A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day....10-23-03....What does Iraq look like without the Media Filter?

JohnHuang2; Dutchess; Billie | JohnHuang2

[dutchess]

A Few of FR's Finest....Every Day

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What does Iraq look like without the Media Filter?

by JohnHuang2

"There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth," President Bush observed recently, regarding news coverage on Iraq. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people."

The 'filter' the President refers to is the filter of Big Media reportage, which reports regularly of tremendous progress Saddam forces have made since the fall of Saddam in April. The fall of Saddam -- a minor setback for Saddam, really -- was prompted by the evil Halliburton-led invasion of Iraq in late March. The 3 major broadcast networks -- part of the filter -- say they're not really anti-Bush, only trying to set the record straight: That Bush is a warmonger, his advisers are warmongers and postwar setbacks for Saddam haven't really happened. The post-Saddam aftermath has gone swimmingly for Saddam, despite what Bush says, Big Media insists. Forty-three of 55 top Baathists are dead or captured, but that's no big deal. Things are looking upbeat for Saddam. Don't let Bush fool you, Saddam isn't bogged down in any Quagmire, they say. It's America, not Saddam, on the run in postwar Iraq. From Basra to Mosul, Saddam is making very good progress, dismantling Coalition forces triumphantly. The besieged Coalition forces are led by evil neo-con think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, in league with Skull and Bones, in league with Halliburton, which seeks global hegemony for Halliburton, says Big Media.

Big Media refuses to say how long before Neo-Con-led forces are driven out and Saddam's march to Baghdad is complete. But it could happen any day now, you'll see.

To justify war, the neo-cons, led by Richard Perle, sought to foster the notion that Saddam was a bad guy, among other misconceptions. In fact, so deep, so profound, so nefarious was this neo-con plot, that the neo-cons even got Saddam's inner circle of advisers to fool Saddam, telling him he had Weapons of Mass Destruction when he really didn't. This misinformation was then fed to the CIA -- all part of a plot hatched by Fred Barnes and Richard Perle to start a war against an innocent dictator misled by top advisers who were taking orders from neo-cons in Washington.

"Was (Saddam) tricked by his own people?" Brit Hume asked not-yet-Arnoldized Rep. Jane Harmon, California Democrat, on Fox News Sunday. "It's a possibility," replied the brilliant Congresscritter.

Hume, impressed with her brilliance, pressed Harmon further: "The greatest intelligence hoax of all time, you now believe in it."

Harmon: "I think."

But this doesn't get George W. Bush off the hook. "WEEK AFTER WEEK AFTER WEEK AFTER WEEK, WE WERE TOLD LIE AFTER LIE AFTER LIE AFTER LIE!!," Sen. Ted Kennedy calmly observed last week on the Senate floor, denying his personal attacks were personal attacks. BUSH LIED! SADDAM NEVER LIED! Obviously Bush, an evil mastermind, was in on the plot to trick Saddam into thinking he still possessed WMD. Although Bush is an evil mastermind, at times he's the dumbest evil mastermind in history, forgetting to plant the Bloody Glove on Saddam. It's all so very clear.

But this evil right-wing plot is unraveling, rest assured, as the U.S. occupation has been a Miserable Failure.

Since the fall of Baghdad, Big Media has waged a massive public relations campaign, defending its opposition to military action through gazillions of articles and gazillions of hours of airtime, aimed at dispelling silly notions that Saddam might be losing and America might be winning the war.

Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and other Democrat officials strongly deny they're filters, or that they have a hidden agenda.

They're only trying to present a fair and balanced picture of the U.S. occupation, which, they say, has been horrible, shocking, brutal.

And a Quagmire.

Well, has it been a brutal Quagmire? I've done some digging.(For the record, Al Gore does not claim to have invented Quagmire).

Since Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, Quagmire in Iraq has come under increasing fire. In the past 6 months, U.S. forces have pounded Iraq with 13,000 reconstruction projects and 1,500 school rehabilitations, confesses L. Paul Bremer, U.S. anti-Quagmire administrator in Iraq and notorious Quagmire-basher. The offensive dealt a heavy blow to Quagmire, leaving it in critical condition as of this writing (late Tuesday evening). Eight hundred schools in northern Iraq have been hit with new windows, new paint and new textbooks, a further setback for the embattled Quagmire.

Coalition forces, in another major offensive, have attacked Iraq with higher salaries for doctors and teachers and 22 million vaccination doses to children, a major blow to contagious disease, raising still more doubt about Quagmire's poor postwar planning. Six months of bungling and ineptitude Quagmire has amassed has left Quagmire's struggling mission in serious doubt, even among its loyalist fans at Democrat headquarters and France. All 240 hospitals and all 1,200 clinics in Iraq are up and running, a very troubling development for Quagmire as bacteria spores and disease face increasingly long odds. Folks, this stuff is World Series! Er, Serious.

