31 March 2010 >> Not too long ago, taking to the streets to protest your government was considered a patriotic act.

It’s true!

But it seems that publicly airing your grievances stopped being patriotic right around noon on January 20th, 2009.

Once President Obama was sworn in, protesting became incitement to violence.

If you’ve opened up a newspaper or watched a cable news program in the past week or so, you’ve probably seen members of the media painting Tea Party activists as dangerous bigots. That’s because disagreeing with President Obama on issues like government spending and high taxes makes you a racist, you see.

What’s interesting about the media’s latest freak-out is that there were radicals a-plenty under President Bush. They protested in the streets. They talked openly about revolution and killing. But oddly, the violent imagery used by people claiming to be advocates for peace never registered with the media. They were too busy fawning over Cindy Sheehan.

Why the difference in coverage? Did the media cheerlead protests against President Bush to hurt him politically? Are they trying to marginalize the increasingly powerful Tea Party movement because they favor President Obama’s agenda?

One thing’s for sure: If there is such a thing as dangerous rhetoric, then the media is at least one president too late in reporting the story.

Don’t believe me?

Well, then let’s take a trip down memory lane... Video >>

2 June 2008 @ 8:29AM >> When a blue-blooded old media outlet like the Washington Post raises the possibility of victory in Iraq on its editorial pages, it’s news:

THERE’S BEEN a relative lull in news coverage and debate about Iraq in recent weeks — which is odd, because May could turn out to have been one of the most important months of the war. While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Iraq passed a turning point last fall when the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign launched in early 2007 produced a dramatic drop in violence and quelled the incipient sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites. Now, another tipping point may be near, one that sees the Iraqi government and army restoring order in almost all of the country, dispersing both rival militias and the Iranian-trained “special groups” that have used them as cover to wage war against Americans. It is — of course — too early to celebrate; though now in disarray, the Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr could still regroup, and Iran will almost certainly seek to stir up new violence before the U.S. and Iraqi elections this fall. Still, the rapidly improving conditions should allow U.S. commanders to make some welcome adjustments — and it ought to mandate an already-overdue rethinking by the “this-war-is-lost” caucus in Washington, including Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

It is funny to see the editors say it’s “odd” that the stunning turnaround in Iraq isn’t getting more press coverage. If they think it’s under-reported, isn’t a rather simple solution to report it more? In fact, wouldn’t that be the only journalistically responsible thing to do?

After all, it’s not as though the Washington Post exists in a vacuum; if the paper decided to cover success in Iraq as vigorously as it covered failure, other media outlets would have a harder time continuing to peddle a storyline of defeat.

Eventually, politicians would even have to acknowledge the emerging reality. But as the Post notes, that might be problematic for certain candidates.

Perhaps that’s why these improvements aren’t being reported more.

Still, it’s refreshing to see the Post acknowledge the very real successes of the past year. Will other outlets follow suit?

21 May 2008 @ 8:17AM >> In a White House letter to the president of NBC News, presidential advisor Ed Gillespie has some questions for the network that I’d love to see answered:

[P]lease allow me to take this opportunity to ask if your network has reconsidered its position that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, especially in light of the fact that the unity government in Baghdad recently rooted out illegal, extremist groups in Basra and reclaimed the port there for the people of Iraq, among other significant signs of progress.

On November 27, 2006, NBC News made a decision to no longer just cover the news in Iraq, but to make an analytical and editorial judgment that Iraq was in a civil war. As you know, both the United States government and the Government of Iraq disputed your account at that time. As Matt Lauer said that morning on The Today Show: “We should mention, we didn’t just wake up on a Monday morning and say, ‘Let’s call this a civil war.’ This took careful deliberation.’”

I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a “civil war.” Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?

And if NBC News no longer believes there’s a civil war in Iraq, given all the fanfare over the network’s initial announcement, why didn’t NBC ever publicly admit to undeclaring civil war?

