Jan 02 2007
What Else Is Made Up Regarding Iraq?
Reader Crosspatch noted a series of like sounding, yet unsourced and unspecified death figures for Iraq in the comments of this post. One would have to wonder, in light of all the shenanigans discovered with AP and other media credibility on Iraq stories, whether these have any basis in reality. So I also did some searching on vague stories with anonymous sources of deaths in Iraq and found these:
(1) Oct 16, 2006 – 81 bodies found in Baghdad, from an unspecified “official with Baghdad emergency police” (CNN).
(2) Sept 13, 2006 – 65 bodies found across Iraq, from unspecified Iraq police sources (AP of course)
3) Sept 15, 2006 – 30 bodies found in Baghdad, from no source whatsoever (AP again).
What is amazing is the consistency of unspecified sources. Why would anyone be concerned about naming the death toll in Iraq? What possible reason would someone have to remaining anonymous? They are death tolls. What our reader Crosspatch noted was a series of Reuters articles that involved a common recurring source designated “an Interior Ministry source”. While some of the reporting seems reasonable to come from an Interior Ministry source, the fact is no one can trust the media anymore. After the incident with the staged photographs in Lebanon (see my posts on Hezbollah for evidence and links to others) and now the mythical AP source Jamil Hussein,why should we trust the media? After CBS News and Dan RaTher tried to pawn off forged documents as real evidence against our President why should we treat the media as credible? After the media was duped by forgeries in the Downing Street memos – why should the media be trusted to know what the truth is?
The Downing Street memos were such dumb forgeries the guy who pawned them off as real had to make up a story as to why HE had them forged to look like they were written on a 1970’s typewriter when supposedly they were authored in 2002! And not one journalist caught this amatuer move by one of their own! Bloggers have time and time again shown how easy it is to detect the BS being passed off as news. So how is it ‘the professionals’ cannot do it?
I have said for years now that anyone owning stock in news organizations was holding onto Enron-class stock. The only thing of value a news organization owns is its credibility. And everyone of the major news entities should be taken to task for the fiscal ruin of the companies in their charge. Because right now there is no reason to believe anything written or produced by the news media anymore. Junk bonds the lot of them.
Here is the original Crosspatch comment:
What I wish someone could dig into are these stories by Reuters that every day trot out some number of dead bodies found in Baghdad. They never attribute the reports to a source other than “an interior ministry source†who is never named.
Examples:
December 28: BAGHDAD – Police found 41 bodies in different parts of Baghdad over the past 24 hours, an Interior Ministry source said.
December 27:BAGHDAD – A total of 40 bodies were found, shot dead and most showing signs of torture, in different districts of Baghdad on Tuesday, an Interior Ministry source said.
December 26:BAGHDAD – A total of 40 bodies were found, shot dead and most of them showing signs of torture, on Monday in different districts of Baghdad, an Interior Ministry source said.
December 25:BAGHDAD – A total of 29 bodies were found shot dead, with most showing signs of torture, in different districts of Baghdad on Sunday, an Interior Ministry source said.
Get the picture? Every day this one-sentance report that quotes no specific source, give no locations, provides no information about them (Sunni? Shiite? criminal?) …
I believe that this is a manufactured number reported by someone with an agenda.
And his follow up comment where he claims there are no other news sources for the body counts:
The problem is with those Reuters reports, I can’t find any confirmation. No other agency seems to report those numbers independently though some will quote the Reuters report. Now if the Interior Ministry has a spokesperson, there would be no problem with giving a name and if they issued a daily bulletin or something, there would be no problem with other agencies also getting those numbers.
What I am seeing is a number being reported daily (interestingly, that number is absent or much lower when there are other large Baghdad casualty events such as a car bombing) by only Reuters with no named source.
I believe I know the purpose of the number. It is designed to get aggregate casualty numbers up so that sites such as this one pick they up and tally them. Casualty rates are being used by some sites as some kind of a progress indicator for the war (nevermind that about 80% of Iraq is booming and relatively peaceful) and these numbers are being used to keep the number up. When other casualty events occur, we see the “Baghdad Bodies†number take a drop or completely absent for a day.
It’s bogus. I am going to do a little more research and see if I can identify exactly when the Reuters’ Baghdad Bodies first started showing up.
It is completely bogus. I assumed the media source was staying quiet for personal security reasons. But the fact no other outlet picked up this news means it was not being presented as a media announcement from the government to a range of media outlets. This all deserves a serious inquiry. Sadly we cannot count on the Democrats to clean this scandal up – they rely on it too much for their agenda.
