Boy, 5, doused in gas, set on fire by masked men

PurestAmbrosia said:
probably the culprits are the same ones offering help now?.. everything for good publicity!
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It's sometimes done for revenge, by one of the religious groups. More children were reported taken yesterday by Al Qaeda.
By Mariam Karouny

BAGHDAD, Aug 23 (Reuters) - Al Qaeda fighters kidnapped 15 Iraqi women and children after rival Sunni Arab militants repelled their attack on two villages in a fierce battle on Thursday in which 32 people were killed, police said.

The fighting, rare on such a large scale, underscored the growing split between Sunni Arab militant groups and al Qaeda that U.S. forces have sought to exploit as they try to quell sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands.
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http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/COL337167.htm
 
Science101 said:
It's sometimes done for revenge, by one of the religious groups. More children were reported taken yesterday by Al Qaeda.
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Revenge by a religious group? If I wanted corporate media news.. I'll know where to get it..
Thank you and peace!
 
Then can you explain why these events are so common in Iraq? Without blaming the coalition forces for what is clearly "sectarian violence"?
 
Science101 said:
Then can you explain why these events are so common in Iraq? Without blaming the coalition forces for what is clearly "sectarian violence"?
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I am under no obligation to offer you any explanation, however given your kind demeanor here is one of many.. BTW Fisk is a winner of many awards, as I tend to know the approach when people don't like what is written, they go for some character assassination... I am not sure what America is doing in Iraq?... but even if people are to work out their diffrences without these satanist help, I imagine they'd have reached some resolution in spite of their 'barberism'...
peace!

Robert Fisk: Seen through a Syrian lens,

'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq

By Robert Fisk

04/29/06 "The Independent" -- - In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.

His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington's best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States wilfully ignores. And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental instability.

The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."

Impossible, I think to myself. But then I remember how many times Iraqis in Baghdad have told me similar stories. These reports are believed even if they seem unbelievable. And I know where much of the Syrian information is gleaned: from the tens of thousands of Shia Muslim pilgrims who come to pray at the Sayda Zeinab mosque outside Damascus. These men and women come from the slums of Baghdad, Hillah and Iskandariyah as well as the cities of Najaf and Basra. Sunnis from Fallujah and Ramadi also visit Damascus to see friends and relatives and talk freely of American tactics in Iraq.

"There was another man, trained by the Americans for the police. He too was given a mobile and told to drive to an area where there was a crowd - maybe a protest - and to call them and tell them what was happening. Again, his new mobile was not working. So he went to a landline phone and called the Americans and told them: 'Here I am, in the place you sent me and I can tell you what's happening here.' And at that moment there was a big explosion in his car."

Just who these "Americans" might be, my source did not say. In the anarchic and panic-stricken world of Iraq, there are many US groups - including countless outfits supposedly working for the American military and the new Western-backed Iraqi Interior Ministry - who operate outside any laws or rules. No one can account for the murder of 191 university teachers and professors since the 2003 invasion - nor the fact that more than 50 former Iraqi fighter-bomber pilots who attacked Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have been assassinated in their home towns in Iraq in the past three years.

Amid this chaos, a colleague of my source asked me, how could Syria be expected to lessen the number of attacks on Americans inside Iraq? "It was never safe, our border," he said. "During Saddam's time, criminals and Saddam's terrorists crossed our borders to attack our government. I built a wall of earth and sand along the border at that time. But three car bombs from Saddam's agents exploded in Damascus and Tartous- I was the one who captured the criminals responsible. But we couldn't stop them."

Now, he told me, the rampart running for hundreds of miles along Syria's border with Iraq had been heightened. "I have had barbed wire put on top and up to now we have caught 1,500 non-Syrian and non-Iraqi Arabs trying to cross and we have stopped 2,700 Syrians from crossing ... Our army is there - but the Iraqi army and the Americans are not there on the other side."

Behind these grave suspicions in Damascus lies the memory of Saddam's long friendship with the United States. "Our Hafez el-Assad [the former Syrian president who died in 2000] learnt that Saddam, in his early days, met with American officials 20 times in four weeks. This convinced Assad that, in his words, 'Saddam is with the Americans'. Saddam was the biggest helper of the Americans in the Middle East (when he attacked Iran in 1980) after the fall of the Shah. And he still is! After all, he brought the Americans to Iraq!"

So I turn to a story which is more distressing for my sources: the death by shooting of Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon - an awesomely powerful position - and Syrian Minister of Interior when his suicide was announced by the Damascus government last year.

