A Public Thrashing

Ouch! I’m talking about the public thrashing Juan Cole delivered to the clueless Jonah Goldberg. Not content to accept defeat after being bested by Cole, Goldie made the dispute the subject of a column — and soon found himself on the receiving end of the most-painful-to-watch take-down since Jon Stewart humiliated Tucker Carlson. I almost found myself feeling sorry for poor Jonah.

Almost — but not quite …

Hitch Spills the Beans

Apropos my recent post on the Iraq elections, Christopher Hitchens, and liberventionists generally, here’s what Hitch recently told some Iraqi guests:

    “If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power.”

First, who is this “we”? Consider the epithet chickenhawk forever vindicated.

Second, you liberventionists can spare us any further BS about the sanctity of democracy – you cynical creeps don’t believe in it any more than I do. And please stop selling this line about democracy being an antidote to terrorism, illiberalism, fundamentalism, etc. You clearly don’t buy it.

Finally, never again protest the labels imperialist or colonialist: if “we” are to ensure Iraq’s political correctness for the rest of eternity, then that nation lacks self-determination and is by definition a colony.

3 Egyptian hostage stories

Pick the version you like best:

1) U.S. troops manning a checkpoint Monday discovered four Egyptian technicians who had been kidnapped the day before in Baghdad, an Egyptian diplomat said. The four were freed and some arrests were made, he added.

2) Four Egyptian telecom engineers kidnapped in Baghdad have been released, Egyptian embassy sources and a spokesman for their company say.

“They were released this afternoon at around 6:30pm [local time],” Orascom spokesman Shamel Hanafi said.

“They are in good health and no ransom was paid. They should be leaving the country tomorrow early in the morning.”

3) U.S. forces in Iraq stormed a house in Baghdad on Monday and freed Egyptian telecommunications engineers kidnapped since Sunday, the head of their Egyptian parent company said.

Naguib Sawiris, chairman of Egypt’s Orascom Telecom, said U.S. forces raided a villa, possibly in the mainly Sunni al-Aadhamiya district, and freed two of the four Egyptians. The other two managed to escape on their own from a car they had been locked in, he added.

“All four are free,” Sawiris told Reuters by telephone from Algeria.

“Two were released when U.S. forces barged into where they were being held in Baghdad and the other two escaped on their own … The Americans caught one of the kidnappers,” he said.

The conservative jihad against the press

Hostage_us_soldier_2
FAKE.

But, whodunit?

I see the conservative warblogs are on yet another anti-media jihad, so it looks like the US soldier hostage hoax needs to be revisited. To recap, the story of the US soldier hostage was broken by the AP under Robert Reid’s byline from Baghdad. Reid reported:

Feb 1, 3:03 PM (ET)By ROBERT H. REID
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – Iraqi militants claimed in a Web statement Tuesday to have taken an American soldier hostage and threatened to behead him in 72 hours unless the Americans release Iraqi prisoners. The U.S. military said it was investigating, but the claim’s authenticity could not be immediately confirmed.

The posting, on a Web site that frequently carried militants’ statements, included a photo of what that statement said was an American soldier, wearing desert fatigues and seated on a concrete floor with his hands tied behind his back. The figure in the photo appeared stiff and expressionless, and the photo’s authenticity could not be confirmed.

Almost instantaneously, the story was “debunked” by…who else….Matt Drudge. Drudge’s splashy title for his scoop, GI JOE: MILITANTS TAKE ‘TOY’ HOSTAGE; IRAQI WEBSITE WAS CLIP ART, was fortunately quickly picked up by bloggers, because it was eclipsed by the Pope’s hospitalization (screen shot here.) The interesting thing about Drudge’s scoop is the claim about “clip art.” In not one news report will you find that allegation. I looked at the time and wondered where he got that bit of information, but assumed it would eventually be written up somewhere as the story developed. It never was. So, where did Drudge get it? If anyone has any idea, email me and I’ll post a correction.

So, why the warblogger flogging of a story that most commenters wrote off as an example of how idiotic the Iraqi jihadis are? Clearly, discrediting and ridiculing the jihadis was at least one purpose of the hoax. On that aspect, Antiwar.com reader “DK” identifies the most likely source of the hoax:

Having served in a military intelligence unit, I can tell you that this is most likely a “psy-ops” mission designed to undermine the credibility of the resistance. The chance of such an idea coming to the mind of Iraqis is very slim…even slimmer is the chance that one of these brand-new toys could be found in war-torn Iraq.

The media has been duped yet again. The “psy-ops” boys are chuckling in their underground bunkers.

