Women and children killed in US raid in Iraq. We say insurgents killed.

[Kellyiswise]

Folks on the ground and the ones who pulled the bodies out say differently.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/12E45678-37C5-40D4-BED1-20240C3A740E.htm

[xultar]

1. Whites killed = women & children. Brown women & children killed = insurgents.

[Kellyiswise]

2. Got it! Thanks I'll be more accurate in the future.

[Igel]

3. Or, the flip--and equally verifiable version--

Insurgents killed in US raid in Iraq. Local stringer reports women and children killed.


Unless it was a Shi'ite or Western reporter, with video. Nasrallah can say Saniora ordered the Lebanese army to confiscate weapons and cooperated with the Israelis; imams can say the US killed Saddam. The truth is obviously malleable when there's PR to be gained. Few dispute this.

But why people assume only the US military kneads the truth into a pretzel is a mystery to me--an inverse version of American exceptionalism, I suspect.

[Lexingtonian]

4. Thank you very much

Of course we assume that all Middle Easterners tell the truth...not.

We Americans do take the official high level claims by our own military's publicity/propaganda arm with a big grain of salt because it started this variety of shameless misrepresentation and lying about killed civilians being opposition fighters in Vietnam. My Lai, for example. ("We had to destroy the village in order to save it.") It hasn't stopped doing this whenever (a) the fighting is not in a First World country, and (b) it thinks that right-leaning Americans can't tell the difference between the two things or- out of racist and ideological bigotry- don't care. This misrepresentation has continued in the warlets in Granada, Panama, and Kuwait/Iraq. The American Right secretly favored the Serbs in the Yugoslav wars, and its propaganda arms always emphasized the numbers of Serbs (i.e. white Christian fascists) wrongfully killed and discounted the Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, and Croatians killed. The number of civilian Iraqis killed during the low intensity warfare between 1991 and 2003 has also never been acknowledged in the American public arena. The number of Palestinians and Kuwaitis killed in and following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait has also never been acknowledged- they're Muslims and Arabs, after all.

The pattern has not ended in Iraq- the American military and political operatives refuse to create any tally whatsoever of the overall numbers of Iraqis and other non-white people killed in Iraq since March 2003, for the obvious reason that it would be followed by a demand for an accounting for the number of people killed by Americans and explanations for why certain kinds of people, e.g. Israeli and Saudi torture specialists, were in the country at all at the time they were killed.

We simply know our present military and who controls the PR from it. 98% of the soldiers and officers are innocent of any misrepresentation, of course. But the other 2% create a "narrative" to appeal to their murder-approving political supporters and misrepresent the facts to fit a myth of what is taking place and why. Because, as you know, all armies bring peace and are forces of progress and serve the sorrowful work of ending the violence of people whose desires are demonic and actions are immoral. Unless, of course, it's all a lie and the impostion of the armed force is itself a fruit of immoralism at the highest levels.

[Ms. Clio]

6. the difference is, of course, that it never actually goes down in Iraq like your fantasy scenario

gosh darn that reality and its well-known liberal bias. And what a strange and obvious attempt to conflate Lebanon with Iraq.

[malaise]

5. 25 more killed in mortor attack n/t