masked Man?
The Zarqawi Gambit, Revisited
By GREG WEIHER
.....
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...040900890.html
Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi
Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; Page A01
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program............
......Filkins, reached by e-mail, said that he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations campaign aimed at Zarqawi, but said he assumed that the military was releasing the letter "because it had decided it was in its best interest to have it publicized." No special conditions were placed upon him in being briefed on its contents, he said. He said he was skeptical about the document's authenticity then, and remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity with officials outside the U.S. military.
|
To make an elementary initial point, let me ask the obvious question. If he was skeptical of the authenticity of the letter, why did he go with the story? Why did his editors go with the story?
Nothing of this skepticism appears in the story itself. There are no references to any sources other than U.S. government officials, even though there is no shortage of experts familiar with Zarqawi’s career. At no point does Filkins say that he is skeptical about the authenticity of the letter.
I quote from my CounterPunch article of February 26:
“Note the lack of any confirmation of the authenticity of this letter/CD from experts or authorities aside from ‘U.S. officials.’ <b>Note the failure to consult third-party intelligence experts, authorities on Al Qaeda, authorities on wars of national liberation. Note the failure to provide any background on the validity of claims that Zarkawi actually could have written such a letter, is still in Iraq, or collaborated with Saddam Hussein.</b> There is one disclaimer, two lines in a three-page piece: ‘Yet other interpretations may be possible, including that it was written by some other insurgent, but one who exaggerated his involvement.’ . . . In a follow-up story (‘Al Qaeda rebuffs Iraqi Terror Group,’ 02/21/04) the administration’s version of the facts is entirely unquestioned.”
There is nothing surprising about finding out that, once more, the Bush administration played fast and loose with the truth as it pertains to matters Iraqi. After all, as the Zarqawi gambit is being exposed, we are also finding out that Bush prattled on about mobile weapons labs for more than a year after a secret CIA report dismissed the vehicles in question as the biggest sand toilets in the world.
It is just as important to note, however, that these feats of mendacity could not have been achieved without the willing, if not eager, complicity of the American establishment media. Eventually, the Times was criticized pretty severely in the pages of Editor and Publisher, and The Columbia Journalism Review for its slipshod journalistic practices. In his mea sorta culpa in May, 2004, the Times public editor, Daniel Okrent, put his finger on the essence of the problem:
“There is nothing more toxic to responsible journalism than an anonymous source . . . a newspaper has an obligation to convince readers why it believes the sources it does not identify are telling the truth. That automatic editor defense, ‘We’re not confirming what he says, we’re just reporting it,’ may apply to the statements of people speaking on the record. For anonymous sources, it’s worse than no defense. It’s a license granted to liars.”
In this context, it is relevant to note that the Times has yet to own up to its role in helping the liars in the Bush Administration to pull off the Zarqawi gambit.
|
<b>With the above "history", as context...(How can we know where we are, if we don't know where we've been?) and the following denials, disclaimers, and revisions, how can a rational mind represent that any "conclusions" are even possible ?</b>
Quote:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...iewed-homepage
Questions Remain About Zarqawi's Final Minutes
The U.S. denies accounts saying that the terrorist was beaten by American troops before he died, but confirms that a child was among the dead.
By Louise Roug, Times Staff Writer
June 11, 2006
.....In a briefing with reporters, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, a U.S. military spokesman, said that two doctors had been brought to Iraq to conduct an autopsy to determine the exact cause of Zarqawi's death. Results from the examination will be made public within days, Caldwell said.
He also <b>confirmed that a girl between 5 and 7 years old had died in the bombing.</b> Two unidentified women and one man were also killed in addition to Zarqawi and his spiritual advisor, Sheik Abdel Rashid Rahman, Caldwell said. U.S. officials at <b>first had said that Zarqawi and at least five others had died, including a woman and a child, but then changed to say that seven people had died, none of them children.</b>
The military has revised several other details of the bombing and its aftermath.
Caldwell said that early reports after a military operation can sometimes include hazy or contradictory information.
"There is no intention on anybody's behalf to engage in deception, manipulation or evasion," he said.