Excerpted and linked. This just keeps getting better and better.
It might be interesting to see what CENTCOM says about all of this…
After all, if they cannot confirm this – it may be worth doing.
Eason Jordan calls out al-AP on Jamilgate!Updated and bumped: al-AP “responds”…
CENTCOM says AP’s Iraqi police source isn’t Iraqi police — Part 27 — Continued from this post. When I heard Eason Jordan had crawled out from under his rock I figured the best thing to do was just ignore him,…
I am going to do some further research but it is already proving to be difficult. I went back to 2005 and there have been some instances of bodies being found then but those reports were more detailed … where the bodies were found, details about their condition, etc. and those were few and far between … maybe one a month … and were reported by other news sources. Sadly, many of these articles are no longer available or only available from pay archives.
What I am most interested in is this seemingly daily Reuters Baghdad Body count that has been going on for at least a few months. I believe I the pattern first snapped into focus for me something over a month ago and I have been watching it since.
Curt over at Flopping Aces made note a couple of weeks back that a CENTCOM source related that media reports of The Baghdad Bodies are generally about twice as high as they can confirm. Reuters’ Baghdad Bodies reports now account for the majority of media reported civilian casualties from Iraq. That isn’t so hard to do when you report 30 to 50 deaths day in and day out for an entire month. It adds up to a lot of dead bodies.
In light of the media having been caught reporting inaccurate information in the past and showing no editorial review or concern for accuracy in their reporting, they are going to have to start doing a better job in their reporting if they are going to regain any respect. These one-sentence reports don’t hold water. Where were these bodies found? Who were they? What about the source? Is it someone who has given bad information in the past? What is their position in the Interior Ministry? Is it a desk clerk, a line cop, a senior official, an official spokesperson?
The time has passed when we could trust AP or Reuters just because they were AP or Reuters. They have been caught red handed deceiving us. Now they produce numbers that are truly eye-catching but give nothing with which their weight can be judged.
I really started raising this issue over at Flopping Aces a few weeks ago. Today I notice something interesting … AP and Reuters carrying nearly identical reports for yesterday’s casualties (something I hadn’t noticed before):
AP-On Monday, police reported finding the 40 handcuffed, blindfolded and bullet-riddled bodies in northern Baghdad. A police official, who refused to be identified because of security fears, said 15 of the bodies were discovered in the mainly industrial Sheik Omar district.
REUTERS-BAGHDAD – Police found 40 bodies in Baghdad in the past 24 hours, including 15 in one place near the Sheikh Maa’rouf cemetery in western Baghdad, an interior ministry source.
Now just exactly why would the Interior Ministry be reluctant to give their spokesman a name because of “security fears”?
It isn’t like the person is making any accusations, the person is simply stating a casualty figure. Why would that person not want their name to be used? I say it is because that person might not really be an Interior Ministry source or wouldn’t be in a position to know the number of dead bodies found across all of Greater Baghdad in a 24 hour period. Also, how come none of these numbers is ever changed at a later date? We get an “authoritative” number every single day of the number of bodies found every 24 hour period that is never revised for a source who is never identified giving information that isn’t “life threatening” to anyone … it is simply a statistic.
All of this isn’t passing the smell test here.
Another thing … in many reports the bodies being found are handcuffed. Now if you want to find out who is doing this and you suspect the police, simply destroy the handcuffs when you find them on a dead body and wait for a police station to order more because they have “run out”. From the rate of these stories, it appears that they are going through nearly 1000 pairs of handcuffs a month. That should raise some eyebrows in the supply room.
I’ve got an inquiry into CENTCOM now… I’ll see if they get back to me on this.
Bill Faith
You can chalk up Eason Jordan’s diatribe about AP blunders as “rats leaving a sinking ship” not for any altruistic reasons. When you said he crawled out from under a rock you forgot to mention the hole under said rock where he lived. This guy is pathetic.
“The time has passed when we could trust AP or Reuters just because they were AP or Reuters. ”
I’m not sure there was ever really a time that you could trust them.
As I said on a thread yesterday. I remember back in the 50’s and 60’s reading stories in the local press that I knew the facts of the stories and when I read it in the paper, it was barely recognizable. So ask yourself, if you read a story in the paper and you know it is half made up. What makes you think the ones that you don’t know the facts on are actually any truer than the ones you knew about.
I’ve always been skeptical of the press. Making it all up is nothing new for them.