Drudge’s singular “clipart” claim is yet another clue that DK is right, as is the fact that the AP’s Robert Reid, a veteran Middle East correspondent who has covered Iraq since 2002, was taken in, which raises the question of who could plausibly feed a fake story to Robert Reid. The warbloggers and Conservative noisemakers clearly want the impression to be that Reid was given the story by jihadis, thus implying, in keeping with one of their favorite themes, that the press is in bed with jihadi elements of the Iraqi resistance. We can thank Drudge’s blundering headline for showing that to be false, because if the website was “clipart” then it wasn’t a real jihadi website, now was it? It was a fake website and the question is whose fake website? If a fake website was put up, using clipart, it would then stand to reason that Reid was given his tip-off by the US military, which monitors jihadi websites, and was also provided a translation of the fake “statement” that accompanied the picture. The fake jihadi website probably existed just long enough to convince Reid that his source had evidence for his story and then it was pulled off the web before it could be examined in any detail. The mistake was made when it was leaked to Drudge who emphasized the media dupes falling for the fake story angle and triumphantly posting his clipart claim, which almost ruined the story’s usefulness for the next phase. But for the few blogs which reproduced his headline verbatim and google cache, the slip-up would have disapeared.

Along with advancing the notion of the press being in bed with the resistance, the conservative jihad against the press aims to create enough noise to discredit selected “bad news” from Iraq, as well as whip up some manufactured outrage on their scandal du jour, which, if successful, will take out Eason Jordan of CNN. The noise machine run by the War Party is in full swing on this issue. Here’s a major conservative noisemaker tying it all together, with a little help from conservative propaganda tool Jack Kelly:

I though I was the only one who noticed that the fake hostage story, the alleged terrorist downing of a British C-130 transport, and the Eason Jordan controversy were related…

Jack Kelly, in The Toledo Blade The Pittsburgh Post Gazette , ties them altogether and notes ironically that the media has become a PR firm for terrorist organizations.

It’s also interesting that the terrorists turned to the news media to recover lost momentum. Journalists who fell for these hoaxes may merely be idiots, and their silence about the implications of the hoaxes may simply be the by product of embarrassment. But the Web logger Shannon Love (Chicago Boyz) wonders:

“Why were the major media so quick to disseminate pictures of an action figure as a genuine hostage photo?” More to the point, why are major media so quick to disseminate anything that a terrorist group, or purported terrorist group, releases? … For the terrorist, it is like being given millions of dollars in free advertising.

The story is why the story behind the failings at the AP and CNN is not being told anywhere except the blogosphere.

Emphasis above is mine. Read through the Who’s Who of warblogging conservatives’ comments here, and it is striking how they all hit exactly the same note.

All who value liberty should raise their voice in opposition to the demonstrated fascistic mentality of this conservative brownshirt lynch mob before they go any further in establishing the Police Statopia they crave, for which the destruction of the press is but one step.

Recommended Reading

Why I really enjoy reading Matthew Yglesias’ blog:

“Oh John, why do you waste your time thusly? But while we’re on the subject, the extent to which Reynoldsism — the doctrine that “the left” (whatever it is) has been captured by an irrational and pathological hatred for western values — is a dishonest, absurd, and manipulative piece of propaganda is the least of its problems.

“The thing here is that when you tease out the argument Glenn’s trying to make, the consequences are completely absurd. The anti-west faction of the west turns out to include the majority of the citizens of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, The United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The citizens, in other words, of every countries normally understood to be inhabited by western persons except for the United States and Israel.”

Sistani: Islam sole source of legislation

IraqtheocracyHot on the heels of Rumsfeld’s statement today:

“The Shia in Iraq are Iraqis they are not Iranians, and the idea that they are going to end up with a government like Iran with a handful of mullahs controlling the country, I think is unlikely,” Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

He said Iraq like other Muslim countries would find a way to include Islamic principles into the new constitution, which will be written after the results of last week’s elections are known, without having religion dominate the new government.

The mullah in charge of Iraq announced:

Chalabistingbillmon
Iraq’s Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and another top cleric staked out a radical demand that Islam be the sole source of legislation in the country’s new constitution.

One cleric issued a statement setting out the position and the spiritual leader of Iraqi Shiites made it known straight away that he backed demands for the Koran to be the reference point for legislation.

The national assembly formed after last month’s historic elections is to oversee the drawing up of the new constitution and Sistani is the figurehead of the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance expected to become the largest single bloc.

The role of Islam has been at the heart of months of debate between rival parties and factions as well as the US-led occupation authority which administered Iraq until last June.

Sistani leads the five most important clerics, known as marja al-taqlid, or objects of emulation, who had portrayed a more moderate stance going into the election.

The surprise statement was released by Sheikh Ibrahim Ibrahimi, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Ishaq al-Fayad, another of the marja.

“All of the ulema (clergy) and marja, and the majority of the Iraqi people, want the national assembly to make Islam the source of legislation in the permanent constitution and to reject any law that is contrary to Islam,” said the statement.

A source close to Sistani announced soon after the release of the statement that the spiritual leader backed the demand.

“The marja has priorities concerning the formation of the government and the constitution. It wants the source of legislation to be Islam,” said the source.

“We advise the government not to take decisions which would shock Muslims, such as the conscription of Muslims and the publication of their photos with foreign instructors,” Ibrahimi went on his statement.

“We warn officials against a separation of the state and religion, because this is completely rejected by the ulema and marja and we will accept no compromise on this question.

“If they (the government) want the stability and security of the country, they must not touch the country’s Islamic values and traditions,” the sheikh said.

Rumsfeld should have consulted with the guy running the joint before shooting his mouth off, now that Iraq has been “liberated.”

Prescient “Sting” graphic via Billmon.