13 April 2008 >> A lack of action in Iraq leads to a pretty funny conversation in this video.

(Hat tip: Peter Mertz.)

25 January 2008 >> According to an upcoming 60 Minutes report, Saddam Hussein lied about weapons of mass destruction:

Saddam Hussein initially didn’t think the U.S. would invade Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction, so he kept the fact that he had none a secret to prevent an Iranian invasion he believed could happen. The Iraqi dictator revealed this thinking to George Piro, the FBI agent assigned to interrogate him after his capture.

[...]

“He told me he initially miscalculated... President Bush’s intentions. He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998...a four-day aerial attack,” says Piro. “He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack.” “He didn’t believe the U.S. would invade?” asks Pelley, “No, not initially,” answers Piro.

[...]

Saddam still wouldn’t admit he had no weapons of mass destruction, even when it was obvious there would be military action against him because of the perception he did. Because, says Piro, “For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that [faking having the weapons] would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” he tells Pelley.

He also intended and had the wherewithal to restart the weapons program. “Saddam] still had the engineers. The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there,” says Piro. “He wanted to pursue all of WMD...to reconstitute his entire WMD program.” This included chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Piro says.

By the time the war began, Saddam Hussein had already been subverting the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food program for years. U.N. bureaucrats and foreign officials around the globe were being paid by Saddam to look the other way as he used the Oil-for-Food program as his own personal slush fund in one of the biggest financial scams in human history.

In other words, the U.N.’s sanctions against Saddam were far worse than completely ineffective; they were helping Saddam’s regime.

Without war, sanctions would have eventually gone away, and the rest of the world would have been in the position of hoping that the Saddam Hussein was completely reformed and that his talk never turned into action.

Given Saddam’s history of filling mass graves, only a fool would stake their safety on that wishful thinking.

13 January 2008 @ 12:20PM >> I got to know David French in producing Indoctrinate U. When I interviewed David, he was the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a non-partisan group that fights for the free speech and free thought rights of students and professors.

Recently, I got an update on David through a mutual friend, who pointed me to this, written by David’s wife Nancy:

I knew when my husband David French [...] watched the towers fall on 9/11 on his law firm’s television, he wanted to do something. Four years later, he did, by resigning from his role in the civil liberties arena and joining the Army Reserves. In 2007, he left the comfort of his home and family and went to Forward Operating Base Caldwell in Iraq where he serves as the Squadron Judge Advocate for Sabre (2d) Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment.

At Camp Caldwell, he has joined over a thousand soldiers who share less than a dozen phones and computers, making it impossible to stay in touch with family and friends back home.

David feels strongly about this form of service. And we made this decision as a family. David’s deployment has certainly challenged our family’s life. But we’ve been able to remain somewhat connected by sending him care packages. And many of our friends sent David care packages just as soon as we knew his mailing address.

However, David noticed many of the young soldiers receive nothing. Some have dysfunctional or almost no family support back home. Others come from very low income backgrounds where the families cannot afford to send many items.

To address this need, David and Nancy were involved in starting Operation Send-a-box:

Operation Send-a-Box aspires to send two care packages to every soldier in the Sabre squadron by the end of February—ambitious since there are over a thousand soldiers serving in this strategic location. The squadron’s chaplain has agreed to distribute packages to soldiers who have not yet received mail from home, beginning with the lowest ranked soldiers.

11 December 2007 @ 6:56PM >> The headline above can be parsed in two different ways. A court in Iraq will soon try to determine which is more accurate.

Jim Hanson of Pajamas Media reports:

AP photographer Bilal Hussein was on the radar screen of US forces prior to his being detained in a chance encounter April 12, 2006. He was a stringer working in Fallujah who filed numerous reports and photos that seemed to need a high degree of cooperation from the terrorists. He has been in custody for 19 months and will soon face trial by the Iraqi government on charges related to his activities with Sunni insurgents in Fallujah and Ramadi. Evidence against him is expected to be given to the Iraqi government this week.