Widespread rumours outside Syria suggested that Kenaan was suspected by UN investigators of involvement in the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in a massive car bomb in Beirut last year - and that he had been "suicided" by Syrian government agents to prevent him telling the truth.

Not so, insisted my original interlocutor. "General Ghazi was a man who believed he could give orders and anything he wanted would happen. Something happened that he could not reconcile - something that made him realise he was not all-powerful. On the day of his death, he went to his office at the Interior Ministry and then he left and went home for half an hour. Then he came back with a pistol. He left a message for his wife in which he said goodbye to her and asked her to look after their children and he said that what he was going to do was 'for the good of Syria'. Then he shot himself in the mouth."

Of Hariri's assassination, Syrian officials like to recall his relationship with the former Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad Alawi - a self-confessed former agent for the CIA and MI6 - and an alleged $20bn arms deal between the Russians and Saudi Arabia in which they claim Hariri was involved.

Hariri's Lebanese supporters continue to dismiss the Syrian argument on the grounds that Syria had identified Hariri as the joint author with his friend, French President Jacques Chirac, of the UN Security Council resolution which demanded the retreat of the Syrians from Lebanese territory.

But if the Syrians are understandably obsessed with the American occupation of Iraq, their long hatred for Saddam - something which they shared with most Iraqis - is still intact. When I asked my first "security" source what would happen to the former Iraqi dictator, he replied, banging his fist into his hand: "He will be killed. He will be killed. He will be killed."
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
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You have to read these things with caution. In war, propaganda is sometimes one of the most important weapons. Al Qaeda is good at that.

In this part, there are obvious problems.

The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."
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You can first tell it is a biased report, against the coalition forces, with its use of the phrase "Western occupation forces". An unbiased reporter would have never used those words.

What is described is not how "Americans" are authorized to do training. They have a system and this unnamed person would have gone through it if it were run by the coalition forces. The training they claim to have received would have raised suspicion.

It is also a known fact that some of the factions dress in police and military dress and impersonate them as one of their tactics. The article offers no evidence that this unnamed person was being trained by the group they claim it was. It could have just as easily have been Al Qaeda.

The coalition forces would not need him to phone in that they were in place. They have more reliable ways of knowing, not have to take his word for it.

The entire article reads like a classic propaganda piece. Are many clues that it is not true. In my opinion this reporter was set up to report fake news. Besides, the USA wants to get out of Iraq. Creating chaos is not in this countries interest, but an article like this very much serves the other side.
 
Robert Fisk is Britain’s most highly decorated foreign correspondent. He has received the British International Journalist of the Year award seven times, most recently in 1995 and 1996. His specialty is the Middle East, where he has spent the last twenty-three years. Currently the Beirut correspondent for the London Independent, Fisk has covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf war, and the conflict in Algeria. He is the author of Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Atheneum, 1990), and his reporting from Lebanon has brought him international attention. He was the one who broke the story about the Israeli shelling of the U.N. compound in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996.
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That is the author of my article.. I think I can recognize propoganda when I see it..but thanks for the heads up!

peace!
 
Science101 said:
You can first tell it is a biased report, against the coalition forces, with its use of the phrase "Western occupation forces". An unbiased reporter would have never used those words.
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erm....what would you call them exactly? "western neighbours"? "western friends?" "western companions?" western saviors?" "locally based westerners in uniform"?
 
PurestAmbrosia said:
That is the author of my article.. I think I can recognize propoganda when I see it..but thanks for the heads up!

peace!
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Yes, I checked to make sure he existed and discovered that they have done a lot of mainstream writing. But that still does not mean that everything he says is true. Many reporters broadcast the "sensational" in order to build a reputation. His use of language is very biased. Even in US elections things that were not true were believed to be fact. In the last presidential election the Democratic Party was saying things like "Bush created long lines at Al Qaeda recruitment centers" and "The number of terrorists are growing exponentially" which is kinda funny because if it were true then there would be more "terrorists" than there are humans on this planet.

Just don't believe everything you read, no matter who it comes from. There are people telling you what you want to hear, and getting awards for it.
 
The blatant irony is, I can say the same of you.. but hopefully you are a grown man and can decide for yourself?.. I don't need robert fisk to tell me what I can verify with my own eyes and from friends who live in those countries.. I believe nothing beats an eye witness account!
let's leave it at that!

peace!
 
Science101 said:
Yes, I checked to make sure he existed and discovered that they have done a lot of mainstream writing. But that still does not mean that everything he says is true. Many reporters broadcast the "sensational" in order to build a reputation. His use of language is very biased. Even in US elections things that were not true were believed to be fact. In the last presidential election the Democratic Party was saying things like "Bush created long lines at Al Qaeda recruitment centers" and "The number of terrorists are growing exponentially" which is kinda funny because if it were true then there would be more "terrorists" than there are humans on this planet.

