Category Archives: Iraq

UPDATE II: The Meta Deal On The Monster Twister & The Media (BBC Headline News, In Case CNN’s Interested)

Britain, Critique, Iraq, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media

A “monster tornado” has hit Oklahoma City suburbs causing great misery but, oddly enough, serving media purposes. From blatantly ignoring the stories of the day, as CNN has been doing for the past few days, media outlets like it can comfortably shift into pictorial mode.

Wall-to-wall coverage of a natural disaster (or massacre or crime)—and of every related utterance on the issue since, official or other—quickly replaces the imperative to provide viewers with “newsworthy material.”

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UPDATE I: The Headlines, In Case CNN’s Interested. Here are some of the headlines you should have been informed about but were not:

* The Gitmo hunger strike.

* At least 95 dead, dozens wounded in Iraq bombings.

CNN has retreated like a tortoise in its shell from the AP and IRS stories, telling you only what you need to know: “Most of you still like Obama.”

Here are the disgraceful CNN’s headlines for the day:

THE LATEST:

The Doors’ Ray Manzarek dies
Teen featured in viral video dies
Hear his goodbye song Hear his goodbye song
Senators: Apple ducks billions in taxes
Most of you still like Obama
IRS controversy: New details emerge
Yahoo buys Tumblr; what to know
Dallas firefighter gets trapped, dies
N. Korea keeps firing stuff, but what?
Hot air balloons collide in Turkey Hot air balloons collide in Turkey
Christie takes heat for role in tourism ad
Mourinho leaving Real Madrid

UPDATE II: BBC NEWS HEADLINES. CNN no longer seems to offer a half-hour headlines broadcast, the way it once did. BBC News, on the other hand, does. This succinct but comprehensive report of the facts on the ground is so much better at getting “the story” out, than freezing the frame on one event, almost statically, as our cable and news networks seem to do.

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Blah, Blah, Blah Benghazi

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq

“On the atrocity scale,” I wrote on 11.19.12 “Bush’s badness dwarfed Benghazi-gate.” Any one with a moral compass and a cerebral cortex recognizes that, as scandalous as it is, Benghazi is small scale compared to the immoral, fraudulent invasion of Iraq, and the cost in blood and treasure George W. Bush wrought with that one.

It would be an entirely different matter if Republicans had the intellectual moxie to examine the human toll, for decades to come, of Obama’s “murder by multilateralism” in Libya. For that was what the invasion of Libya amounted to.

But they don’t. To the Republicans, Benghazi-gate amounts to no more that a “procedural mishap.” Namely, finding out “what happened? How did it happen? Who covered it up? And, above all, how do we return to doing what we did before IT happened. ‘IT’ being the Sept. 11 attack on the embassy in Libya that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and ‘three other,’ mostly faceless Americans dead.”

In any event, ABC homes in on the meat of the scandal, tracing it directly to the Obama administration:

…ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points that show they were extensively edited as they evolved from the drafts first written entirely by the CIA to the final version distributed to Congress and to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice before she appeared on five talk shows the Sunday after that attack.
White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department. The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack. …

The bare-bones of Benghazi is laid out by STEPHEN F. HAYES of the neoconservative Weekly Standard:

….Within 24 hours of the attack, the U.S. government had intercepted communications between two al Qaeda-linked terrorists discussing the attacks in Benghazi. One of the jihadists, a member of Ansar al Sharia, reported to the other that he had participated in the assault on the U.S. diplomatic post. Solid evidence. And there was more. Later that same day, the CIA station chief in Libya had sent a memo back to Washington, reporting that eyewitnesses to the attack said the participants were known jihadists, with ties to al Qaeda.
Before circulating the talking points to administration policymakers in the early evening of Friday, September 14, CIA officials changed “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda” to simply “Islamic extremists.” But elsewhere, they added new contextual references to radical Islamists. They noted that initial press reports pointed to Ansar al Sharia involvement and added a bullet point highlighting the fact that the agency had warned about another potential attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in the region. “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy.” All told, the draft of the CIA talking points that was sent to top Obama administration officials that Friday evening included more than a half-dozen references to the enemy?—?al Qaeda, Ansar al Sharia, jihadists, Islamic extremists, and so on.
The version Petraeus received in his inbox Saturday, however, had none. The only remaining allusion to the bad guys noted that “extremists” might have participated in “violent demonstrations.”
In an email at 2:44 p.m. to Chip Walter, head of the CIA’s legislative affairs office, Petraeus expressed frustration at the new, scrubbed talking points, noting that they had been stripped of much of the content his agency had provided. Petraeus noted with evident disappointment that the policymakers had even taken out the line about the CIA’s warning on Cairo. The CIA director, long regarded as a team player, declined to pick a fight with the White House and seemed resigned to the propagation of the administration’s preferred narrative. The final decisions about what to tell the American people rest with the national security staff, he reminded Walter, and not with the CIA. …

MORE.

As the always outspoken and interesting Michael Scheuer put it, not so long ago, “Barack Obama is a despicable man.”

Indeed. On par with George Bush.

Moron Strong

Bush, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Iraq

“We are Boston strong” was coined, or just parroted perhaps, by Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts’ Indian American, senior United States Senator. Warren was speaking at the memorial service for Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer Sean Collier, another victim of the brothers Tsarnaev.

