The Moon Landing Was Faked, Too…
By [Melanie] Bunting goes on to blast the media for not reporting “the real story about what their government has done in Iraq.”
Here’s the problem with that: It has.
The trouble is so many of those Americans-are-evil stories turned out to be untrue or exaggerations at best.
The lies began before the war with CNN fronting for Saddam Hussein for 10 years just to keep its bureau open in Baghdad so it could brag about its foreign reporting. Instead of shuttering the bureau and then reporting the horrors from Atlanta, CNN stayed and kept its mouth shut.
That was just the start. Adnan Hajj staged and Photoshopped photos for AP and later Reuters that were sent around the world.
There is Captain Jamil Hussein, a police officer whom AP relied on repeatedly in 2006 for horror stories about Iraq. The military and the Iraqi government often denied the incidents. When Michelle Malkin and others questioned his existence, AP furiously defended him and insisted he was real — and stopped quoting him.
There is “Scott Thomas,” a pseudonym for a very real soldier, who sold outlandish lies to the editors of TNR. Apparently The New Republic learned nothing from Stephen Glass.
Bunting now blames the media for not reporting the horrors of war because if it had, the public would want the troops to be brought home immediately.
Seems to me that happened.
And yet we stayed and seem to be winning.
Wow. I’ll confess. I didn’t actually think it was possible for a wingnut to argue that the cases of Adnan Hajj, Jamil Hussein, Scott Beauchamp, and — no shit — Stephen Glass proved that the American war in Iraq had actually turned out pretty well. After all, the Adnan Hajj controversy involved a single Reuters photographer who digitally altered several images during his coverage of Israel’s summer 2006 war against Hezbollah. As far as I can tell, (1) this has no bearing on the Iraq War, and (2) Hajj’s photographs did not exactly fabricate the rubbling of Beirut, which did in fact occur, Photoshop or no. Moreover, the instances of Jamil Hussein and Scott Beauchamp appear to be as “settled” as the claim that Bill Clinton once delayed air traffic in LA because he was receiving a haircut.
But I suppose when one lives in the dark, all cats look grey, and Don Surber — being an idiot — can only be expected to handle three or four data points when trying to form a narrative about a war whose clusterfuckery is beyond comprehension.