I saw the inquiry from I believe Flopping Aces but I’m not sure right after the election. Whoever it was had a source at Centcom who said there there several named sources in AP and Reuters that they were investigating as bogus. Centcom and the Iraqi government told AP and Reuters that there was no such person as Jamil Hussein in any government position of any kind and that no one was authorised to report anything to the news lower than the chief of police.
“I’m not sure there was ever really a time that you could trust them.”
I am not so much talking about me personally. There was a time when AP had standards and accuracy carried weight. Nowadays it is all about content that fits the agenda. If two strings come in with reports that differ in casualty counts, I suspect the higher one gets printed. Not because of any accuracy check, but because it fits the agenda better.
AP used to be less agenda driven, that used to be the domain of UPI, not anymore, the roles have been reversed to some extent these days.
On the same subject, I had posted, on another blog,on the American leftist media’s
reporting of us losing Vietnam during the Tet offensive; when the North Vietnamese military leadership said (after the war was over) that the Tet
offensive was a disaster for them. That the only thing that enabled the
North Vietnamese to hold on was the aid and support of the American
leftist media and their supporters like John Kerry. Someone came back with a reminder that I had forgotten Walter Duranty and the NYTs of the 30’s.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/791vwuaz.asp
He managed to convince America that there was no famine in an
area of Russia where 25,000 people per day were starving to death.
The use of the media to manipulate public opinion goes way back.
What if a person were to publish several different news sources. What if each of those sources had articles attributed to different authors but they were all really written by the same person? What if this editor/publisher published fake letters to the editor to make a position or topic seem more popular than it really was? What if this person made up “news” or made the reality look a lot worse than it really was?
Would you be upset?
That would be Ben Franklin. The problem these days is that the media is pretending that they are somehow reporting accurate news, we aren’t talking about opinion here, we are supposed to be talking about hard news. When they are doing is shooting themselves in the foot because while the choir they are preaching to loves it, the rest of the people on the street aren’t buying it. It is going to come back to bite them when they have some serious information that people really should be paying attention to and people don’t’ buy it.
Basically AP and Reuters are selling wolf tickets and the people are getting wise to it. One day the wolf really will show up, though, but nobody is going to listen.
AJ,
The “popular media” preens itself on its “fact checking” and layers of review and dismisses bloggers as not meeting any standards.It is lost on them that consumers of information set the standards on the internet, with the huge diversity of offerings.
Well, as the saying goes: If it weren’t for double standards, the MSM would have no standards at all.
I hope this is okay, I could publish this at my own blog but sometimes I think it better if all the material were in one location. The following are all the Reuters Badhdad Bodies stories for the month of December, 2006. I will simply pick that one month out because it is recent and should be able to verify/clarify/debunk/whatever:
12/1/06 – BAGHDAD – Police said they found 20 bodies in different parts of Baghdad on Friday.
12/2/06 – BAGHDAD – Police said they found 44 bodies in different parts of Baghdad, all apparent victims of sectarian violence.
12/3/06 – Reuters reports no deaths this day, but AFP reports: Thirty-five of the bodies were uncovered in Karkh, a majority Sunni district on the west bank of the Tigris, while the remaining 15 were found in Rusafa, a mainly Shiite area on the eastern side of the river.
12/4/06 – BAGHDAD – Police found the bodies of 52 people around Baghdad in the 24 hours to Monday evening, an Interior Ministry source said. Most had gunshot wounds and many had been tortured — victims of suspected sectarian death squads. (same casualties that AFP reported on 12/3?).
12/5/06 – BAGHDAD – Police found about 60 bodies in Baghdad on Tuesday, Interior Ministry sources said.
12/6/06 – BAGHDAD – Police said they found 48 bodies with gunshot wounds and signs of torture in different areas of Baghdad.
12/7/06 – Reuters reports no bodies this day but chron.com reports:
Baghdad – Iraqi police also found 35 bullet-riddled bodies that had been bound and blindfolded and left in different parts of the capital. (the source called a different outlet that day?)
12/8/06 – BAGHDAD – Police said they found 18 bodies dumped in different areas of Baghdad, all with gunshot wounds and many with signs of torture, an Interior Ministry official said.
12/9/06 – BAGHDAD – A total of 40 bodies — many shot and tortured — were found across Baghdad on Saturday, an Interior Ministry source said.
12/10/06 – BAGHDAD – Police found the bodies of 60 apparent victims of sectarian killings across Baghdad. Most of the bodies were found in western Baghdad.
