Posted on 06/18/2006 10:00:25 AM PDT by Sam Hill
I think it might be that McGirk has learned (no thanks to his research) that Taher Thabet has close relatives in jail for ties to terrorists.
Which means that just about every single one of his "witnesses" (who he interviewed by email) have some ties to the terrorists and/or reasons (in their minds) to hate the US.
The "mayor," the "doctor," the "lawyer."
And now, even the "human rights watcher" and "budding journalism student."
And this could just be McGirk once again changing the story to back to them not knowing whom made the tape. But it sure makes his primary source Thabet out to be a liar, no matter how you slice.
I think this blows McGirk and Time Magazine (who are the original reporters on Haditha) right out of the water.
I guess I didn't present it clearly enough, since it doesn't seem to be registering with people here.
But there is clearly a lot of lying going on here. By Time, by McGirk's sources and by McGirk himself.
MTP has a place where you can submit your questions for their guests and that is the one I sent in. In fact, the entire interview (if that's the right word) with Murtha was a scripted event to allow him to repeat all of his nutty statistics and positions without any real challenge.
Man, Diana Irey is a babe.
Is Time Warner good for America?
So we contacted the Hammurabi human rights monitoring group, since we did stuff with them before... [T]hey brought this horrendous video, and they didn't know that much about it, they just knew that it came from Haditha...
We [followed up] through the Hammurabi group, we got the local journalist who had shot the video and he came from Haditha, and through him…
Time Magazine:
The next morning, Thabet–who last year co-founded a small outfit called the Hammurabi Organization for Human Rights and Democracy Monitoring–went into the houses where the killings had taken place and videotaped what he saw, as well as the wrenching scenes later at the local morgue, where friends and family collected the bodies of the victims. "I didn’t know what I was recording," he says. "I just felt I had to record everything I could see."
Thabet shared the VCD with the other members of the Hammurabi group, but for a time, news of the killings did not go further than that... TIME’s Tim McGirk, posted in Baghdad, began to investigate cases in which Iraqi civilians had been killed by U.S. troops. In the course of his reporting, he obtained a copy of Thabet’s VCD…
She gets my vote in that department as well!
A minor wound I would say.
I'd like to know whether any of the embedded ticks--oops, I mean, reporters--have ever seen any indication our Marines would harm them. How often did the Marines risk their lives for them? This crew is in fantasyland.
"I thought the "budding journalist" and another guy only came up with the Hammurabi group recently."
Yes, we've been told only 16 months ago. It would be interesting to ask McGirk what other material they had supplied him before this Haditha tape in January.
And again, if they had supplied material to Time before, why didn't they just run to them with this tape?
Also, it should be noted, that before he became a "rights watcher" and "budding journalist" Taher Thabet worked directly under the head of the Haditha hospital.
He's the guy who a) says everybody was shot at close range, b) says US soldiers had imprisoned him for a week at the hospital and beat him viciously.
In their minds they don't think it is hate
But what else would you call it, that a group of people would go out of their way to report lies to make us all look bad
What do you call it .. when a group of people would call the terrorists that have been kill their brothers??
This isn't about President Bush .. this is about America being top dog in the world and that bothers the hell our of them
On another point, McGirk said, "we made contact with a lawyer in Haditha who was a go-between representing the families when the Americans came and gave them compensation, which was another strange thing, because the Americans never give compensation to civilians who are killed by insurgent activity. They only do it if they're directly involved, and this was a case where they were paying off families."
This is a gross mischaracterization. McGirk knows the payments are not an admission of guilt and that they have been paid out over the course of the War if the casualties occured around Coalition actions whether the coalition was directly responsible or not.
Yes, they are passed out for "collatoral damage" restitution.
It could be argued that the Haditha "victims" got together with their lawyer (who now claims to also be a witness, and who looms large in McGirk's and others' reports) and decided that they could get more compensation if they claimed they were intentionally murdered in cold blood, rather than "collatoral damage" victims.
Haditha Lawyer Wants More “Compensation” | Sweetness & Light
http://www.sweetness-light.com/archive/haditha-lawyer-wants-more-compensation
As other article have pointed out, Iraqis have been willing to lie about "atrocities" for as little as $100.
Either McGirk doesn't know this, and he shouldn't be a reporter. Or he is lying to make the US look bad, and he shouldn't be a reporter.
Thanksgiving With the Taliban
TIME correspondent Tim McGirk shares bread, raisins, and thoughts about the afterlife with some Taliban fighters, and finds some common ground
By TIM MCGIRK
The story by Tim McGirk was titled, "Last November, U.S. Marines killed 15 Iraqi civilians in their homes. "Was it self-defense, an accident, or cold-blooded revenge?"
******
If the USA were to be attacked by ground troops and the same thing happened, would this "reporter" investigate the same sort of "allegations"?
Feh...crap.
FMCDH(BITS)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.