I'MMA LET YOU FINISH
Hope we don't get to "To Be Over" today - or anytime soon.
Why isn't she asking the Iraqis if they "want Saddam back"?
That's what the neocons and their apologists keep asking us.
They still have weather in Iraq: another positive sign that the occupation is going well. Oh, and food rots if you leave it out--but that is certainly the work of terrorists.
***
People are "playing in traffic"?
I don't know about you, but I'd only be inclined to do that if my life were pretty bad.
Does she get canadian bacon on her pizza?
I've been in a war zone or two. Tskhinvali, South Ossetia, (former Soviet) Georgia comes to mind. I was there in 1993-1994. No electricity, no water, no heat, no pay -- people still went to work, kids went to school and played in the streets, kiosks were open, selling booze, candy and tobacco -- not much else. There was food in the markets, but most people lived on reserves and their own or their relatives' produce.
People didn't talk about that. They talked about how they hated the Georgians, and how they wanted to be indpendent, and the latest bombing or shooting.
Kids don't stop being kids until they die.
Atrios:
Dead on. Everyone knows that Iraqis always lived some sort of normal life, and they almost certainly live a free-er life now. The Problem the Bushies have is that they think everyone is dumb and has to be instructed on the truth... so they are pissed that the media doesnt write an article everytime someone takes a crap in piece.
Well, that, or they are using this anti-media campaign as a way to explain to Americans that the "truth" does not exist, and you might as well believe them over anyone else.
good post.
I would compare Baghdad to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. People continue to do their thing, but it still sucks not to have security.
btw, Bremer has announced a 15% flat tax:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/20...11/1/18449/
2540
Atrios: I think I understand the disconnect between the Bushies who are at least in some cases genuine in their belief that the media isn't reporting the "true" story in Iraq
Er ... you think you understand "the disconnect between" X ... ?
Good stuff.
FWIW, I grabbed an op-ed from the October SSI newsletter which touches on this from a slightly different angle (blogwhore link). No really thoughtful analysis on my part, but figure you might want to see the conclusion of the concluding graf without downloading the full PDF.
The comments spouted by PNAC and their staff are no longer surprising me (to take a line from Dr. Dean)
The Iraqis have been dealing with invaders/war for the last 5000 years. Obviously they know how to deal with it.
This is why I accuse people like this, the same type of people who appear on shows like Jerry Springer, as being either actors in on the scam, or completely idiotic.
Say for Jerry Springer, if a guy is standing there in his trailer park and his wife says, "Hun. Let's go be guests on the Jerry Springer show!"
Exactly what subject does this moron think is going to be the topic of the show?? "How my wife loved me so much.."???
The guy should then confront his wife about whether she's cheating on him, a lesbian, or really a guy who's very good at keeping *it* from being felt while they're doing it in the dark at night!
What morons!
MYOB'
.
Life goes on for those left alive.
So ... how good are those Yes remasters anyway?
The 'come out here and see' line is just precious. All of the CPA bigwigs are locked up in Saddam's old palace complex, communicating their orders by over-priced cellphone to the grunts outside. When Bremer puts in an appearance on the 'Baghdad street', he's surrounded by Delta force bodyguards.
And the issues are straightforward: yes, life 'goes on' for Iraqis. But it also goes on with a host of shootings, robberies, rapes and whatnot. And it's the job of the occupying power to sort that mess out. Sorry, thus are the spoils of war.
And the streak reaches 9! (getting obscure though...I keep having to check AMG..)
for actual news on how "life goes on" in Iraq I still treasure riverbend.
you still blocking me, asshole?
There are lots of biases in the press AND the press are idiots.
Anyone who has ever been at an event covered in the press can tell that the press often, usually gets much of the details wrong.
And there are biases in the press. They are young, mostly yuppish folks, so yeah, I might expect them to be more liberal than not, but also more snarky than not.
They are interested in getting their stories published, hence biased towards bad news over good news.
They have mortages on fine brownstones to pay. They are friends with other journalists as well as with very impressively named people. Pols, Actores, ... etc.
They are run by big companies that want advertisers and subscriptions.
Look at what they did to Gore, et. al., and expect that they are reporting badly on Iraq.
Think of the blind men and the elephant.
The press is almost certainly reporting badly on Iraq.
