Desperate measures

Kidnapping journalists, no matter who they work for, is not acceptable.

Palestinian gunmen ambushed a car carrying a Fox News crew in Gaza City on Monday and kidnapped two of the journalists inside, according to witnesses and Fox. "We can confirm that two of our people were taken against their will in Gaza," Fox News said in a statement.

A Fox employee in Gaza, who declined to give his name because he was not authorized to release information about the incident, said the two kidnapped people were reporter Steve Centanni, a U.S. citizen, and a cameraman from New Zealand.

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Major militant groups in Gaza denied having any connection to the abduction, and there was no immediate word of any demands made.

If that's true, then this could be a pure play for cash. That's good news on the one hand. But, on the other, it means that the Palestinians in Gaza are getting more desperate.

This is not a good way to win the world's sympathy at a time when the propaganda war is as important as the shooting war.

Cross your fingers for these guys.

Hostage to history

Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, who made news when she was held for 82 days in Iraq this year, will be telling the story of how she was kidnapped by insurgents. Her translator, Alan Enwiya, was killed during her abduction. But she's not at all eager to report on her ordeal. She doesn't want the publicity, the book deal, or any of the attention that normally comes with a multi-part high-profile report like this.

(The Monitor's Washington D.C. bureau chief Dave) Cook added that "reliving the story was painful for Jill and she did it with reluctance. She is devastated by the death of her translator ... She is concerned about the upheaval her kidnapping caused for her driver, Adnan. And she is worried about retribution aimed at her colleagues in Baghdad, her family, and herself."

The multi-part report also will be available on the Monitor Web site, along with clips from a lengthy interview with Carroll conducted by Monitor D.C. reporter Peter Grier. "Peter worked with Jill closely on this series, interviewed her in Boston and those clips will be embedded in the story on the Web," Cook said.

A promotional ad for the series on the Monitor web site titled it "Hostage: The Jill Carroll Story" and described it as "featuring Jill's own words about her abduction and captivity, along with video clips as she describes her long ordeal."

Obviously the Monitor has fewer reservations than Carroll does.

As it turns out, today four Iraqis were arrested in connection with her abduction.

Meanwhile, back in Baghdad ...

The New York Times' Frank Rich (sub. req'd.) should be available free to everybody. His latest column which asks about "the peculiar disappearance of the war in Iraq."

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won’t catch anyone saying it’s Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a “shame on you” e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

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The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

The specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off Iraq. The larger issue is that we don’t know what we — or, more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops — are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It’s a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot.

Certainly there has been no shortage of retrofitted explanations for the war in the three-plus years since the administration’s initial casus belli, to fend off Saddam’s mushroom clouds and vanquish Al Qaeda, proved to be frauds. We’ve been told that the war would promote democracy in the Arab world. And make the region safer for Israel. And secure the flow of cheap oil. If any of these justifications retained any credibility, they have been obliterated by Crisis in the Middle East. The new war is a grueling daily object lesson in just how much the American blunders in Iraq have undermined the one robust democracy that already existed in the region, Israel, while emboldening terrorists and strengthening the hand of Iran.

But it’s the collapse of the one remaining (and unassailable) motivation that still might justify staying the course in Iraq — as a humanitarian mission on behalf of the Iraqi people — that is most revealing of what a moral catastrophe this misadventure has been for our country. The sad truth is that the war’s architects always cared more about their own grandiose political and ideological ambitions than they did about the Iraqis, and they communicated that indifference from the start to Iraqis and Americans alike. The legacy of that attitude is that the American public cannot be rallied to the Iraqi cause today, as the war reaches its treacherous endgame.

It's worth the price of the subscription just to read the whole thing.

More excerpts here.

Arrested development

Anybody want to hazard a guess as to why Israel would ''detain'' Wal Al-Omari, the Al Jazeera bureau chief in the country, not once but twice this week?

Reporters Without Borders hailed the release of Al-Jazeera bureau chief Walid Al-Omari on bail yesterday but reiterated its appeal to the Israeli authorities to stop harassing the Qatar-based TV news station’s journalists and called on the judicial authorities to drop all charges against Omari.

In a phone call with his editors following his release, Omari said: “It is clear that certain parties want to obstruct Al-Jazeera’s coverage of events.” Al-Jazeera stressed that Omari’s release was subject to payment of bail.

