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Baltimore & Maryland
06.14 Public Can Make Summer 'Historical' at “Chautauqua 2007: Food for Thought” Health & Environment
06.01 Fixing Our Broken Food System Ref. : Environmental Health News Ref. : What is Global Warming, and what can citizens do about it? Ref. : Global Warming Links Ref. : Health & Nutrition Links Letters
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US News Media Criticism
07.02 Will the Press Idiocy Ever Stop? 07.02 Blacked Out by the Corporate Media, Impeachment Advances 06.30 USA Today's 'Sicko' Debate 06.28 Slandering the Dead: The American Massacre at al-Khalis 06.25 The Iraq-gate Cover-up Continues 06.19 Sunday Sun Hits New Low 06.19 Alliance With Atrocity: Bush's Terror War Partners in Ethiopia 06.12 Things Your Media Mama Didn't Tell You 06.12 Incendiary Weapons Are No 'Allegation' 06.11 Powell Belies 'Commander Guy' Bush 06.11 THINKING FLUFF 06.09 Romney's Iraq Gaffe Ignored 06.08 GOP/Media Rewrite Iraq War History 06.05 The New Assault on Al Gore 06.02 Bush's Global Warming Foot-Dragging 06.02 Can Democrats End the Iraq War? 06.01 Treated Like a Democrat 06.01 Journalists' Group Unmasks Sen. Jon Kyl as “Senator Secrecy” OP-EDs & Opinion
06.28 Congress Needs to Stop Playing in Bush's Court 06.28 Next Generation of 'Family Jewels'? 06.28 Why They Hate Us 06.28 One More Good Reason Why Rupert Murdoch Should Not Get Dow Jones 06.26 Research on Human Nature is Cause for Optimism 06.16 Dare We Call It Tyranny? 06.14 Unintended Uighurs 06.12 War Foretold 06.08 Impeachment on a Roll 06.01 The Hariri Case & Double Standards 05.31 Conyers is my Constitutional Hero US Politics & Policy
06.26 Nancy & Harry: Bringing Down the House (and Senate) 06.26 Thinking About Baggage 06.25 Goodbye to the city upon a hill and to its fabled economy 06.25 Is Obama Getting 'Colin-ized'? 06.22 Sen. Levin's False History & Logic 06.22 Which Candidate Do You Support? 06.21 Slap Doesn't Stick: Corrupted Congress Will Help Bush Escape Court Ruling 06.20 Bush's Mafia Whacks the Republic 06.20 Iraqi Labor Leaders Blame US for the Bloodshed in Iraq and say Get Out! 06.19 The Reign of the Tyrants is at Hand 06.19 Democrats in Congress: The Wheels are Coming Off 06.13 America's Fragile Republic 06.12 Congressional Failure and the Democrats' Last Chance 06.12 The Neocon Threat to World Peace and American Freedom 06.12 Sic Semper Tyrannis: A Slap in the Face of the Crawford Caligula 06.11 Everything They Say About Promoting Democracy Is, And Always Has Been, A Damnable Lie 06.09 Losing Iraq, Nuking Iran 06.07 Last Plamegate Worry for Bush-Cheney 06.06 Some democracy, America Economics
07.02 Thinking Upside Down 06.20 Reader response: Inflation? You'd Better Believe It! 06.18 THINKING INFLATION 06.11 Losing the Economy to Mythology 06.04 Thinking About Budgets—the “La-La” Land of Governmental Accounting Africa
06.13 'Kill Anyone Still Alive': American Special Ops in Somalia Middle East & Asia
07.02 Killing Time: Countdown Quickens for Bush War on Iran 06.30 The New Bush-Blair Vanity Play 06.19 Newly Discovered Nuances to the Camp David Accords 06.19 Crocodile Tears 06.07 Brothers in Arms: Bandar Bush Took a Billion in Bribes to Push UK Weapons Deal We are a non-profit Internet-only newspaper publication founded in 1973. Your donation is essential to our survival.
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MEDIA CRITICISM:Slandering the Dead: The American Massacre at al-KhalisThe new Bushist line is that everyone killed by American forces in Iraq is "al Qaeda" – a transparent falsehood belied by the Pentagon's own assessments but now mindlessly adopted by almost every corporate media venue, with the honorable exception (as always) of McClatchy Newspapers.