This is not to say that Bush is correct in saying everything is going swimmingly, and that we have the terrorists right where we want them.
Read Raed, Riverbend and root for the Iraqi and for the US Army. There's a lot of folks in the area with an interest in making things better, and with $150B of my money and the efforts of all these people, things will get better.
So expect the press to report on things badly and strategize based on that.
'meant to say that riverbend touches in several places on where this sort of thinking comes from--the assumptions from Americans that Iraqis a) are a bunch of primitive camel jockeys with no culture or sophistication or urban life, so we've got to give them a society built from scratch; and/or b) spent the entire Hussein regime cowering in the dark and not (the majority) leading "normal lives," as folks do in even the most oppressive regimes, especially ones that were for the most part secular and modernist in outlook...
m
This weeks Newsweek paints a pretty plain picture of the security around the "green zone".
Apparently most of those traffic jams are caused deliberately by the military placing concrete barriers in the middle of the street for security purposes, not by *shiny happy people*
me balls itch!
After reading the Newsweek primer on doing business in Iraq ("Be sure to hire your own pair of bodyguards--$2400 a day is the going rate. Don't go out after dusk. When you're being driven from one place to another, consider lying flat on the floor of the rear seat.") I have to figure that one reason for reporters missing all the soccer field openings is that they're terrified to leave the fortified bungalows they're renting. So much for progress.
But the issue seems to be, for me, how is a new soccer field in Iraq, or the return of civil order there, going to actually make the US safer than keeping the old soccer field and Saddam's civil order?
Patrick Cogburn had a nice report in the Independent. The Iraqis figure that they're at risk from all these suicide bombers because we fucked up the security of their nation. That's some news they'd like to share.
Imagine what would happen if the NYT wrote a series of articles about normal people having fun, shopping, going to school, getting medical care, and hanging out on the streets of Havana. The right would blow a gasket and accuse the NYT of being the pawn of Castro, and would scream for stories about jailed dissidents and religious repression.
Normal people try to have fun and live their lives as best as they can however horrible the political situation. A visitor to the Warsaw Ghetto would have seen kids playing and commercial activity, and could write a story about the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming dread and misery, but that was hardly the big story going on at the time.
When American soldiers are being killed and wounded daily, and Iraqis are being blown up, and villages are being encircled in barbed wire, and various areas are in conditions of near or open revolt, that seems like legitimate news to me. I don't have problems with stories about improvements in Iraqi infrastructure or happy sketches of Bagdad street scenes -- it's good to know the full picture. But it's a little idiotic for the right to think that a reputable newspaper will have a headline "Iraqi Kids Playing Soccer Again" on the front page and bury "12 Iraqis, 2 Americans Killed In Police Station Bombing" on page 17. That's just not what most people think news priorities should be.
Terence Smith interviewed jounalist Dexter Filkins on Monday's NewsHour after the Red Cross bombing. He certainly didn't feel very comfortable being in Iraq:
DEXTER FILKINS: ...I think there were five bombings today, and all of them were within 45 minutes of each other. In fact, today, this morning it must have been about 8:30 I was standing right at the foot of the Red Cross building that had just been bombed, and it was a terrible scene, and as I was making my way through there, I heard two other explosions go off. And I was just, well, it was a bad day.
It's not easy in the best of circumstances, there were bodies all over the place, there were body parts, there were charred corpses, it was just terrible. And then the worst was to come for me, I mean, I went with some colleagues to a second bombing, the north end of Baghdad and we were attacked by a crowd of, must have been a crowd of 200 people when we got out of the truck. We were really lucky to get out alive. The photographer I was with, he got his head bashed pretty badly. We almost didn't get out of there today. I think we counted 27 bricks that smashed the windows in our car. And it was a bad scene. The crowd was very, very angry and very excited, and soon as they saw us they went at us.
TERENCE SMITH: Because you represent the Americans?
DEXTER FILKINS: Yeah. Yeah. I mean it may be kind of, you know, it may be a difficult logic to understand, but, you know, and I, we weren't doing a lot of talking out there. But I've heard this before. People get angry and they say the Americans brought the car bombs. We didn't have those before you got here, look what you've done. This was a rough neighborhood to begin with. But it was really ugly.
