In other words, they place less credibility on the word of British intelligence and Tony Blair than they do on this hezbolite propagandist shithead.
I do not mourn the self destruction of the AP or Reuters.
Posted on 08/11/2006 6:27:12 PM PDT by pitinkie
TYRE, Lebanon (AP) - After hours of digging in the blistering heat, Salam Daher emerged from the wreckage with the body of a 9-month-old baby, a blue pacifier still pinned to its nightshirt.
Daher, a member of the civil defense for 20 years, has been photographed with bodies of the dead in two wars now - first in 1996 and most recently with the baby on July 30 -- both times after Israeli attacks in the village of Qana six miles southeast of the city.
For that reason, some Web sites have labeled him the "Green Helmet," and accused him of being a member of the Hezbollah guerrilla group, and of showing off bodies as propaganda.
"But that isn't true," he told The Associated Press. He is not affiliated with any party, he said. "I am just a civil defense worker. I have done this job all my life."
When bombs strike, he said he is often the one who takes the phone call alerting the civil defense to an emergency, and he is often part of the first team to reach the site.
The baby at Qana died when Israeli missiles slammed into a house - a response, Israel said, to rockets that Hezbollah fired from nearby.
Bloggers have accused rescue workers and volunteers of showing off victims for the media.
Ten years ago, on April 18, 1996, Daher was one of the first to arrive in Qana after Israeli artillery slammed into a U.N. compound where 800 Lebanese had taken shelter.
In 1996, he moved to Tyre, a city where Hezbollah's influence is weaker than other parts of the south because of the power of more secular Shiite parties.
(Excerpt) Read more at home.bellsouth.net ...
What an amazingly one-sided "article" that follows no journalistic standards. The only criticism is in the form of a question to Green Helmet about his actions as noted by bloggers and amazingly HE DENIES THE CHARGE! I couldn't believe it. I figured he would crack under the pressure of the AP's relentless pursuit of the truth. (/sarcasm) The article then lets Green Helmet spew his story with no challenge.
But what is so insulting about the article is the fact that NO AUTHOR IS CREDITED! This allows the AP to fire their propoganda and then hide behind the anonymity of this article. Just like the Hezzies firing and then blending into the crowd.
F*&K the AP (and Reuters while I am at it)
Oh, yes, it's very dangerous. No time to dilly-dally around the site setting and re-setting the scene... It's tough work taking those bodies into the ambulances and then taking them out again to display for the cameras, then putting them in again, then taking them out again...
Why doesn't this article have a byline? I've been looking and I can't find it. Do we know who wrote this drivel? Adnan Hajj, is that you???
Is this the same guy?
'Green Helmet' Helps Rescue the Wounded
KATHY GANNON (AP Online) 08/11/2006 Article ...attacks in the village of Qana six miles southeast of the city.For that reason, some Web sites have labeled him the "Green Helmet," and accused him of being a member of the Hezbollah guerrilla group, and of showing off bodies as propaganda."But that isn't true," he told The Associated...12 miles out of Tyre, with the International Committee of the Red Cross. He told a reporter he had been trying to rescue a family of four believed buried beneath the rubble of an abandoned, six-story orphanage hit by missiles. The debris...Israeli artillery slammed into a U.N. compound where 800 Lebanese had taken shelter. The attack killed 106 people and wounded another 116.There, Daher was photographed holding up the mutilated body of a child, one of many victims he carried...
This tactic of no author byline is similar to AP and Reuters and fellow travelers never naming photo subjects. The result is a lack of accountabilty about those pictured and their motives. Is there an official Lebanese list of the dead so real reporters can discern between civilians and combatants? Didn't think so.
In other words, they place less credibility on the word of British intelligence and Tony Blair than they do on this hezbolite propagandist shithead.
I do not mourn the self destruction of the AP or Reuters.
AGREED !! After watching the German news crew video of this "civil defense" worker in action staging photos and treating the dead like a prop, and along with all the other evidence, there is no other conclusion other than GHG is a Hezbollah propaganda wing operative.
He's a civil defense worker like I'm the starting quarterback for the Indianapolis Colts.
He was obviously framed by the Jewish cops. Green Helmet will be looking for the real scene stager on the golf course!
About the Author:
Gannon Keeps Ringside Seat on Troubled Times
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2545
Run Date: 12/02/05
By Laura J. Winter
WeNews correspondent
After 18 years of covering the harsh effects of the Taliban--particularly on women--Kathy Gannon, the celebrated AP correspondent, is leaving her base in Pakistan to reopen the AP's news bureau in Tehran.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (WOMENSENEWS)--Choosing the hard option over hot meals and clean sheets is Kathy Gannon's way of getting the better story.
She's trudged with burly anti-Soviet mujahedeen soldiers over the mountains separating Pakistan from Afghanistan and lived in Kabul while U.S. bombs rained down from above. Most recently she slept in her car for eight days in Muzaffarabad, the epicenter of the South Asian Earthquake, where tens of thousands died and many more were left homeless.
Sitting in the lush garden of her Islamabad home, holding a freshly brewed mug of coffee, she smiled wryly. "It was a place to stay," she said of her car. "And I could lock the doors."
After almost two decades of tenacious reporting and writing from Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Associated Press that has earned her a closet full of awards, Gannon is moving on.
The 52-year-old newlywed has been named AP bureau chief for Iran, whose president is under intense diplomatic scrutiny for having aspirations to create a nuclear bomb. Her husband, Naeem Pasha, 63, is a prolific Pakistani architect and art gallery owner. He said he was planning to go to Iran to visit Gannon and study Persian art.
