Three U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq

Middle East - AP via Yahoo News ^ | 10/27/03

[TexKat]

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Three American soldiers were killed and four wounded in two separate attacks in Iraq, the U.S. military said Monday.

Two soldiers were killed and two others wounded Sunday in Baghdad after their patrol was targeted by a roadside bomb. The soldiers belonged to the 1st Armored Division, a military statement said.

In Abu Ghraib, on the western edge of Baghdad, one soldier was killed and two wounded Sunday after an attack on their Military Police unit, according to the statement.

Since President Bush announced the end of major combat in Iraq on May 1st, 213 U.S. soldiers have been killed in hostile action.

[DCBryan1]

sad, prayers sent

[Grampa Dave]

13 Americans were killed by forest fires in S. California over the weekend and no major headlines on that.

[Coop]

Requesting honors for those fallen bravely serving their country.

[Austin Willard Wright]

Actually, there were plenty of headlines on that.

[Grampa Dave]

Where besides Free Republic? There was big lack out here in N. California.

Read the threads posted yesterday where many of the local tv stations didn't really cover what was happening in LA/Riverside at first and then the San Diego fire.

Fortunately as usual, great Freepers keep us in the loop with the threads yesterday.

[TexKat]

Grampa Dave I am not going to go cut and paste all those articles for you today. However they have reported more about the California fires and casulties than they have the bombings in Iraq since they have been talking about the cali fires since yesterday and before. I was trying to find some info on the Iraq suicide bombings about an hour ago. I pulled up MSNBC, CNN, and Fox. Guess what their #1 front page story is with pictures and all. By golly it was the California fires. Imagine that.

[Grampa Dave]

Well it wasn't yesterday as Travis and others who live an that area can tell you.

Travis, Bones how was the media coverage of the San Diego fire yesterday?

[Travis McGee]

Good point.

[Travis McGee]

It's the big local story, that's for sure, but I don't know if the WP or NYT put the 14 dead on their front page or not.

[Grampa Dave]

What type of news did you get yesterday from the LA tv stations and San Diego stations?

[Travis McGee]

The only news out here is the firestorm. There is no other news.

[AxelPaulsenJr]

I wonder what the total number is of Americans that have died in this country due to auto accidents, drug deals gone bad, murders, spousal abuse,falling down stairs, etc, since President Bush declared active ground operations over in Iraq?

[Grampa Dave]

Excellent point.

How many gang bangers get killed in LA and Oakland each day and night.

There are areas in the Goron voting cities in America that are far more lethal than being in Iraq.

It is dangerous and tough be in Iraq. However our soldiers and marines are doing a great job.

These liberal writers are doing the same trick they did during the Nam Days when we really started killing the communists over there. This time their plan to turn victory into perceived defeat will not work.

[TexKat]

Seek and ye shall find:

CNN 10/27/03 http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/West/10/27/california.wildfire/index.html

Fox News 10/26/03 Fires Roar Through Southern California

Fox News 10/27/03 Calif. Wildfires Kill 13, Destroy 825 Homes

MSNBC 10/27/03 More homes lost in Calif. wildfires

[cope]

French Missiles Used in Hotel Attack
(CNSNews.com) - A British newspaper reported that half of the rockets used in Sunday's attack on the Al Rasheed Hotel were French weapons produced after an arms embargo was imposed against Iraq following the Gulf War

[TexKat]

You know guys as a mother of a soldier that is serving and defending our homeland while we sit over here and type to one another let me be one that enlightens you that the above is not an arguement we want to hear. There is no comparison. Although it just might be true. No one wants to hear that. Did either one of you guys serve in the military? Did either one of you loose a military buddy or love one. Whomeever you have lost in your lifetime would that your words above be acceptable to you. I just saw a documentary last night of President Bush 41 and he stated that he has never got over the men in his battalion ? that were lost. You maybe using logic, but that logic stinks. We are talking people here, not insects.

Okay I'm done.

[AxelPaulsenJr]

I never said they were insects.

The only point I was making, and that is not meant to lessen the loss of our brave fighting men and women, is that relatively speaking for what they have accomplished, our losses have been few.

[Grampa Dave]

Yes I served. I had several friends who didn't return from Nam whole or alive.

However, I'm seeing the same bs done that was done during the Nam situation. The nation went from honoring the military to spitting on our soldiers when they returned from Nam. One of my brother laws had that greeting in San Francisco after his tour in Nam.

After the Cuban Crisis I was not being to buy a drink or dinner while in uniform because grateful people wouldn't let me. My last reserve two weeks in 1970, we could not wear our uniforms in our travel to the duty station and off the duty station.