Obviously, you have to question the timing of the email and its suspiciously broad dissemination.
The message dovetails very neatly with the current Republican meme:
"We're making so much progress but...
the terrorists are killing the poor Iraqis, the terrorists are killing the poor Iraqis..."
Chimpus was right on time with the beat in his radio address:
"They're jus trying to live free, and if only all Amuricans would support the war, the Preznit could stop the terrorists from killing the poor Iraqis, and they could all go to SCHOOL, and become good little capitalists."
Whatever else you can say about these treasonous bastards--they do know how to stay on message.
"Anyone who has ever been at an event covered in the press can tell that the press often, usually gets much of the details wrong."
Make that "always", at least in my experience. Every time I have first-hand knowledge of the topic of a general-interest newspaper or magazine article I spot numerous serious errors of fact.
Scientists, to pick an example out of the air, constantly complain about the shoddy level of science reporting in the mainstream media.
I suppose it's because most journalists don't have the opportunity to specialize, but it's still worrisome that even people who try to keep up with the news aren't getting a very good picture of the world.
Life goes on during a war? Holy crap! You see, I thought the entire population died, and just lay there until the war was over, when they magically ressusicated. But this woman found actual living people doing things like buying food to eat meals with, IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR!
What do you say to that, stinking American media?
OT: Car smashes into building where president attends rally in MS.
This is reported by Fox, so it could easily be a total fabrication.
One thing I liked about The Pianist was that it showed life going on, kids playing and such precisely in the Warsaw Ghetto. Kids play, as someone says upthread, they're kids. It's pretty cheap to try to use smiles from Iraqi kids as proof of support for the US, and it is routine on the right.
Seraphiel, it was in the NYTimes, also.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/0...ND-BUSH.html?
hp
Didn't even come close to hitting Bush.
...she and the other Americans here typically do not mingle with ordinary Iraqis. The e-mail writer lives in a guarded compound and, as she noted in her message, must have an armed escort to go even a few blocks to get a pizza.
Where have I heard this before? A war on an entire population where the Americans were secluded in their own little cocoons and had no idea what normal life for the masses was like? What was that country? It started, I think, with a "V"...
Anyone other than me notice that we've never been shown overhead panoramic film of Baghdad neighborhoods and city centers? You know, the kind of shots that are regularly shown when the media reports on broad topics, like fires or natural disasters.
Could it be because we would see a whole shitload of devastation, and might say, "wow, wonder if anybody got hurt?"
Maybe they don't have enough heliocopters.
it's easy to take a copter down.
Dave,
I'll take a wild shot at it. Was it Vanuatu?
Was it Vanuatu?
Hmmmm... is that a trick question?
Maybe they don't have enough heliocopters.
How about nice satellite imagery or pictures from a spy plane? You know, like all those pictures of WMD sites that Powell showed to the UN before the war.
I find it amusing that the administration that hasn't gotten the most free passes from the media complains when their lap dog lets out a muffled growl.
In Baghdad's western suburb of Abu Gharib, at least four Iraqis, including a policeman, were killed and two US soldiers wounded in violent clashes at a marketplace, sparked by the death of a six-year-old boy a witness said was crushed by a US tank.
Iraqi police tried to contain the protest, but US troops later opened fire, according to medics and witnesses, who said three civilians were killed and around 20 others wounded.
US tank crushes 6 year old boy, US troops gun down protesters
I wonder if my link will work? - Making more friends in Iraq... The guys that married the Iraqi women are going to be court-martialled? If they are court-martialled, does that mean they get to be dishonorably discharged from the military? Problem get some jail time, too, Huh?
Slightly OT, but relevent to the NYT article on the Iraq clusterfuck: anyone else listen to Clark's speech at Podesta's the Center for American Progress last week? Good Lord, he demolished Bush. And not a little. He really took it to him, and in best liberal style: intelligent, comprehensive, rational and principled--and totally devastating.
I'm so excited seeing someone speaking the truth to the corrupt power that has taken control...I can hardly speak...er..type.
And, the usual disclaimer is that I'm firmly in the ABB camp--I just hope Clark's speech is a sign of things to come, whoever carries the progressive flag come next fall.
Bremer is back in Iraq with this message:
The chief US administrator in Iraq has said he wants to accelerate the handover of authority to Iraqis.
