Shiite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near Iraqi soldiers who did not intervene, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.
So much for police. If the three paragraphs that made up the original story where true, Baghdad police had either felt unwilling to risk confronting the gunmen or had already chosen sides in the unfolding civil war. Way back then -- nearly a month and a half, now -- the most partisan warheads still felt they could deny there was anything to worry about with Iraq. For them, the violence was the fault of foreign terrorists. Iraqis wanted only peace and their purple finger democracy. It wasn't the broader cultural conflict that could be described as civil war.
Immediately, they doubted the story. Hadn't they spotted an incredibly bad photoshop job by Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj (see photo)? Right wing bloggers found this photo from the israeli/lebanese conflict and hooted that it proved media bias, somehow.
Clearly, this Capt. Jamil Hussein -- the source for AP's Sadr City story -- wasn't telling the truth or, worse, didn't actually exist at all. I've written before about the tendency of the right to only consider two possibilities at any given time. Either the media were always telling the truth or they were always lying. The warbloggers had caught one inconsequential lie, therefore, every story was a lie. The media was helping the terrorists.It's hard to see how a photographer altering his photo to make it more compelling and, thereby, more likely to be picked up by wire services would have any affect on anything. Hajj just added more smoke -- the smoke was already there. For warbloggers like Michelle Malkin, however, it was proof positive that the media was on the side of the terrorists.
Malkin put up a long post collecting comments from other warbloggers, explaining why and how the photo was faked. These people are amazingly obsessive. Where, "Hey, look how fake this photo is!" would've sufficed, she piled up comment after comment after comment. It's tempting to take that as evidence Malkin realizes her audience is sharp as Nerf. Again, look at the photo -- what do you really need to explain?
Having proved the media is always lying, the warheads moved on to the AP story. They began to call AP "Associated (with terrorists) Press." They did a little digging and found what they thought backed up their assertions -- no one could find this 'Capt. Jamil Hussein'...
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Tags: news | politics | iraq | war | terrorism | media | blogs | conservative | Michelle Malkin | Jamil Hussein
