Military

-By Warner Todd Huston

This USA Today story about an AP report should be called headline abuse instead of “detainee abuse” because if one were to just read the headline and move on, you’d get the wrong impression about what the story really reveals. You’d obviously read USA Today’s headline, “Guantanamo detainees tell of abuses,” and assume the story is another abu Ghraib styled yarn about how evil US soldiers are abusing these poor, poor terrorists in the Guantanamo Bay detainment facility — after all the prevailing MSM story has been just that when the word “abuses” is used. But, if you take the time to actually read the story, there seems less of the “abuses” you’d expect to find and more of how the detainees themselves are abusing each other, themselves, and their guards. Instead of BEING abused, the detainees seem more like the abusers and this is certainly not the message that the headline imparts in today’s MSM climate. One wonders why USA Today would want to leave such a wrong conclusion with a headline that doesn’t quite seem to match the story.

After reading the headline, in light of how the prevailing usage of “abuses” in the MSM so often means the “abuses” caused at the hands of US soldiers, we find, however, that the story itself does not really detail too much “abuse” of prisoners. Even that first paragraph starts to disabuse about the “abuses.”

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Detainees flinging body waste at guards. Guards interrupting detainees at prayer. Interrogators withholding medicine. Hostility and tension between inmates and their keepers at the Guantanamo Bay prison are evident in transcripts obtained by The Associated Press.

Notice the lopsided preponderance of what might be termed “abuse?” The detainees are doing more of it both to their guards and to each other. The detainees are, in truly uncivilized fashion, “flinging body waste at guards” and causing hostility between each other. The worst that USA Today can accuse our soldiers of is “interrupting” a prayer! It turns out that the detainees here and not the guards are causing the worst “abuses”.
Continue reading “More Media Bias Against Guantanamo Facility”

-By Warner Todd Huston

This one makes you want to say, “Captain Kirk to the Starship AP. Beam us up, there’s no intelligent life in the AP News Room.” on August 29th, the AP published a story scolding the U.S. Military for refusing to use a non-lethal “ray gun” to control crowds in Iraq and they quote a few military sources who claim they issued an “urgent request” for the system. It takes over half the story before the reader is finally told that this system is still experimental and that this “ray gun” has never been put into production, so “urgent requests” or no, the Pentagon couldn’t ship the weapon even if it wanted to because it doesn’t really even exist in a field ready state. And, even as the AP admits this, the fact that this weapon doesn’t really exist is never developed well enough in the story for a casual reader to easily grasp this fact. The net effect of the story causes a reader to imagine we have a warehouse filled with these life saving, non-lethal weapons and that the Pentagon refuses to release them to desperate commanders in Iraq. But the truth is that we do not even have any such stash of these experimental crowd control devices anywhere.

Worse than misleading the public into assuming that the Military has non-lethal weapons at its disposal that it refuses to use, AP presents its story as if the Military is simply prefers to just randomly kill people. And, in keeping with the AP’s anti-American stylebook, Iraqi insurgents are treated as mere loiterers that the US military indiscriminately sprays with bullets, bullets that also kill untold numbers of civilians.

Catch their opening sentences:
Continue reading “Media Scolds Military for Not Using Non-Existent ‘Ray Gun’ in Iraq”

-By Warner Todd Huston

Washington Post columnist, Sarah Stillman, has penned the sort of pretentious column that is blind for its self-indulgence and foolishly extrapolates the author’s singular experience as one ubiquitous or as a universal representation of our soldier’s lives once back in the states. In this case, Stillman seems to imagine that the Iraq war has made all our returning soldiers drug addicts, drunks, and social outcasts. Worse, she naively seems to imagine that no returning soldiers in history have ever experienced such difficulties returning to “normal life” once back from war’s jarring experience, or at the very least today’s soldiers have it worse than any others. Her condescension is infuriating and her obvious bias against our soldiers and this action is painfully obvious.

Stillman starts by describing a bar fight in an establishment near Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and relating that such fights are far too common of late. Of this there is little doubt and that it isn’t a good thing is obvious.

But, she then goes on to imagine that our veterans today are mistreated and ignored.

Half a decade into the “war on terror,” America’s bars have become our barometers: instruments that measure the extent to which our veterans have been left to wrestle alone with substance abuse, anxiety disorders and other mental health problems after long tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What makes today’s vets any different than any other era? It is woefully common to see vets “left to wrestle alone” with war’s harsh experience. Unfortunately, it is just a sad example of human nature. It’s hard for young men (and now women) to deal with what they went through and even harder for the folks back at home to understand and lend a helping hand. But, today’s soldiers are NOT going through anything that has never been experienced by humanity, nor is it somehow worse than it ever has been.
Continue reading “WashPost: Our Wounded Troops all Drunks, Substance Abusers”

-By Warner Todd Huston

Michael A. Fletcher of the Washington Post has a little snippet of a story so full of hyperbole about how wonderful and “crystallizing” so-called “Peace Mom” Cindy Sheehan has been for the country that unintentional comedy is the result — that or it raises a collective groan for its slobbering sycophancy. He so outlandishly exaggerates the impact of the “antiwar hero” and her protégé in “Camp Casey” that it just boggles the mind. Seems like Fletcher is far from a disinterested “journalist” but has succumbed to outright hero worship here.

I say “little snippet” of a story because it is one of those entries containing several short snippets of political news, the Sheehan story being one of them. But, befitting Fletcher’s obviously smitten condition with “grieving mother” Sheehan, it is the largest entry in the article.

Let us start with the overawed first paragraph.

It was just two years ago that Cindy Sheehan pierced the national consciousness with her roadside vigil near President Bush’s Texas ranch in protest of the Iraq war.

“Pierced the national consciousness?” How is that for over the top, eh? About all Sheehan has “pierced” is her own reputation as she went on to associate with every dictator, anti-American and subversive leftist organization out there.

Fletcher doesn’t get any less absurd as he continues.
Continue reading “Shilling for ‘Peace Mom’… STILL”