Antiwar.com Blog

Via James Wolcott, we have an article from The Economist detailing the American military’s tactics in the insurgent hotbed Al Anbar Province:

In Ramadi, the capital of central Anbar province, where 17 suicide-bombs struck American forces during the month-long Muslim fast of Ramadan in the autumn, the marines are jumpy. Sometimes, they say, they fire on vehicles encroaching within 30 metres, sometimes they fire at 20 metres: “If anyone gets too close to us we fucking waste them,” says a bullish lieutenant. “It’s kind of a shame, because it means we’ve killed a lot of innocent people.”

Read the whole thing.

Jeff Jarvis attempts to compare Saddam Hussein to the tsunami disaster. In a post titled Catastrophic equivalencies, he says:

By the latest count, 160,000 people have died in this tsunami.

A month ago, Tony Blair said that 400,000 victims of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and murder have been found in mass graves in Iraq.

Both are humanitarian tragedies, humanitarian issues, humanitarian needs.

In Jeff’s rush to come up with a number documenting what he thinks he already knows, he grabs, off the US Aid website, a quote by Tony Blair that Blair himself admitted was false long ago.

Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.

The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.

In that publication – Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: ‘We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.’

On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: ‘The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.’

The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports ‘to the outer limits’ in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.

I find it rather repulsive that Jarvis, who vocally supported the Iraq invasion on his widely-read blog, is using the tsunami disaster to opportunistically ride his pro-war hobby horse, but to repeat such a widely discredited factoid as Blair’s mass-grave numbers is simply irresponsible. Not only did he fail to research the discredited quote but he attributed it to Blair in the wrong year.

Sistani-endorsed United Iraqi Alliance, represented by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and Ahmed Chalabi held a press conference today. The shocker: “We will need American forces to be in Iraq for the foreseeable future.”

That position is likely to be a surprise to average Shiite voters, who largely believe that the election is all about kicking the occupation out.

Yes, I read other blogs besides Clark’s but this is too funny:

The “blog of the year” proves its worth by announcing some good news from Iraq …

So, read Clark’s post and then read this one from Raed Jarrar.

Clark: IT WAS REPORTED ON A BLOG, WHICH MAKES IT MUCH MORE RELIABLE THAN ANYTHING IN THE DREADED MSM!

UPDATE: Arthur puts the final nail in the coffin of this spam email the “Blog of the Year” posted as news.

Do you think the photographer responsible for taking the lower photo in this post is an accomplice to murder? Roger Simon:

But these allegations about the Associated Press are even worse. If true–and I don’t, of course, know that they are–they mean that people working with that news agency are embedded with the “insurgents,” that they are participating in murder, aiding and abetting it.

When I first saw the photo under discussion, my immediate thought was that the situation in Iraq was so bad that Iraqis in the resistance were able to execute those they saw as collaboratoring with the occupation in broad daylight in downtown Baghdad. Because I believe the invasion and occupation of Iraq was and is immoral, illegal, unconstitutional, wasteful, counterproductive, destructive and stupid, I lack the black/white high contrast lens of “with us or against us” that the warbloggers use to simplify everything that happens in Iraq, so it never occurred to me that this photo would be seen by some as an indictment of the photographer and the AP. After the Kevin Sites incident (see here and here), I suppose it was predictable that this photo would be all over the warblogs, not as an example of the failure of the US occupation, but as proof that the “MSM” (that’s mainstream media, aka The Enemy, in War Blog lingo) was nefariously undermining The War Effort and is on The Other Side.

Clark Stooksbury on Hugh Hewitt’s assertion that a warblog “‘scissor[ed]’ the Associated Press’s credibility,” on the Haifa street photo:

But he also seems to think that just because a blog has attacked a big media source, that the blog must be correct. He say that the Belmont Club “scissor[ed]” the Associated Press’s credibility and links to a post that is a confusing mess of accusations based in part on a letter sent by some guy to the aformentioned Power Line. The gist of the argument is that the AP is in cahoots with terrorists in order to be able to get pictures of their murders. If the anonymous blogger who goes by “Wretchard” has any solid evidence for this theory, I am not smart enough to glean it from his post.

No, Clark, not only does he not have any evidence whatsoever for his theory, the fact that he even raised the question is proof of both shoddy thinking and failure to do even the most rudimentary research, as Ryan at The Dead Parrot Society proves in this post:

In all likelihood, even the photo on the left was cropped in from full frame; very few news photos aren’t cropped at least somewhat to tighten in on the important part of the image. But you can see how easy it is to take a photo from distance and bring the viewer right in close. So we know the Baghdad photographer wasn’t standing right up on top of the insurgents, and common sense says the photographer wasn’t standing fearlessly in the middle of the street, either. Even if you were one of the terrorists themselves, you wouldn’t do that. Ever tried to get a sense of what’s going on around you when you’re looking through a camera lens? Want to do that with bullets and grenades flying around?

So where was the photographer most likely standing when he got these shots? Hey, you know that Glenn Reynolds, he’s a camera buff, so why not ask him: If you were a professional photographer carrying professional equipment optimized for shooting pictures in a war zone (where you might not want to be right up close to the action), how far away could you have been and still gotten these shots? Actually, you don’t have to ask Glenn, because I just spoke with a news photographer on our staff (for readers who don’t know, I’m an online producer for a newspaper in Washington state). Judging by the perspective and clarity on the image above, he estimates that the photographer in Baghdad was using a 300-millimeter lens from about a block away. “From a very safe distance,” he said.

Let me repeat that: From a city block away. This is part of why you think the AP might have done something wrong? (Hey, remember how awesome it was when a blogger found someone in the field to speak to the authenticity of the CBS memos? You’d think someone might have thought of this on the Haifa Street photos.)

Read the rest of the smackdown. Ryan concludes by saying, “Hopefully this gets cleared up, but I’m not holding my breath. The AP deserves criticism like any media agency, but it certainly doesn’t deserve a demonization campaign based on suspicions supported by little more than misconception.” No, don’t hold your breath, Ryan. These types of bloggers are infamous for throwing out damaging speculation and then blithely ignoring anyone who proves them wrong, as Clark points out, and Henry at Crooked Timber also has some damning things to say about blogger responsibility and hypocrisy. Matt Welch lets Hugh Hewitt and the Bias Hunters have it here, as well:

The ideology of bias detection begets the shortcut of hyperbole, which then demands escalation when the conditions being described worsen. Many of the same people who roasted Dan Rather lapped up Judith Miller’s discredited New York Times reporting about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. People believe what they want to hear. What are bloggers and other media watchdogs willing to believe about the target of their wrath?

“Because you ignored us,” Breitbart says, “because you ignored Rush and Drudge and God knows who else, we decided to go out and create our media. And I think that what we’re doing is building up something that may be bigger and better.”

Bigger, probably. Better, arguably. More factual…we’ll see.

I think we can see already.

Who knew that the Pentagon has experts in the use of enemas as torture?

….after a review, Mr. Rumsfeld issued a final policy in April 2003, approving 24 techniques, some of which needed his permission to be used.

None of the approved techniques, however, covered some of what people have now said occurred. Mr. Kahtani was, for example, forcibly given an enema, officials said, which was used because it was uncomfortable and degrading.

Pentagon spokesmen said the procedure was medically necessary because Mr. Kahtani was dehydrated after an especially difficult interrogation session. Another official, told of the use of the enema, said, however, “I bet they said he was dehydrated,” adding that that was the justification whenever an enema was used as a coercive technique, as it had been on several detainees.

I wonder if they passed this knowledge on to their domestic counterparts in the Department of Homeland Security.