UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
working on his doctorate. He says some soldiers
encouraged the looting we saw:
“I had gone to see some friends who live near
a dilapidated area just past Haifa Avenue on the
west bank of the Tigris. It was the 8th of April
and the fighting was so intense that I was unable
to return to the other side of the river. In the
afternoon it became perfectly quiet and four
American tanks took places on the edge of the
slum area. The soldiers shot two Sudanese
guards who stood at their posts outside a local
administration building on the other side of
Haifa Avenue. Then they blasted apart the doors
to the building and from the tanks came eager
calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close
to them.
“The entire morning, everyone who had tried
to cross the road had been shot. But in the
strange silence after all the shooting, people
gradually became curious. After 45 minutes, the
first Baghdad citizens dared to come out. Arab
interpreters in the tanks told the people to go
and take what they wanted in the building.
“The word spread quickly and the building was
ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from
there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards
the tank crushed the entrance to the Justice
Department, which was in a neighboring
building, and the plundering continued there . . .
“I stood in a large crowd and watched this
together with them. They did not partake in the
plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had
tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning
the plundering spread to the Modern Museum,
which lies a quarter mile farther north. There
were also two crowds there, one that plundered
and one with watched with disgust.
210
Are you saying????
“ARE you saying that it was U.S. troops who initiated
the plundering?”
“Absolutely. The lack of jubilant scenes meant
that the American troops needed pictures of
Iraqis who in different ways demonstrated
hatred for Saddam’s regime.”
“The people pulled down a large statue of Saddam?”
“Did they? It was an American tank that did
that, right beside the hotel where all the journalists
stay. Until lunchtime on April 9, I did not see
one destroyed Saddam portrait. If people had
wanted to pull down statues they could have
taken down some of the small ones without any
help from American tanks. If it had been a political
upheaval, the people would have pulled
down statues first and then plundered.”
Media post mortems
THE media post mortems have begun with growing
doubts being expressed over the effect on
war reporting of the embedded journalists program.
At the symposium I attended put on by the
Edward R, Murrow School at Washington State
University, mainstream journalists from AP, the
Oregonian and the Wall Street Journal admitted
that the whole story has yet to be told, and that
the embeds, who most insisted were not censored
or suppressed, could only see one part of
the story. I keep trying to argue that most Americans
get most of their news from TV, and that
while many newspapers did offer more detailed
reporting, there was more selling of the war than
telling on the cable nets. I didn’t get much of an
argument.