Does the Media Use al-Qaeda & Iraqi Insurgency Organizations for Reports?
Posted by Robin Boyd on July 2, 2006 - 15:16.
There have been many complaints about how our media reports the stories from Iraq. Countless articles have been written about the selective nature of reports from the field – focusing on the negative and completely ignoring the positive. Documents uncovered in Iraq have demonstrated how the insurgents use the American media for propaganda dissemination.
Now I have uncovered something even more shocking and disgusting. Our media is using pro al-Qaeda, pro Iraqi insurgency organizations as the basis for their reports – more importantly as sources of information that is damning to our soldiers.
While researching the claims of US soldiers raping a young Iraqi woman and then killing her and her family, I came across an article from Mafkarat al-Islam via Free Arab Voice. The article cites eyewitness testimony about the US rape and murder of the Iraqi family. According to Free Arab Voice, the report was filed on Saturday night at 11:55 Makkah time.
Today’s Washington Post posted an article by Ellen Knickmeyer. The article’s headline purported the subject of the article as the Baghdad market bombing but the text of the article was almost exclusively devoted to the rape and murder allegations. At the bottom of the article, the Washington Post cited “Two Washington Post special correspondents in Mahmudiyah contributed to this report.” The article cites a Saturday interview with two eyewitnesses to the attack.
Read the whole thing.
To be fair, not everything that is reported by our enemies is a lie. But this is a propaganda war. Every bombing, every beheading, every IED attack and every atrocity claim is part of a propaganda effort. The terrorists cannot face them American forces in open battle, or even in ambush. But they can use casualties, deaths, destruction and atrocity stories to wear down our will and paint our fighting forces as evildoers. Like the war in Viet Nam, the battlefield is the will of the American people.
That is why a press that is on America’s side would not reprint – word for word – an atrocity story by the enemy; not without full confirmation by American forces and only to report the facts.
But the press is not on America’s side. If the media had the same monopoly on information that it had in the 1960s, we would have been surrendered in Iraq by now, hightailing it to “redeployment” zones in Okinawa, 4000 miles away.
But thanks to the Internet, the media monopoly on information has been broken. Today it is the NY Times and LA Times that are on the defensive for publishing America’s secrets. Today, it’s Dan Rather who has been “redeployed” to a retirement home.
Getting back to the Post’s sources, the writer gives an example of a previous report of another “atrocity” again involving rape (a common theme among the followers of the Religion of Peace):
“On December 19, 2004, Abu Nasr claimed an attack against Abu Ghraib prison was sparked by a letter from a female inmate named Fatima. In the letter, which seems undoubtedly to be a fabrication, Fatima claims to have been raped repeatedly, along with 13 other girls.
The charges in the letter are totally groundless and Fatima herself appears to have never existed. Only six females were held temporarily at Abu Ghraib prison at various times from July to mid-December 2004, two of them for treatment in the medical facility. None of them were held for more than 10 days and none were sexually assaulted.
Despite the fact that the claims in “Fatima’s letter” are baseless, the sensationalistic, outrageous nature of the charges ensured that the letter was widely reposted on Internet sites and circulated by email. Jihad Unspun posted in on December 24, 2004.”
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