Paul Bremer told a news conference in Baghdad his aim was to give Iraqis a "path and a timeline" for the transfer of power from the US-led coalition.
He also promised to speed up the training of Iraqi soldiers and police to respond to ongoing attacks.
[...]
Our correspondent says many people in Iraq believe that fellow Iraqis could provide stability better than foreign troops.
Ambassador Bremer's remarks were intended to demonstrate his willingness to respond to those concerns, she says.
The top administrator said the coalition was going "to turn sovereignty to the Iraqi people as quickly as practicable".
He gave no specific date, but said that by September of next year, more than 200,000 Iraqis would be involved in the defence of their country.
"it's easy to take a copter down."---
Nah, they have to be doing daily overflights with cameras for intel. Many, if not all, of the helos have onboard cameras and they're certainly in the area for the large demonstrations.
And, if the situation is so perilous that they can't fly over the city, wouldn't that rate as a news story?
Life goes on during a war? Holy crap! You see, I thought the entire population died, and just lay there until the war was over, when they magically ressusicated. But this woman found actual living people doing things like buying food to eat meals with, IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR!
What do you say to that, stinking American media?
John Isbell | Email | 11.01.03 - 2:52 pm | #
That was sooo good it had to be repeated
Why isn't she asking the Iraqis if they "want Saddam back"?
That's what the neocons and their apologists keep asking us.
Seraphiel | Homepage | 11.01.03 - 2:00 pm | #
You're right... but apparently a lot of the Iraqis do want Saddam back. It looks like many of these people we've managed to antagonize/terrorize have decided that life was better under Saddam. It is probably true, also, that a large number do not want Saddam back, but do want to be treated like human beings or be protected which is not always happening.
Apropos of nothing, here's an update from the American Friends Service Committee:
Despite their wondrous joy and enthusiasm, these children inhabit a pretty bleak world. Their new "neighborhood" is a bombed, looted, and burned out complex that once housed the training and social club for Officers of the Security Forces. Sewage, rubble, glass, and metal scraps are everywhere. The children run and play amid this debris. One of the first things you notice is how many are without shoes.
Word, technopeasant. Trouble with thinking reporters are your "friends." They're not. And someday they may write something you don't like, and that's just fucking tough. It's your fault for forgetting they have a job to do, and don't work for you. That's the mistake this administration made, in thinking its honeymoon would go on forever.
Is it just me or are they a big bunch of whining babies afraid somebody in the papers is saying bad things about them? Somebody should ask them if they have bigger things to worry about, i.e. body parts and charred corpses lying around the Red Cross building, besides their press clippings.
Nobody likes hearing "bad" things. What this story does, at least, is put the spotlight on the fact that the bad things are HAPPENING, and the problem is that, not the coverage.
Go, go, NYT, I say.
A.
Begins with a V...Vichy France?
At a news briefing last week, Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling was asked if he could provide the numbers of those killed and wounded at each police station during a string of attacks on Monday. He declined to do so. "That's too morbid," he said. The total number was provided by other officials. General Hertling suggested to the reporters that their accounts should emphasize not the deaths and injuries, but the heroic efforts of the Iraqi police officer whose actions, he said, had prevented more deaths.
"That's too morbid," !!!
Vatican City?
Atrios:
A fairly obvious point, actually, but one I'm embarrassed to say had totally eluded me. It's easy to think of the Bushies as all being liars, but the truth is many of them are just startlingly thickheaded. True believers do well in pursuing final solutions, but flounder when forced to account for themselves.
Let's turn the pressure up a notch. There's a shitload of blogging fodder up at Buzzflash right now. Maybe it's time for W. to have a second "hell week." Who wants to apply the branding iron?
Wow... Great, Atrios!
Thanks.
p.s. People in prison also carry on with life: tell jokes, play games, eat lunch, get high, commit crimes, even (sshh) make love...
I loved the byplay on that NewsHour program a few weeks back where the gal whom corrupt politician and one of the White House Resident Mad Dogs, Richard Perle, who had accused her of not seeing all the wonderful things that had been done to Iraq and of his contacts with Iraqi citizens who thanked him for it and had to listen to her response that it was she who was on the streets without bomb sniffing dogs and massively armed bodyguards and not meeting with the [handpicked and primed] politicians that Perle trucked with.