The unrelenting reconstruction barrage unleashed by Coalition forces has brutally killed the electricity shortage, with power now exceeding pre-war levels and 75% of pre-war telephone services restored, another terrible setback for Quagmire. The energy crunch has lost so much ground, few believe it can ever recover. Not even Affirmation Action -- for example, giving the energy crunch special admissions preference in 10 percent of homes in Iraq -- can save it now. It's all so terribly unfair!

While the French and Old Europe Democrats are Quagmire's biggest fans, hostility towards Quagmire runs at fever pitch among our troops. (Sorta like Cubs fans towards Steve Bartman after inning 8, Game 6 at Wrigley? Nah, wouldn't go that far.)

Throughout Iraq, Quagmire is getting ambushed, outmaneuvered. With Coalition forces on the hunt, Quagmire can run, but Quagmire can't hide. The string of U.S.-led raids, seizing hundreds of Quagmire "guerrilla" reinforcements, bedevils the struggling Quagmire, as it grapples with increasingly sophisticated U.S. resistance to Quagmire.

Dealing a massive setback to street crime, Coalition forces have carpet-bombed Iraq with over 40,000 new Iraqi police now on duty, with more on the way. Frustrating Democrats and other die-hard Saddam supporters further, the new Iraqi police force has no intention of handing control back to Quagmire any time soon.

An outbreak of severely contagious freedom has infected the country, with over 170 new newspapers in circulation. (Don't know if the New York Times or L.A. Times are on stands though, given Iraqi distaste for Ba'athist propaganda, plagiarism and 30-year old grope stories about Arnold, an icon in Baghdad.) Satellite dishes, forbidden under Saddam, are now sold on street corners everywhere.Transmitting the infectious condition further, "all 22 universities and 43 technical institutes and colleges are (now) open, as are nearly all primary and secondary schools," added Ambassador Bremer, in a further grim assessment for Quagmirists. "Today nearly all of Iraq's 400 courts are functioning," as signs and symptoms of freedom spread by the hour. Threatening Iraq with a successful transition to democracy, elected local councils now dot the land, as 25 ministers -- selected by evil Halliburton! -- run the central government in Baghdad. With oil pumping at near pre-war levels, a new currency, and growing anti-Quagmireism throughout Iraq, the future for Quagmire looks increasingly bleak as pervasive U.S. success grows evermore...pervasive. Quagmire's early success was waaaaaay overrated.

While top Democrats believe the road to the White House leads through Baghdad -- drive U.S. forces from Iraq, and the White House goes Dem in '04 -- unless Quagmire 'finds its voice,' and soon, Quagmire is doomed in the sands of Iraq.

Anyway, that's...

My two cents...

THIS WEEK'S THREADS 10-20-03...Military Monday 10-21-03...The Best Defense: GodluvsAmerica 10-22-03...Michigan...A Water Wonderland

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[The Mayor]

Through prayer, finite man draws upon the power of the infinite God.

[DollyCali]

Excellent.. what a great way to start the day...

Thank you two !

[Calpernia]

Goood morning to the Finest!

[Calpernia]

Under Saddam he only knows fear. Fear can be a great motivator but after you've lived with fear Hope can be an even greater motivator. America provides Hope and he really knows nothing about America, except he knows what is most important about America. America provides Hope. Ernie De Bella, April 2003

[MEG33]

Good Morning.I love the picture with the Psalm.

[Calpernia]

Our military can end the regimes of today with military might. But, then, we must step up and finish the job. We need to contribute to feed, clothe and educate the citizens of these countries; otherwise, the terrorist will come back and recruit.

Even President Bush recognized this. In his State of the Union address, he said that America will help the oppressed people "secure their country, rebuild their society and educate all their children-boys and girls."

Why does this responsibility fall to us? Because of what the regimes have been doing to them. And unless we step up and aggressively, collectively contribute to the cause....it will only be a matter of time before the next 9/11.

9/11 made this cause both of our destinies, the people oppressed by regimes and the people of the US are bound together. We must win together to win this one. In a way we have become related by blood. Their freedom and our homeland security have been watered by the blood of those willing.

"It is no coincidence the name of the coalition is The Coalition Of The Willing. It is costing us the lives of our children that is a mighty bond." Luz C. Cintrón, April 2003

See Ragtime Cowgirl's post about France and Germany's decline to Iraqi Aid here

[MEG33]

Is this the very best?If not it is close.Great column,wonderful layout,dutchess!

[Calpernia]

"Was (Saddam) tricked by his own people?" Brit Hume asked not-yet-Arnoldized Rep. Jane Harmon, California Democrat, on Fox News Sunday. "It's a possibility," replied the brilliant Congresscritter.