Also:

Al Omari was first detained Sunday night in the northern Israeli city of Haifa. He was released several hours later.

Rosenfeld said Al Omari, his cameraman, and an assistant were questioned Sunday about footage they took after dozens of Hezbollah rockets landed on Haifa, killing eight Israelis in the guerrilla group's deadliest ever attack on
Israel.

Israeli authorities and local media have accused the Qatar-based satellite station of showing sensitive security locations that could be used by Hezbollah to pinpoint targets for an attack.

Al-Jazeera has denied the allegations.

After his release Sunday, Al Omari headed north to the Lebanese-Israeli border — the scene of fierce fighting between Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerillas for six days. There he was detained a second time.

"The only difference between us and the rest (of the journalists) is that there are people who want to make it difficult for us to do our work after all the incitement against us. I have no other explanation," Al Omari told Israel Radio as he was being taken into custody.

Note that the Arabic-language satellite news channel is available in Israel.

Unlike in Canada.

Girlhood, interrupted

Editor & Publisher reports that, despite proof that the victim in the alleged Mahmoudiya rape and killing spree involving members of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, was only 14, news organizations continue to refer to her as ''woman'' and ''young woman.''

Two days ago, Reuters and others news agencies produced proof that she was 14, based on a passport and identity card. Most news organizations then started calling her a girl -- but some persist in referring to her as a "woman."

The girl was apparently born August 19, 1991. Yet a widely published AP story today by Robert H. Reid repeatedly referred to the girl, whose last name was al-Janabi, as a “young Iraqi woman" and later again as a "woman." The story was in reference to the gag order being requested by attorneys of Steven D. Green, an ex-soldier who is one of the men charged with the rape and murders. It begins: "An al-Qaida-linked group posted a Web video today purporting to show the mutilated bodies of two Fort Campbell soldiers, claiming it killed them in revenge for the rape-slaying of a young Iraqi woman by American troops from the same unit."

A separate AP story today by Juan Lozano, on the soldiers' families defending them, also refers to the girl as a "young woman."

In Tuesday's Washington Post, an article by Joshua Partlow refers to the teenager as an “Iraqi woman.” USA Today continues to feature the AP "young woman" story. The CNN site calls the victim a "young female" and a "woman." A CNN report aired Tuesday by Nic Robertson continued to refer to the child as a "young woman."

Yet a full day earlier, and again today, The New York Times was calling her a "girl." The Los Angeles Times today referred to her as a "teenage Iraqi" and later as a "teen." Bloomberg used "girl" and McClatchy's dispatch chose "teenager." Reuters simply stated her age: 14.

But Jim Lehrer on his PBS "NewsHour" last night referred to her a "woman." At the CBS News site today, a joint CBS/AP story uses "young woman."

They sure grow up fast in occupied liberated Iraq.

Trigger a debate

The Sunday Times' Christina Lamb, embedded with an elite company of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment in Afghanistan, gives a hair-raising account of an ambush last week by the Taliban. This is war reporting at its bravest, and finest.

“HAVE you ever used a pistol?” yelled Sergeant-Major Mick Bolton amid the Kalashnikov fire and bursts from a machinegun as we ran across a baked-mud field and dived for cover. “If it comes down to it, everyone’s going to have to fight.”

Round after round fizzed past our ears, sending up clouds of dust. My heart was thudding crazily against my flak jacket, my breath coming in short, rasping pants.

The whoosh of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) close enough to lift the hairs on the back of my neck was followed by an orange blaze of flame as it landed nearby.

I hurled myself into an irrigation ditch and crouched amid the tall reeds, the soil just above me flying up as bullets landed all around. Then firing started coming from behind too. The Taliban had us from three sides.

Lamb, an old Afghan hand (does one say that these days?)  truly thought she was done for, as did the troops she was with.

I have been in some hairy situations, not least in Afghanistan, a country that I love, where at the age of 22 I was trapped in trenches by Russian tanks with a group of mujaheddin. But this was the first time in my life that I thought I would not survive.

Worse, I looked at the taut faces around me — and could see the soldiers thought that too.

I thought about all the things left undone in my life, words left unsaid or unwritten, but most of all, my little boy’s big blue eyes and curly hair, and I just wanted it to stop.

FOR the next two hours we were under relentless fire from AK47s, RPGs, mortars and a Dushka, a Russian-made heavy machine gun.