As soon as the Iranian government sees fit to fix a visa inside her Canadian passport, she is going to Tehran to re-open AP's bureau, which turned off its lights in 1979 when Islamic revolutionaries overthrew Iran's shah and stormed the U.S. embassy, taking 66 American hostages.
"I don't wear headscarves unless I have to," said Gannon, in response to a question about how she dresses for her work. "I am very culturally sensitive, but I am what I am. In Iran I won't wear the tight-fitting one that will keep my hair in when I meet a cleric and a little flimsy one when I meet with a liberal."
Memories Form a Montage
Gannon said the change in her posting is making her look back on the often tragic stories she has covered--many of them about women--to mix into a montage of memories that repeat in her mind's eye as if it were on a loop.
"Images--sounds and smells really--stay with me more so than a particular story," Gannon said as she looked away, beyond the confines of the garden toward the smoky Pakistan sunset. "During Taliban rule there was the widows' bakery. The women were behind the door pounding, screaming, 'Why don't you just shoot us instead of killing us slowly?' That's something that keeps playing over and over in my head."
The Taliban had forcibly closed the bakery once it had established its rule over much of Afghanistan in 1996. As the regime prohibited almost all women from working, Gannon reported on how women were committing suicide, behind painted windows and high walls because the Taliban had forced them out of their jobs and off the streets.
Gannon brought to readers the stories of how widows and their children were particularly vulnerable under the Taliban.
They were the women who had survived the civil wars that had been raging since the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989 and the fall of the Afghan Communist regime in 1992. During those years Gannon went to Kabul often and brought out stories of the utter brutality women endured at the hands of soldiers controlled by warlords such as Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Ahmed Shah Massoud.
Inside Afghanistan
In her recently published book, "I is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror: 18 Years Inside Afghanistan," Gannon challenges the Washington establishment's simplistic rendering of why Afghanistan and Pakistan have become the centers of narcotics production and terrorism. She believes blaming the Taliban for the region's ills is allowing the U.S. and its Afghan allies to shirk their responsibility for Afghanistan's recent and bloody past in the civil war years. It was during that dangerous and chaotic period the Taliban became popular for instituting order and basic security.
Gannon said writing the book allowed her to close her chapter in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She said she was able to gain confidence that she could go beyond her usual beat this year when, in her current position as AP's special correspondent, she traveled in and reported from Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan.
Gannon came to Pakistan and crossed over into Afghanistan in 1986, when the Soviets dug in and battled the U.S.-backed mujahedeen, who wanted them to leave. The mujahedeen were the Afghans who took up arms against the Soviet and Communist Afghan forces in what they believed was a holy war, or jihad. The Soviets left and the communist regime crumbled. But Gannon stayed, refusing to give up her ringside seat for what would become Afghanistan's unfolding tragedy of civil wars, with tens of thousands dead and very few heroes.
"The bravest people I have met have been women. In Afghanistan in the Loya Jirga (national assembly), it was women who stood up and said, 'What are they doing here? Why are the war criminals here?' Only women would criticize," Gannon said.
First into Kabul
Gannon wants to be regarded as simply a journalist, but because she is in a region of the world where many women are veiled and even shut away behind tall walls, it is difficult to shed her gender in the workplace. She only wears a headscarf when it is absolutely necessary, such as when she meets with a Taliban official, or when she is in a public place in Iran, where it is the law. In spite of the traditional discrimination, Gannon was the first Western journalist the Taliban allowed into Kabul after the United States started its bombing campaign there in September 2001.
Gannon concedes that being a female reporter in this part of the world has its difficulties because the local culture dictates that women should be in the home, married and raising children, not vying to be the first to reach a war's frontlines. But because she has been one of the few foreign journalists to consistently report from Afghanistan during the country's most dangerous periods, she has earned the respect of many Afghan commanders, including the Taliban.
Even with such long-standing relationships with the local players, getting access has not always been easy. She has used a combination of Islamic law, logic and stubbornness to shame those who would thwart her.
Gannon gently placed her coffee cup on the table and leaned forward to tell about the time she was kept waiting in the hallway outside the office of the Taliban supreme court's chief justice. The judge did not want to answer questions posed by a woman.
"I sat there for six hours," she said. "I had a Turkish photographer. They said, 'Give him the questions.' I said, 'No. I'm the reporter. He is the photographer. I ask the questions.' So I waited six hours. I shamed him into talking to me. And it was shameful. If someone takes me on toe to toe, I take them on!"
Laura J. Winter is originally from Sierra Madre, Calif., and has recently moved to London. She writes for the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Daily News and has been filing stories from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan for four years.
Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at editors@womensenews.org.
Note particularly paragraph 5.
You see him on the TV...everywhere he seems to be
Always where some people die...he is known as Green Helmet Guy
If a building has been hit...he will be all over it
He's always where some people die...and he is known as Green Helmet Guy
He'll appear out of the blue...he seems to know what to do
Always where some people die...he is known as Green Helmet Guy
Lebanon is his home base...he has such an honest face
He's always where some people die...and he is known as Green Helmet Guy
Hezbollah is needing press...so he'll show up and looked distressed
Always where some people die...he is known as Green Helmet Guy
There is a drone above his head...omigosh, he will soon be dead
He'd always been where people die...we will miss the Green Helmet Guy
[doug from upland, tune: "Green Berets"]
Wow! Hours of digging in the blistering heat & he has no dirt on him at all! How stupid do they think we are?
The babe who wrote it is head of AP's Iran bureau & is married to a Pakistani. She's literally and figuratively in bed with the enemy.
FYI
Thanks to all for the info on the writer. The locals should not be posting it anonymously as far as i am concerned.
I'm sure the author has the respect of Taliban leaders due to the "Eason Jordan School of Journalism."
Yes GHG
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