Okay, that’s enough for now. First 10 days of December …. about 400 Baghdad Bodies.
Curt’s article today says:
Which I would tend to see as reasonable. Those 400 Baghdad Bodies in the first 10 days of December were probably closer to 150 in reality.
Reporters
Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Cokie Roberts, and a tough old U.S. Marine Sergeant were all captured by terrorists in Iraq. The leader of the terrorists told them that he would grant them each one last request before they were beheaded .
Dan Rather said, “Well, I’m a Texan; so I’d like one last bowlful of hot spicy chili.” The leader nodded to an underling who left and returned with the chili. Rather ate it all and said, “Now I can die content.”
Peter Jennings said, “I am Canadian, so I’d like to hear the song “O Canada” one last time.” The leader nodded to a terrorist who had studied the Western world and knew the music. He returned with some rag-tag Musicians and played the anthem. Jennings sighed and declared he could now die peacefully.
Cokie Roberts said, “I’m a reporter to the end. I want to take out my tape recorder and describe the scene here and what’s about to happen. Maybe someday someone will hear it and know that I was on the job till the end.”
The leader directed an aide to hand over the tape recorder and Roberts dictated some comments. She then said, “Now I can die happy.”
The leader turned and said, “And now, Mr. U.S. Marine, what is your final wish?”
“Kick me in the ass,” said the Marine.
“What?” asked the leader? “Will you mock us in your last hour?”
“No, I’m not kidding. I want you to kick me in the ass,” insisted the Marine. So the leader shoved him into the open, and kicked him in the ass.
The Marine went sprawling, but rolled to his knees, pulled a 9 mm pistol from inside his cammies, and shot the leader dead. In the resulting confusion, he leapt to his knapsack, pulled out his M4 carbine and sprayed the Iraqis with gunfire. In a flash, all the Iraqis were either dead or fleeing for their lives.
As the Marine was untying Rather, Jennings, and Roberts, they asked him, “Why didn’t you just shoot them in the beginning? Why did you ask them to kick you in the ass first?”
“What,” replied the Marine, “and have you three Assholes report that I was the aggressor?
Land of the free,
Because of the brave.
SBD
SBD, that story should be headlined every where. I have never seen a story that better demonstates what the media has done to our military.
The sad part is that in most cases today, there is no tough old sergeant,
Just young enlisted or officers, who don’t realize that the media can be
more dangerous than the actual enemy. How many stories has everyone read where, what the media reports is not the facts , or the words are taken out of context to show a totally different slant than
the initial words spoken.
Oh ,this is too funny. Today’s Reuters report now uses TWO unnamed sources in a lame attempt to pretend they have done some checking:
BAGHDAD – Police in Baghdad found the bodies of 45 people, most apparently the victims of death squads, a police source and an Interior Ministry official said.
Usually they source just the unknown Interior Ministry official or the unknown police source … today they source both anonymous sources. Hey, Reuters … zero plus zero still equals zero.
AP Continues Stonewalling on Jamil Hussein…
Is there any reason for this scandal to die out because there’s no indication that AP is going to capitulate and admit that they’re using a source that simply does not exist. The questions are going to remain……
Barbara is right on Jamil Hussein. I don’t know if that’s a real person, but according to Iraqi officials, there’s no Iraq police person by that name, and certainly no one authorized to be a spokesman. AP argued the point about a false report they ran, about people leaving a mosque being set on fire, insisting the story was true and he, Jamil Hussein, was their police captain (or whatever rank) source, and kept reitterating the story that was firmly debunked by both Iraqi officials and US Military officials.
Their problem (among many) is that they hire terrorists as “stringers” because the Western reporters won’t venture out of the Green Zone. Of course, the terrorists they hire say, “Who, me? Naw, I’m no terrorist! I’m Abdul the news reporter. Trust me!”
It’s getting to the point the terrorists don’t even have to kill anybody. All they have to do is turn in fairy tales to AP, Reuters, et al, claiming X number of mutilated bodies were found. Voilla! It’s headline news.
Slightly off point, but as long as we’re on lying news people: Does anyone else believe that Bob Woodward is a bald-faced liar about his claim that former President Jerry Ford gave him malicious quotes denigrating President Bush and the Iraq War, and told him not to report it until after his (Ford’s) death? I find that whole scenario completely at odds with President Ford’s character. It just doesn’t wash. And Woodward’s penchant for posthumous interviews has long since stretched credulity beyond limits for the most gullible in any kindergarten class.