Just don't believe everything you read, no matter who it comes from. There are people telling you what you want to hear, and getting awards for it.
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Robert Fisk is hardly a mainstream journalist. He is a leftist icon of course, as he says the things they want to hear. However, his journalistic career is full of politically charged rhetoric and biased reports without proper sourcing or verification.
 
It is a sad thing and a dent in his reputation indeed, that he doesn't corroborate his stories and verifies them with fox and other stations promoting Republican criminality and scandals in the guise of humanitarian efforts! :rollseyes
 
Keltoi said:
Robert Fisk is hardly a mainstream journalist. He is a leftist icon of course, as he says the things they want to hear. However, his journalistic career is full of politically charged rhetoric and biased reports without proper sourcing or verification.
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I stand corrected! But in this case I like the way you describe him even better than I did with my "unbiased" wording! :giggling:
 
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PurestAmbrosia said:
It is a sad thing and a dent in his reputation indeed, that he doesn't corroborate his stories and verifies them with fox and other stations promoting Republican criminality and scandals in the guise of humanitarian efforts! :rollseyes
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Sourcing and verification means the story you are publishing is actually the truth, meaning there are verifiable witnesses or documents, and not simply a biased story describing the personal reflections of a journalist's political leanings.
 
please don't patronize me -- You wrote what you wanted, I think it sufficed-- do you really want to hammer it in? People don't get granted awards for writing for the national inquirer-- ( I don't know how you do it, but I'd be ashamed to defend the spying and scandals of the repuke party) at this point believe what you want and leave it amicable as I tend to lose interest fast with folks who have a clangorous need for self-righteousness humbug, while causing the demise of millions on the side!
This isn't world affairs -- how far w've strayed from the doused kid amongst the millions killed by your boys in an illegal war!

peace!
 
PurestAmbrosia said:
please don't patronize me -- You wrote what you wanted, I think it sufficed-- do you really want to hammer it in? People don't get granted awards for writing for the national inquirer-- ( I don't know how you do it, but I'd be ashamed to defend the spying and scandals of the repuke party) at this point believe what you want and leave it amicable as I tend to lose interest fast with folks who have a clangorous need for self-righteousness humbug, while causing the demise of millions on the side!
This isn't world affairs -- how far w've strayed from the doused kid amongst the millions killed by your boys in an illegal war!

peace!
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Who brought up the Republican Party? It wasn't me. If you base your trust of journalists on awards, you should be happy to know that Bill O'Reilly has won many of them. I suppose you will be soaking up his editorials like sponge on water from now on? :D

As for straying from the point of the thread, that tends to happen when one puts forth conspiracy theories.
 
one man's conspiracy theory, another man's truth.. I treated a woman who killed a 7 year old Iraqi boy-- I think that was enough to give me a descript picture of what goes on in Iraq..
later she felt the govt. had abandoned her.. oh, the irony-- we gave her amytriptalene because it is cheap and very effective, though deep inside, I wish the image of him would torture her for the rest of her natural life-- along with others like her, who feel it is ok to rob families of their children in the name of Bull!

I have in fact sponged up all I can take and reached my saturation point!
peace!
 
Keltoi said:
Sourcing and verification means the story you are publishing is actually the truth, meaning there are verifiable witnesses or documents, and not simply a biased story describing the personal reflections of a journalist's political leanings.
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Excellent point Keltoi. It is not a matter of seeing if another news source is saying the same thing. It's making sure that what they are reporting is factual, that there is strong evidence it happened. Not having strong evidence to support these claims makes the article an "opinion" piece, not factual reporting.

We all have to beware of opinions like this, and of rumors that are circulating because of them that make it seem like it's the truth when many people are claiming the same thing. It would not be right to blame people who are innocent, and would only make the current conflicts even worse than they are now.

In the USA, troops and their families genuinely want to get out of Iraq and come home. It's in all of our best interest to work towards peace so this can happen. Arguing amongst ourselves only creates the kind of conflict that will get even more children stuck in the middle of fights between adults.

We have to try harder to understand this conflict for what it really is. Do what we can to avoid creating even more panic.


And thank you seeker_of_ilm for the edit of the last post!
 
this queue jumping is going unnoticed for days, world affairs is everyplace including Islamic multimedia forum.

also it must be a "true" story since CNN says so. Big bad mozlems killing each other's babies despite the best efforts of Bush & CNN to save them. Yeah right!
 
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