An American woman working for a U.S. nonprofit organization inIraq to help strengthen the fledgling government was among four people killed Wednesday in a roadside ambush.
The woman, whose name was withheld pending notification of her family, worked for the National Democratic Institute, a Washington organization thatadvises political parties around the world.
Les Campbell, director of the group's operations in the Middle East and North Africa, said the three other people killed - a Hungarian, a Croat andan Iraqi -- were bodyguards from the private security firm Unity Resources Group.
Two other guards were injured, one seriously, Campbell said.
The above is from Borzou Daragahi and Peter Spiegel's "American woman killed in Baghdad attack: The victim helped train Iraqi political parties" (Los Angeles Times). The New York Times isn't interested in that -- they offer a few paragraphs of an AP story on it in the print edition. Their own writers? Interested in selling you the war -- again -- because they can't tell you a damn thing about the violence yesterday. They can push Operation Happy Talk's latest wave -- al-Maliki's really, really going to crackdown on the Shi'ite militias . . . this time. He's really, really going to do it. Why, Shi'ites have been arrested and they haven't been released . . . yet! Not yet!
You had another kidnapping yesterday, easily 35 reported Iraqi deaths (that's low balling), the US military announced yesterday that two more US troops had died and look for the story addressing the violence in the Times and you won't find it. You'll find sop -- as though al-Maliki -- a puppet -- can really do anything and as though, if he did, he wouldn't find himself out of his power-in-name-only immediately.
But there's an escalation the paper supports so tell the world lies about how al-Maliki is really, really serious this time and maybe a few fools will believe it.
Ignore the realities in Iraq and maybe a few fools will think "The corner's a' being turned!" The New York Times is a bigger embarrassment than usual this morning.
In the Los Angeles Times, Ronald Brownstein writes of a recent poll:
A strong majority of Americans opposes President Bush's decision to send more troops to Iraq, and about half of the country wants Congress to block the deployment, a Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
As he seeks to chart a new course in Iraq, Bush also faces pervasive resistance to and skepticism about the U.S. commitment - more than three-fifths of those surveyed said the war was not worth fighting, and only one-third approved of his handling of the conflict.
And in a striking measure of people's declining trust in Bush, half said they believed he deliberately misled the U.S. in making his case for invading Iraq.
This is Bush's weakest showing on these questions in a Times poll.
Asked about the president's recent announcement that he would dispatch an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, three-fifths said they opposed the move, whereas just over one-third backed it.
Worth noting again is that the New York Times loves their own polls, loves them so much they front page them. But when that paper has a war to sell, suddenly they go poll shy. There has not been a story published on any poll by that paper since escalation became a topic. When you consider the weeks and weeks it has been a topic, that tells you a great deal about how interested the New York Times is in selling the war (again). The people don't like it, they don't support it, so the paper ignores it (not unlike the massive protests ahead of the illegal war). Better to continue tossing out sop about how al-Maliki's really, really serious this time.
In the real world, the US military announced: "A Sailor assigned to 16th Military Police Brigade, Camp Bucca, Iraq, died Jan. 17 in a non-combat related incident." Already today there are reports of twenty Iraqi deaths. Don't expect to read about them tomorrow in paper's more interested in managing your opinion than in actual reporting.
Yesterday, I left out the link to Joshua Partlow's Washington Post article on the bombings targeting the college in Baghdad. I'll try to go into the earlier entry, time permitting, but I may not get to it. If you missed the article you can use the link today.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
borzou daragahi
peter spiegel
ronald brownstein
the washington post
joshua partlow
Note: Links fixed.