Ain't it all just grand!
Another part of the story we are not getting is that of civilian casualties caused by trigger-happy, scared, heavily armed American troops as they go after the insurgents without the training to do so. I'll bet the numbers here are pretty awful. Why not ask the silly woman about this?
I think she's right.
I hope and pray the nightly news reports that there was a "traffic jam today" in downtown Baghdad, and claim that this is a sign that our $87 nillion are going to a good cause.
"Cchildren are playing with other children?"
What the fuck?!? Of course they are. I am reasonably certain they played, even during the regime of saddam Hussein too.
This stupid bitch is the one living in a sheltered world.
Bush's War has entered a new phase: an intensive propaganda campaign directed at the American people.
Indeed, how can anyone comment about how things are going in Iraq unless they've spent time watching Iraqi children and traffic jams from afar behind a heavily guarded compound.
If the media spent more time hobnobbing with political appointees in US compounds, and less time talking to whining Iraqis out on the street, they'd have a much better perspective on things.
Atrios you are an escapist geek after my own heart!
I used to want to be a Chris Squire groupie, but then he got all gross and fat. He's like a mean, unfunny Ozzy Osbourne now, and likes to threaten Bill Bruford with violence.
blivet and other press carpers: I disagree. I've been on the invertviewee side a lot, and have known more about many stories than the reporters who covered them. They always get something wrong, to be sure, but I've generally felt the thrust was on target.
On the other hand, it was often the BBC I dealt with.
lotsa funerals too.....just like everywhere.
No, no, no. Children caught playing were tossed into that prison.
The deep problem here is that everybody, left, right, and center has to address a public with a very short attention span. Thus everybody talks about Iraq as if the most serious issue was what happens in the next couple of months, just as everybody talks about our economic problems as if getting past the current recession and not dealing with our long term insolvency were the big thing.
With sufficient money and bruatlity, the U.S. should eventually be able to complete the subjection of the country. The more important questions are whether we can finish off the conquest and just leave and, assuming we ever get out, what sort of regime can emerge in the artificial nation we leave behind. Thousands of years of experience in the Middle East suggests that the puppet state solution is only temporary.
I was stationed in Seoul in the spring of 1987.
My parents saw the rioting going on on TV back here in the states, and were terribly concerned for my safety.
The fact of the matter was, unless you were at the riot (always carefully arranged to happen when the TV camera crews were ready to go) you were in no danger. Be a block away, and it was business as usual. You might get a whiff of the peppergas being used on the protestors (who always waited until finals were out of the way!) but unless you managed to stumble into the middle of it, you were not going to get hurt.
So, the problem the Bushies have is that the damn media is going where the action is. While this will always give you a somewhat alarmist view of what is going on, the fact of the matter is that the protests in Korea DID represent a change taking place, that day-to-day life in the next alley couldn't hide or alter.
The other problem the Bushies have is they're ignoring, from the saftey of their compounds, that there really is discontent out there. I mean, the GIs in body bags SHOULD be a clue for them. But I forget...the deaths of soldiers mean nothing to the NPAC crowd.
All of them need to be lined up and slapped.
Our souldiers found a prison for children!
The story that hasn't been reported, and in the U.S. press never will be, is about the thousands of people we killed with "shock and awe."
Similar story as Gary.....
Around 4:30, I left the LA Emergency Operations Center located 5 floors below ground level where I was helping build a 911 system. We had heard of the Rodney King decision. Once on the street, the streets were calm (not 10 miles south), and I walked over to Parker Center where there was a small crowd acting very peacefully. Acting peacefully that is, until the camera lights came on. For the 20 minutes I was there, camera lights on meant riots, camera lights off meant milling. Lights on, lights off.
Boring. I went and hiked the Griffith Park Hills until about 10pm, where getting home, I found the city aflame.
Part of the reason the press is often so wrong come down to Heisenberg effects.
It will be interesting to observe the conservatives when they realize that Chimpi's 2004 Iraquification cut and run electoral policy will put power into an islamic democracy that is still somewhat unfriendly to the west and israel. (According to Noah Feldman)
"Begins with a V" - Venezuela?
