Posted on 04/02/2003 9:40:04 AM PST by kattracks
"I am still in shock and awe at being fired."
This is what Peter Arnett moaned in an op-ed piece for his new, frenzied, anti-war employer, London’s Daily Mirror entitled "This War is Not Working.”
Arnett says he was fired by NBC, "Because I stated the obvious to Iraqi television; that the U.S. war timetable has fallen by the wayside."
Not, of course, because he gave aid and comfort to the enemy by going on Iraqi television and criticizing the way the U.S. is fighting the war, he says, but because his former employers objected to having him tell the truth as he sees it.
Arnett, who once accused the U.S. of bombing a baby food factory in the 1991 Gulf War when the plant was really producing weapons, and whose "Tailwind” story on CNN was proven a hoax (he and two producers were fired from CNN for concocting that story) is now unrepentant.
"I have made those comments to television stations around the world and now I'm making them again in the Daily Mirror," he writes defiantly.
Among "those comments:”
- "The right-wing media and politicians are looking for any opportunity to be critical of the reporters who are here, whatever their nationality. I made the misjudgment which gave them the opportunity to do so. I gave an impromptu interview to Iraqi television feeling that after four months of interviewing hundreds of them it was only professional courtesy to give them a few comments."
- "I don't want to give aid and comfort to the enemy - I just want to be able to tell the truth. I came to Baghdad with my crew because the Iraqi side needs to be heard too."
Picture Arnett standing in Berlin in 1945, telling us he came there to make sure Hitler's side of the story got told.
And Arnett has been routinely telling the Iraqi side of the story. According to the Media Research Center:
- On March 26 Arnett asserted in the 8:00 a.m. hour on NBC's Today show: "The Information Minister, Mr. Al-Sahaf complained that the U.S. has started using cluster bombs in the area." An hour later, he repeated "The Iraqi peoples are complaining that two cruise missiles or cluster bomb units did land in a residential area."
Katie Couric, however, alerted viewers "The Pentagon is refuting that cluster bombs have been used in Baghdad."
Pentagon reporter Jim Miklaszewski later maintained that "as far as we know, there were no plans to use cluster bombs inside Baghdad," and that "if you look at pictures, so far, outside of Baghdad, a cluster bomb would create a Swiss-cheese effect - thousands and thousands of holes in the target - and we don't see that quite yet."
Arnett’s dispatch for the MSNBC Web site revised the line: "Iraqi officials later blamed the attack on two cruise missiles."
- On March 25 Arnett relayed the tender mercies of Saddam toward U.S. prisoners of war on Today: "Now last night we saw on television pictures of the two more American POWs, the pilots of those Apaches, making seven prisoners. And this morning the trade minister, Mohammed Salih, told us in a press conference that President Saddam Hussein had personally ordered that these prisoners be treated well. The Iraqis are aware that there is increasing American concern about the treatment of their people that are being held, a total of, I believe, seven now. The trade minister said Saddam wants them given the best medicine and the best food."
Some of those U.S. soldiers Arnett said Saddam promised to treat well were pictured on Al-Jazeera TV with execution-style bullet wounds to their heads, with a smiling Iraqi soldier standing over them looting their belongings.
- On March 19 Arnett told Today co-host Matt Lauer from Baghdad: "The government here maintaining a very strong pugilistic position, you might say. In fact, the National Assembly met this morning in special session and [was] criticizing the U.S. One other aspect, Matt, the Foreign Minister Naji Sabri has called the UN's act of completely leaving Iraq, all its aid workers, he called that ‘shameful' and he suggested it would leave 10 million Iraqis possibly starving in a few weeks if the war does continue."
- On February 28: "Peter Arnett's Baghdad Diary" for National Geographic Explorer aired as part of MSNBC’s "Countdown: Iraq." Arnett showcased an Al-Jazeera broadcast of U.S. and Iraqi students denouncing U.S. treatment of Iraq. One Iraqi student charged that "my mother, sister and brother were burned to death in the Ameriyah shelter. I want to ask the American people is this the human touch and love letter your government has sent to other people?!" After an American student worried about the "pain" the U.S. caused Iraq, Arnett lamented that "it's a pain some Iraqi students might have to suffer again." Comments the Media Research Center "At least Americans won’t have to suffer through Arnett’s sloppy and slanted reporting for the war’s duration."
Writes Seattle's KOMO News journalist Ken Schram:
"Peter Arnett is an idiot. He sits down to be interviewed on Baghdad TV by someone dressed in an Iraqi military uniform and mumbles something about a ‘misjudgment?’ Arnett then earnestly speaks of how the U.S. war plan has ‘failed’ because of Iraqi resistance, and easily segues into how his reports about civilian casualties in Iraq helps those who oppose the war, AND will also help to undermine the president, and says that too was a 'misjudgment?' Peter Arnett is an idiot."
Now that two of Saddam’s Republican Guard divisions have been decimated, and the rest of Saddam’s goons are taking refuge in schools and mosques so that they can try to cause the Coalition to amass civilian casualties, Arnett and his arguments have been proven to be, in the words of Gen. Richard Myers, "bogus.”
His allegations around some rightwing cabal controling the context of the war reports out of Iraq, stinks to the high heavens and reminds me of the ridiculous charges leveled by Hillary Rotten several years back, about something she called, "a vast rightwing conspiracy".
Hilliary's charges were laughable back then and Arnett's charges are laughable today and shamefully sad. What a bunch of idiots!
AND IT'S ABOUT TIME !!!
Somehow that's really easy to imagine... would make a great pic!
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