Hussein was in his house with Hamid Hamad Motib, a known al-Qaeda leader, last year when Marines wanted to use the house as an observation point. They determined Motib’s identity and status as a wanted terrorist and took both him and Hussein into custody. They also recovered a number of items that led them to believe that Hussein was involved in insurgent activities. The US will now provide the evidence it has to the Iraqi government.

[...]

Bilal Hussein had free reign [sic] to be anywhere and was often taking pictures in the company of insurgents and terrorists. He and the other stringers who made up AP’s Pulitzer Prize winning photo team managed to capture assassinations as they happened. They were on site at bombings within seconds to capture the carnage almost as it happened.

This access and the number of false reports of civilian deaths led the information operations staff to take note. They began monitoring Hussein more closely for two reasons: one they were tasked with countering or debunking false claims of civilian casualties and atrocities, second because Hussein’s very tight relations with the insurgents could be used against the Marines themselves.

The photo to the right was taken by Balil Hussein. It appears to show Italian hostage Salvatore Santoro shortly before he was executed. The Associated Press tries to defend Hussein by copping to a different journalistic no-no: that the photo was staged after Santoro’s execution.

Either way, Hussein had remarkable access to terrorists, and he routinely supplied photographs to AP that were useful propaganda for insurgents. By AP’s own admission, he dutifully waited while insurgents staged an execution scene, proving that he was an active participant in generating their propaganda.

So even if you give the Associated Press the benefit of the doubt, the best you can say is that their own evidence shows that Hussein was a willing tool of the insurgents.

Was he more than that?

Iraqi authorities will be seeking a verdict on that question soon enough.

19 November 2007 @ 9:17AM >> On a recent airing of CNN’s The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer attempts to explain why good news out of Iraq—such as the sharp decreases in violence seen over the last few months—goes unreported:

[TERRY] JEFFREY[, CYBERCAST NEWS SERVICE]: You know, there’s sort of a catch-22. As the war starts to succeed, as the surge is working, violence is going down, U.S. casualties are going down in Iraq, it’s not news.

When Americans aren’t killed there, it’s not on the front pages of the newspaper. It’s not heavily in the cable news coverage. And people start to forget about it. They don’t realize necessarily that things are going well.

But to the degree that it’s not an issue, it’s good politically for Republicans.

[WOLF] BLITZER[, CNN CORRESPONDENT]: You know, I’m — I’m always reluctant to say things are going well. I hope they are going well in Iraq. Always reluctant to even say it, because I’m afraid of a jinx, because, the next morning...

[DONNA] BRAZILE[, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST]: Absolutely.

BLITZER: ... you could wake up and there could be a horrible, horrible disaster over there.

(Emphasis added.)

Blitzer’s admission came up in a discussion of poll numbers, which he kicked off by asking, “How are things going for the U.S. in Iraq? Thirty-four percent say it’s going well. Sixty-five percent say it’s going badly.”

The polls largely reflect the media’s reporting, so if positive trends go unreported—and by Blitzer’s own admission, they do—then those positive trends will not be reflected in the polls.

It’s really laughable that good news goes unreported because it might jinx the war effort. If that were the case, one would expect the media to hold back on bad news, too; after all, bad news has the effect of driving down public support for the war, which also damages the war effort.

But, of course, the media’s newfound reporting restraint only seems to apply when discussing positive developments out of Iraq.

20 October 2007 @ 12:21PM >> Leave it to the media to figure out a way to turn dramatically declining death rates in Iraq into a negative story:

At what’s believed to be the world’s largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn’t good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that’s cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq.

“I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead,” said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. “People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don’t talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more.”

[...]

“Certainly, when the number of dead increases I feel happy, like all workers in the graveyard,” said Basim Hameed , 30, a body washer. “This happiness comes from the increase in the amount of money we have.”

