More News From The Enemy?

First posted 12/09/06 1700hrs PST – bumped to the top

In my post yesterday I updated with a story put out by the AP in which our troops killed 20 terrorists after calling in a airstrike on a house.  The report said a supposed Mayor claimed women and children were killed.  Now Al-Jazeera is claiming to have photo’s of the dead children:

Al Jazeera has obtained exclusive footage that confirms children were among the victims of a US air raid northwest of Baghdad. Local officials said that the bodies of 17 civilians, including six children and eight women, had been pulled from the debris of two houses in al-Ishaqi.
   
The US military had issued a statement on Friday saying that two women were among 20 suspected "al Qaeda terrorists" killed in the operation.
 
Al Jazeera’s footage showed the bodies of men, women and children wrapped in blankets after they had been pulled from the rubble.

The Agence France Presse news agency said it passed its own photographs of the dead children to Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, a US military spokesman, who said: "We’ve checked with the troops who conducted this operation – there were no children found among the terrorists killed.

"I see nothing in the photos that indicates those children were in the houses that our forces received fire from and subsequently destroyed with the air strike."

Lets leave out the fact that this is Al-Jazeera for a minute, but once you go look at the pictures you can instantly get the feeling your looking at another Green Helmet Guy production:

Now as disturbing as those pictures are you should recall this post by a photographer sometime ago about the use of long dead bodies to stage a incident:

i have been working in lebanon since all this started, and seeing the behavior of many of the lebanese wire service photographers has been a bit unsettling. while hajj has garnered a lot of attention for his doctoring of images digitally, whether guilty or not, i have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in peoples arms. these photographers have come away with powerful shots, that required no manipulation digitally, but instead, manipulation on a human level, and this itself is a bigger ethical problem.

whatever the case is—lack of training, a personal drive as a photographer to show what is happening to your country in as powerful a way as possible, or all out competitiveness, i think that the onus is on the wire services themselves, because they act as the employer/filter of their photogs work. standards should be in place or else the rest of us end up paying the price. and i’m not against the idea of local wire photographers, but after seeing it over and over for the past month, i think it is something that is worth addressing. while i walk away from a situation like that, one wire shooter sets up a situation, and the rest of them follow…….

by Bryan Denton Fri Aug 11 07:36:08 UTC 2006 | Beirut, Lebanon

So lets look at the evidence.  The Military issued this press release:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Coalition Forces killed 20 terrorists Friday morning while targeting al-Qaida terrorists in the Thar Thar area.

Coalition Forces targeted the location based on intelligence reports that indicated associates with links to multiple al-Qaida in Iraq networks were operating in the area.

Ground forces were searching buildings at the targeted location when they began receiving heavy machine gunfire from one of the buildings.  The ground forces returned fire, killing two armed terrorists.

Despite efforts to subdue the remaining armed terrorists, Coalition Forces continued to be threatened by enemy fire, causing forces to call in close air support.  A Coalition aircraft performed the air strike, resulting in 18 more armed terrorists killed.  

During a search of the objective, Coalition Forces found multiple weapons caches consisting of AK-47s, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-personnel mines, explosives, blasting caps and suicide vests.  All these items were destroyed on site.

Coalition Forces also found that two of the terrorists killed were women.  Al-Qaida in Iraq has both men and women supporting and facilitating their operations unfortunately. 

and have gone on record stating NO children were found amongst the dead.  But we have a AP source (cough) saying children were indeed among the dead.  Now we have Al-Jazeera showing supposed pictures of dead children.

Let’s just say I’m a bit suspicious. 

This Reuters piece names two spokesmen:

Police Major Khedr Hussein said 32 people were killed at Ishaqi, 90 km (50 miles) north of Baghdad. Mayor Amer Alwan told Reuters U.S. aircraft bombed two homes around 1 a.m (2200 GMT). He said 32 people were believed to be inside and that of 25 bodies pulled so far from the rubble, eight were women and six children.

That is in addition to the one named yesterday:

Amir Fayadh, the mayor of the al-Ishaqi area

The Mayors are one thing, but this Police Major is another.  I have sent a request to find out if this new Hussein is legitimate.

Centcom sent me this yesterday before these new reports:

Sir:
   
Unfortunately, this issue is being handled by Multinational Force – Iraq because the incident involved one of their units.  They have not replied to my request for some information about it.  All I know is that the attached release and pictures was sent out by MNFI yesterday.  Unfortunately, we are not privy to their operational reporting.

Vr,
LT Dean

So I can’t go too far via that route although he did send two digital pictures that were taken at the scene of the cache of weapons found:

Stay tuned!

UPDATE 2045hrs PST

Chris Muir’s December 10th edition of Day by Day is a doozy:

UPDATE 12/10/06 2100hr PST (and bumped)

Howie at The Jawa Report has done some more investigating on this incident and has come up with some interesting theories.  He first notes this report by the AP:

The U.S. command said a ground raid and airstrike killed 20 insurgents, but local officials claimed at least 19 civilians died, including seven women and eight children.

About 1,000 residents of the predominantly Sunni village of al-Ishaqi held a funeral for the 19 dead Saturday, shouting "Down with the occupiers," "Long live the resistance," and "There is no God but Allah."

The Association of Muslim Scholars, a group of hard-line Sunnis that opposes the coalition, issued a statement alleging U.S. soldiers entered two Iraqi houses, shot 32 civilians to death, including women and children, and then blew up the buildings to make it look as if the victims died in a U.S. airstrike targeting insurgents.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, part of a Sunni bloc that controls 44 of parliament’s 275 seats, made a similar claim, calling the attack "a new massacre by the American occupiers."

Howie is just as amused as I am since the above photo’s show what was found at that site including AK-47’s, pistols, ammunition, grenades and explosives. 

As we learn more and more about the absurd stories these groups spin, and how the MSM gobbles it all up, we must now look even harder at the Haditha story.  Many of us have said all along that the whole story smells but as more and more of these idiotic conspiracies are highlighted by our MSM it should cause many of us to question the truthfulness of the supposed Haditha massacre.

In other AP news Confederate Yankee takes Kathleen Carroll to task:

The AP will not tell us who their reporters are (citing safety concerns, of course). We have no names for alleged witnesses for precisely the same reason. We don’t know the name of the mosque from which these men were abducted. We don’t seem to have the names of the dead, and contrary to initial AP reports, we don’t seem to have any named employees of the Kazamiyah Hospital who will claim to have seen these bodies. Of the two named sources in the initial story, one now disavows the story originally attributed to him, and the other, primary witness seems all but certain of being a long-run, deeply embedded fraud.

And what about the things that Carroll would rather not address?

Such an example is the fact that the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, which would rarely miss a chance to cite an example of Shia brutality, has been curiously silent about these alleged immolations. Al Jazeera, the preeminent Arab news outlet, also did not report on this atrocity, despite how easily they could sell this story to their primary media market. For that matter, neither Reuters, nor UPI, nor any other news organization has been able to confirm the Associated Press story. AP, it seems, has an exclusive that no one else can or will substantiate, even two weeks later.

Note the Scholar group that he highlights.  Thats the same group that is alleging the US murdered innocent women and children and then conspired to make it look like a airstrike.  Do you not think they would have raised a stink about six Sunni’s being burnt alive?

But hey, the AP still stands by their reporting.

UPDATE 2130hrs PST

Confederate Yankee has found some pictures of the six Sunni’s being burnt.

Heh…made ya look.

Curt

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