Remember less than a month ago when I wrote this?

It was only a matter of time before Hezbollah and their gullible dupes in the media began applying the Terrorist Propaganda Cook Book to the present war in Lebanon, accusing Israel forces of using chemical and other "illegal weapons" against civilians.

The Sydney Morning Herald was all too willing to print these suspiciously vague allegations:

Killed by Israeli air raids, the Lebanese dead are charred in a way local doctors, who have lived through years of civil war and Israeli occupation, say they have not seen before.

Bachir Cham, a Belgian-Lebanese doctor at the Southern Medical Centre in Sidon, received eight bodies after an Israeli air raid on nearby Rmeili which he said exhibited such wounds.

He has taken 24 samples from the bodies to test what killed them. He believes it is a chemical.
Cham said the bodies of some victims were "black as shoes, so they are definitely using chemical weapons. They are all black but their hair and skin is intact so they are not really burnt. It is something else."
"If you burnt someone with petrol their hair would burn and their skin would burn down to the bone. The Israelis are 100 per cent using chemical weapons."

I stated that:

The arguments are recycled, the evidence contrived; there is no credible evidence that chemical or white phosphorus weapons are being used to target Lebanese civilians, and it is telling that the media are all too willing to be led down this same path of lies again.

It turns out that I was right (thanks to LGF for finding the video). The debunkings of the Greg Mitchell's of the world are coming so fast I can hardly keep up with them...

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Bad Jawa. Great Video.

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First published as a weekly in 1884 as The Journalist, Editor & Publisher (E&P) is a monthly journal covering the North American newspaper industry.

Since 2002, Greg Mitchell has been the Editor of E&P, and he writes both an online and print column. While I've never read the print version, I have occasionally read Mitchell's online Pressing Issues column, and have actually written about what he has had to say twice in the past.

Click. Print. Bang. was a reaction to the mind of Mitchell, as in his column he advocated that the media should attempt to actively undermine (subscriber-only) the current U.S. President:

No matter which party they generally favor or political stripes they wear, newspapers and other media outlets need to confront the fact that America faces a crisis almost without equal in recent decades.

Our president, in a time of war, terrorism and nuclear intrigue, will likely remain in office for another 33 months, with crushingly low approval ratings that are still inching lower. Facing a similar problem, voters had a chance to quickly toss Jimmy Carter out of office, and did so. With a similar lengthy period left on his White House lease, Richard Nixon quit, facing impeachment. Neither outcome is at hand this time.

Lacking an impeachable offense and disappointed that Bush was reelected to a second term, Mitchell made the following alarmist cry to the journalistic community:

The alarm should be bi-partisan. Many Republicans fear their president's image as a bumbler will hurt their party for years. The rest may fret about the almost certain paralysis within the administration, or a reversal of certain favorite policies. A Gallup poll this week revealed that 44% of Republicans want some or all troops brought home from Iraq. Do they really believe that their president will do that any time soon, if ever?

Democrats, meanwhile, cross their fingers that Bush doesn't do something really stupid -- i.e. nuke Iran -- while they try to win control of at least one house in Congress by doing nothing yet somehow earning (they hope) the anti-Bush vote.

Meanwhile, a severely weakened president retains, and has shown he is willing to use, all of his commander-in-chief authority, and then some.

Mitchell's tone is both decidedly shrill and purposefully ominous, as he advocates his solution (while saying he doesn't) for what he seems to regard as the Bush problem.

I don't have a solution myself now, although all pleas for serious probes, journalistic or official, of the many alleged White House misdeeds should be heeded. But my point here is simply to start the discussion, and urge that the media, first, recognize that the crisis—or, if you want to say, impending crisis -- exists, and begin to explore the ways to confront it.

Not content with the news being reported by the media about the administration, Mitchell was publicly pushing for a confrontational antagonistic policy to be used to try to undermine the White House; a smear campaign to "start the discussion." He pushes, in no uncertain terms, to use the media to dig up scandals, building doubts and fears (his warning that people should, "cross their fingers that Bush doesn't do something really stupid -- i.e. nuke Iran" is a clear indication of his mindset).

What he hopes to accomplish by building distrust and fear of the White House in an influential media is open to interpretation, but based upon his earlier comments that Bush seemed neither likely to be impeached nor voted out, Mitchell seems to hope that with enough fear-mongering, someone sufficiently alarmed by the kind of coverage he hopes to gin up might find another way to remove Bush from office.