What happened is the same bs that we seeing in our newspapers and tv shows each and every day. Eventually the American public went from supporting our military personnel to hating them. Or at the least minimizing what they had done in Nam.

You are legitimate re you comments and concerns. How many enemies of America on Free Republic are not and are trying to defeat us via the media.

Our men and women in Iraq are doing a hard and dangerous job. The last thing they need is a Nam repeat.

[Grampa Dave]

Interesting enough, here is a hit piece from the NY Slimes which proves my point about all of the media's phoney concern about our brave people in Iraq:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1008921/posts

Why Are We Back in Vietnam? (Air-Sick Bag Required To Read!!)
The New York Times ^ | Published: October 26, 2003 | FRANK RICH


Posted on 10/27/2003 7:42 AM PST by .cnI redruM


In his now legendary interview last month with Brit Hume of Fox News, George W. Bush explained that he doesn't get his news from the news media — not even Fox. "The best way to get the news is from objective sources," the president said, laying down his utopian curriculum for Journalism 101. "And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

Those sources? Condoleezza Rice and Andrew Card. Mr. Hume, helpfully dispensing with the "We Report" half of his network's slogan, did not ask the obvious follow-up question: What about us poor benighted souls who don't have these crack newscasters at our beck and call? But the answer came soon enough anyway. The White House made Condoleezza Rice's Newshour available to all Americans by dispatching her to Oprah.

"No camera crews have ever been granted this much access to this national security adviser," Oprah told her audience as she greeted her guest. A major scoop was not far behind. Is there anything you can tell us about the president that would surprise us? Oprah asked. Yes, Ms. Rice said, Mr. Bush is a very fast eater. "If you're not careful," she continued, "he'll be on dessert and you're still eating the salad."

And that's the way it was, Oct. 17, 2003.

This is objective journalism as this administration likes it, all right — news you can't use. Until recently, the administration had often gotten what it wanted, especially on television, and not just on afternoon talk shows. From 9/11 through the fall of Saddam, the obsequiousness became so thick that even Terry Moran, the ABC News White House correspondent, said his colleagues looked "like zombies" during the notorious pre-shock-and-awe Bush news conference of March 6, 2003. That was the one that Mr. Bush himself called "scripted." The script included eight different instances in which he implied that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, all of them left unchallenged by the dozens of reporters at hand.

Six months later, the audience is getting restless. The mission is not accomplished. The casualty list cannot be censored. The White House has been caught telling too many whoppers, the elucidation of which has become a cottage industry laying siege to the best-seller list. Vanity Fair, which once ran triumphalist photos of the administration by Annie Leibovitz, now looks at this White House and sees Teapot Dome. The Washington Post, which killed a week of "Boondocks" comic strips mocking Ms. Rice a few days before her Oprah appearance, relented and ran one anyway last weekend on its letters page, alongside the protests of its readers.

But print, even glossy print, is one thing, TV another. Like it or not, news doesn't register in our culture unless it happens on television. It wasn't until the relatively tardy date of March 9, 1954, when Edward R. Murrow took on Joseph McCarthy on CBS's "See It Now," that the junior senator from Wisconsin hit the skids. Sam Ervin's televised Watergate hearings reached a vast audience that couldn't yet identify the pre-Redford-and-Hoffman Woodward and Bernstein. Voters didn't turn against our Vietnam adventure en masse until it became, in Michael Arlen's undying phrase, the Living Room War.

However spurious any analogy between the two wars themselves may be, you can tell that the administration itself now fears that Iraq is becoming a Vietnam by the way it has started to fear TV news. When an ABC News reporter, Jeffrey Kofman, did the most stinging major network report on unhappiness among American troops last summer, Matt Drudge announced on his Web site that Mr. Kofman was gay and, more scandalously, a Canadian — information he said had been provided to him by a White House staffer. This month, as bad news from Iraq proliferated, Mr. Bush pulled the old Nixon stunt of trying to "go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people" about the light at the end of the tunnel. In this case, "the people" meant the anchors of regional TV companies like Tribune Broadcasting, Belo and Hearst-Argyle.

Last Sunday, after those eight-minute-long regional Bush interviews were broadcast, Dana Milbank, The Washington Post's White House reporter, said on CNN's "Reliable Sources" that the local anchors "were asking tougher questions than we were." I want to believe that Mr. Milbank was just being polite, because if he's right, the bar for covering this White House has fallen below sea level. The local anchors rarely followed up any more than Brit Hume did. They produced less news than Oprah. Will countries like France, Russia and Germany provide troops for Iraq? one of them asked Mr. Bush. "You need to ask them," was the reply.