Death is something everyone must face, he noted. “My job demands death, and this is our fate, all of us.”

What’s next? A story on a recession in the Iraqi explosives market?

11 October 2007 @ 3:32PM >> Michael Totten brought his video camera along on a foot patrol in Ramadi, the capital of the once-violent Anbar province in Iraq. He returns with 18 minutes showing what happens when it’s time for the barbed wire to come down.

2 October 2007 @ 3:14PM >> Michael Totten, currently in Iraq, has a new post about his trip with a relief convoy in Anbar Province. As always, his pieces are worth a read, and are heavily illustrated with pictures.

23 August 2007 @ 11:53AM >> U.S. News and World Report notices that some Democrats are toning down their pessimism about Iraq:

With congressional Democrats still groping for a unified Iraq withdrawal strategy, the eyewitness reports from individual Democratic lawmakers who’ve recently visited Iraq appear to have changed the dynamic in the debate over the war. The Kansas City Star’s “The Buzz,” for example, reports Democratic Rep. Brian Baird “saw enough progress on the ground that he will no longer vote for binding withdrawal timelines.” Rep. Jerry McNerney “suggested that his trip to Iraq made him more flexible in his search for a bipartisan accord on the war.” Also changing his tune is Rep. Tim Mahoney of Florida, who says the troop increase ‘has really made a difference and really has gotten al-Qaida on their heels.’” As the Washington Post says this morning, “Democratic leaders in Congress had planned to use August recess to raise the heat on Republicans to break with...Bush on the Iraq war.” Instead, “Democrats have been forced to recalibrate their own message in the face of recent positive signs on the security front, increasingly focusing their criticisms on what those military gains have not achieved: reconciliation among Iraq’s diverse political factions.”

15 August 2007 @ 2:14PM >> One benefit of opposing the United States is that the worldwide media will often report your allegations without even the simplest of fact-checking. Agence France Presse, or AFP, published this photo along with a caption saying:

An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.

Blogger Rocco DiPippo over at The Autonomist caught the transgression, saying “The only way those bullets hit her house was if someone threw them at her house.”

I guess in the many layers of editors at AFP, nobody has actually seen what a shell casing looks like after the bullet has been fired. They could use a little more diversity over there.

12 June 2007 @ 1:36PM >> Did you know that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had ties to terrorists? It’s true!

Don’t believe me?

Just ask Al Gore. (One of the previous iterations, that is.)

25 April 2007 >> Well, not quite Cops...better.

Michael J. Totten’s latest dispatch from Iraq, “Meet the Iraqi Police in Kirkuk,” contains a compelling four-minute video taken after Iraqi police arrested the driver of a vehicle whose passenger was shooting at a crowd. The video is half-way down the page, embedded in one of Totten’s characteristically vivid reports.

Totten is a groundbreaking reporter—calling him a blogger seems to diminish the stature of his work—who writes (and now films) from all over the Middle East thanks to contributions from people who find his work valuable. If you think as highly of his work as I do, please dump a few coins in the tip jar at the end of his post.

8 April 2007 @ 6:15PM >> London’s Telegraph reports on more bias at the BBC:

Amid the deaths and the grim daily struggle bravely borne by Britain’s forces in southern Iraq, one tale of heroism stands out.

Private Johnson Beharry’s courage in rescuing an ambushed foot patrol then, in a second act, saving his vehicle’s crew despite his own terrible injuries earned him a Victoria Cross.

For the BBC, however, his story is “too positive” about the conflict.

The corporation has cancelled the commission for a 90-minute drama about Britain’s youngest surviving Victoria Cross hero because it feared it would alienate members of the audience opposed to the war in Iraq.

I wonder if the BBC has ever cancelled a project because it might alienate people who support the war in Iraq.

Call me cynical, but for some reason, I doubt it.

5 February 2007 @ 3:54PM >> Every year, seven times as many Americans are killed by doctors’ sloppy handwriting than are killed in Iraq.

