Posted on 12/02/2005 3:55:17 PM PST by Congressman Billybob
Ten more American soldiers, all Marines, were killed today (Friday) near Fallujah while on foot patrol. Anticipating the coverage by the New York Times on these deaths, I ask, What side is the Times on?
The Times was created before the Civil War. So, it covered that war, the bloodiest that America has ever fought in percentage of the population who were killed. That was also the most costly, in percentage of the national wealth spent in it.
But did the Times make any attempt to cover that war death by death, profiling and decrying every single soldier who fell, as it has done in the War on Terror? No, it did not.
Then came WW I, the third most costly war in percentage of population killed, and percentage of national wealth expended? Did the Times cover it death by death? No.
Then came WW II, the second most costly war by those two measures. Did the Times cover that war, death by death? No.
Nor did the Times cover the Korean War, that way. Nor the Vietnam War. Nor the Gulf War.
Only for the War on Terror has the Times focused on every individual death, and on Cindy Sheehan, the unfortunate, and deranged, mother of just one of those soldiers.
Before I continue, I say this. In no way do I minimize the gut-wrenching sense of loss parents of every soldier killed, feel at the loss of their son or daughter. I know how it feels to put a child in the ground, dead suddenly at the age of 21. Nothing makes that sense of loss go away. Ever. (No, my son did not die in the military. But the loss is no greater or less for the cause of death.)
The point is that the Times, and many other media in the mainstream, are spending time wallowing in each individual death in this war, as never done in any prior war prior. Why?
Had the Times spent the same amount of space and ink on each individual death in the Civil War and all wars since, it would have worked its way through the Civil War dead, and WW I. It would probably now be near the end of reporting on the dead from WW II.
The current war reporting in the mainstream media occurs in an historical vacuum. The blood cost of prior wars is never placed side by side with the carnage which occurred at places like Gettysburg, the Somme, Omaha Beach, or Iwo Jima, to name a handful of hundreds of historical examples. Why are these comparisons not presented?
The only logical answer is that the Times is on the other side in this war. Its publisher, editors, reporters want the United States to be defeated now. Therefore, they exaggerate the blood costs of this war, by dwelling on every death and ignoring the historical context of all other American wars.
There are similar examples of the bias of the Times coverage on subjects other than American deaths. The Times trumpeted the discovery of secret prisons in which particularly dangerous and knowledgeable captured terrorists (they are not soldiers by any definition in the Geneva Conventions) have been held in foreign nations. This involves less than 200 captured terrorists. And the lives of maybe thousands of Americans can be saved by obtaining the information that this select group of terrorists possess.
Did we have secret prisons for the interrogation of Germans or Japanese or Vietnamese or North Koreans in those respective wars? Perhaps we did, but if we did the Times and other media did not report on efforts to obtain information from high value captives those other wars. Competent conduct of any international war would dictate special attention to special captives. But only in this war is the Times both printing and obsessing over such an activity.
I would like to see the President of the United States challenge the New York Times to choose sides in this war, as it has in every war since the Civil War. Its no guarantee that the Times would choose to side with the United States. And I could create a short list of employees of the Times would resign in disgust if it did.
The President will not directly attack a major media institution in that way. So, I do. To the New York Times: Which side are you on in this war? If you lack the integrity to answer the question in plain English, your future coverage of this war will answer for you. If it continues as it has been so far, the conclusion is that you support the other side in this war.
About the Author: John Armor is a First Amendment attorney and author who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
You obviously write (believe) nonsense. So we knew all about what was going on in Iraq? So how come the WMD's did not turn up? Were they moved (quite likely), so how come we do not know where they were moved to?
You overestimate the ability of our "remote viewers". We still have to act on very cloudy information and judgment. For heaven's sake, we did not know that India and Pakistan had nuclear weapons before they let it be known. Lots of intelligence information pointed to Saddam running a nuclear weapons program - and many tons of yellow-cake were found in Iran, as well as suspicious enrichment technology. We certainly knew he had other storehouses of WMD - inventoried by the UN, and not disposed of by any documented or verified processes.
