Bloodiest Week This Year For US Troops Ends With Bombing
BAGHDAD - A roadside bomb killed an American soldier in Baghdad yesterday, capping the bloodiest week for US troops in Iraq this year. Clashes persisted in Shi’ite areas, even as the biggest Shi’ite militia sought to rein in its fighters.
At least 13 Shi’ite militants were killed in the latest clashes in Baghdad’s militia stronghold of Sadr City, the US military said. Iraqi police said seven civilians also died in fighting, which erupted Friday night and tapered off yesterday.
Bloodiest Week?...not to the NY Times. The NY Times never mentioned this surge in American troop deaths, although last week they had a nice article entitled: "Counting Wall Street’s Casualties." What's more important anyway?
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/13/8264/
-----------
The NY Times has finally responded to the criticism that it didn't cover the Winter Soldier's Testimony in DC last month.
Why hadn't it? Turns out the newspaper didn't know! All the rest of the world knew. I was there and there were at least thirty major news sources covering the event. Somebody forgot to tell the NY Times!
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt didn't stop there, of course. If the NY Times had known, they just didn't have the reporters in DC to send: "one is on book leave, one was traveling with the secretary of defense, and one was in Iraq covering the war."
"News organizations like the Times, with its own substantial investment in independent reporting from Iraq tend to prefer their own on-scene accounts of the war, rather than relying on charges and counter-charges at home by organizations with strongly held political viewpoints about the war."
No, the NY Times likes their embedded reporters and Pentagon sources so much better than Iraq War vets who might tell things upsetting to readers. And the NY Times did cover a vet's group in DC that week: the Vets for Freedom, a tiny group supporting the war. Anyone still thinking the NY Times is against the Iraq occupation should think again. The NY Times has been a cheerleader for this war from the beginning.
-----------
Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups.
A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings.
Private firms spying for the US Government? What is this, "Big Brother" privatized? Don't worry about this report; the NY Times didn't bother covering it.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/11/8217/
-----------
The NY Times has called attention to one humanitarian disaster, the "genocide in Darur." Of course, like most US media, the NY Times has blamed it all on one group (bad Arabs), and pushed military solutions over other remedies. Could it be all that oil in Sudan, which is never included as part of the story?
Turns out, all that hand wringing for another US military adventure may be based on lies: In 2007, Doctors Without Borders, which has been on the ground in Darfur since 2003, stated, "Today, it is totally incorrect to speak of large-scale massacres, of genocide, of famine and of large epidemics in Darfur." A recent report by FAIR bears this out. Most of the stories are gross exaggerations and based on happenings before 2004.
When the establishment in the US, including the NY Times calls for "humanitarian intervention," you know something is being cooked up in the Pentagon. And Nicholas Kristof's role in promoting American military intervention must be seen for what it is, pure propaganda - something he is very good at.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3259