Children in refugee camps play with other kids. Kids in homeless shelters in the US play with other kids. Children with terrible illnesses play with other kids in the hospital, when they are able. This is supposed to be news?
Have these people really been so sheltered from real life all their lives that they think that children playing and people moving around means success? Holy freaking shit, this kind of thing makes me tired.
If she's so damned convinced about how happy-go-lucky everyone is there, she needs to go see the kids who have no arms or legs due to our bombing. She needs to go visit the wounded American soldiers. It's a war, lady. Go see what war really does to people, and STFU.
People are crossing the streets, playing in traffic.
Apparently, the American progress brigade hasn't gotten around to traffic safety yet...
good one, Atrios.
"thousands of people we killed with "shock and awe."-
We killed people in Iraq...wha..huh?
LOOK! Children playing with puppies in Baghdad!
Manumission - "The American Progress Brigade."
Heh. Good one.
Great...and this line of bs is being brought to you by the same group of people that told us all to go shopping after 9/11. I mean really no need to sacrafice anything for the war on terra. Go shop, more tax cuts for the wealthy. Yet they are so amazed that the people of this country that have suffered and lived through many wars/and much personal sacrafice are continuing to go on with life.
If things are so great in Iraq, why does Bremer spend more time in Washington than he does in Baghdad
and life will go on under Bush, after we get pasted running Dean as the head of our Party, the one he's so sure to fix.
Abenaki. I doubt "Democrat" comes anywhere near second. Are the freeper boards a bit too boring today?
The whole neo-con thing is so cult-like it is really scarey. There is this mindless insistence on an alternative interpretation of reality. There is a defensiveness and intolerance of scrutiny that has ominous implications. Now that the whole delusion is facing a confrontation with reality, they are getting increasingly desperate. This is when cults are their most dangerous. When they feel they are being attacked, and when their world view is called into question. This could get even more ugly.
When they feel they are being attacked, and when their world view is called into question.
Or their desperation will lead to actions that will seal their doom.
I want them desperate frankly.
pie - "I want them desperate frankly."
Ooh, good point. Yep, one more overreach, and that might just do it.
Maybe the media should have been reporting on children playing and traffic jams in New York City and Washington on September 12, 2001. I'm sure if they looked they could have found both, it's just that they wanted to give a slanted picture of what life was like in those cities.
I'm even more disgusted with our diplomatic staff than I was before reading this.
Tena, I wish one more overreach would do it.
Of course, they used to be much more confident. And people are getting pissed. Check out Sid Blumenthal's article in the Guardian about the CIA vs the Bushies.
When is the American version of the Guardian launching?!!
Tena: "Kids in homeless shelters in the US play with other kids."
I can confirm this.
what a dissembling crybaby.
how she can get away with perverting the reality of the horribly lazy reporting i cannot comprehend. more of the nyt sucking on something presidential, i suppose.
let's call it straight, now. there has been virtually no hard and accurate amerikan reporting on the amerikan scew-ups in iraq. there has been nothing like the reporting that came out of vietnam as reported by halberstam et alia. and certainly there has been no good war photography such as shot by burrows, fass, paige et alia.
my guess is that reportage void has been the creation of the stage management section of the amerikan[not coalition] occupation forces.
as best i can determine, only robert fisk has had the cojones and the connections to wander around iraq without having his head embedded up the bushies' rectums.
and i think he continues to relate the truth.
and those truths do injure the maidens[male and female] hiding within their compounds.
lastly, perhaps it has already been answered, but can anyone tell me exactly why babs bodine and maggie tutwiler really departed badhdad? i try to be informed, but this development seemed to occur without any extensive comment or analysis. why i wonder?
did it have anything to do with babs and her long time career at the company? anything to do with maggie and her long-time main squeeze, james baker - the real cardinal richelieu to the bushies.
all ears.
pie - I really haven't given up on the CIA, yet. I fully expect more from them. I keep thinking they might pop little stories all the way to the election, and then pop a big one.
But there has been so much more bad press for Bush in the last several months than there has ever been that I'm starting to see letters to the editor that read like they were written by one of us. Negative stories every day in the Dallas Morning News. Bush has a world of trouble on his hands.
Tena, when a Dallas paper starts to print articles and letters that bash Bush, you know he's in trouble.