Justin — separated in a trench with a group led by Major Blair — was under attack from all sides, but witnessed the turning of the battle.

“We were ordered out of the ditch and, under heavy covering fire, scrambled up the sides. Breaking towards the river we came under fire again. This time there was a massive burst of fire from the FSG on the ridge directed at the Taliban.”

The Paras had managed to regroup impressively. The men of the FSG beat off their own ambushers, drove their vehicles to the south where they were more secure and then moved back north along the ridge to our aid — with devastating effect.

But it's not just the Taliban that's the enemy.

Everyone was stunned at how quickly the Taliban had organised themselves and how co-ordinated they had been. From the time we had walked into the village to the start of the ambush was less than an hour and they had been undeterred by our array of hardware.

“That’s as bold as it comes,” said Captain McKenzie, shaking his head in awe. He added: “The Taliban are quite ingenious but they’ve probably got 25 dead blokes and we’ve got none and that speaks volumes.”

Private Deerans said: “We don’t tend to think the Taliban can fight as well as us, but they’re fighting for something they really believe in and they have the advantage of local terrain. They’re world-class at getting rounds down but fortunately their shooting was crap.

“Still, it was close enough for me. They had the advantage from the beginning and I don’t know how none of us got shot.”

Some of the men realised they had forgotten to wear their wedding rings that day. “I have my fiancée’s ring on a string and it’s the first time I’ve gone on an operation without it,” said Sergeant-Major Bolton.

I looked at my own bare finger, remembering how while checking in for my flight at Heathrow 20 days earlier I had realised the two rings I always wear were in an oyster shell by the side of my bed.

The big question was whether the villagers were in on the ambush. It seemed clear to me that they had directed us straight into it, and there must have been locals fighting for them to organise so quickly.

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains untamed, unchanged and unpacified.

It may be just too late. Disillusion with the government of President Hamid Karzai has never been so high. The Taliban have reorganised, possibly with the help of both the Pakistani military intelligence and Al-Qaeda, to use the sophisticated tactics I experienced first hand in Zumbelay.

No longer are they just a few dozen ragtag fighters here and there. Now groups often include hundreds of heavily armed men equipped with motorbikes, cars, horses and radios.

All over the south they have set up shadow administrations and kill any Afghan who is even indirectly associated with the government, such as teachers. Approximately 1,500 Afghan security guards and civilians were killed by the Taliban last year and some 900 already this year.

The Taliban are also winning the propaganda game. Within a few hours of our returning to Camp Price, the Afghan Islamic Press in Peshawar had put out a statement claiming the Taliban had killed seven British soldiers in Zumbelay.

Far from losing any men, the brave paras from C company had killed about 20 Taliban. Yet the Ministry of Defence put out nothing. If Justin and I had not been there, you would probably never have read about it.

Ask yourself how much you have heard about what is going on with Operation Mountain Thrust from a Canadian perspective. Ask yourself what Canada's ''mission'' there is, and whether it's the right one -- both for Afghanistan and Canada. Then ask yourself why this debate isn't (still) raging in the media.

H/t to Scott Disher.

Number one with a hail of bullets

The U.S. Marine Corps confirmed that it is investigating a music video on the Internet showing what seems to be a Marine in Iraq performing a comic song about killing civilians. The video was posted on YouTube.com but has been taken down. In it, the soldier, to the laughs and cheers of his unseen audience, sings about using a young Iraqi girl as a shield while bullets fly.

The song also refers to Iraqis as ''hajis'' -- which properly means somebody who has completed his or her pilgrimage to Mecca but is now an insulting term used by U.S. troops. (Remember ''gooks'' from the Vietnam era?)

Said the Corps in a statement:

The video is not reflective of the tremendous sacrifices and dedication demonstrated, on a daily basis, by tens of thousands of Marines who have assisted the Iraqi people in gaining their freedom. We agree with the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations that the inappropriate actions of a few individuals should not tarnish the reputation of all American military personnel.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has the song here.

We welcome the Marine Corps statement, but we also expect that those who participated in this incident will be identified and disciplined appropriately,” said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. Awad added that he hoped Congress would conduct hearings on this and similar incidents.

Yabbut, after the alleged Haditha massacre, what's a little ditty, right?

Hurt

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED BECAUSE I LEFT OUT THE LINK BECAUSE I WAS TIRED OKAY? (Thanks to all you guys who emailed me about my lapse.)

