They shoot schoolteachers, don't they?

[fintstone]

They shoot schoolteachers, don't they?

By Clifford D. May

Sep 29, 2005

President, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

To The Washington Post they were simply “gunmen.” The New York Times non-judgmentally called them “armed men.”

The elite media fastidiously avoid such harsh words as "terrorist" – even to describe those who, last week, rounded up five Iraqi teachers from outside their school, dragged them into a classroom, lined them up against a wall and shot them to death.

The Post was quick to inform readers that “no children were hurt in the attack.” Are we to regard that as restraint on the part of these “gunmen”?

The Times noted that “the killings appeared to have been motivated more by sectarian hatred than any animosity toward the [teaching] profession.” Is that meant to be reassuring?

In a bygone era, reporters would have let readers know in no uncertain terms how thoroughly they despise and condemn those who massacre teachers in a schoolroom. Nor would they have minced words in regard to those who blow up civilians or ritually decapitate “infidels.”

But today, most big-league journalists see it differently. The Reuters news agency loftily insists that “one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.”

Other media moguls will tell you that it is their professional obligation to remain disinterested regarding this war and those fighting it. At key moments, however, that neutrality seems to wear thin – in a perverse way.

For example, the Post ran the story of the slaughter of the Iraqi teachers not on the front page but on page 19. On page 1 was what the editors evidently judged a more consequential story: It was about Iraqis “scorning” Americans.

“Baghdad's Karrada district,” readers were told, “was one of those neighborhoods where residents showered flowers on U.S. forces entering the capital” in 2003. (Interesting: How many times have you heard that Iraqis did not celebrate the American intervention against Saddam Hussein?)

The story goes on to say that “car bombings and other insurgent attacks, as unknown in Baghdad before the invasion as suicide bombings were in London until this summer, have killed more than 3,000 people in the capital since late spring.”

The implication is that those who order attacks and those who detonate bombs -- in Baghdad and London -- are less to blame than those Americans who interfered with Saddam's fabled stability.

The story notes, too, that “kidnapping and other forms of lawlessness since the invasion” have altered the lives of “Baghdad's comparatively liberated women.”

Striking a similar -- if even less subtle -- note on Meet the Press last weekend, Times columnist Maureen Dowd argued that Senator Hillary Clinton “is going to have to answer the question about why she voted for an invasion that ended up curbing women's rights.”

Is it possible that these veteran journalists don't know that Saddam Hussein murdered – according to Human Rights Watch – 300,000 Iraqis? Among those butchered were both men and “comparatively liberated” women. Children, too, by the way.

Kenneth M. Pollack, who served on the National Security Council under President Clinton, has noted that Saddam would “gouge out the eyes of children to force confessions from their parents and grandparents …drag in a man's wife, daughter, or other female relative and repeatedly rape her in front of him. ...behead a young mother in the street in front of her house and children because her husband was suspected of opposing the regime."

Do commentators such as Ms. Dowd believe that such acts did not “curb” women's rights? Would the Post argue that gouging, raping and beheading don't qualify as “lawlessness”? Alternatively, would they contend that barbarism in pursuit of stability is justifiable? If so, why not propose the U.S. military adopt such tactics? And why cavil about Abu Ghraib?

For decades, too many correspondents covering the Middle East failed to report Saddam's worst atrocities – sometimes because they knew little beyond what the dictator's flacks told them, sometimes to protect their local staffs, sometimes to avoid getting kicked out of the country or tossed into jail themselves.

But what can be the excuse for so many media heavyweights continuing the cover-up now -- overlooking documented history, soft-peddling the murder of innocents by Saddam loyalists and al-Qaeda invaders, and shifting blame from terrorists to those fighting them?

This isn't neutrality. It's moral vacuity.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Find this story at: http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/cliffordmay/2005/09/29/158822.html

[bryanthompson]

The implication is that those who order attacks and those who detonate bombs -- in Baghdad and London -- are less to blame than those Americans who interfered with Saddam's fabled stability.

We could quote many members of this BBS who have said exactly that. But it's their patriotic duty to, erm, what?

Is it possible that these veteran journalists don't know that Saddam Hussein murdered – according to Human Rights Watch – 300,000 Iraqis? Among those butchered were both men and “comparatively liberated” women. Children, too, by the way.

Oh quit it with your propaganda already. Human Rights Watch is only accurate when they're inventing charges about abu gharib.

[stuartj]

Yes indeed, Saddam was a very bad man.

Where are the Weapons of Mass destruction that threaten our very way of life?

Where are the links between the secular regime of Saddam and the religous nutbags of Al Qaeda?

What altruism, to shed Amercian 2000 lives to free the people of Iraq from an abusive dictator. When are we off to Burma, Zimbabwe-or China? After the Olympics?

[Mulhollanddose]

You asked for it! (note--quite a few of the sources are left politically)

Originally posted by stuartj
Where are the links between the secular regime of Saddam and the religous nutbags of Al Qaeda?

* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.

* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man.

(Why are all of those meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.")

* As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports.

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'"

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

*The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.

* That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.

*Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post.

* Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq."

* Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.

* Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.

* Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad."

* After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq.

[stuartj]

Jesus Mulholland, that’s twice in a matter of days.

First you provide incontrovertible proof of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, now you document links between Al Qaeda and Saddam.

You owe it to your country to get this information to the Whitehouse ASAP.

Damn the liberal media for denying us this information. Damn the liberal weenies for demanding proof when all the information they need to know has been available at Free Republic the whole time.

