[Dean's World] Dave Price: Who Is Jamil Hussein?

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
Who Is Jamil Hussein?
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1165609441.shtml


   And where has he hidden the media's respect for truth and accuracy?
   Mary Katherine Ham [1]asks. Answers are not forthcoming. And as I've
   said before, he's the tip of the iceberg.
   [2]Confederate Yankee looks at the train wreck in progress, and hits
   on the most important point in all this.

     This presents us with the unsettling possibility that the
     Associated Press has no idea how much of the news it has reported
     out of Iraq since the 2003 invasion is in fact real, and how much
     they reported was propaganda.

   And [3]here we have a glowing, misleading homage to "[4]Green Helmet,"
   in which the AP's Lauren Frayer claims it's his presence in two wars
   that prompts questions about his legitimacy. Somehow, she ignores the
   strongest evidence againt him, the [5]video showing him stage-managing
   photo ops of dead civilians, and snobbishly attributes all the
   questions about Green Helmet to the West's collective cultural
   ignorance about Mideast culture. Really, you [6]couldn't make this
   stuff up if you tried.
   But never mind Iraq and Lebanon. They [7]can't even get the news about
   a war from 50 years ago right:

     As AP told it, Daily was the only soldier at No Gun Ri who directly
     received orders from his officers to turn his water-cooled .30
     caliber machinegun on the civilians and shoot them down in cold
     blood at point-blank range.
     Daily's account was chilling. It was also - as AP should have known
     - a fantasy.
     The AP story took at face value Daily's claims that he was a combat
     infantryman who won a battlefield commission just a few days after
     the events at No Gun Ri, and had been awarded the Distinguished
     Cross and three Purple-Hearts.
     In reality, he was an enlisted mechanic in an entirely different
     unit, nowhere near No Gun Ri. He had fabricated his biography and
     credentials as well as his entire account of the events at No Gun
     Ri

   It turns out the source was also pleading guilty to fraud for claiming
   benefit checks for post-traumatic stress despite never seeing combat.
   Oddly, all this misinformation seems to go the same way. There's
   rarely any pro-Western news to question, because we seldom see
   front-page stories about heroic American soldiers, Israelis bravely
   doing their best to avoid civilian casualties even as their enemies
   attempt to maximize them, or reminders that our military has kept
   millions of South Koreans free and prosperous despite the slavering
   nightmare of privation, death and oppression to their north. The press
   believes that to accept and promulgate such memes at face value would
   be "jingoistic" and wrong. But news that reflects negatively on
   America? Well, no need to look into that, and if it turns out our
   enemies have been feeding us propaganda, that must be part of their
   "culture of drama," and who are we to judge them?

References

   1. http://www.examiner.com/a-444127~Mary_Katherine_Ham__Who__exactly__is_The_Associated_Press__Capt__Jamil_Hussein_.html
   2. http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/207426.php
   3. http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_international/lebanon_israel/green_helmet/index.html?SITE=AP
   4. http://www.greenhelmetguy.blogspot.com/
   5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vPAkc5CLgc
   6. http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260
   7. http://www.nypost.com/seven/12082006/postopinion/opedcolumnists/the__not_so__infallible_ap_robert_opedcolumnists_robert_bateman.htm