What Does Iraq and No Gun-ri Have in Common?
The Associated Press of course:
THE most powerful media institution in all of human history is the Associated Press. Its news feed is ubiquitous – used, directly or indirectly, by every U.S. newspaper and TV news program and a vast number of foreign ones, too. AP maintains the largest world-wide coverage, and its reader base is nearly immeasurable. Unfortunately, and repeatedly of late, this behemoth has not only been getting it wrong – but increasingly refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing.
Instead, acting more like a politician or the mega-corporation that it is, the AP crew spins, obfuscates and attacks. Now they’re at it again in Iraq.
I have got direct experience of this – from challenging the AP’s seriously flawed 1999 “scoop” about the massacre near the South Korean village of No Gun Ri during the opening days of the Korean War.
Bad things did happen at No Gun Ri, of this there can be no doubt. My own research and other historians’, as well as the joint U.S.-Korean government investigation, confirms that a tragedy occurred – there were civilians who were killed there, by our side, and that was wrong.
But the AP’s sensationalistic story painted it as a deliberate massacre, done with machine guns at extremely close range.
The most sensational account started in the 57th paragraph of the 3,448-word story, sourced to one Edward Daily. As AP told it, Daily was the only soldier at No Gun Ri who directly received orders from his officers to turn his water-cooled .30 caliber machinegun on the civilians and shoot them down in cold blood at point-blank range.
Daily’s account was chilling. It was also – as AP should have known – a fantasy.
The AP story took at face value Daily’s claims that he was a combat infantryman who won a battlefield commission just a few days after the events at No Gun Ri, and had been awarded the Distinguished Cross and three Purple-Hearts.
In reality, he was an enlisted mechanic in an entirely different unit, nowhere near No Gun Ri. He had fabricated his biography and credentials as well as his entire account of the events at No Gun Ri.
When I later confronted AP editors with the facts and records that showed their source Daily to be a fraud, they blew me off. What would a historian know about this topic after all, or a soldier?
The AP didn’t issue a retraction, or even attempt to reinvestigate; and it certainly didn’t withdraw the story from the Pulitzer competition. Instead, it attacked the messenger.
Make sure you read the rest of the article.
Robert Bateman wrote the book, No Gun-ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident, that exposed much of the sloppy reporting by the AP in their No Gun Ri story and lays out a very strong case of what happened at No Gun-ri based on physical evidence. Due to his efforts, Bateman had to withstand an AP attack on him for exposing their sloppy reporting.
I’m sure Bateman is looking on with some personal satisfaction as the AP has been caught yet again sensationalizing the news. If you haven’t read “Who is Jamil Hussein?” yet, than you have been missing out because you really should. The AP No Gun-ri reporting aided the North Korean enemy in a limited manner by helping to mobilize public opinion in South Korea against the US military, but the Jamil Hussein controversy is the AP directly taking news reports straight from the enemy and reporting it as fact for two years! This would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
HT: MM
Here is the AP's response:
http://tinyurl.com/yj34tw
I read that and the AP is doing the same thing they did to Robert Bateman. Attack the people who offer evidence challenging their story instead of proving their story is accurate. They said they verified their story by "anonymous witnesses". Other media outlets have witnesses from the neighborhood on the record saying only one mosque had fire set to it on its door and no one was burned alive. This was confirmed by US and Iraqi soldiers who went to the neighborhood.
All the AP has to do shut everyone up is produce Jamil Hussein. They won't do it because they know he is a fraud. To protect their reputation they won't admit it and will keep denying it until blows over. Just like the No Gun-ri controversy.
Be on note: CENTCOM is intensifying its efforts infiltrating blogs and message boards to ensure people, "have the opportunity to read positive stories," about how Iraq is a liberated democracy and the war on terror really is about protecting Americans.
The CENTCOM website features a useful section, "What Extremists Are Saying," which provides a full catalogue and showcases the diatribes of Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi , Ayman al-Zawahiri and their sympathizers – rhetoric that CENTCOM hopes surfers will seek out in order for them to grasp a true understanding for the necessity for helping Iraq in the name of "freedom."
We want to spread the message that inquisitive careless bloggers must not "aid the enemy".
President George W. Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in the East Room of the White House in Washington. The bill effectively is a tool to nullify Journalistic and blogging disinformation.
The White House has made clear it will target American citizens for propagating information harmful to the interests of the U.S. government and classify them as enemy combatants. This is codified in sub-section 27 of section 950v. of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Bush's own strategy document for "winning the war on terror" identifies "conspiracy theorists," meaning anyone who exposes alleged government corruption and lies about major domestic and world events, as "terrorists recruiters," and vows to eliminate their influence in society.
In a speech given Monday, Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff identified the web as a "terror training camp," through which "disaffected people living in the United States" are developing "radical ideologies and potentially violent skills."
Chertoff has pledged to dispatch Homeland Security agents to local police departments in order to aid in the apprehension of domestic terrorists who use the Internet as a political tool.
Soon subversive online writers, bloggers and journalists like Greg Palast, who was charged with aiding the terrorists when filming "critical U.S. infrastructure," can now be legally gunned down on the street like in Russia or the newly "free" Iraq.
The Bush administration's media mouthpieces have also been mobilized to stereotype any kind of critical thinking as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," a recent case in point being Fox News' Bill O'Reilly calling for the FBI to investigate the 9/11 Scholars organization for possible ties to terrorist organizations.
A combination of suppressing subversive journalism and moves to license websites, impose "hate speech" restrictions and terminate the old internet in favor of a government regulated "Internet 2" are the tools in the American arsenal in its noble struggle to continue their domestic and international cleansing of terrorist factions under the mandated consensus of total obedience.