Not just hostile to the President, however, Mitchell has gone out of his way to condemn Israel's response to Hezbollah's rain of rockets on Israeli civilian targets, while dismissing Hezbollah's attempts at mass murder:

The word “rockets” makes Hezbollah's terror weapon of choice seem very space age, but they are in fact crude, unguided and with limited range – nothing like the U.S. prime grade weapons on the Israeli side. The vast majority of them land in the water or an empty field or explode in the air.

Mitchell again made his opinion on who was more at fault in the recent Hezbollah-triggered war in this column, and as you might expect, Mitchell placed the blame for Lebanese deaths squarely upon Israel and the White House, refusing to even mention Hezbollah's role in the column except to say that Israel created it.

Given his obvious biases, it should have been no surprise when Mitchell released this first part of a two-part column yesterday, attacking those bloggers who questioned the manipulation and staging of photos from some photojournalists in the recent war, primarily fought in Lebanon. His defense should have been expected, as every example of staged or manipulated stories and photographs attacked Israel, and the exposure of this journalistic fraud undermined the anti-Israeli view Mitchell has clearly decided to advocate.

Allahpundit at Hot Air rightfully took Mitchell's column to task, pointing out that clear examples of journalistic fraud did in fact occur, and catches Mitchell misrepresenting the comments made by Bryan Denton, a U.S. photojournalist witness to the sight of some staging performed by Lebanese wire service photographers.

Allah also notes that while Mitchell blasts bloggers and the suspicions and allegations they've made of staged photos, he pointedly refuses to discuss the fact that a German television station captured live video showing just such staging as it occurred in Qana. One can only imagine how much effort Mitchell took to avoid this well-documented proof that one of the most influential stories of the Hezbollah-Israeli war, the so-called Red Cross ambulance attack, was, in fact, almost certainly a complete fraud.

All of this sets up today's editorial from Mitchell, In Defense of War Photographers: Part II, in which Mitchell continues:

In a column here on Tuesday, I mounted a defense of the overwhelming number of press photographers in the Middle East who bravely, under horrid conditions, in recent weeks have sent back graphic and revealing pictures from the war zones, only to be smeared, as a group, by rightwing bloggers aiming, as always, to discredit the media as a whole.

Which is not to say that this is much ado about nothing. Obviously, Adnan Hajj, the Reuters photographer who doctored at least two images, deserved to be dismissed. A handful of other pictures snapped by others warrant investigation. In a few cases, caption information was wrong or misleading, and required correction. In addition, the controversy has sparked an overdue discussion -- some of it here at E&P -- on the credibility of all photography in the Photoshop age and the wide use of local stringers abroad in a time of cutbacks in supervision.

But, in general, the serious charges and wacky conspiracy theories against the photographers, and their news organizations, are largely unfounded, and politically driven, while at times raising valid questions, such as what represents "staging."

Were press photographers smeared, as Mitchell states, as a group?

I have heard no one doubting that news photographers have put their lives on the line to capture stories, and even when what they capture on film isn't always popular or what we want to hear in the past, we've debated it without clearly taking sides based upon ideology.

I can state for my part that I questioned the overall story the media was presenting from Qana based upon seeming inconsistencies between the stories and the photographic evidence. These questions raised by myself and others helped get an investigation launched—thought Mitchell doubtlessly disproves of it, as it is not the kind of investigation that serves the interests Mitchell's observed bias.

This success in rooting out some apparent fraud led to bloggers to look more closely at the other media information coming out of Lebanon for more, where other suspicious photos and stories emerged.

Did rightwing bloggers attempt to smear the entire media, as Mitchell alleges, or were they targeting specific questionable stories, specific questionable photographs, and photographers exhibiting a suspicious pattern of behavior?

The answer, quite obvious to those that actually read the blog posts and the commentary they generated, is that bloggers investigating specific instances uncovered general problems with how the media gathered news and verified the accuracy of the information, a fact that Mitchell begrudgingly admits. I'd like to know which "wacky conspiracy theories" Mitchell was referring to, as the Qana staging episode and the Red Cross ambulance stories most thought implausible when first proposed by bloggers, turned out to be absolutely correct.

In a significant number of the more widely disseminated blog posts asking questions and making accusations about suspicious media accounts, the suspicions of bloggers turned out to be quite well-founded. Contrary to Mitchell's suggestions, quite a few—more than a handful—of the more widely regarded questions raised by bloggers were exposed apparent staging or fraud--a remarkable achievement by people thousands of miles away from the story, doing the fact-checking and analysis that the media should have been doing, but much to their embarrassment, often did not.