31 January 2007 >> “[A]t least a dozen Democratic senators who in the past have called for more troops in Iraq,” the Washington Times reports, “now support a resolution condemning President Bush’s plan to do just that.”

If the Democrats win the White House in 2008, what will the party’s foreign policy be? Without President Bush to reflexively oppose, I don’t think they’ll have any way to figure it out.

21 January 2007 >> At the end of last year, I wrote about the elusive Jamil Hussein, a supposed Iraqi police captain quoted in at least 61 stories by the Associated Press. A number of bloggers digging into the story started expressing skepticism about Hussein after various governmental instutitions in Iraq found no one with that name working in the police force. AP has since admitted that the name attributed in their stories was in fact a pseudonym, even though no such acknowledgement was ever made in the many stories in which he was quoted.

Recently, Michelle Malkin went to Iraq to investigate the story that led to the questions surrounding Jamil Hussein. Her report, published in the New York Post, indicates that AP’s troubles go far beyond the true name of Jamil Hussein:

[O]ne story [Jamil Hussein] told the AP just doesn’t check out: The Sunni mosques that as Hussein claimed and AP reported as “destroyed,” “torched” and “burned and [blown] up” are all still standing. So the credibility of every AP story relying on Jamil Hussein remains dubious.

Let’s take it from the beginning.

When the AP ran its headline-grabbing and horrifying account of alleged atrocities in Baghdad last Thanksgiving, its main source was an Iraqi police captain, one Jamil Hussein.

[...]

AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll indignantly attacked those who had questioned the global news organization’s reporting: “I never quite understood why people chose to disbelieve us about this particular man on this particular story,” she told Editor and Publisher. “AP runs hundreds of stories a day, and has run thousands of stories about things that have happened in Iraq.”

Well, Bryan Preston and I visited the area during our Iraq trip last week. Several mosques did, in fact, come under attack by Mahdi Army forces. But the “destroyed” mosques all still stand. Iraqi and U.S. Army officials say that two of them received no fire damage whatsoever. Another, which we filmed, was abandoned and empty when it was attacked.

We obtained summary reports and photos filed at the time by Iraqi and U.S. Army troops on the scene. They contain no corroborating evidence of Hussein’s claim that “Shiite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene.”

One of the mosques identified by the AP, the Nidaa Alah mosque, had been abandoned and vacant at the time it was hit with small-arms fire, say Iraqi and U.S. Army officials. Two of its inside rooms were burned out by a lobbed firebomb, according to an Army report.

Three other mosques in the area - the al Muhaymin, al Mushahiba and Ahbab Mustafa mosques - sustained small-arms fire damage to their exteriors; the Mustafa mosque also had two rooms burned out by a firebomb.

Contrary to Hussein and the AP’s account, military reports note that Iraqi Army battalion members were on the scene - pursuing attackers, securing the area, calling the fire department, providing support and an outer cordon.

Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post was able to confirm AP’s story.

The AP quoted one corroborating witness, Imad al-Hasimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriya, who “confirmed Hussein’s account” of the immolated Sunnis on Al-Arabiya television. When Al-Hasimi later recanted, AP implied that it was due to pressure from Iraqi government officials. The other possibility: He recanted because it wasn’t true.

Capt. Aaron Kaufman of Task Force Justice, which works closely with the Iraqi Army battalion that was on the scene and monitored events as they happened, told us: “It was blown way out of proportion, there was nobody lit on fire.”

Capt. Stacy Bare, the civil-affairs officer who took us on patrol in Hurriya, concurred: “There were no six Sunnis burned.”

---

Update: Michelle Malkin has posted a video report containing images of the still-standing mosques that were supposedly “destroyed.”

