Quote from aradiel:
edit : damn I just noticed the distortion that GUARDIAN has done. Taking words out of context is LOW LOW LOW practice.
They've also been forced to retract and "clarify" both the Wolfowitz story AND one of the lead stories in the recent trumped-up WMD controversy:
The Guardian
Thursday June 5, 2003
A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the Department of Defence website, "The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq." The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.
Thursday June 5, 2003
The Guardian
In our front page lead on May 31 headlined "Straw, Powell had serious doubts over their Iraqi weapons claims," we said that the foreign secretary Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell had met at the Waldorf Hotel in New York shortly before Mr Powell addressed the United Nations on February 5. Mr Straw has now made it clear that no such meeting took place. The Guardian accepts that and apologises for suggesting it did.
The items were lousy propaganda - easily and simply disposed of, though some harm has already been done, as no doubt the ideas will circulate around kneejerk leftist and peace movement circles forever and ever, ad nauseam. How the stories even came to exist raises questions about the GUARDIAN and its willingness to trust and unwillingness even to fact-check dubious sources, at least when the latter's information just happens to confirm the paper's prejudices. (Sound familiar?) Apparently, Straw wasn't even in New York at the time the meeting between him and Powell was supposed to have taken place. And you'd have to have been pretty naive about how the world works, utterly blinded by your biases, or just not too swift ever to have believed the Wolfowitz story in the first place.
The BBC trumpets a story falsely claiming that American rescuing PFC Lynch were firing "blanks" in the process of creating a made-for-TV event. (BTW: Follow-up interviews with Iraqis at the hospital by NBC suggested that the "blanks" might have been "flash-bang" stun grenades.) Anti-Bush Columnists like Robert Scheer and Maureen Dowd uncritically pick up and spread such items, or create new ones of their own by distorting and decontextualizing statements of public figures - as when Dowd recently mangled a statement of Bush's to make it seem like he was claiming to have destroyed Al Qaeda, or when the "news" pages "improved" a statement of Gen. Wallace's during the war to make it seem like he was admitting the US was unprepared for Iraqi resistance.
These are just a few examples of what's been going on. I ask again: Who are the real liars here?
The foolish and presumptuous charges made by the likes of Trader556 are typical of the twaddle that's still circulating in Left-Land - of a piece with the made-up casualty figures he keeps throwing around.
Meanwhile, every day brings another mass grave in Iraq to be unearthed. It seems (according to Kurdish news sources) that they just found one in which over 200 children were buried alive - some of the little girls with their dolls.
My recommendation to Trader556 and his buddies is to take some time off from trading this Summer, and do some volunteer work in Iraq. I'm sure they could use some help collecting unearthed corpses prior to identification and proper burial. Then he could come back and tell us whether he still thinks the war was unjustified, and that the Iraqis were better off under Hussein.
Oh, and in answer to Trader556's frequent question, what the friggin f&ck is going in is this: This country's leaders are trying to deal with a dangerous, complex, and ugly world situation, while immature cranks, who devote all their naive cynicism toward their own country and none toward the incompetents and ideologues who provide them with their "news," make false accusations and whine.