Mitchell, apparently then unable to go much further on his own, decides to simply turn to the Lightstalkers photography forum, and quote heavily from media photographers denying that manipulation and staging took place. And while the much-respected Tim Fadek can say all he wants that the scene in Qana wasn't staged, and other photographers choose to take his observations as fact, when I see with my own eyes on YouTube that it was indeed directed by none other than Mr. Green Helmet himself, I have every right to doubt the veracity of Mr. Fadek and other photographers that denied Qana was staged, along with the media organizations that try to act that such compelling evidence of malfeasance does not exist.

I suspect that Mitchell's next groundbreaking column will expose that according to interviews with inmates at San Quentin, 99% are actually innocent.

This E&P editorial chooses to dodge the real issues of the media's vetting of the accuracy of the stories and photographs that they chose to print coming out of Lebanon and other venues, just as they dodged how so many pictures and events ever had reason to be questioned in the first place.

Greg Mitchell, Editor of Editor & Publisher shows himself to be a prime example of exactly what bloggers fear most in the media; a newscrafter, not a newsman, with a quite specific and heavily partisan agenda. He seems terrified that if the public actually looked too closely at how the sometimes tainted product of the news business is manufactured, they might discover it has fewer quality checks than a disposable diaper, and sadly, sometimes ends up smelling much the same.

David Perlmutter wrote of the problems with photojournalism last week:

I'm not sure, however, if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both.

A simple glance at such industry leaders as Greg Mitchell suggests that not only are the wounds are indeed self-inflicted, but that some newscrafters can't keep their fingers from jerking the trigger.

Update: Allah reacts as well.

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CNN's web team doesn't appear to be a big fan of Joe Lieberman. While the actual article carries the headline, "Lieberman secures spot on November ballot," the Web team decided this was a fitting link:

This would presumably be the same "fine folks" that brought us this gem in July:

Top-notch. Professional. Pithy.

This is CNN.

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The John Locke Foundation will be hosting a half-day blogger conference, Carolina FreedomNet 2006, open to all on Saturday, October 7 in Greensboro, North Carolina, from 8:00 AM-2:00 PM.

I've been invited to be on the 8:45 AM-10:15 AM Local vs. Global: What Should Be Your Blog's Focus? panel with Lorie Byrd of Wizbang, Sam Hieb of Sam's Notes, and Sister Toldjah.

A second panel of will attempt to answer the question of How Has The Blogging Phenomenon Affected Politics and Political Discourse?, and will feature Townhall.com's Mary Katharine Ham, Jeff Taylor of The Meck Deck, Scott Elliott of Election Projection and Josh Manchester of The Adventures of Chester.

Scott Johnson of Powerline will be giving the keynote speech, titled The 61st Minute: Inside the Eye of Hurricane Dan.

If interested in attending, you can register for Carolina FreedomNet 2006 here.

I hope to see you there.

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Marines on the Inactive Ready Reserve (IRR) are being recalled to active duty consistent with the commitment they signed up for, and some of the predictably clueless are claiming that this constitutes a "backdoor draft," when it is of course nothing of the sort.

Two very irritated Marine bloggers, Paul and Brando of Brandodojo ripped into these folks last night.

From Paul in the comments of that post:

People like to call this a "back door draft" because they're idiots and are intentionally using misleading rhetoric to bring up emotions from the Vietnam war, which is the last time a draft was used. They use "backdoor" as if the government is using some sneaky loophole, but this also isn't true. All a servicemember has to do is open up their SRB and look at their contract and read what it says. It's not even in "fine print." It's right there. In my case it says, plain as day, 5 years active, 3 years IRR.

Back to my main point: The offensive part of the "backdoor draft" bullshit is that it's used by two groups of people: 1) People who have never served 2) People who have served and refuse to be accountable for their signature.

I don't have a problem with people being pissed about it -- they're leaving their new lives or whatever and going to a shithole country where they might blow up -- everyone I know was pissed but they still went. That's what matters.

In no uncertain terms, this is something that every Marine signs up for, and is clearly part of their commitment. Implying this is sneaky or underhanded behavior and not a standard part of a Marine's service commitment is simply dishonest.

