Propaganda Victory!
As a career newsman, I can assure the last thing any reporter worth his salt wants to do is let sticky, unresolved questions and facts mess up the story line. That’s why a professional sometimes employs the time-honored device known as “burying” them. Much as the evidence was buried in Afghanistan. AP:
KABUL (AP) — Villagers dug dirt graves Wednesday to bury what the international Red Cross said were dozens of Afghans — including women and children — killed in American bombing runs. A former Afghan government official said up to 120 people may have died.
If so, it would be the deadliest case of civilian casualties since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. “deeply, deeply” regretted the loss of innocent life, and the U.S. military dispatched a brigadier general to investigate the deaths in two villages in western Afghanistan’s Farah province.
The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, voiced doubts about whether it was an American airstrike that caused the tragedy.
The AP takes a nose-holding view of US suggestions that the incident may have been staged by the Taliban on the orders of a senior Taliban commander, using grenades to simulate airstrike deaths. Continues with Red Cross reports of bodies seen and US reports of airstrikes ordered. To its credit, the AP eventually gets around to acknowledging that the Taliban is usually complicit in civilian deaths, purposefully producing high volumes of fire from civilian locations in order to draw fire and airstrikes, “thereby giving the Taliban a propaganda victory.”
Sorry, hate to quibble. But engineering the deaths of civilians is not what gives the Taliban its propaganda victories. It’s everyone else’s insistence that the United States is responsible for Taliban war crimes. Scratch up another for the Taliban!
Somehow that singular, seemingly germane fact, grenades or no grenades, never makes it into a lede. In this case, as usual, it’s deep enough that it is below the cut most AP wallpaper-hanging news desks are going to manage to get into their newspapers.
Meanwhile, waiting on the recriminations vs the war criminal Barack Obama.
(tap tap tap )
waiting …
Topics: Afghanistan,media,military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:51 am Comments (4) on Thursday, May 7, 2009
4 Responses to “Propaganda Victory!”
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May 7th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
[...] when news hit that Americans had committed mass slaughter against Afghani civilians. Except that, as Jules Crittenden points out, reading past both headlines and Hillary’s knee-jerk apologies, it appears that these tragic [...]
May 7th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
[...] AP’s as much as anyone’s, natch. Jules also mentions waiting for something else he’ll never, ever see. Category: Near-Naked Propaganda ♦ [...]
May 7th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden – Propaganda Victory! [...]
May 8th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
There’s also been many instances of goats buried to give off the proper stink of an unembalmed body under the dirt. This is done to get the cash payments for “civilian dead”.
There’s also been cases of talib and/or talib friendly folk (such as NGOs, reporters, etc) cleaning up a battlefield of weapons so that pics could be produced of “civilian dead”.
With a little luck, and a dose of proper rage breaking through the reasonableness barrier, we’ll get to see some of these reporters and NGO folk dangling by their necks with the ground just out of reach of their little toesies.