We could have won what we sought, now we could lose the entire Middle East.
What, by maintaining tyrannical dictatorships that were engaged in mass murder to keep their power - you are a wretched human being!
Go back to the Democratic Underground where you came from and belong. I'm sure everyone there will welcome your stupidity.
Daily Herald
Heres what two Marines say
Christian Science Monitor
Posted Saturday, December 03, 2005
Should the U.S. stay the course in Iraq?
As opposition to the war mounts at home, Marines in Iraq say youre not hearing how theyve made a difference
What the soldiers say>
BROOK PARK, Ohio Cpl. Stan Mayer has seen the worst of war. In the leaves of his photo album, there are casual memorials to the cost of the Iraq conflict candid portraits of friends who never came home and graphic pictures of how insurgent bombs have shredded steel and bone.
Yet the Iraq of Mayers memory is not solely a place of death and loss. It is also a place of hope. It is the hope of the town of Hit, which he saw transform from an insurgent stronghold to a place where kids played on Marine trucks. It is the hope of villagers who whispered where roadside bombs were hidden. But most of all, it is the hope he saw in a young Iraqi girl who loved pens and Oreo cookies.
Like many soldiers and marines returning from Iraq, Mayer looks at the bleak portrayal of the war at home with perplexity, if not annoyance. It is a perception gap that has put the military and media at odds, as troops complain that the media care only about death tolls, while the media counter that their job is to look at the broader picture, not through the soda straw of troops individual experiences.
Telling lost stories
Yet as perceptions about Iraq have neared a tipping point in Congress, some soldiers and Marines worry that their own stories are being lost in the cacophony of terror and fear. They acknowledge that their experience is just that one persons experience in one corner of a war-torn country. Yet amid the terrible scenes of reckless hate and lives lost, many members of one of the hardest-hit units insist that they saw at least the spark of progress.
We know we made a positive difference, says Cpl. Jeff Schuller of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, who spent all but one week of his eight-month tour with Mayer. I cant say at what level, but I know that where we were, we made it better than it was when we got there.
It is the simplest measure of success, but for the Marine, soldier, or sailor, it may be the only measure of success. In a business where life and death rest on instinctive adherence to thoroughly ingrained lessons, accomplishment is ticked off in a list of orders followed and tasks completed. And by virtually any measure, Americas servicemen and women are accomplishing the day-to-day tasks set before them.
Yet for the most part, America is less interested in the success of Operation Iron Fist, for instance, than the course of the entire Iraq enterprise.
What the national news media try to do is figure out: Whats the overall verdict? says Brig. Gen. Volney Warner, deputy commandant of the Army Command and General Staff College. Soldiers dont do overall verdicts.
Yet soldiers clearly feel that important elements are being left out of the medias overall verdict. On this day, a group of Navy medics gathers around a table in the Cleveland-area headquarters of the 3/25, a Marine reserve unit that has converted a low-slung school of pale brick and linoleum tile into its spectacularly red-and-gold offices.
What press misses
Their conversation could be a road map of the kind of stories that military folks say the mainstream media are missing. One colleague made prosthetics for an Iraqi whose hand and foot had been cut off by insurgents. When other members of the unit were sweeping areas for bombs, the medics made a practice of holding impromptu infant clinics on the side of the road.
They remember one Iraqi man who could not hide his joy at the marvel of an electric razor. And at the end of the 3/25s tour, a member of the Iraqi Army said: Marines are not friends; Marines are brothers, says Lt. Richard Malmstrom, the battalions chaplain.
It comes down to the familiar debate about whether reporters are ignoring the good news, says Peter Hart, an analyst at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, a usually left-leaning media watchdog in New York.
In Hit, where Marines stayed in force to keep the peace, the progress was obvious, say members of the 3/25. The residents started burning trash and fixing roads a sign that the city was returning to a sense of normalcy. Several times, people came up to us (and said): Theres a bomb on the side of the road. Dont go there, says Pfc. Andrew Howland.