* * *

Interestingly enough, liberal Ron Chusid cites the CNN article linked above and then states:

If actions such as this continue the trend towards decreased voluntary recruits, this could be yet another way in which George Bush is underming [sic] our long term national security.

But if you follow Mr. Chusid's link, you will find it is obsolete, being over a year old, and concerning only part of the year at that. I last wrote about military recruiting a little over a month ago, and it shows Ron's "truthiness" deserves to be called into question:

Military recruiting for June once again met or exceeded goals across all four branches (h/t Paul at Adventurepan:

• Marines: 105%
• Army: 102%
• Air Force:101%
• Navy: 100%

You'll note that the Marine Corps and Army, responsible for fielding most of the forces on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, have exceeded their goals by the largest margins, despite having higher target numbers than the other branches. They achieved this in the face of a mainstream media attempting to portray the military as rapists, racists, and murderers based up the alleged actions of a handful of men.

Since October 1, all four branches have met or exceed their goals:

• Army: 104%
• Marines: 101%
• Air Force: 101%
• Navy: 100%

Reserve forces recruiting has not been as even, but interesting enough, the Reserve and Guard forces most likely to be called upon for ground combat overseas (Army National Guard, Army Reserves, Marine Corps Reserves) have been the most successful in recruiting.

One could argue that this also represents only part of the year, but it is the most current data; far more relevant than statistics over a year old that were not reflective of the overall year's total.

About.com's U.S. Military Recruiting Statistics page confirms that recruiting for 2006 (so far) and 2005 were either met or exceeded for both years by all active duty branches. Funny how Mr. Chusid was unable to find those figures, isn't it?

Chusid cherry-picked a story concerning several months in 2005, ignoring the overall 2005 and 2006 recruiting data that undermines his chosen storyline. Honesty is apparently not high on the list of Liberal Values.

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Could be something, could be nothing:

A Northwest Airlines flight bound for India was escorted back to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport by F-16 fighter jets on Wednesday.

The plane was turned around after "a couple of passengers displayed behavior of concern," according to Northwest Airlines.

"Northwest is cooperating with the appropriate government officials," the company said in a statement.

The DC-10 plane, bound for Mumbai, was carrying 149 passengers, Northwest said. Flight number 42 has been canceled and will be rescheduled for Thursday.

The airport spokeswoman said the pilot had requested to return to Amsterdam and after the plane landed, there were some arrests.

She would not specify if those arrested were passengers.

Sources told Dutch journalist Marijn Tebbens that the disturbance was the result of some unruly passengers. The plane landed safely at 11:39 a.m. (5:39 a.m. ET), the sources said.

This sounds supicious, but at this point we have very little concrete information to go on. I'm am curious about odd sentence from the airport spokeswoman, "She would not specify if those arrested were passengers."

Who else would it be, an errant dogwalker?

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Proof once again that liberals dispise few things more than a live voter's right to choose:

Critics of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's independent run to keep his job attacked on two fronts Monday, with one group asking an elections official to throw him out of the Democratic Party and a former rival calling on state officials to keep his name off the November ballot.

Staffers for the senator from Connecticut, who lost the Aug. 8 Democratic primary to Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont, called both efforts dirty politics. The senator filed as an independent candidate a day after the loss, running under the new Connecticut for Lieberman Party.

A group whose members describe themselves as peace activists asked Sharon Ferrucci, Democratic registrar of voters in New Haven, to remove Lieberman from the party, arguing that he cannot be a Democrat while running under another party's banner.

[snip]

John Orman, a Democrat who gave up a challenge to Lieberman last year, argued in complaints filed with the state Monday that the senator should be kept off the Nov. 7 ballot.

Orman, a Fairfield University professor of political science, accused Lieberman of creating "a fake political party" and added: "He's doing anything he can to get his name on the ballot."

Joe Lieberman, who has a solid liberal voting record going back to when he was first elected to the Senate in 1989, who was nominated as the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic party in 2000, isn't "Democrat enough" for the Peace Democrats (otherwise known as Copperheads as they struggled against Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s, calling him Abraham Africanus as modern liberals call the current Republican President the Chimperor without any registration of the implicit racial overtones spanning three centuries, but I digress). If Lieberman's resume is the standard which we discard Democratic candidates, Republicans would run nearly unopposed.

Connecticut's liberals are playing a dangerous game, trying an overt attempt to throw out the seasoned incumbent frontrunner, forcefully limiting the choices of the voter, based upon the most inane of arguments and the most brazenly partisan of reasons.

