Monday, August 29, 2005

It’s only an outrage when the US forces are involved

According to most of the press, the Reuters soundman Waleed Khaled killed in Baghdad by an American sniper is called a journalist, when he was a media assistant. Reports from the most recent Algerian civil war were that 57 journalist and 20 media assistants died.

The conclusions of a biased media?:

- Iraq deadlier for journalists than the Vietnam War was! RSF:

«Khaled is the 66th journalist or media assistant to be killed in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003. A total of 63 journalists were killed in the Viet-nam war, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. »
No mention of the Elephant in the room. Very few were killed by US forces. Tabulations, not done, are not and hand because the passive activists of the press are not interested in finding a cause of their colleagues' deaths, not when the story is about the evils of America.

- The implication was that all 66 journalists and media assistants killed in Iraq were killed by the US military. Not so. Read carefully and you’ll see that the only attributions made when US forces are involved. Buried in the details, and not in the headlines are the journalists killed by the murderous opponents of a free Iraq. Entirely lost is the fact that journalists CAN’T get out and get a good picture of Iraq when an insurgency is after them.

One Journalist opposed to the war puts some of this incontext by discussing his experience in Iraq:
«Every one of the people involved in the resistance that we spoke to held us individually responsible for their security. If something happened to them -- never mind that they were legitimate targets for the U.S. military -- they would blame us. And kill us. We soon learned that they had the U.S. bases so well watched that we had to abandon our idea of working on the U.S. side of the story -- that is, discovering what the soldiers really thought about who might be attacking them. There were so many journalists working with the American soldiers that we believed that that story would be well told. More practically, if we were seen by the Iraqis going in and out of the American bases, we would be tagged immediately as spies, informants and most likely be killed. »
He goes on to give his readers the Chimpy W. Hitlerburton routine, but while he raises questions of what US forces COULD do, he was quite certain of what the terrorists WOULD do to him.

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