<b>After first reporting that Zarqawi was dead when U.S. troops arrived,</b> U.S. officials also now agree with Iraqis who said that the leader of the terrorist organization died at the site in the presence of U.S. troops.....
|
If I allowed myself to be "sucked in", I could react with wonderment over the fact that all possible efforts weren't undertaken to attempt to apprehend "Al Qaeda's #1" in Iraq, "alive"...for the wealth of intelligence that interrogating him might bring. I could react to the bombing death of a small child as "collateral damage", etc.
Instead, my sensibilities are still smarting from earlier disclosures that the NY Times reporter Judy Miller planted false WMD stories that were handed to her By Ahmed Chalabi, probably directed by PNAC. I recall the false certainty with which the Bush administration embellished the false "mobile biological weapons trailers" story, and the "Op" about the Zarqawi propaganda campaign that was fed to NY Times', Dexter Filkins, via selective leaks. That "Op" included a fake Zarqawi "letter".
I note that some folks here believe that the NY Times is "liberal", even after all of the disclosures that it's reporters and editors have been so "incurious" when it came time to publish what should have been suspected as blatant propaganda. I note that so many who post here, have their "minds made up", and I have to wonder....and post....over and over....how they can do that.
What do they "pick out", that they know to be "true"? Last week, the Haditha atrocities story and a deteriorating stock market dominated the news.
The....as if a switch was thrown, the government was able to shift attention, almost instantaneously...to the story that it wanted us to focus on....the still changing story of our military's "success" in "bombing" the bogey man that was created by our government's own propaganda.
The "timing" of the new "our military get's it's evil-doer" story, was just as convenient. a few days ago, as this scenario was, 2 years ago:
Quote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in614063.shtml
Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed
60 Minutes II Has Exclusive Report On Alleged Mistreatment
April 28, 2004
(CBS) Last month, the U.S. Army announced 17 soldiers in Iraq, including a brigadier general, had been removed from duty after charges of mistreating Iraqi prisoners.
But the details of what happened have been kept secret, until now.....
.......It was American soldiers serving as military police at Abu Ghraib who took these pictures. The investigation started when one soldier got them from a friend, and gave them to his commanders. 60 Minutes II has a dozen of these pictures, and there are many more – pictures that show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners....
|
....and then....as now...almost as if he was paid to take the stage on cue, just 12 days after the Abu Ghraib controversy was reported, this convenient, and I'm sure....(I'm not....but too many of you are..) "story" came along..the "bogeyman, Zarqawi", to deflect attention away from U.S. war crimes du jour:
Quote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/i...eheading_x.htm
Posted 5/11/2004 12:57 PM Updated 5/12/2004 11:30 AM
Video shows beheading of American captive
By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY
A gruesome videotape posted on an Islamic militant Web site Tuesday showed the beheading of an American contractor who had been looking for work in Iraq — a bloody scene that appears to mark the first violent response to U.S. abuse of Iraqi captives at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.......
..........Despite claims from his family, the young American who was decapitated on a videotape posted by an al-Qaeda-linked Web site was never under U.S. custody, coalition spokesman Dan Senor said Wednesday...........
.........In a grainy execution video eerily similar to one in 2002 that showed al-Qaeda operatives executing a Wall Street Journal reporter in Pakistan, Berg was shown sitting in an orange jumpsuit in front of five armed, hooded men.
Berg's body was found on a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday...
|
If the folks who really should read this post, have even gotten this far into it, I'm sure many of them are shaking their heads and muttering, ooohhhh...that "host", why does he hate American soooo much? My question is...why do you believe that our government's executive branch has so much, coincidental, fortuituous luck? Their christian god must have been smiling down on them when he gave them "Zarqawi"....a co-operative and unimginably "evil" adversary, who made attention on Abu Ghraib, "Vaporize" when he was incompetent enough to conveniently, personally behead Nick Berg, video tape the crime, and then post it online for the world to see, just at the right time to rehabilitate the reputation of our government. <b>If I can convince even one of you to be more curious....more skeptical....if it's even possible!</b>
Last edited by host; 06-13-2006 at 09:04 AM..
|