And now is the time at Azerbic where we see their pain -- because sure as shootin' you ain't gonna see this on Fox News.

H/t to Voxpopgirl.

Every time you close your eyes! Lies! Lies!

I will get to the coverage of the Toronto terrorism arrests later today but I had to draw your attention to this explosive piece in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed is long, thousands and thousands of words long, and it is complicated, but Craig Unger has produced bang-up journalism in tracking down the ''black propaganda'' campaign around the supposed attempts by Saddam Hussein to acquire yellowcake urnaium from Niger. This is a tale of forgery, international collusion, media manipulation, political conspiracy and, of course, outright and outrageous lies to the world.

In last-minute negotiations between the White House and the C.I.A., a decision was made to attribute the alleged Niger uranium deal to British intelligence. The official reason was that it was preferable to cite British intelligence, which Blair had championed in his 50-page report, rather than classified American intelligence. But the C.I.A. had told the White House again and again that it didn't trust the British reports.

The British, meanwhile, have repeatedly claimed to have other sources, but they have refused to identify them. According to Joseph Wilson, that refusal is a violation of the U.N. resolution stipulating that member states must share with the International Atomic Energy Agency all information they have on prohibited nuclear programs in Iraq. "The British say they cannot share the information, because it comes from a third-country intelligence source," says Wilson. "But that third country is presumably a member of the United Nations, and it too should comply with Article 10 of United Nations Resolution 1441." So far, Wilson says, no evidence of a third country has come to light.

A week after Bush's speech, on February 4 (2003), the Bush administration finally forwarded electronic copies of the Niger documents to the I.A.E.A. Astonishingly, a note was attached to the documents which said, "We cannot confirm these reports and have questions regarding some specific claims."

On March 7, the I.A.E.A. publicly exposed the Niger documents as forgeries. Not long afterward, Cheney was asked about it on Meet the Press. He said that the I.A.E.A. was wrong, that it had "consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing." He added, "We know [Saddam] has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Excerpting anything from this does not even begin to do Unger's work justice. So settle in and read the whole thing.

Let's see if the Bushies deny it.

My guess it, they won't. Or can't.

H/t to Voxpopgirl.

Bullet holes in her story

Media Dissector Danny Schechter uncovers this astonishing tidbit about the alleged Haditha massacre:

Early Thursday morning, the CNN website carried a story by one of its Iraq reporters who realized after the fact that she knew about the marines at Haditha but did not report on them at the time.

"It actually took me a while to put all the pieces together -- that I know these guys, the U.S. Marines at the heart of the alleged massacre of Iraqi civilians in Haditha,” admits reporter Arwa Damon.

When I went back to quote her more extensively a half-hour later, the story was off the website and its URL did not work, but I found it anyway through CNN’s website archive.

It’s a rare piece of media introspection.

“I don't know why it didn't register with me until now. It was only after scrolling through the tapes that we shot in Haditha last fall, and I found footage of some of the officers that had been relieved of their command, that it hit me.

“I know the Marines that were operating in western al Anbar, from Husayba all the way to Haditha. I went on countless operations in 2005 up and down the Euphrates River Valley. I was pinned on rooftops with them in Ubeydi for hours taking incoming fire, and I've seen them not fire a shot back because they did not have positive identification on a target.

(Note: the anguish of the U.S. military still tends to get more airtime than the anguish of Iraqi civilians.)

Damon continues:

“I saw their horror when they thought that they finally had identified their target, fired a tank round that went through a wall and into a house filled with civilians. They then rushed to help the wounded--remarkably no one was killed…

“And so began the e-mails and phone calls between myself and my two other CNN crew members, Jennifer Eccleston and Gabe Ramirez: Do you remember when we were talking with the battalion commander and his intel guy right outside the school and then half an hour later they found an IED in that spot? Do you remember when we were sitting chatting with them at the school? And all the other "do you remember whens."

“There was also -- can you believe it? -- the allegations of the Haditha probe.”

“Can you believe it?” Yes, I can believe it. Haditha is coming to light because conscientious marines spoke out and then ex-marine Congressman John Murtha spoke out and then ‘TIME’ picked it up.

Our fearless TV journalists did not break the story.

CNN had it, but, according to Damon, didn’t realize it.

Maybe this is what happens when you're embed too deep?