Continuing Silence On al-Qaeda Torture By Our MSM

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The very same MSM outfits that showed this picture:

Over and over and over again (MRC has the MSM writing 6000 stories on Abu Ghraib) is still refusing to pay any attention to these pictures from an al-Qaeda torture manual found in Iraq recently:

I wrote about the silence 8 days ago, Mike 4 days ago, and still not a peep.

MRC notes that a few organizations gave a few quick blurbs about it, and then forgot it:

To their credit, CNN and Fox News Channel ran stories on the declassified material. Yet nine days since the material was released, neither ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times nor The Washington Post has run a story with the photos of this shocking evidence of al-Qaeda’s barbarism.

All of which seems to illustrate that while the MSM (and the left) cares a great deal about what our troops do to others, they care little, indeed can’t even be bothered by, the kind of tactics and torture our enemy does to us. 

While it is important to point out when we screw up, as is the case with Abu Ghraib, is it too much to ask for a bit of perspective? 

Nothing like this was used at Abu Ghraib:

So why the silence?

And think about this.  If it had not been for sites such as The Smoking Gun, and the conservative blogs, these pictures and stories would never had been known by the wider populace.  Which begs the question what else do we not know about events in our history?  Just imagine what was left out of newspapers by the leftists inside the MSM 30 years ago.

Patrick Poole points this out along with the fact that while there is complete silence from the MSM on this story, it hasn’t stopped many organizations from condemning the US:

As details slowly leaked out last week, the Center for Public Integrity, which promotes itself as “Investigative Journalism in the Public Interest”, published an article last week by Michael Bilton of the “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists” entitled, “US Treatment of Detainees Deplored”, where he expresses such outrages as the waterboarding of al-Qaeda operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, and revisiting the Abu Ghraib scandal. 

A check of the Amnesty International website directory for Iraq also finds no mention whatsoever of al-Qaeda’s torture networks and methods. But a report from last year, “Beyond Abu Ghraib,” identifies the primary culprit of torture and abuse in Iraq – the US armed forces: “As Amnesty International has reported elsewhere, many of the abuses occurring today are committed by armed groups opposed to the US-led Multinational Force (MNF) and the Iraqi government that it underpins.” 

The foreign press has also joined the conspiracy of silence on the al-Qaeda torture story. Two weeks ago, the BBC published a hand-wringing article, “US detainee mentally tortured”, about the horrors described by Majid Khan, an al-Qaeda operative imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay who was planning to conduct terrorist operations inside the US.

Those horrors being:

  • Pictures confiscated
  • Wrong prescription glasses
  • Shaved his beard
  • Forcibly fed him during his hunger strike
  • Denied him access to the recreation yard
  • Given cheap, unscented soap
  • Noisy fans
  • Half inflated balls for recreation

Now THAT is news!

But you see, the bias in the MSM is all made up by us wingnuts….

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Please allow me to introduce anti-war/anti-Bush WMD logic to this:

Just because they found a few pieces of paper that depict torture, doesn’t mean the guys caught with it were torturers.

Just because they had pliers and drills etc doesn’t mean they were going to use those for torture. These are benign objects that are DUAL USE, and not necessarily implements of torture.

Witnesses? Irrelevent. Surely they were just trying to pull something over on the US to make us BELIEVE there was torture going on there.

What? The guys caught at the torture house have a history of torture? That doesn’t matter. Just because someone has (literally) written a book on torture doesn’t mean that they are torturers. They could have just been innocent carpenters busted in a Bush scheme to boost poll numbers by making the world THINK there was torture going on (busted by the neocons surely by the use of an Iraqi version of the Patriot Act which caught them checking out the books on torture.

See, a group of guys with a history of torture are not necessarily torturers. They could have gone to Iraq to retire, and just have had an old manual lying around in their garage with blood stained carpentry tools.

Oh, and there’s no proof they were Al Queda either, in fact, it seems highly unlikely since Democrats (ie honest politicians) tell us that Al Queda is not in Iraq. Actually, there are no terrorists in Iraq. These guys are drilling out people’s kneecaps for freedom.

May as well face the facts. If you hear or read it on an Antique MSM outlet it is 99 44/100% wrong or an outright lie. If it’s credited to the Ass ociated (with terrorists) Press or Roto Reuters it’s 99 99/100% a flat out lie.

“Unscented soap?”

That might actually be a torture to the other prisoners who live in close proximity to this guy.

Pictures confiscated
Wrong prescription glasses

The REAL torture would be if they replaced their pictures with one of Rosie and then made them wear correct prescription glasses! I’ll bet they’d get alot of intel to make it stop. 😉

It’s certainly wrong that the media hasn’t run the story. Whether or not it’s liberal bias or something else, I don’t know.

(Off the top of my head, one “other” possibility is that Abu Garib involved Americans and real prisoners, where this story has neither. If it were Iraqis mistreating Americans in Abu Garib, they still would’ve run the story as hard. On the other hand, if all that was found in Abu Garib was drawings of Americans torturing Iraqis, that story would probably’ve gotten even less play than the AQ torture book has.) ((Let me be clear!!! I’m not claiming this is any reason for anything. I’m saying there’re all kinds of biases, some of which ain’t about liberal/conservative, though. Again, this is NOT my actual thinking on the subject, but a made up example of another bias in the US media.))

Whatever the bias, its no excuse. The story should’ve run. I can see not running/or editing the pictures, though… (Perhaps having them on a news station website, with a “Warning: Graphic images” would be appropriate, but running them on the 6pm news would be tasteless.)

As for the poor guy with the bad glasses & unscented soap, I’ll note 2 things: He’s the one claiming he was mentally tortured, not the BBC story (which even ran “mentally tortured” in quotes), and he also claims he’s innocent of having anything to do with terrorism which, if true, would make his whole detention kinda mentally torturous, just like it would be for any other innocent man in any prison anywhere. Again of course, he’s the only one making the claim.