Let's hear from some Iraqi Natives about this trick:

I have been imprisoned, tortured and gassed by Saddam Hussein's regime. I know what life is like inside Iraq.

So I can assure these demonstrators that they wouldn't survive a month if they were dropped into Baghdad and forced to live as Iraqis live. They would be arrested and tortured as soon as they started complaining about the lack of basic human rights.

I was born in Halabja, close to the Iranian border in the northern Kurdish region. After graduating from school, I became a mathematics teacher there. In the mid-1980s, a law was passed decreeing that all teaching must be done in Arabic. No more would we be allowed to teach in Kurdish. There were demonstrations. Some students burned books in protest.

These young protesters soon found themselves fleeing Iraqi intelligence officers who were sent to our town to round up the demonstrators. I helped hide these youths in the school's physics lab and they managed to escape.

But someone must have informed the authorities because I was arrested the following day. I was held for three days, during which I was forced to sit in ice-cold water and, like so many other Iraqi women, endure many humiliations.

After I was released, Iraqi intelligence officers followed me everywhere. No one was allowed to speak to me. I was soon fired and told not to go anywhere near my school or any of my former pupils. I was reassigned to the education department office of the regional government in the city of Suleimaniyah.

In 1987, I received a memo from the director calling me to a meeting. I arrived to find the hall packed with friends and colleagues. Intelligence officers surrounded the building and arrested all of us. Before being taken away, the women were told, "Bring your menfolk who are peshmergas (anti-Saddam Kurdish guerrillas) or bring divorce papers."

I did neither. That was the day I decided to join the peshmergas. Once released, I fled to the mountains, living the life of a guerrilla - a life of hell.

In 1988, 21 members of my family died of suffocation when Saddam's forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons. Fortunately, my mother, brothers and sisters were in Suleimaniyah and survived. I wasn't so fortunate. Saddam's forces launched a chemical attack on the small mountain village of Kanyto where I was living. I survived, although badly injured, and spent three months in a hospital recovering from the chemical burns blistered my body from head to foot.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, I decided to leave my homeland: I fled to England and resumed my teaching career at a school for boys in London. Since then, the most dangerous thing I have to deal with these days are unruly teenagers. This is the world that the protesters know, not Saddam's world of chemical weapons, of arbitrary terror and rape.

How many opponents of the war have spoken to an Iraqi woman who has been raped in front of her father and son by Saddam's thugs? How many have asked an Iraqi mother how she felt when she was forced to watch her son being executed - and then ordered to pay for the bullet that killed him? How many know that these mothers have been forced to applaud as their sons died, or face execution themselves? I saw and heard all this in the village of Suleimaniyah. I still hear the clapping.

I have spoken to many people in northern Iraq over the last few weeks. They all agree that the threat of war advocated by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair may be the one chance to rid Iraq of the disease that is Saddam Hussein. Like myself, they worry that Saddam will see the war protests as a sign of weakness.

Giving U.N. weapons inspectors more time to determine whether Iraq is complying with international demands that it give up its weapons of mass destruction is a bad joke. Saddam will never disarm. He will lie, cheat and bluff his way out. He always has and always will.

Freshta Raper is head of mathematics at a boys school in London. Institute for War & Peace Reporting

Click here to hear another Iraqi Native who called into a radio show.

[Calpernia]

Hume, impressed with her brilliance, pressed Harmon further: "The greatest intelligence hoax of all time, you now believe in it."

I would like to post pictures of this hoax; but they are disturbing. So click here to see this great intelligence hoax.

[MEG33]

I loved the Michigan post.Good morning to all!Hope it's a good one.

[MEG33]

Sock it to em ,Calpernia.Great posts,tragic pictures.

[Calpernia]

Wow John and Dutchess, can you tell your post hit a nerve with me today? GREAT JOB!

Click!

[Calpernia]

>>>I love the picture with the Psalm

Luz C. Cintrón made the pictures with the Psalms. He is another freeper and I unfortunately forgot his FR Nic.

[MEG33]

I clicked and it doesn't work on the eagle and flag.

[Calpernia]

>>>Sock it to em

It genuinely *isses me off.

[Calpernia]

Oh what a bummer. I messed up the url.

http://goexcelglobal.com/NJ_DefenseForce/images/leegreenwood_usa.mid

Sorry about that.

[Pippin]

Hi, (((MEG)))!

[MEG33]

Morning,Pippin.Our cup runneth over with these great posts!

[Calpernia]

>>>This Kennedy creep made my blood boil when I first heard this ...

That REALLY hit my nerve too. Or can't you tell by the way I just about hijacked this thread?

Well, good writing is suppose to stir passion, right John?

[Calpernia]

>>>>I wish the big fat obnoxious SLOB would just GO AWAY AND SHUT UP!!!!!

Can we drop him in the middle of Tikrit?