Antiwar.com Blog

It takes Victor David “VD” Hanson four paragraphs of mild angst over the Abu Ghraib atrocities to segue into his apologia. The rationalizations for American torture of Iraqi prisoners are in five bulleted points. I’ll sum them up so you don’t have to read it.

• There’s an investigation going on! Nothing’s proven.
• Bush and Kimmitt are mad about it and boy, are those very few soldiers who did it in trouble.
• Worse things happened in history!
• The media is blowing this out of proportion, especially the Arab Press, those Osama-lovers!
• Those guys naked in human pyramids with bags on their heads were probably terrorists who deserved it!

Conclusion: People are just picking on America for this because they’re mean hypocrites and don’t understand America’s moral superiority! Don’t forget the rest of the world, especially Arabs, are much worse than us, so go nag on them.

This morning, I was having my coffee and reading my local newspaper when it dawned on me that something was indeed missing from this noble rag. Well, on the front page and in the main section there was the story of the hostage who managed to escape his captors in Iraq. That was good news. An article about how local military families are waiting for their loved ones to come home. That was nice. Next was an article about how American troops in Afghanistan killed four “suspected” terrorists. Well, mixed feelings on that one depending on whether they really were terrorists, or merely some guys going to the post office. There was a story about Arnie’s nice speech on the Holocaust in Jerusalem. I could have lived with that being on a less-prominent page. Same with the news that ear infections are rampant. A few articles about local politicians who were tossing their hats into the ring for dogcatcher, ho-humm, and there was a bunch of feel-good stories about kids’ achievements in school; nice, but not the stuff that front pages are made of.

I’ll give you three guesses as to what was missing, and bet you will get it on the first one!

Right! Not a single mention anywhere about the eleven soldiers who died yesterday in Iraq!! Not in the main section, not in the local section, not in the home section, the money section, the sports section! Nowhere! Not surprising though since it seems even the major networks and online news pages are ignoring it, with just a few exceptions.

I want to add that my hometown is a military town chock full of families of troops overseas and veterans of several wars. Pensacola is the “Cradle of Naval Aviation,” as well as being next door to the vast Eglin AFB. What happens to our troops is of great concern to all in this city. And yet, the Pensacola New Journal does not even find the deaths of eleven soldiers worthy of note in their entire newspaper! I suspect there is more than just a bit of politics going on here. And it is surprising in light of the results of a current WEAR TV online poll which showed that the majority of the area’s population, 73%, disagreed strongly with the preemption of Ted Koppel’s roll call of the dead last week at WEAR, our Sinclair-owned local station.

Well, now I know why they call them “local rags.” That’s all the paper is good for. The problem is, many of our national newspapers have become “rags” as well. I won’t even start ranting about the broadcast media which are just as bad. Apparently, if you want the news, both good and bad, you have to go in search of it yourself. I didn’t originally intend this to be a solicitation for donations but — well, dammit, yes, I guess I do!! Antiwar.com has consistently brought us all the news including that which otherwise would be buried on the back pages or tossed in some newsroom’s trash can, news from every corner of the global community. I am proud to be one of the volunteers here, proud to be helping in my very small way to keep the information flowing for you. Please help as well by contributing to keep us up and running.

To add to this post:
One of our readers, Pete in NC, wrote to me that try as he might, he couldn’t locate a contact link at the Pensacola News Journal. I had to call the newspaper to find out where it was myself, but here it is for those who have something to say to them: Customer Contact

Thank you, Pete!

This is too funny:

Myers: Former Saddam General Not in Charge in Falluja

Gen. Jasim Mohamed Saleh, a former general in Saddam Hussein’s army, is not in charge in the volatile Iraqi city of Falluja and is still being vetted for a possible peacekeeping role, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday.

“The reporting to date has been … very, very inaccurate,” Gen. Richard B. Myers told Fox News Sunday. “We’ve gotten a lot of help from tribal sheiks and other folks.”

“… The reports of that one general … Gen. Saleh that you’ve just mentioned … and there’s another general as well … They are being vetted as we speak by the Iraqi minister of defense and the Iraqi provisional authorities.”

“They have not been vetted, they have not been put in charge,” Myers said.

However, ” … we think we are very close to having Iraqis help achieve our objectives in Falluja,” he said.

Saleh is a former general who once belonged to the elite Republican Guard of ex-ruler Saddam Hussein’s army.

You can almost smell the burning rubber as they slam on the brakes.

Thomas Hamill wandered up to an American patrol in Balad, between Baghdad and Tikrit today. The press accounts are calling it an “apparent escape” though the demand by the mujahiden originally was for the Marines to end the siege of Fallujah, so I expect that it will come out that he was released after the Marine withdrawal in much the same manner as the POWs held by the Iraqis during the invasion. They also wandered up to the American soldiers on patrol in the same area after their release.

With world attention fixed on the Abu Ghraib prison torture outrage, an important story from Saudi Arabia is going under the radar.

I first saw mention of the more exotic aspects of this story on Raed Jarrar’s blog where he wrote:

The thing no one said about the incident of Yanbu that the dead naked bodies of killed foreigners were dragged over the small town for over an hour, the same way they were dragged around Falluja one month ago, (and maybe as a reaction for the pictures of the naked Iraqi men at Abu Greib prison yesterday).

the four attackers were brothers.

I heard that from two differen individuals from Saudi Arabia, one of them was on SAWA (the voice of america in arabic)

Bush: Kimmitt…
Frog: YES! SIR
Bush: take your soldiers, kill some hundreds of Saudis, arrest some thousands and piss on them, Blair is really creative.
frog: PISS! SIR

Finally some reporters are actually catching up with blogs in figuring out what really happened in Yanbu, though they can be somewhat excused in the case of getting the story out of the Police State of Saudi Arabia. Here’s Adnan Malik, writing for the AP:

Militants sprayed gunfire inside an oil contractor’s office, killing at least six people — including two Americans and three other Westerners — and tying one of their victims to the bumper of a car and dragging it past horrified students at a high school in this western Saudi industrial town.

Police killed the four gunmen in a shootout after a car chase. One of the attackers was reported to be on the Saudi kingdom’s list of most-wanted terrorists, many of them suspects in 2003 suicide attacks on foreign housing compounds in the capital, Riyadh. The two attacks were blamed on al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden’s terror network.

Students told The Associated Press Sunday that bearded men drove a car into the Ibn Hayyan Secondary Boys School parking lot as classes began Saturday, the start of the school week. They fired into the air to attract students’ attention, then urged the boys to go to an Iraqi city where U.S. troops are battling insurgents.

“God is great! God is great! Come join your brothers in Fallujah,” they shouted. Pointing to the bloodied and badly damaged corpse, his clothes shredded, they screamed: “This is the president of America.”

Now, if the War Party were consistent, which they are not, they would have to surround Yanbu with 3,000 Marines and bomb the crap out of everyone in revenge for this dreadful event, but as Raed points out in his Kimmitt the Frog dialogue, the Saudis won’t get the Fallujah Treatment.

Oh, and in their tradition of not giving in to “terrorists” the Americans are urging the evacuation all private citizens from Saudi Arabia and engineering and oil services group ABB Ltd said it is pulling out all staff from the Saudi Arabian port of Yanbu.

---

UPDATE: Good grief:

Three of the terrorist gunmen who killed an Australian and four of his colleagues had been working with their victims at the same company in Saudi Arabia – and used their security passes to launch the gun attack.

Saudi terror killings an inside job

The brilliant Oxyconservative Rush Limbaugh, as brought to my attention by Arthur Silber. Well, my objection is a bit pedantic, viz., when have we gone 20 years without war?