Posted on 04/19/2003 6:51:30 PM PDT by agitator
Disclaimer. My point in posting this is not to give the cretins responsible for the propaganda I'm about to destroy any further exposure. There are no links to any lefty sites, and the images are not hosted at the original locations and have been renamed. The point here to is trash some widely distributed propaganda with facts, provide people looking to rebut this crap with ammo, and to maybe have it occur to the people that forward any old POS that comes into their email boxes that they ought to exercise a little critical thinking before hitting the "Send" button.
Recently, I got sent an email composed of skillfully presented propaganda from a commie site with a URL that might just as well have been "propagandaforlazysuckers.info" that has been making the email rounds on the internet. The origination of this piece of propaganda was yet another well known commie site - had anybody bothered to check it out.
The URL itself should have been a tipoff that what you were going to find here was crap (after a while you can just about smell those sites by the URL long before you get to them) but apparently a bunch of people who should know better and are too lazy to check it out for themselves have continued to forward this crap.
Propaganda can come from all sides of an issue, not just the side people are pre-disposed to disbelieve.
The fact that people who should have known better would take this crap at face value and pass it around (especially to me) as some sort of confirmation of anything has irritated me to no end. It’s not my job to do other people’s research for them and point out who A.N.S.W.E.R. is, who IAC is, who all of their crappy little front sites are, and who ultimately funds these parasites and what their agenda is.
On the other hand, this particular piece of propaganda and the fact that it has gotten such coverage has pissed me off to the point that I’m going to slam dunk this garbage right into the dumpster where it belongs and shame on anybody that let this BS slide through their hands unchallenged.
Here’s the original piece of propaganda:
What this propaganda purports to represent is that there was no genuine popular support in evidence when the statue in that square came down and the only people present were shills planted there by the DOD. Pardon me while I rip this lefty fantasy to shreds.
What you see in the picture at the top-left is a classic example of selective editing. I watched the CBS live camera of that city square 18hours a day for weeks during the war. There was NEVER any more than a dozen people on the street in that scene the whole time. This was a city under attack and so it's not like people were going to be casually strolling around. Anyone who paid attention to the war coverage knows this area had its share of fighting. Reporters on the roof of the hotel that shot was taken from were careful not to present a profile at the parapet of the roof for fear of getting shot like a duck in a shooting gallery. Even post-liberation, this area has had its share of snipers.
1. The advance into this area of Baghdad by US troops was faster than anyone had expected and TV and radio in Baghdad was off the air so it was a miracle that anyone was aware of what was happening there.
2. This is also a business district of the city so it's not like people could look out their living room windows and simply stream out into the street. Virtually all of the businesses had long since shut down so there was no reason for any sidewalk traffic.
3. Anyone who was paying attention to the television coverage of this area prior to the Marines taking up positions in the square knows that the number of foreign journalists in that hotel was tiny so any claim that a large number of the people in the square were TV people is erroneous.
4. Anyone familiar with totalitarian regimes knows that terrorizing their people is their stock in trade. Anyone with a whit of sense in Baghdad had good reason to believe that if the Americans failed to hold the city that there would be retribution of the most horrible kind taken on anyone who so much as happened to be in the vicinity, much less those celebrating. It is not hard to believe that many would have simply sat out this event out of 20+ years of fear.
The two UN-ATTRIBUTED AND UN-SOURCED pictures at the bottom of the original composite fraud ATTEMPT TO CLAIM that because ONE UNKNOWN PERSON who MIGHT have been associated with Chalabi and who MIGHT have been present in the square at that time is proof that ALL of the people in the square were associated with Chalabi. The fact that this is a ridiculous leap of logic seems to have escaped many people. Of course if you bought into the selective editing of picture at the top left, it might be easier to take.
The website where this unadulterated crap originated from also posted several other pictures as alleged support for their claim that there was hardly anybody present in the square save a few DOD plants.
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| This first picture is obviously before the statue was pulled down, and also obviously before the tank retriever which was used to pull it down showed up. The time span from when the Marines showed up until the time the statue came down was over 2 hours. Note the haze from smoke on the horizon and the visibility. |
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| This second photo is what is purported to be the moment at which the statue was pulled down - just like the picture in the composite at the top of the page. The butt-heads at the website that posted this claim that the lack of people in the picture is indicative that what people are there are shills. What is immediately evident however is that: #1 The lighting is considerably different #2 The color in the photo has obviously been altered, which may or may not be evidence of "doctoring." #3 A significant amount of smoke has cleared from the horizon |
Now,
the biggest problem with this is that you're seeing static screenshots of what was live video, AND THERE IS NO TIME CODE to determine when these screenshots were taken. Duhhhhhh!
If you look at this live video of the event
and pay particular attention at 3 minutes and 26 seconds into the video, you'll see that the area in the following picture that is circled in green was PACKED WITH PEOPLE include a lot of children whom I'm supposed to believe were also brought in for the cameras by the DOD (give me a break......)
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What becomes immediately obvious to anyone who bothers to check out the live video or who saw it live in the first place is that the photo in this propaganda that is being used to purport that there was nobody in attendance save paid shills was
CLEARLY TAKEN LONG AFTER THE EVENT WAS OVER.
Now why am I doing all of this when people should be doing it themselves?
Here's my own propaganda which is just as believable as the original:
And for those who (unbelievable as it may seem) don't know who the guy in question is and are too damned lazy to find out, his name is "The Tourist Guy". Jeeez.
But, the images are SLOOOOOW to load and I'm on a cable modem. I pity the dial-up folks.
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