I'm old enough now to remember a time -- check this, kids -- when journalism meant, more than anything else, telling you what was new (hence, news). Hence my curiosity over this week's focus on the admittedly haunting WikiLeaks video, while the national media totally ignore the story of NATO's remarkable coverup of the killing, presumably by special ops forces, of two pregnant women and an 18-year-old girl in a seemingly botched Afghanistan raid.
The story was broken by a Times of London reporter, interviewed at length here by Mark Colvin of Australia's ABC radio. The most crucial detail: after being shot, the victims appeared to have borne signs of attempts to carve out the bullets; similar attempts were made on the walls of the house where the killings took place. Prior to the raid, music was heard as a party to celebrate a newborn's naming was winding down at 4 in the morning, even though NATO characterized the house as a Taliban hideout (the Taliban notoriously ban music).
Key fact: the event memorialized in the WikiLeaks video happened three years ago. The event discussed in this interview happened this year, in the war we're currently being told is the good war, the necessary war.
Why so little mention of the coverup of civilian killings? Occam's razor is our friend. Unlike the Iraq killings uncovered by WikiLeaks, there's no video of the Afghanistan killings.
Lesson to all: turn off those robot cameras and you're cool.
Follow Harry Shearer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/letwits
BTW: Your Father Knows Best bit was one of the best political satires I have heard in - perhaps forever.
Then they attack and kill the innocent people in the house, including two pregnant mothers that have 16 children between them. Then they dig all bullets out, which means they know they have done something they want to hide.
Then the US and NATO pretend that the house was full of insurgents.
This has the feeling of bad behavior on the part of our troops, not stand-up guy types. Sooo, the media does not want to touch it. You just can not make our troops look anything but brave, good, caring guys who do not blast away just because they are there.
The thing that bothers me most about this and prior incidents is the constant lying that our government does when communicating what is going on in the war to us. To me that means the government KNOWS it is doing something wrong, but is too ***** you fill in your favorite word ***** to face up to it and just say, Hey, its necessary - if it is.
My countries forces are in NATO in Afghanistan and it wasn't them.
I was also around to witness the Viet-Name war and the nightly news reports and video footage that were broadcasted in my home every evening. Peter Jennings was reporter at the time...the bodies burning, dead dismantled bodies....it called a detestable war and in wars there are unwanted fatalities.
The "REAL" war was in Afghanistan and the fatalities that I was commenting on were pertaining to this article. The Taliban uses all types of methods to assist them in the murder of our servicemen and women and pregnant women and children are of no exception. In my opinion the death of civilians will happen because we are at War in that country. Get a life yourself MAN.
Some quotes to ponder:
"I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time, whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them... but no details can be relied on." --Thomas Jefferson
"I deplore... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them... These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our funtionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief... This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit." --Thomas Jefferson
They simply don't give a dam. If they did they would have added what you want since 90+ percent of the delegation is republican. Who is representing LA and NOLA during this democratic presidency and control of congress. Mary Landrieu? That's is it. She is the only member of the delegation that has any responsibility in your eyes? No other elected official has any responsibility to NOLA or LA? Or, if they do have responsibility, how about going to their meeting and protesting their lack of, well, anything for the last 18 months.
Just saying
I.F. Stone used to say he loved to read the Washington Post because he was always curious to learn which page they decided to put the page 1 stories on. This was certainly the case with Walter Pincus' pre-Iraq war stories that were skeptical of all the unsubstantiated WMD claims, stories that ended up way back in the A section.
Wherever you look in American life, we have immensely powerful institutions set up with all the wrong motives: transnational corporations legally beholden only to the most venal short-term interests of shareholders; too-big-to-fail banks bound to the sacred mission of obscuring financial risk till it can offloaded onto taxpayers; a military devoted to aggrandizing itself regardless of the cost in American and foreign blood and treasure; a political elite dedicated body and soul to the perpetuation of all the above, and mainstream media whose dirty little unspoken mission is to please them guys.
So, what's new? My question: Exactly how do we go about sweeping every last one of these goddam bastards into the dustbin of history?
I mention this because so many who post at HuffPost seem to think that a sense of what's right combined with attitude and impatience is enough to change the course of things. Sadly, it is not.
The "Taliban" is, at this point, a catch-all phrase to describe myriad anti-government groups -- some, merely accidents of geography. A fraction of the Taliban are the hardcore ideologues - Mullah Omar and the like; others are just drug traffickers, others are groups connected to warlords fighting for their own chunk of territory; others are villagers just aligning themselves with whichever of the above is least likely to get them killed.
The case that you cite sounds awful - I'm not disputing the possibility of a war crime if those acts are true.
But to assume that a group has NOT committed actions against US troops or Afghan forces simply by the fact that they listen to music, is terribly, terribly oversimplified.
Since I hate anonymous postings to blog sites (including my own), information about me can be found on www.mpnunan.com, or trueslant.com/mpnunan. I'm a journalist who has covered Afghanistan and other fronts in "the war on terror."
The best book I've read on the subject lately is Gretchen Peters' "Seeds of Terror."
Respectfully,
MP Nunan