Part of the reason that such stories usually arent told is simply the nature of the war. Kidnappings and unclear battle lines have made war correspondents jobs almost impossible. Travel around the country is dangerous, and some reporters never venture far from their hotels. It has to have some effect on what we see. You end up with reporting that waits for the biggest explosion of the day, says Hart.
To the Marines of the 3/25, the explosions clearly do not tell the whole story. Across America, many readers know the 3/25 only as the unit that lost 15 Marines in less than a week nine of them in the deadliest roadside bombing against U.S. forces during the war. When the count of Americans killed in Iraq reached 2,000, this unit again found itself in the stage lights of national notice as one of the hardest hit.
But that is not the story they tell. It is more than just the dire tone of coverage though that is part of it. It is that Iraq has touched some of these men in ways that even they have trouble explaining. This, after all, has not been a normal war. Mayer and Schuller went over not to conquer a country, but to help win its hearts and minds. In some cases, though, it won theirs.
Recess from war
Schuller, a heavyweight college wrestler with a thatch of blond hair and engine blocks for arms, cannot help smiling when he speaks of giving an old man a lighter: He thought it was the coolest thing. Yet both he and the blue-eyed, square-jawed Mayer pause for a moment before they talk about the two 9-year-old Iraqis whom members of their battalion dubbed their girlfriends.
The first time he saw them, Mayer admits that he was making the calculations of a man in the midst of a war. He was tired, he was battered, and he was back at a Hit street corner that he had patrolled many times before. In Iraq, repetition of any sort could be an invitation of the wrong sort an event for which insurgents could plan. So Mayer and Schuller took out some of the candy they carried, thinking that if children were around, perhaps the terrorists wouldnt attack.
It was a while before the children realized that these two Marines, laden with arms to the limit of physical endurance, were not going to hurt them. But among the children who eventually came, climbing on the pairs truck and somersaulting in the street, there were always the same two girls. When they went back to base, they began to hoard Oreos and other candy in a box.
They became our one little recess from the war, says Mayer. Youre seeing some pretty ridiculous tragedies way too frequently, and you start to get jaded. The kids on that street I got to realize I was still a human being to them.
It happened one day when he was on patrol. Out of nowhere, a car turned the corner and headed down the alley at full speed. A car coming at you real fast and not stopping in Iraq is not what you want to see, says Mayer. Yet instead of jumping in his truck, he stood in the middle of the street and pushed the kids behind him.
The car turned. Now, Mayer and Schuller can finish each others sentences when they think about the experience. You really start to believe that you protect the innocent, says Schuller. It sounds like a stupid cliche....
But its not, adds Mayer. You are in the service of others.
Adding to legacy
For Mayer, who joined the reserves because he wanted to do something bigger than himself, and for Schuller, a third-generation Marine, Iraq has given them a sense of achievement. Now when they look at the black-and-white pictures of Marines past in the battalion headquarters, were adding to that legacy, says Schuller.
This is what they wish to share with the American people and is also the source of their frustration. Their eight months in Iraq changed their lives, and they believe it has changed the lives of the Iraqis they met as well. On the day he left, Mayer gave his girlfriend a bunch of pens her favorite gift wrapped in a paper that had a picture of the American flag, the Iraqi flag, and a smiley face. The man with the lighter asked Schuller if he was coming back. He will if called upon, he says.
Whether or not these notes of grace and kindness are as influential as the dirge of war is open to question. But many in the military feel that they should at least be a part of the conversation.
Says Warner of reaching an overall verdict: Im not sure that reporting on terrorist bombings with disproportionate ink is adequately answering that question.
dailyherald.com
In truth, it's primary function has never been as "news" organization at all. The NYT has never been anything but a propaganda organ for socialism and the Democratic Party masquerading as a newspaper. The NYT is, and always has been, the equivalent of Pravda West. Their objective has been to advance the Democratic Party as the purveyor of socialism.
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