Of course everything you say is correct. That is exactly the point. But the website did not 'show us some unfiltered reports'. It accepted them without question as true.

Saying "it is reported that" pretty much means nothing. In the case Terry cited it was used to claim hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties from American airstrikes and comparing this to the Luftwaffe attack on Guernica. Just didn't seem to pass any kind of burden of proof ( which should be on the accuser ) Guernica has passed the test of history. We'll have to wait and see about Faludja.

As to Iraqis on the moral high ground - talk to Kuwaitis about what fun visitors they were. I'm a little surprised we were restrained enough to not entirely annihilate the Republican guard as the fled burdened with everything they could steal.

A friend of our family was with the U.S. Army on the final push to Berlin. His unit was taking 1000 S.S. prisoners a day before they saw the first camp. After that they never took another S.S. prisoner before they got to Berlin.

The truth will be known in time, but I am suspect of spin and political agendas. I am a especially suspicious of people who cut off the heads of innocents on video, and of their aplogists. That's not the 'Iraqi Resistance'. Al Zarqowi is a Jordanian thug.

Many of those who were appalled by the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghareb just don't seem to have the same level of indignation about the beheadings. And they compare humiliation of prisoners ( by people who were actually court-martialed) to Saddam's treatment of his enemies... or Uday's treatment of the Iraqi soccer team. This seems to lack a sense of proportion and show extreme bias. ( of course, if like terry one thinks all the bad buzz about Saddam is some kind of plot by Jews then rational discussion ends there. )

The site Terry linked has a pretty obvious bias. I also suspect spin, of course, in any U.S. Military press briefing. I feel better about the embedded reporters, but still consider that in battle very few people have the whole picture, however well-intentioned.

I was once in a position to know some of the realities behind U.S. military briefings on what was going on in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the early 70s. I loss my innocence in this respect a long long time ago.

I do find it amazing that someone will accept without question any casualty figure coming out of any website without question - but find the deaths of the Kurds in Halabja some kind of urban folk myth or just the unfortunate luck of some people who ate some bad hummus.



>>Believe it or not, Terry, an lot of educated people actually had heard of Guernica ( and Franco, and WWII and Picasso ) before they stumbled across the reference on a polemic website. <s>
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>>"Reports filtering out" do not mean truth. They just as easily mean spin. If you know anything about modern warfare capabilities you surely know if the U.S. military had been targeting civilians in Iraq there would not be any more civilians in Iraq.
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>Saying that reports "easily mean spin" can also be used as a means of discarding the other voices.
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>Michael Moore is rich, and was caught exaggerating a couple of times? Whatever he says doesn't need to be verified, and anyone who mentions him can be disregarded altogether.
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>A website shows us some unfiltered reports? Ummm... let's see, if the name of the site has some "Al-" in its name, then it must be some Arab propaganda, doesn't need to be verified, and anyone who mentions it could be a suspect. Did one of the sentence coincide with a sentence spoken in Kerry's campaign? The whole thing can be disregarded as "liberal blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah..." (qv).
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>I've seen this technique of vaccinating the believers against hearing any voices of dissent applied very efficiently. One of the major reasons why Milosevic won the elections in 1992, and lost only local ones in major cities in 1996 (but won the rest), even though he had lost two wars by that time. There were still too many people who believed what he said.
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>Another technique which also worked very nicely, was to spread the conviction that "our guys may be qute bad and corrupt, but the other guys are really so much worse you're better off with us". Combine these two with stiff control over about 99% of the media, and you may understand why it took us nine years to get our bastard down.
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>I'm not trying to compare presidents here. The technique of selective deafness is, however, easy to spot once you went through years of fighting it.
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>As usually, the problem with brainwashing is not the washing itself, but high-speed spinning tumble drying.
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>>( This reminds me of the 60s when we stood in the street screaming the government was stifling dissent - rather forgetting that in societies where dissent was really stifled we would have disappeared very quickly.
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>The methods were very different then, from what I recall. In the East, you couldn't speak unless you were let to, so you could be made a case and someone would get to a higher position by exposing you. In the West, you could speak but had trouble being heard, unless someone could make good money on selling what you say.