Israel Law Center Director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has written a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft, warning that the Palestinian put in charge of investigating the Gaza roadside bombing that killed 3 Americans in October—Rashid Abu Shabak—is probably the perpetrator.
But I’m sure he gets along fine with the State Department, and who could want more than that?
A New York Times op-ed by two Brookings Institution researchers, Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Michael O’Hanlon, claims that Baghdad’s murder rate is among the highest in the world. Supposedly Baghdad’s annualized murder rate from April to October this year ranged from an incredible 100 to 185 per 100,000 people […]
Yet, according to the Wall Street Journal Europe, the U.S. Army 1st Division in Baghdad reports that the numbers fell continually from a high of 19.5 per 100,000 in July to only 5 per 100,000 in October. […]
I contacted the authors of both pieces. Albuquerque and O’Hanlon, who wrote the Times piece, provided two sources for their murder rate numbers: An article by Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times (Sept. 16, 2003) and a piece by Lara Marlowe in the Irish Times (Oct. 11, 2003). Yet, both references clearly stated that much more than murder was included in the reports that they used from the Baghdad morgue. MacFarquhar notes that these deaths also included “automobile accidents” and cases where people “were shot dead by American soldiers,” cases that clearly did not involve murders. The Irish Times piece mentions that “up to a quarter of fatal shootings [in the morgue] are caused by U.S. troops.” […]
The Wall Street Journal Europe instead relied on the U.S. Army 1st Division stationed in Baghdad. A public affairs officer with that division, Jason Beck, confirmed for me that a large part of the Iraqi legal system is being overseen by the U.S. JAG officers, and they are using the same standards for murder rates as used in the U.S. and separating out murders from other deaths.
The NY Times cooking the numbers between source and cite? I wish I could be surprised.
As you can see in my pictures there were scores of reporters and cameras all over the place. And since the rallies ended in front of the Palestine hotel we thought that it would be impossible for the media to ignore this event. I felt a bit awkward walking along reporters carrying just a little digital camera while they had all the equipment.
The last thing we expected was to be the first to publish anything about the protests. It felt both good and awful at the same time. Good for scooping Reuters, AFP, AP, and other wire services and media stations. And awful for the people that depended on these services for their news. I’m telling you there were reporters from every station in the world at the demos that day and yet only a few mentioned them at all.
So these reporters just forgot to mention this to their senior editors?
:UPDATE: Long post at Instapundit with the NY Times lame excuse that they didn’t cover the protests because they weren’t notified ahead of time. Skipping over the fact that it was all over the blogosphere beforehand, we can see from above that the reporters were there anyway and the NY Times actually published one (one!) picture from the protest. So the story was dropped or spiked, not just missed.