abu-alwafa

In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

Lies, damned lies, and news

By Rob Schultheis

It's time to amend the old "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" to "Lies,
damned lies, and news."

For instance, last week's much-publicized story about the FBI's break up of
a terrorist plot to buy shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles.

I'm sure 95 percent of the American public cheered at the news, thinking,
"Hey, the bad guys lost another one." But consider the facts.

The TV "news" people started out saying that the people involved were trying
to buy American-made Stingers. Then, within hours, the missiles became
Soviet SAM-18s, a weapon similar to the Stinger and far superior to the old
SAM-7s so familiar to those of us who cover small wars.

Then it turned out that the "terrorists" trying to buy the missiles were
really FBI agents posing as African rebels.

And then it turned out that there never were any missiles: the Feds arrested
a Southeast Asian arms dealer and his American accomplice when they arrived
to pick up the down payment on the SAM-18s. That's why you never saw the
otherwise inevitable footage of the Feds opening up cases of contraband
SAMs.

Real story: our guys busted two arms dealer types who may or may not have
even had SAM-18s to sell. (Arms dealers commonly try to sell weapons they
don't have, or bait and switch - "Whoops, we're all out of SAM-18s, how
about some of these 1960s SAM-7s that've been buried in a rice paddy in
Vietnam for 30 years?")

No terrorists were arrested, and no weapons were seized.

Why then did the American public end up with the impression that we just
struck a powerful blow against global terrorism? In the old days, 20 years
ago, our watchdogs in the press would have jumped all over the Feds' bogus
claims. Is the Fourth Estate stupid, lazy, asleep at the wheel, or what?

We see the same lack of intelligent reporting in the coverage of our
occupation of Iraq.

On one side, no one seems to be covering the often laudable civil affairs
work many of our troops are doing there: building schools and clinics,
helping farmers get their crops to market, ridding neighborhoods of crime.

One Army Reserve unit from Washington D.C. recently rescued the animals from
the Baghdad Petting Zoo, and an Army Captain in northern Iraq put together a
system for identifying stolen cars so vehicle owners could come and reclaim
their vehicles.

Of course, I didn't learn about either story in the press, I accessed the
Army's Public Affairs division on the Internet.

On the opposite side - the bad stuff - news coverage has been equally lame.

For one thing, the press has gone along with the U.S. government's specious
policy of separating out deaths caused by hostile action and KIAs from
accidents, friendly fire and the like.

Aside from the message it sends to the friends and kinfolk of such dead
G.I.s, it is dishonest - a blatant attempt to minimize the losses our
soldiers are taking over there.

In one incident, a Humvee racing to the scene of an ambush on the notorious
Baghdad Airport road crashed, and one of the men in it died.

He wasn't included in the weekly figures of Americans killed in Iraq.

This is ridiculous, totally bogus, and, again, an insult to the man and
those who mourn him.

Hundreds of stories are flooding out of Iraq about catastrophic supply
shortages among the troops there.

A subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton was contracted to take care of food,
water and shelter for the Army, but when the war started and insurance rates
in the war zone soared they simply backed out of the job.

The result: troops are still on MREs, or field rations (the troops call them
"Meals Rejected by Ethiopians") after four months in-country, and bottled
water is so scarce in many places troops have to observe water rationing.
Heatstroke has felled dozens of troops, and one soldier died of it last
week.

Soldiers are living in unsanitary, unsafe and uncomfortable tent
shantytowns.

You'd think all this would be a cause celebre in the press, but no, you
barely hear about it in the papers or on TV.

You have to go to Col. David Hackworth's Web site. A hack who earned eight
Purple Hearts in Korea and Vietnam, and who quit the Army in disgust with
our incompetent strategy and tactics in Vietnam, now operates as an unpaid
watchdog of our military, especially how the ground-pounders, grunts and
infantrymen are treated. His site is a real eye-opener.

You don't learn about the good or the bad in the American press: they are
equal opportunity incompetents and idiots.

When I was making the public speaking/talk-show rounds as an "Afghan expert"
after Sept. 11, the question I heard most often was, "Where do I look to get
the real story? What channel do I turn to; what paper do I read?"

It's even worse today. Heroes go unsung and deadly mistakes and crass
injustices go uncorrected because no one knows they happened.

What a shame. What a farce.

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