11 January 2007 >> There’s something about our psyche which seems to make self-criticism the new national pastime. Naturally, our political leaders know this. They know that when hundreds of newspapers and television stations align in a daily tearing-down of the war effort, the American people will eventually lose their nerve and want to give up. Others know this, too, which is why al Qaeda distributed copies of Black Hawk Down as a means to understand how the media can be used to amplify a relatively minor military failure and drive the United States from the field of battle. If terrorists provide enough negative footage to our media, they know we’ll turn and run. But if we fight too vigorously, that will be held up by our own media as evidence of our inherent evilness. More >>

29 December 2006 @ 12:54PM >> Another media scandal refuses to die:

The AP claims [Jamil] Hussein is a captain in the Iraqi police force and works in the Baghdad region. Between April and November, he was used as a source in 61 AP stories. In one of his last starring roles, he provided an account of an alleged Shiite militia attack on a Sunni mosque in Baghdad on Nov. 24.

According to that AP dispatch, 50 men blew open the front of a mosque and dragged six Sunni worshippers outside, where they poured kerosene on the six and set them on fire. If true, the story would seem to be yet another incident that reflects badly on the U.S. efforts in Iraq. It feeds the media-generated perception that Iraq is a Vietnamlike quagmire from which we cannot escape.

There’s evidence, however, that the story might have been embellished, because Capt. Jamil Hussein of the Iraqi police force may not exist. U.S. military officials told the AP in a letter that they checked out the captain and were told by the Iraqi Interior Ministry that no one by the name of Jamil Hussein works there or as a police officer.

Armed forces officials also said the U.S. was unable to confirm the media reports that the six Sunnis were burned to death. Military officials further said in the days after the alleged incident that neither Iraqi police nor coalition forces had reports of the event.

So far, no Iraqi authorities have been able to confirm the existence of Jamil Hussein, a man the Associated Press says is an Iraqi police captain. Nor have any authorities been able to confirm the story of six Sunnis being dragged from a mosque and burned to death. And despite a month of investigation into this story, the Associated Press has still been unable to prove he even exists, despite their continued insistence that he does.

More made up news from the establishment media? As each day passes with no sign of Jamil Hussein, that’s looking more and more likely.

5 December 2006 @ 8:32AM >> Blogger Bill Rogio is embedded in Iraq:

While waiting to manifest on the flight to Fallujah, CNN played a news segment of President Bush announcing there would be no “graceful exit” from Iraq, and that we’d stay until the mission was complete. Two sergeants in the room cheered. Loudly. They then scoffed at the reports from Baghdad, and jeered the balcony reporting.

In nearly every conversation, the soldiers, Marines and contractors expressed they were upset with the coverage of the war in Iraq in general, and the public perception of the daily situation on the ground. The felt the media was there to sensationalize the news, and several stated some reporters were only interested in “blood and guts.” They freely admitted the obstacles in front of them in Iraq. Most recognized that while we are winning the war on the battlefield, albeit with difficulties in some areas, we are losing the information war. They felt the media had abandoned them.

During each conversation, I was left in the awkward situation of having to explain that while, yes, I am wearing a press badge, I’m not ‘one of them.’ I used descriptions like ‘independent journalist’ or ‘blogger’ in an attempt to separate myself from the pack.

What a terrible situation to be in, having to defend yourself because of your profession. I’ve always said that the hardest thing about embedding (besides leaving my family) is wearing the badge that says ‘PRESS.’ That hasn’t changed. I hide the badge whenever I can get away with it.

13 November 2006 @ 8:13AM >> Yesterday, just in time for last Tuesday’s election, the New York Times editorial page finally admitted something I have contended for quite a while: that—for all their criticism—the Democrats have no real plan for Iraq:

Americans are waiting to hear if [Democrats] have any good ideas for how to get out of Iraq without creating even wider chaos and terrorism.

[...]

The Democrats will also need to look forward — and quickly. So far they have shared slogans, but no real policy.

[...]

Voters gave the Democrats the floor — and are now waiting to hear what they have to say.

