Dafydd wrote an excellent fisking of the arrogant Eric Boehlert who has taken it upon himself to belittle those of us who discovered and wrote about the fraud we know as the Burning Six story:
In his post, Boehlert shows utter contempt towards any blogger who dares question elite media reporting (rather than simply receiving it like tablets from Mount Sinai). He mocks the very notion that the MSM could be willing accomplices (or useful idiots), out to make us lose the war in Iraq… just as Walter Cronkite helped us lose Vietnam by falsely (and deliberately) reporting the Tet Offensive — a Viet Cong attack that failed catastrophically, resulting in the destruction of the Viet Cong as a serious military force — as a tremendous enemy victory that meant America had already lost the war.
Boehlert equates "warbloggers" like Michelle Malkin and Confederate Yankee with lunatic conspiracy theorists, disdaining as "illogical obsession" our suspicions about the accuracy, and even the veracity, of Iraqi and Afghan stringers and informers. He crows that we only question the MSM because we cannot face the reality that we lost the war (which certainly would be news to the American military personnel fighting in Iraq; and to the Iraqis; and for that matter, to al-Qaeda or Muqtada Sadr or whomever we’re supposed to have lost the war to).
Boehlert’s central j’accuse is that we "warbloggers" ignore the carnage of sectarian violence, clinging instead to irrelevant minor discrepancies (such as non-existent mosque burnings and burnt Sunnis who cannot be found) like “a ray of hope.”
And he also tries to slip another one across. Unable to seriously damage the credibility of "warbloggers" by actually finding errors or maladroit reasoning in their war-related posts, Boehlert embarks upon a campaign of drive-by discrediting: he finds some post somewhere, typically unrelated or only tangentially related to the war, where the warblogger in his crosshairs wrote something to which Boehlert objects. He then trots this out as more evidence of the "warblogger" being "unhinged," "obsessed," "demented," or harboring "unbridled hatred of Arabs and Muslims" and wanting to see journalists "get killed":
Warning: Confederate Yankee is the same warblogger who recently posted a Reuters photo of an elderly Iraqi woman wrapped in a headscarf and crying beside a coffin. Confederate Yankee sensed foul play and claimed the picture had been mischievously doctored by the wire service because the Iraqi woman’s face was actually George Bush’s mug superimposed onto the picture. I kid you not.
Actually, "kid you" he does… because following the link to Confederate Yankee makes it perfectly clear that Bob Owens was simply joking, for heaven’s sake.
Eric rails on and on about the fact that we, meaning the right, should just believe the media….I mean they are professional journalists while we are nothing but pajama clad bozo’s, how dare us for calling the AP unethical.
But Dafydd points out a story that encapsulates our argument quite succinctly:
In Gaza, Palestinians have been staging battles and coaching witnesses for years. We even have a name for it: Pallywood. Here is an 18 minute video from YouTube, taken during the second intifada from 2000 to 2002:
For the first ten minutes, you will see Palestinians staging various events:
- A man shoots into a building as if he were defending himself; but the building is actually deserted;
- Civilians direct soldiers and crowds of "innocent bystanders" (extras) how to act prior to filming a scene;
- Footage of a funeral march in Jenin, after the "Jenin massacre," where the pallbearers accidentally drop the corpse from a stretcher — and the dead fellow obligingly hops back aboard.
But the most telling footage starts about the 11th minute: an interview conducted by a Palestinian “reporter” with a new mother and father and with the doctor who had just delivered their baby at the local hospital. (I wonder if the reporter is a stringer for AP?)
On the way to the hospital, the reporter discusses with his staff what kind of story he is looking for: the terrible conditions that Palestinians must endure because of the wicked Israelis. At the hospital, the reporter tells the doctor that the young couple must say that the road was so dangerous, they couldn’t get to hospital in time… and the young husband had to deliver the baby all by himself. In fact the doctor had delivered a healthy baby in the hospital few hours earlier.
Chillingly, all three subjects — father, mother, and doctor — agree; they give the interview, describing the terrible ordeal that never occurred.
How many times have we heard that eyewitnesses, bystanders, and doctors had all "verified" some calamitous event caused by the Israelis, the Americans, or our Coalition partners in Iraq? Oh, wait, here’s one:
For the record, along with Hussein, the AP based its Burned Alive reporting on an account from Imad al-Hashimi, a Sunni elder who told Al-Arabiya television about the killings. (He later recanted his story after being visited by a representative of the defense minister.) The AP also spoke to three independent eyewitnesses (two shopkeepers and a physician) and confirmed the story with hospital and morgue workers.
According to people like Eric Boehlert we are supposed to believe this story about six Sunni’s being dragged out of a mosque and burned alive because of 3 unnamed witnesses, 1 named witness who recanted, and 1 police officer. Absolutely no other evidence exists to prove this incident took place. On the contrary there is plenty of evidence that this event never took place. Even other "professional" journalists have admitted that this story smelled so they never ran with it.
Why are we supposed to swallow this story when every other news organization didn’t? Except the AP of course. Because Iraq is disaster dammit……if you don’t believe that then your a rightwing looney!
Bushitler is wrong, you must believe……
Democracy Project gets down to the nitty gritty of the problems inherent inside the MSM:
The self-governance of the Associated Press and of American media is seriously lacking in independent checks. It’s role, and fourth estate presumptions, are too central to – literally – America’s survival and interests for this to continue.
Exactly. There is no independent checks inside the media institutions, except for us bloggers of course, who they quickly dismiss. Four mosques weren’t burnt? Ok, we will quietly change the word Four into One and be done with it. No one will notice.
Sigh….
Oh, by the way….going on 44 hours now and we still have no other confirmation of the existence of Jamil Hussein other then the AP, but if the AP said it we MUST believe.
See author page