Good old American commonsense.
SW,
"The whole neo-con thing is so cult-like it is really scarey."
We've all seen this phenomenon before: it's earler incarnation was referred to as Amway. Anybody wanna buy some detergent?
Funny -- Bremer's aide never hated the media pre-invasion when it failed to expose Bush's phony Niger letters, plagiarized graduate thesis, imaginary IAEA reports, spurious aluminum tubes, bogus satellite photos, fictitious Saddam-al Qaeda ties and other assorted deceptions.
She didn't hate the media for headlining every WMD "discovery" on the march to Baghdad, for promoting the Jessica Lynch hoax, or for downplaying US troop casualties.
No -- she hasn't a problem that most Americans believe Iraqis piloted the 9/11 terror planes and that Saddam and Bin Laden worked together.
She's peeved they don't report the victorious sight of Iraqi kids playing in traffic.
The press are idiots though,
Look, when the BBC shows a looted train or a car bomb, uh, that's news and that's bad news. Lots of places have the occasional car bomb, they don't have five in one day, preceeded by a rocket attack from a trailer.
What the fuck is wrong with everyone? Don't you see the stream of dead coming home? Uh, playing in the street? So what? Three or four GI's are being killed each day.
Fuck the kids playing. Talk to me about why so many Americans are dying in Iraq.
Simply put: The best of the good news gets reported; the worst of the bad news does not. Ergo, things are better than we're being told.
Bedtime, Alice. Don't bother waking until December 2004.....
it nice that some stuff benefiting iraqqis is going on, but where are the WMD and do you think something could be done to help AMERICANS other than the top 2%???
Don't you see the stream of dead coming home?
actually, we don't. there's a ban in place since 1999, but only enforced since the bush administration, preventing the media covering the arrival of caskets.
"you still blocking me, asshole?"
It would be a huge task, blocking an asshole the size of yours.
The administration plays up infrastructure improvements as progress. We need political stability before we can cut and run. Once there is political stability they can rebuild all by themselves. the Iraquis are educated and have oil, they don't need anyones help to rebuild infrastrucure. The bad news is political and is truly bad news
Why is it whenever a helicopter or Humvee is destroyed and Americans are killed that the people in Iraq are dancing in the street and dancing in the wreckage?
Is it because they love us so much? A different culture's way of showing grief?
Y'all don't really still think that we actually get "NEWS" of any kind here in Oz? The US news sources spend the least amount of time on international happenings of any news reporting structure I have ever been in contact with (I am a European immigrant and am used to the reporting style of the BBC or Spiegel or Tagesschau). What passes for news around here, is propaganda even Göbbels could have been proud of. When I want news, I go to foreign news sources and agencies.
It sounds like Ms. Bremer-Aide didn't see what life was like before the US invasion, so she believes every person walking in the market, every traffic jam, and every smiling face is because we have US troops on the ground, doing great things.
Lady, all these great, normal, day-to-day things are happening IN SPITE OF the US presence.
I say when people work over time they should have the rights to get payed more and be able to have a brake. I know a lot of people the dont get payed that much.
You guys do the best news cast as well
I say when people work over time they should have the rights to get payed more and be able to have a brake. I know a lot of people the dont get payed that much.
You guys do the best news cast as well
I say when people work over time they should have the rights to get payed more and be able to have a brake. I know a lot of people the dont get payed that much.
You guys do the best news cast as well
There are always two sides to everything. Nothing is perfect. There is more to the story of "Iraqis are in the streets". There are no Baathists running around, rounding people up and torturing them.
Iraqis do want security and the troops are doing their best to provide that. They need help. Iraqis have to eventually realise that they are responsible for helping to provide that security. While it is very dangerous, they have to turn in the bad guys. They can't just sit and wait for the troops to do it for them.
It is obvious that some are doing this and they are being picked off by the bad guys.
The powers that be haven't done a perfect job of this and there is plenty of room for improvement. I don't know why they let equipment and goods flow out to Iran and other countries. Also, I don't know why they can't do a better job of sealing the borders.
That said, I believe things are better than they were under Saddam. The elections aren't going to fix everything, but if they can be held, at least Iraquis can show what they really think.
Let freedom ring out.
Thanks
Film izle
thank you
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