May 19, 2006

87 Taliban Killed In Setback For U.S.

Hatched by Dafydd

Here's how it starts:

A brazen attack by hundreds of Taliban militants on an isolated town had been building for days, a coalition spokesman said Friday, after a wave of violence in southern Afghanistan left around 100 dead.

A hundred dead innocent villagers! Our policy is in tatters; Afghanistan is spiraling out of control in a cycle of violence... right?

Here is, as Paul Harvey says, the rest of the story:

The attack Wednesday night on Musa Qala in the volatile southern province of Helmand sparked eight hours of fighting and left about 40 Taliban and 13 Afghan police dead.

It was the epicenter of some of the fiercest combat since the Taliban regime's ouster by U.S.-led forces in late 2001 and raised new fears about deteriorating security in the hardline militia's former southern heartland.

In all, more than 100 people were reported killed in a string of attacks and engagements across Afghanistan that started Wednesday and continued through Thursday: up to 87 insurgents, at least 15 Afghan police, an American civilian training Afghan forces, and the first female Canadian soldier to die in combat.

"Deteriorating security?" All right, a show of hands: how many thought, reading the first paragraph, that a terrible catastrophe had just occurred in Afghanistan, and 100 peaceful civilians had just been brutally slain? I sure did; my heart leapt up my throat and almost gagged me.

This gets even better, however: we weren't the ones who killed 87 Taliban... it was the Afghan police and the townsmen of Musa Qala, making this absolutely great news:

[Coalition Spokesman Maj. Quentin] Innis said the Taliban often infiltrates villages and extorts money from tribal elders, but that leaders in Musa Qala had told the militants they weren't welcome. The militants then mounted their attack using machine guns and assault rifles.

Innis said coalition forces flew military aircraft overhead to scare the Taliban militants and as a show of force, but that the Afghan police forces did 100 percent of the fighting in the eight-hour clash.

"We see this as them taking control of the situation and sorting it out for themselves," he said. "We see it as very empowering on their part, and of course that's what we want, because eventually we're going to leave."

Why does the mainstream media do this? Even the best news is cast in a way that the casual reader will mistake it for dreadful news. At some point, surely some news reporter should rebel and say, "we're here to report history, not rewrite it." Don't they at least feel a little uneasy, deliberately misleading the American people?

I often wonder about this. The journalist community is largely left-liberal, but it's certainly not 100%. And even among the left-liberals, there must be some, a handful, who really do feel some small obligation to the truth.

So where are they? I went looking for the "Moslem Methodists" some months ago; should we send out a searching party for the Justice Journalists, the ones who say "darn the party line, I'm going to tell it like it is!"

But here, the rest of the rest of the story once again tries to undercut what's already been reported:

The fighting on Wednesday and Thursday was concentrated in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, the scene of repeated bombings and suicide attacks this year. But it marked an escalation in a region where the U.S.-led coalition is to cede control of security operations to NATO by July.

Yes... an escalation in the death toll of our enemies, the enemies of freedom, the people who spent days and tons of ordnance desperately trying to "kill" a couple of holy statutes (in between stoning women to death for being too attractive) to prove their god was bigger than the Buddhist "god". How can an attack that kills seventeen good guys and 87 bad guys be anything but a catastrophic defeat for the Taliban?

I tell you true: journalism has found a new floor to fall through; they are even worse today than they were in the epoch when Uncle Walter conjured defeat out of the American victory in the Tet Offensive. I now believe that most journalists are seriously clinically demented. At the very least, they have become so disassociated from reality that they have become a danger to themselves and others.

And we know what that usually entails.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, May 19, 2006, at the time of 5:52 AM

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Comments

The following hissed in response by: Rovin

87 Taliban Killed In Setback For U.S.
?????

I clicked to your link and did not find this headline. Did AP change it since your post?

The above hissed in response by: Rovin [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 19, 2006 7:04 AM

The following hissed in response by: XB234C

Many in the "new media" so called, Talk Radio, the Blogosphere, Fox News etc., like to refer to the media or antique media, the mainstream press (or MSM) as waning in influence and maintain the optimistic assertion that people will see through the bias and dismiss it as party line blather and on some levels perhaps they do, but the constant, ceaseless hammering of bad news regarding the War on Terror (particularly Iraq) is perhaps a way of reasserting their dominance. I've observed that while there is a vigorous anti-war movement in this country today, it doesn't seem to be as influential as it was perhaps in the '60s. Maybe this is because many who were in the anti-war movement in the '60s are now the very journalists you are excoriating in your post or at the very least, the children of these activists.I don't know if they're "clinically demented" unless "Bush Derangement Syndrome" or BDS is an actual affliction, I put a link to your post up on my blog, so as to engage my vast readership of 1 or 2 people,you make some excellent points.

The above hissed in response by: XB234C [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 19, 2006 7:07 AM

The following hissed in response by: Papa Ray

I really don't know, but there is one other aspect to consider.

As you know many of our liberal higher learning establishments (otherwise known as Moonbat Universitys) are graduating hundreds of budding journalists each year.

Those learned graduates need jobs, so they get a job and are given an assignement and they research it and type it up. Of course they are persuaded, influenced and brainwashed by their previous enrollment in "Liberal Journalism 101-102-103."

What other results would you expect?

Now their editors...that is a different story.

Papa Ray

The above hissed in response by: Papa Ray [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 19, 2006 10:03 AM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Rovin:

It's not their headline, it's my headline based upon the tone of their story. If they actually wrote it, I would have put it in quotation marks.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 19, 2006 1:12 PM

The following hissed in response by: Big D

Coming up next: "Hundreds of Taliban killed in major set-back to President Bush." Remember, you heard it hear first.

The above hissed in response by: Big D [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 22, 2006 10:45 AM

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