I wrote just two weeks ago that I hoped Ned Lamont would win the primary, and when he won, I was thrilled that the Democratic Party would be committing Lamonticide. But I had no idea that the self-administered poison would so quickly take effect.

Connecticut Liberals are trying every trick in the book to keep Connecticut voters from have Joe Lieberman on the ballot.

It appears they aren't "Pro-Choice" after all.

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Rusty and Allah are all over this example of just how lazy Hezbollah has become in their efforts to provide fake news. The official Hezbollah web site (with an appropriate Iranian URL) is showing a picture of a ship being ripped apart in an explosion. Hezbollah claims that the ship was an Israeli ship hit by a Hezbollah missile.

Here is the picture as shown on Hezbollah's site:

And Hezbollah did hit an Israel ship, the INS Hanit, a Saar 5 class missile boat, most likely with an Iranian-made C-701 "Kosar" type missile, on July 14, 2006.

This is the INS Hanit (photo credit: Sweetness & Light):

Note the damage (most noticeably the scorch marks) near the waterline directly under the Hanit's helicopter hanger, roughly three-quarters of the way to the stern. Note also that while the ship was reported to have serious internal damage and four Israeli sailors died in the attack, the ship is largely intact, the keel unbroken, and the ship otherwise, from this view, externally undamaged, where the ship in the Hezbollah photo to has literally been broken by the blast, the aft half of the ship behind the explosion several degrees out of alignment with the fore.

The two ships, as noticed by Andrew Bolt of the Australian Herald-Sun, are not nearly the same.

HMAS Torrens, a decommissioned Australian destroyer escort, was purposefully sunk in a torpedo test on June 14, 1999. If you look at first picture in the second row on this page, it becomes quite likely that Hezbollah stole the image from this wikipedia entry, cropped it, and then enlarged it to get their end result.

A ship built in the mid 1960s and decommissioned in 1971 is not going to be mistaken for a modern vessel launched in 1994.

Of course, seeing is believing.

The INS Hanit (picture mirrored 180 degrees from above for comparative purposes):

HMAS Torrens, just prior to the torpedo test:

Not even close. You would expect that a recently unemployed Adnan Hajj would have been make it at least this close:

These days, Hezbollah isn't even phoning it in.

Update: Blue Crab Boulevard uncovers more Hezbollah pictures.

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I hope that the Left will condemn this obvious war for oil:

A Romanian oil rig off the coast of Iran came under fire from an Iranian warship and was later occupied by Iranian troops, a company spokesman said.

The Iranians first fired into the air and then fired at the Orizont rig, said GSP spokesman Radu Petrescu. Half an hour later, troops from the ship boarded and occupied the rig and the company lost contact with the 26 crew members shortly afterward.

Petrescu said he had no information about any injuries or deaths. The Orizont rig has been moored near the Kish island in the Persian Gulf since October 2005, he told the Associated Press.

Eugen Chira, the political consul at the Romanian Embassy in Tehran confirmed the incident, but provided few details.

"Some forces opened fire. That an incident has happened is true. We have no details or the reason yet," he said.

If this is the first stage of an attempt to shut down the Persian Gulf, the Iranian's picked an odd place to start, as Kish is to the northwest of the Straits of Hormuz.

More as this develops.

Update: This is still something of a "non-story," that I'm not seeing widely reported, for whatever reason. I'm not sure if it is a lack of information, or a determination by the news Powers That Be that this is a minor story. More info comes from Bloomberg, indicating that this might be a business/teritorial dispute:

Iran attacked and seized control of a Romanian oil rig working in its Persian Gulf waters this morning one week after the Iranian government accused the European drilling company of ``hijacking'' another rig.

An Iranian naval vessel fired on the rig owned by Romania's Grup Servicii Petroliere (GSP) in the Salman field and took control of its radio room at about 7:00 a.m. local time, Lulu Tabanesku, Grup's representative in the United Arab Emirates said in a phone interview from Dubai today.

[snip]

Iran urged the United Arab Emirates last week to help it return another oil rig owned and operated by the Romanian company in the same waters close to the Straits of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world's daily oil supply moves on tankers.

Grup said it recovered its rig last week because of a contractual dispute with its Iranian client, Oriental Oil Kish.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suspended Oriental Oil's activities in 2005 on alleged corruption activity and ties to Halliburton Co. of the U.S. The U.A.E.-registered drilling company had signed a preliminary contract with Halliburton after winning an estimated $310 million contract to develop phases 9 and 10 of Iran's offshore South Pars gas reservoir.