Wednesday, 27 June 2007—As Glenn Greenwald, among others, has pointed out, the new Bushist line is that everyone killed by American forces in Iraq is "al Qaeda" – a transparent falsehood belied by the Pentagon's own assessments but now mindlessly adopted by almost every corporate media venue, with the honorable exception (as always) of McClatchy Newspapers. Of course, the Invader-in-Chief and his multitude of bootlickers in traditional media and the blogosphere have always vastly inflated the numbers and importance of those elements in Iraq that are associated with al Qaeda in some way, however tenuous. Indeed, we know, again from the Pentagon itself, that the exaggeration of al Qaeda's influence in Iraq has been part of a deliberate, well-funded "psy-ops" scheme. (See "Hubub in Hibhib: The Timely Death of al-Zarqawi.") But now they have decided to dispense with the subtleties of psy-ops and simply repeat "al Qaeda" with every breath, in an effort to demonize all resistance (both in Iraq and at home, both violent and non-violent) to Bush's murderous boondoggle.
This slander is being applied even to those Iraqis who have taken up arms against the very "al Qaeda" terrorists that the American military is purportedly protecting them from, Iraqis who are cooperating with the American-backed government and its American-trained military and security forces. The BBC reports about an horrific massacre of Iraqi civilians last week – an air attack with missiles and gunships that literally ripped to shreds the bodies of village guards who had just returned from a raid with Iraqi government forces on a suspected terrorist hideout. These men were then accused of being "al Qaeda gunmen" in Pentagon press releases trumpeting this magnificent feat of arms – accusations then duly (not to mention dully) parroted in the press. But the people in the village of al-Khalis tell a different story. (And for all the bootlickers out there who have fully entered into the spirit of the sectarian bloodbath unleashed by Bush and resolutely reject any contradiction of Pentagon propaganda by Sunni victims, al-Khalis is a largely Shiite village, on the side of the American-backed Iraqi government.) The BBC, which acknowledges that it too simply repeated the Pentagon line in its first reports on the "triumph," has gone back to the village to dig up the truth – and to do what the Bush Regime never does, and what the American press does only with the most extreme rarity: give names to the "collateral damage" of Bush's aggression. Village Disputes Story of Deadly Attack (BBC):The BBC then quotes the American command's version of the incident: "Coalition Forces attack helicopters engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen southwest of Khalis, Friday. Iraqi police were conducting security operations in and around the village when Coalition attack helicopters from the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade and ground forces from 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, observed more than 15 armed men attempting to circumvent the IPs and infiltrate the village. The attack helicopters, armed with missiles, engaged and killed 17 al-Qaeda gunmen and destroyed the vehicle they were using."This, say the villagers of al-Khalis, is simply a lie. Here is the account they gave to the BBC when it followed up on the story: At around 2am on Friday morning, the village guards were at their usual base in an unfinished building on the edge of the Hayy al-Junoud quarter about 1.2 miles south-west of al-Khalis village centre. They were surprised when a convoy of Iraqi police suddenly turned up, headed by the commander of the Khalis emergency squad, Col Hussein Kadhim.So here we have a local guard, an admirable example of Shia-Sunni cooperation, working with the Iraqi government against suspected insurgents, ground into mulch by American bullets then denounced by American brass as killers and terrorists. Thus yet another village has been turned against the blind and brutal occupation; thus many more seeds of revenge and bitterness have been planted. Is this part of the much-ballyhooed "counterinsurgency doctrine" crafted by the sainted General Petraeus to win hearts and minds, to teach peace to the conquered? Or just the inevitable product of a war of aggression, an action conceived in deceit and callous inhumanity? The BBC goes on to ask a few more pertitent questions: If the villagers' account is true, the incident would raise many questions, including: On what basis did the US helicopters launch their attack that night? How many other coalition reports of successes against "al-Qaeda fighters" are based on similar mistakes, especially when powerful remote weaponry is used?Ah yes, it's the best of all possible worlds for dirty warriors like George Bush and Dick Cheney: a bloodbath "where only the official military version of events is available." But as we all know, "murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ." And the names of the slaughtered in al-Khalis cry out with bitter eloquence their silent condemnation.
Jassem Khalil, the Mukhtar of Hayy al-Junoud
Abbas Khalil, his brother Ali Khalil, his other brother Kamal Hadi, their cousin Shaker Adnan Abdul Wahhab Ibrahim Mohammad al-Zubaie Abbas Muzhir Fadhel Jamal Hussein Alwan Abdul Hussein Abdullah Ali Jawad Kadhem Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including the Nation, CounterPunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.
This column originally appeared on Chris Floyd's site, and is republished here with the permission of the author. Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent. This story was published on June 28, 2007. |
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