Waiting to hear what they have to say? Isn’t that what campaigns are for? You’d think the Times would have noticed that the Democrats had nothing to say before the election, but for some reason the paper thought that minor detail wasn’t worthy of coverage until now. I wonder why that is.

5 November 2006 >> Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe reports on a few fronts in the global Jihad:

Australia: Australia’s foremost Muslim cleric triggers an uproar when he likens women who don’t wear an Islamic headscarf to “uncovered meat” and blames them for attracting sexual predators.

Afghanistan: The kidnappers of Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello threaten to murder him unless Abdul Rahman, an Afghan Christian convert, is returned to Afghanistan and handed over to an Islamic court.

Iran: The president of Iran calls Israel “a group of terrorists” and threatens to harm any country that supports the Jewish state. “This is an ultimatum,” warns Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the elmination of Israel and the United States.

Thailand: Islamist terrorists bomb a column of Buddhist monks as they collect offerings of food in Narathiwat, a city in southern Thailand. One person is killed; 12 are injured.

France: “We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,” says police union leader Michel Thoomis. “This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifadah, with stones and firebombs.”

Britain: In a “true Islamic state,” sexually active homosexuals would be executed, says Arshad Misbahi, an imam in Manchester’s Central Mosque.

Meanwhile, Muslim Kurds in Iraq prefer to live in peace:

There are no insurgents in Kurdistan. Nor are there any kidnappings. [...] Iraqi Kurdistan is optimistic, full of hope, infused top to bottom with a go-go, build-build attitude.

Who would have thought that a glimmer of hope for peaceful coexistence with our Muslim brothers could be found in—of all places—Iraq?

20 October 2006 @ 8:45AM >> First, they came for the satellite dishes. Now they come for the broadband Internet connections:

Iran’s Islamic government has opened a new front in its drive to stifle domestic political dissent and combat the influence of western culture - by banning high-speed internet links.
In a blow to the country’s estimated 5 million internet users, service providers have been told to restrict online speeds to 128 kilobytes a second and been forbidden from offering fast broadband packages. The move by Iran’s telecommunications regulator will make it more difficult to download foreign music, films and television programmes, which the authorities blame for undermining Islamic culture among the younger generation. It will also impede efforts by political opposition groups to organise by uploading information on to the net.

You’ve got to wonder about a government that believes the only way to survive is to cut off its citizens from the outside world.

28 September 2006 @ 3:08PM >> There have been a lot of press reports lately claiming that by waging a vigorous campaign against terrorists, we’re simply creating more terrorists. Leaving aside the fact that the alternative would seem to be surrender, a recent poll of Iraqis indicates that the press speculation isn’t based on reality:

Overall 94 percent [of Iraqis polled] have an unfavorable view of al Qaeda, with 82 percent expressing a very unfavorable view. Of all organizations and individuals assessed in this poll, it received the most negative ratings. The Shias and Kurds show similarly intense levels of opposition, with 95 percent and 93 percent respectively saying they have very unfavorable views. The Sunnis are also quite negative, but with less intensity. Seventy-seven percent express an unfavorable view, but only 38 percent are very unfavorable. Twenty-three percent express a favorable view (5% very).

Views of Osama bin Laden are only slightly less negative. Overall 93 percent have an unfavorable view, with 77 percent very unfavorable. Very unfavorable views are expressed by 87 percent of Kurds and 94 percent of Shias. Here again, the Sunnis are negative, but less unequivocally—71 percent have an unfavorable view (23% very), and 29 percent a favorable view (3% very).

If our military actions in the Middle East are creating more terrorists, you’d think the place you’d see this most is in Iraq. But I guess not.

24 September 2006 @ 5:45PM >> Pajamas Media has an interesting report on the number of embedded reporters in Iraq. There are none from The New York Times, the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times. There aren’t any from CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, MSNBC or Fox News.