Damn them all to hell.

[Mulhollanddose]

Originally posted by stuartj
Damn the liberal media for denying us this information. Damn the liberal weenies for demanding proof when all the information they need to know has been available at Free Republic the whole time.

Damn them all to hell.

I know!!...Tell me about it...Dude, not only available at FreeRepublic, but also the London Guardian, the London Independent, the Sunday Times and Janes report...Gee, you would think there was a conspiracy or something.

[fintstone]

The liberals know it too. It just doesn't fit their agenda. So no proof is ever enough. They are still claiming Dan Rather's forgeries are true...even though they were printed from computer fonts on a modern printer...in the '70's.

[Steeve]

Originally posted by stuartj
Yes indeed, Saddam was a very bad man.

Where are the Weapons of Mass destruction that threaten our very way of life?

Where are the links between the secular regime of Saddam and the religous nutbags of Al Qaeda?

What altruism, to shed Amercian 2000 lives to free the people of Iraq from an abusive dictator. When are we off to Burma, Zimbabwe-or China? After the Olympics?

Of course, these are rhetorical questions. Obviously if you really tried to answer them, your responses would be blasted as blasphemy or worse.

The libs don't wanna know the truth. And it is all Bush's fault.

[ronin]

Originally posted by Steeve
Of course, these are rhetorical questions. Obviously if you really tried to answer them, your responses would be blasted as blasphemy or worse.

want proof positive? just look at stuartj's second post

[gavinlit]

Come on now boys - I thought it was the loony left that was full of conspiracy theories. Don't tell me you've got some of your own.

[tabs]

I ask U, Have any of you ever got to know any school teachers?

The Naybobs of Negativism are at it again....all they are is a bunch of efete elitist snobs. Who are delusioned into thinking that they actually know something with moral certitude, that could justify the crufixion of Jesus Christ if it served their agenda.

[gavinlit]

"Have any of you ever got to know any school teachers?"
Yup - used to be one and work with them every day now. Don't know what that's got to do with anything though.

"Naybobs of Negativism are at it again....all they are is a bunch of efete elitist snobs"
Again a puffing rampage in which I can't see the link to the original post tabs. Twice in one day you've trotted out the same line. What's up mate - favourite buffet cancelled today or something

[aways]

Liberalism is a mental disease with some similarities to anorexia - both are equally out of touch with reality. A slim woman looks at herself in the mirror and sees a fat pig. A liberal looks at George Bush and sees a Saddam Hussein... There is someting fundamentally sick and demented about anyone who Hates Bush more than Hussein. And don't deny such people aren't common on the left either. When was the last time anyone saw a leftist protest with a "FU&K Saddam" sign?

[speeder]

Originally posted by tabs
The Naybobs of Negativism are at it again....all they are is a bunch of efete elitist snobs.

It's rare to see anyone quote or paraphrase Spiro Agnew, at least not for the purpose of mocking him. Those were really the good old days, huh Tabs?

I guess that I don't understand the point of the column that started this; is it that journalists should inject more personal/editorial slant to their reporting??

I will actually shock some conservatives here and admit that much of the main stream press is openly contemptuous of the Bush administration, but in their defense it might be impossible not to be. When your job involves being on the ground in places like Iraq and you see first-hand the results of failed policy and political hubris, it must be hard to stay disinterested. This AM's Sunday LA Times has a particularly brutal front page story about the nightmare that is Iraq in Oct. 2005. Iraqi "security forces" that will be self-sufficient in the year 3000 at the present rate, an accellerated pace of sickening terrorist attacks on civilians that was unheard of in the region before we "liberated" them, etc., etc.....

Oh yeah, and an oil infrastructure that is now permanently damaged according to experts, ie. it will need massive rebuilding, (in places from the ground up), before production could ever reach pre-invasion levels.

******* Brilliant, these neocons!! Journalists should be bowing at their feet, like in Argentina or Chile!

The new American right wing's hatred for a free press is well documented, but still, you could try to be a little less obvious about it. Rush Limpballs referred to "the media" yesterday in regards to the Delay story, I almost drove off the road I was laughing so hard at that bag of schit! No irony necessary, (or understood), for that audience, I guess.

[stevepaa]

Originally posted by Steeve
Of course, these are rhetorical questions. Obviously if you really tried to answer them, your responses would be blasted as blasphemy or worse.

The libs don't wanna know the truth. And it is all Bush's fault.

The real problem is the answers become more of the what is is defintions. Something the Republicans in general pillorized Clinton with, but use the same disingenuous now.
So perhaps the better question is:
Where are the WMD that were an imminent danger and able to be launched in 15 minutes?


Your use of the term blasphmey is rather revealing? Who's gospel are you spinning?

[tabs]

GAv and the title of this thread is....aboput shooting school teachers and the implication of...have you ever got to know any school teachers....is that to know one is to want to shoot one...

And Speeder your sooooo smart..you caught it...It's Spiro....

One of the maddening things the Bush Admin does is stonewallsl the press..they don't tell them anything...no denial no confirmation just silence... The LA Times is not known for it's conservativism, and to say that there are now more terrorist attacks in Iraq after our intervention then under Sadam is REALLY FUNNY...

[speeder]

I believe it was nabobs of negativism... but anywho, he was a lot of fun.

[gavinlit]

Uh - ok, I was searching for the political implication. Too many trees to see the forest.

[FrayAdjacent911]

ARM TEACHERS!!