We are also Moron Strong.

The Shrub, former President George W. Bush, delivered an address at Thursday morning’s library dedication ceremony on the campus of SMU in Dallas, Texas. There he said:

“… my deepest conviction, the guiding principle of the administration, is that the United States of America must strive to expand the reach of freedom. [APPLAUSE]”

The Iraqis are still reeling from Genghis Bush’s faith and freedom-based initiative to their country.

No self-examination or reflection have happened in that head … or in Bush-revering ditto-heads like Dana Perino’s.

Iraq: A Decade Hence, Suffocated By Sorrow

Iraq, Journalism, libertarianism, Republicans, War

“I wish the Americans had never come. They ruined our country. They planted divisions. They made us cry for the days of Saddam Hussein.” So Mohammed Rejeb, an Iraqi from Baghdad, told Arwa Damon.

CNN does have one most excellent war correspondent, unmatched, naturally, on the neoconservative channel. She is Arwa Damon, who has been covering America’s aggression abroad for almost (but not quite) as long as this column has been analyzing it.

Unlike the congenitally stupid entertainers around her on cable, right and left, Damon is a serious reporter (if a bad writer). She’s the Yin to Michael Ware’s Yang. The latter was another worthy war-time reporter in the old mold. One could only wish the gaggle on cable possessed Ware’s understanding and knowledge of the geopolitical terrain in Iraq. Naturally, this made Ware persona non grata. He’s gone. Fired, I believe.

Unlike her cretinous colleagues, little tough Arwa seldom smiles or frolics on camera. What’s there to smile about? She covers the carnage of America’s crusades abroad. Damon is also decidedly awkward when that estrogen-oozing ignoramus, Anderson Cooper, draws up a seat for her at a CNN Stupid Panel, and subjects her to his forced bathos.

Here is an excerpt of her report from Baghdad, a decade since that evil invasion:

Ten years on, one can easily look around Baghdad and see a veneer of normalcy. But nothing about Iraq or what it has been through is normal. The cloak of sorrow that hangs over the capital is more suffocating than ever, even if violence is slightly down.
“We’re not living,” one Iraqi colleague told me. “We’re just surviving.”
I think the ones who are good left, and only the bad people stayed here.
It’s as if the violence created a façade. People were so focused on staying alive they didn’t fully notice the corruption, suspicion and tribalism that had seeped into society and government. Now that attacks are down — and fewer Iraqis are killed every day — all that and more has risen to the surface.
Basma al-Khateeb and her two daughters, 22-year-old Sama and 14-year-old Zeina, are among the remnants of Baghdad’s elite — a family that could have left but chose to stay. Basma is an IT professional and well-known activist.
We’ve known Basma and her family for years — she is a regular guest on CNN — and have always marveled at their courage and determination, a love for country that trumped their desire to escape.
But even Basma is uttering what for her was unimaginable. “I lost hope six to seven months ago,” she said. “You don’t feel it’s home any more.”
She paused, crushed by the weight of her own words. “Did I really say that?”
“Now the fear is different,” she explained. “You don’t know who is in the next car. They look at you as if you are different, your clothes, or even your gestures, your body language is different. We’re not comfortable being around the streets.”
“I think the people changed,” her daughter Sama added. “I think the ones who are good left, and only the bad people stayed here.”
It’s such an emotional, mentally complex notion that the family struggles to clearly define it — to be an alien in your own country.
“It’s a different culture, it’s a tribal culture. Before, there was no kind of culture that was dominant.”
Now there is. The streets feel hostile, and people continue to be wary of each other.
For the young, there is no room to mentally expand. For a professional like Sama, it’s either adopt the “principles” of corruption or find yourself unemployed.
“I had hope in the beginning and then I lost it,” she says. “It was like climbing the stairs and then there’s no end to it. You have to go down the stairs again. And that is depressing and very disappointing.
“This is no place for us. Because if I stay here, I have to be corrupt also, to live, to survive.”
In another time and place, Sama might have pursued her passion for the arts. She plays the piano beautifully. It’s a dream she plans to pursue far from her homeland.
As for Zeina, who has known nothing but war, she too wants to leave. Her first memory is of violence. Her defining moment of the last 10 years was a church bombing in 2010 in which her best friend was killed.
For their mother, this is the only home she has known. “I don’t want to have another home.”
But Basma wants something better for her daughters.
“In a certain time, at a certain point, it’s best for them to leave,” she says. “For study or work … for them to find out about themselves (and) be strong. They will not be strong here.”
Tragically, so many Iraqis I know echo those same sentiments. For the vast majority of them, the defining moments of the last 10 years are not of Saddam Hussein’s trial and execution, the drafting of the constitution or dipping their fingers in purple ink in the first elections.
It is the moment they last saw their loved one, gave them that last hug or kiss goodbye — not knowing it would turn out to be such a precious moment — before they were inexplicably, harshly torn away.

[SNIP]

IT IS TIME FOR Arwa Damon to go to Libya and expose Barack Obama’s follow-up crimes in that country and elsewhere, through proxies, covert special operations, drones and armaments.