Monday,
September 19 2005
INTERVIEWING THE ENEMY:
It's not quite sleeping with them, but a bit unseemly nonetheless.
In what I'm sure many on the left will hail as a sterling piece
of "objective journalism," Ellen
Knickmeyer of the Washington Post turns to an expert to debunk
claims by the U.S. military that they're making progress against
the insurgency in Iraq:
The
fact that American forces still attack entire cities and towns
in the west is a sign of how much territory remains out of U.S.
and Iraqi government control, said Abu Hatem Dulaimi,
a member of the Zarqawi-allied Ansar al-Sunna Army.
"I
can say that the legend of the undefeated U.S. Army is gone,
owing to our rockets and mines, which are separating them from
it day after day," Dulaimi said in a telephone
interview. "If they bet that time will be the
way to end the resistance, they are wrong, because we are stronger
since a year ago or maybe more."
Twenty-five
members of Ansar al-Sunna killed themselves and others in suicide
attacks last month, he said, and 53 volunteers for suicide attacks
have arrived since.
There's nothing
quite like getting your enemy's propoganda served up unfiltered
in a major American daily newspaper.
Meanwhile,
if this
little item from the Associated Press is accurate it would
seem to merit at least as much attention as Knickmeyer gives to
Dulaimi's claims:
A suicide
bomber captured before he could blow himself up in a Shiite
mosque late last week claimed he was kidnapped, beaten and drugged
by insurgents who forced him to take on the mission. The U.S.
military on Sunday said its medical tests indicated he was telling
the truth.
This sounds
remarkably similar to a September
14 DoD briefing where Colonel Robert Brown described the deterioration
he's seen in the Iraqi insurgency over time (via Belmont
Club):
And
as we got to February and March, we saw a completely different
foreign fighter. We've captured Libyans. We've captured Saudi,
Yemenis, Algerians. And many of these -- one Libyan that we
captured about a month and a half ago -- he was clearly brainwashed.
And he was told that, you know, what was going on here and brainwashed
to come and be a -- what he thought was -- he was going to be
a foreign fighter against this crusade against the Muslim religion.
He got here. He saw that was not correct. They told he was going
to be a suicide martyr. He said he didn't want to do that.
The insurgency
may not be in its "last
throes" just yet, but these reports along with the fact
that Zarqawi
has now declared war on the Shiites suggest the insurgency
may not be as strong as we think, but is instead scrapping, scraping,
and pulling out all the stops to try and derail the coming elections.
Iraq the Model, a blog every American should be forced to read,
says
the next few weeks are the biggest and toughest test Iraqis
will ever have to face.
PAUL
& TIM MISLEADING THE PUBLIC: What's worse, no correction
or a faux correction? According to yesterday's
transcript Tim Russert made no mention of the fact that Aaron
Broussard's emotional breakdown on the September
4 show was, in reality, a
piece of political theater of which many of the details were
fabricated with the obvious intent of misleading Mr. Russert's
viewers.
Meanwhile,
it looks as if Paul Krugman and his ego have been saved by The
New York Times' insane decision to lock their columnists
in a subscription cage. Now, after two pathetic misfires, Krugman
can get that testy
and ethical Byron Calame off his back by issuing a real correction
- one that Krugman can rest assured only a few people are going
to read.- T. Bevan 9:45 am Link
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