Thursday’s New York Times misidentified GOP Senate candidate Pete Coors as a Ku Klux Klan member who murdered a black sharecropper. . . .
The Times story concerned a federal court decision upholding Louisiana resident Ernest Avants’ 2003 conviction in the slaying.
The story indicated the accompanying photo was of Avants. But the picture actually was of Coors on the day the Golden beer baron announced he was running in Colorado’s open Senate race.
I’m sure that the person who wrote this still doesn’t see what the problem is.
The next item isn’t Big Media “accidentally” making a mistake that makes a political opponent look bad, but simply being flat out gullible:
Many news organizations across the country are mistakenly identifying the flag-draped caskets of the Space Shuttle Columbia’s crew as those of war casualties from Iraq.
Editors are being asked to confirm that the images used in news reports are in fact those of American casualties and not those of the NASA astronauts who were killed Feb.1, 2003, in the Columbia tragedy.
An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia’s seven astronauts.
These wouldn’t be such a big deal if Big Media didn’t mock others for being innaccurate, or the blunders weren’t so mind numbingly stupid.
Asked about US and Israeli demands to halt terror attacks as a condition for resuming the peace process, [PLO Foreign Minister Farouk] Kaddoumi replied: “They can go to hell!”
My guess is that the US and Israeli leaders aren’t the ones on the fast track to that destination.
Bush’s support for Sharon may have gone over well with conservative and Jewish voters in the U.S. presidential election, but it inflamed the Arab world.
Well, yeah … can you say “likely voters”?
Volunteers at the US RAF Lakenheath base in Suffolk have been producing the soft toys from old and torn uniforms which were found in an attic.
But campaigners Suffolk 4 Peace have said the scheme is insensitive and could traumatise the Iraqi children.
[…]
Annie Wimbush, of Suffolk 4 Peace, said the material being used was inappropriate.
“The camouflage material, the uniform material that’s being used could in fact trigger trauma symptoms in a child as well as relieve them,” she said.
Just the kind of idiotic protest you’d expect from a group that thinks “for” is spelled “4”.
[source]
Peace award-winning General Romeo Dallaire was raked over the coals at the International Conference on Genocide, held at Kigali, Rwanda in the very country where his United Nations Command had failed to prevent a massacre of 800,000 people. He was asked by angry participants how he could have let the very thing he was charged to prevent happen without resistance. He blamed the Britain, France and the United States for not coming to his aid.
“You, me, my forces, were abandoned by our own countries and the international community,” the retired Canadian Armed Forces lieutenant-general told the International Conference on Genocide […]
He faced two specific attacks yesterday, one from a Belgian academic who questioned why he did not disobey orders from UN headquarters and do more to protect civilians, and another by a Belgian doctor-turned-legislator who said Gen. Dallaire should have resigned when it became clear the UN Security Council would not appropriately support his mission. …
Gen. Dallaire angrily denied the charge. “With no resources to sustain a battle, I would have become the third target, the third force in the battle, and as such would have been free game for the other side to eliminate the force in total,” he said, explaining why his troops did not engage Hutu militias to defend Tutsi civilians who sought shelter with the peacekeepers.
Dallaire’s statement is astounding on three counts. First, it is a candid admission that the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission was wholly unprepared to fulfill its mission. Even had he been prepared to disobey the United Nations instructions to sit on his hands, Dallaire is arguing he did not have the military means to be more than a sacrificial force. The second is that he accepted this lunatic mission, by his own description little more than an imposture or a fraud, and reposed on it the credulity of an entire African nation. The third is his revelation that criminal responsibility lies, not with the men who shot, hacked and stabbed thousands to death, but with the American taxpayer who did not do enough to restrain them, as those who are responsible for naughty children. That said, Dallaire has admitted that he unit he commanded could not and it would not fight.
I think it might also be mentioned that any protection of civilians Dallaire might have attempted would have been in direct violation of his orders from the UN. Think about that - his mission had no other purpose than to protect civilians (by preventing a genocide) yet he was forbidden by the very source of mission from doing that. Of course, if one sends out a military force that is forbidden to fight, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s capable of doing so.
This leaves us with the one big policy question of the day: Are these the people who should take charge of protecting civilians in Iraq?
Belmont Club has an analysis of what many of we supporters of our current actions in the Middle East worry about. It points out that the worst results from a failure of President Bush’s mission to bring self-ordered society to the Middle East. Note carefully that it wouldn’t be the West that would pay the highest price.