Bob over at Confederate Yankee has written a letter to the AP Board of Directors:
I write to you today as members of the Board of Directors for the Associated Press, asking you to write a wrong that Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll has steadfastly refused to address, even after being confronted with the evidence.
On November 24, 2006, a series of stories was published by the Associated Press concerning a series of Shia militia attacks upon Sunni mosques in the Hurriyah neighborhood of Baghdad, Iraq. Two these reports have been attached as PDFs, as they were published by Gainesville.com and the Jerusalem Post (gainesville11_25_26.pdf and jeruslampost11_24_06.pdf, respectively).
These reports allege that four Sunni mosques were "burned and blew up" and that 24 Sunni civilians (18 at one mosque, six at another) perished as a result of these attacks as nearby Iraqi Army units looked on. A particularly gruesome detail of the attacks were claims made by a long-time Associated Press source, Iraqi Police Captain Jamil Hussein, that when the al-Mustafa mosque was attacked, six Sunni men were pulled outside by Shia militiamen, doused in kerosene, and immolated—burned alive.
From that time until today, Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll and International Editor John Daniszewski have officially held the position that these attacks occurred just as they have described.
Bob then goes over the litany of evidence that proves, beyond a reasonable doubt, that these attacks did not happen. Of course he has yet to hear a peep from any of the board members. That is their modus operandi, deny and ignore. Sooner or later we will all go away they hope.
Meanwhile the smorgasboard of media bias continues unabated: (via LGF)
Yesterday LGF noted the Associated Press report on the crash of a US security contractors’ helicopter in Iraq. According to the AP, four of the five Blackwater employees killed were “shot execution style in the back of the head.”
Today I received an email from an unnamed person in Baghdad with knowledge of the incident:
Do not believe what you see in the media. Four agents and numerous BW personnel saw the remains, and there was NO INDICATION the four BW guys in the crashed helo were executed on the ground. We are awaiting the official autopsy from the States, but a visual inspection gave no indication of “shots to the back of the head”. This rumor of “shots to the back of the head” was leaked by someone in the government and was based on a false initial report.
Does this sound a little familiar?
[…]Helicopter pilot Dan Laguna, Blackwater Aviation Program manager and brother of one of the fallen contractors, wrote a letter to Iraqslogger about it. He doesn’t mention any execution-style shots, and his letter seems to support that one of the casualties was in another helicopter that managed to return to safety.
You mean to tell me that the AP used questionable sources to report that the people inside the helicopter were executed? Get outta here!
More of the same from our "trusty" AP. You think any retraction will be forthcoming?
Then we have the LA Times: (via Newsbusters)
There’s no sign that the Los Angeles Times is planning to correct, clarify or explain an embarrassingly negligent passage from this past week. On Tuesday (1/23/07), the Times published a front-page piece called, "Scant evidence found of Iran-Iraq arms link." In alleging that there are few Iranian arms in Iraq, the writers asserted (emphasis mine):
"During a recent sweep through a stronghold of Sunni insurgents here, a single Iranian machine gun turned up among dozens of arms caches U.S. troops uncovered."
As NewsBusters’ Mark Finkelstein wrote Tuesday, the Iranian government is a Shia government working in opposition to Sunnis in Iraq. (Even the writers of the article appear to know this.) Therefore, it should not be news that there are not a lot of Iranian machine guns turning up among Sunnis.
Really people, how is it that these supposedly educated journalists get so much wrong?
I believe strongly that when it comes to news that they WANT to believe they just do a half-assed attempt to verify it. I mean Iraq is a disaster right? So if some insurgent stringers tell you that these guys were executed then it must be true right?
Sigh…..
Oh, and lets not forget the AP calling a terrorist "a lawmaker":
The comments also hit a nerve in Lebanon, where lawmaker Nawar Saheli told AP Television News that Bush should listen to the Lebanese people. “They do not want the U.S. government to interfere in the Lebanese internal affairs,” he said.
LGF again:
Ms Eddy forgets to mention that the person she quotes as speaking for “the Lebanese people,” Nawar Saheli, is a top political director for the terrorist group Hizballah.
In the world that Ms. Eddy and her brethren live in there is no such thing as a terrorist. Just a man with a different viewpoint.
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