In fact, there are only nine embedded reporters in Iraq, and four are from armed forces outlets, leaving a grand total of just five embedded reporters. Of those five, three are from relatively small outlets—The Charlotte Observer, Polish Radio, and the Italian media network RAI—leaving just two major media companies with embedded reporters: the BBC and the Associated Press.

It makes you wonder where much of the Iraq War reporting is coming from. In some cases, the answer is local stringers whose loyalties and biases are—to be charitable—unclear. It’s interesting that the media is willing to utilize reporters embedded with terrorists and insurgents, but seems less interested in having reporters accompany our own military.

19 September 2006 >> Time and time again, we’re told that there were no connections between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda, and that any such claims are merely Bush Administration fabrications. However, two years before President Bush took office, CNN reported:

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire accused by the United States of plotting bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, has left Afghanistan, Afghan sources said Saturday.

Bin Laden’s whereabouts were not known, said the sources who declined to be identified.

[...]

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has offered asylum to bin Laden, who openly supports Iraq against the Western powers.

Saddam offered asylum to Osama? And Osama openly supports Iraq? That can’t be right, at least not according to the official mantra that the establishment media has been repeating for the last five years.

So what explains this find? The only logical explanation is that President Bush traveled back in time and brainwashed the reporter, or that Karl Rove has been hacking into CNN’s computer system. Either way, it’s all part of the conspiracy!

(Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)

12 September 2006 >> Not only did Saddam Hussein have CNN’s chief news executive covering for him, it now appears that Saddam had a spy inside the Associated Press who was supplying the Iraqi dictator with information on U.N. weapons inspection plans.

AP bills itself as “the backbone of the world’s information system serving thousands of daily newspaper, radio, television and online customers” and “is the largest and oldest news organization in the world, serving as a source of news, photos, graphics, audio and video for more than one billion people a day.”

An organization that large is vulnerable to infiltration, and a lone Iraqi spy inside AP is not necessarily a sign of a systemic problem. Still, it makes you wonder who else has infiltrated the world’s big media outlets, and whether they’re having any effect on coverage. (In the case of AP rival Reuters, we already know the answer.)

23 June 2006 @ 9:50AM >> In response to my piece yesterday on chemical weapons found in Iraq, Daniel writes:

Mr. Maloney,

While I enjoy most of your articles, I cringed at this article because it really doesn’t prove anything. Even on Fox News they admit that nothing that they have found is evidence that Iraq had an on-going WMD program at the time we invaded. I agree with the gist of the article, though, that Saddam repeatedly lied and Democrats believed he had WMD’s, etc., but I think the recent press release by Senator Santorum was little more than a publicity stunt before the vote on troop withdrawal. Maybe some useable WMD’s are yet to be found in Iraq, but I found the recent press release to be pretty inconsequential.

Daniel

Daniel,

You are correct that the new revelations do not prove that Iraq had an active weapons program. But these weapons do prove that Iraq was in complete failure to comply with the U.N. resolutions that required him to turn over a full catalog of his weapons, and to destroy the very types of weapons that we’ve since found. Clearly, he did not do either. And either of those alone would have been enough justification for action under U.N. Resolution 1441, the 17th consecutive U.N. resolution that Saddam Hussein was violating.

Add that to the fact that Saddam Hussein had been gaming the U.N. inspections for years and apparently bribing U.N. officials as well. Those are not the actions of a man with nothing to hide, and point to the possibility that Saddam was trying to escape the noose of the U.N. sanctions so that he could restart his weapons program once the sanctions had been lifted.

I think the discovery of these weapons is relevant, considering that one of the prime arguments against the war for the last few years has been that no WMDs have been found. That’s not true, and as I pointed out in my original piece, that hasn’t been true for a long time.

Because I covered previously-discovered weapons in the past, these new revelations didn’t strike me as the bombshell that others claimed it was. But it is one more bit of evidence showing that the rationale for deposing Saddam Hussein was sound.

Thanks for writing,
Evan