Seems like a pretty absolute statement...
Only what I've read about the same incident in other articles. I wasn't there, but (I would bet) neither were you. The point is that it's yet another in a long string of articles that establishes a pattern.
Celebrating? Hardly. Passing it on? Obviously.
Yes, I read about it.
That's a one-sided view. That's what our military says after their investigation. The Iraqi police are saying something else. I don't know which is the truth, but I see no reason to automatically prefer our version over the Iraqi version.
In the meantime, enough accusations have been levelled about us killing civilians, and more are coming it seems almost weekly, that its difficult to not lend them some credence,
especially in light of our history in such matters. I've posted any number of articles and supporting documents to show that not only have we done some pretty horrible things in the world, the people we had doing them admit to it. So denying it is becoming increasingly difficult, which I think is a problem for you guys on the right. If we are just as bad as everyone else, then we lose any kind of moral impetus for our actions.
Again, the Iraqis (obviously) have a different version. It comes down to a case of one word against another, but one side is becoming increasingly vocal. Could they be lying? Sure. But as more and more people come forward to say that we're killing people for no particular reason, and as this dovetails with the evidence of history, of our shena****ns at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, etc. it becomes more difficult to defend the notion that all such instances are lies. Some probably are, but just as probably, some are not.
But to go a little deeper: I am also aware of a number of instances of intentional manipulation of the news on the part of large corporate/ government interests in this country. Note that I'm talking about actual memos from network execs to reporters leaked to the small press. The content of at least a couple of those memos concerned the war in Iraq, and told the reporters to specifically avoid casting the war in negative terms. These were memos that came out in 2004.
Obviously, something has changed since then, though I'm not sure what. I'm not aware of any major news agencies having been sold to anti-war interests, so there are a couple possible explanations for why these stories would begin to appear in the mainstream press:
1) They're posted as a limited hangout. The scenario would be that, at this point, unable to deny our killing of innocent civilians, the news media are cherry picking stories and reporting those that have some element of doubt to them.
2) They're posted as a means of further hobbling the neocons (I consider this the most likely explanation), who are simply mis-managing the moneyed interests that got them elected.
3) A loose cannon got the story out (not as unlikely as it sounds, but still not too likely).
Is that the right-wing version of "you've been brainwashed by Uncle Sam?" I don't really think so. Somewhere along the road, I've posted links to some middle-eastern news agencies and sources I pay attention to. One of those is
www.uruknet.info. If you'll read the stories that get posted there, you'll find that some of them make far more radical claims than the ones I make. I don't post them, and frankly find some of them highly questionable. If I were a puppet, this would not be the case. Nor would I have made the claim, as I have, that OBL and Al Qaeda probably also serve corporate interests in the same way our military does. I don't idealize Al Qaeda or have any illusions that they are also just a bunch of killers, more or less a band of mercenaries well-funded by those who have an interest in keeping the ME unstable.
I didn't send the military. If it had been my choice, I'd have sent the military elsewhere.