Iraq: The Public's Right to Know

Its truly amazing after five and a half years of daily reports claiming the War In Iraq is lost, the Press has been pretty silent about the turnaround brought about by the (poorly named) surge. While the war is no longer the fiasco the liberal media claimed it was, their coverage remains a fiasco. Clifford May says in his column today:

Mark Twain famously said “if you don’t read the newspapers you are uninformed — if you do read the newspapers you are misinformed.” Today, those who rely on the elite media for news of Iraq suffer from both disabilities.

Start with lack of information: The average news consumer probably has no clue that Gen. David Petreaus’ new strategy has crippled al Qaeda in Iraq, that Americans and Iraqis are now fighting side-by-side against both Sunni and Shia extremists, and that the elimination of terrorist safe havens and weapons caches has improved security for average Iraqis in parts of the country that a few months ago were snake pits.

As for misinformation, how many people still believe that guards in Guantanamo flushed Korans down the toilet, that U.S. Marines committed a massacre at Haditha, and that American soldiers ridicule women disfigured by bombs, run over puppies for sport and desecrate graves for a laugh? All of this was reported in such mainstream publications as Newsweek and The New Republic. None of it is true.

Meanwhile, the barbarous violence committed by al Qaeda and the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq is scarcely noted. For example, here’s a story you probably have neither read nor heard: On Oct. 28 in a village ten miles southwest of Baqubah, U.S. infantrymen came upon a prison run by al Qaeda. In it, according to military spokesmen, they found a hostage, bruised, battered, dehydrated, and tied to the ceiling, his arms injured because of the way they were twisted behind his back.

He had been kidnapped three days earlier, he said, because “of my brother who is in the Iraqi Army. They wanted information and for my brother and me to work for al-Qaeda. …They beat me with cables while holding a gun to my head, but I would not work for them because I would not betray my brother.”

Gee that must have been cut out of my NY Times either that or they didn't publish it because it was neither a state secret nor Anti-Israel. Her more facts that they missed:

In perhaps his most haunting dispatch, [Michael] Yon reports on meeting an Iraqi official who told him that it was al-Qaeda’s practice to invite “to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy” and at some point during the meal “their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.”

The Problem with the media distortion of the Iraq war is that the are shaping pubic opinion with lies and omissions. The press always talks about the public's right to know. I guess that right doesn't include the truth when it goes against their political agenda. Read the full Clifford May piece by clicking here Not the News Not the News