Mircea Geoana, the head of the Social Democratic Party, the main opposition party in Romania, called on the government to ``undertake all diplomatic measures necessary'' to persuade the Iranians to release the rig.

He also called on President Traian Basescu in a news conference broadcast on Realitatea television to invite all political party heads to the presidential palace to "discuss what Romania's reaction will be to this provocation."

You just knew Halliburton would get dragged into this, didn't you? I suspect that it is just a matter of time before the accusations start to fly that this is a set-up by the Bush Administration to use as a justification to go to war.

Andy Sullivan, your newest conspiracy theory awaits...

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It is horrific that they would risk a child's life by forcing him so close to an unexploded but still very much "live" bomb.

It is even worse that they admit it (my bold) (h/t LGF):

When Um Ali Mihdi returned to her home in the southern Lebanese city of Bint Jbeil two days ago, she found a 1,000lb (450kg) Israeli bomb lying unexploded in her living room.

The shell is huge, bigger than the young boy pushed forward to stand reluctantly next to it while we get our cameras out and record the scene for posterity.

The bomb came through the roof of the single-storey house and half-embedded itself into the floor, just missing the TV.

"Reluctantly" is correct. The Lebanese boy, wearing a blue tank top and jeans that hang on his thin frame, is visably leaning away from the unexploded ordinance, hands in pockets. That someone pushed him forward to be in such a picture, and that the BCC was willing to capitalize on this obvious bit of propaganda staging, going so far to admit it openly, is reprehensible.

This is an admittedly staged photo by an ostensibly professional and once-respected news organization. Martin Asser and any other BBC staff complicit in this event should be fired, without question.

Much to my disgust, the suicide of photojournalism continues at an every more dizzying pace.

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This just in from CNN:

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Monday that Tehran will continue to pursue nuclear technology, state television reported.

Khamenei's declaration came on the eve of Iran's self-imposed August 22 deadline to respond to a Western incentives package for it to roll back its nuclear program. The United Nations has given Tehran until the end of August to suspend uranium enrichment.

The supreme leader's remarks also came the day after Iran's armed forces tested surface-to-surface missiles Sunday in the second stage of war games near its border with Iraq. (Full story)

"The Islamic Republic of Iran has made its own decision and in the nuclear case, God willing, with patience and power, will continue its path," Khamenei was quoted as saying by the broadcast.

He accused the United States of pressuring Iran despite Tehran's assertions that it was not seeking to develop nuclear weapons, as the United States and several of its allies have contended.

"Arrogant powers and the U.S. are putting their utmost pressure on Iran while knowing Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons," he said.

Iran on Sunday said it will offer a "multifaceted response" to the incentives proposal.

For those who have been following these rumors for the past few weeks, the promise of a "multifaceted response" is an ominous, if uncertain, portent:

This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to "the farthest mosque," usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad and the Hojjatieh movement of the ruling mullahcracy in Iran are so radical that they were banned in 1983 by Ayatollah Khomeini, and it is this sect of Shiite Islam that seek to force the return of the 12th Shiite Imam, Muhammad ibn Hasan. Followers of the three major world religions all believe that the world will one day face an End Times scenario, but only this sect feeling that forcing the hand of God is within their grasp:

...rooted in the Shiite ideology of martyrdom and violence, the Hojjatieh sect adds messianic and apocalyptic elements to an already volatile theology. They believe that chaos and bloodshed must precede the return of the 12th Imam, called the Mahdi. But unlike the biblical apocalypse, where the return of Jesus is preceded by waves of divinely decreed natural disasters, the summoning of the Mahdi through chaos and violence is wholly in the realm of human action. The Hojjatieh faith puts inordinate stress on the human ability to direct divinely appointed events. By creating the apocalyptic chaos, the Hojjatiehs believe it is entirely in the power of believers to affect the Mahdi's reappearance, the institution of Islamic government worldwide, and the destruction of all competing faiths.

Because of the belief of the Hojjatieh that they can, with human hands, bring about Apocalypse, the significance of tomorrow's date sets up in their eyes a divine opportunity that the rest of the world would be wise to treat with all due seriousness.

Considering the magnitude of the threat, I would be quite unamazed if the long-range F-15I "Ra'am" and F-16I "Soufa" and other aircraft of the Israeli Air Force were not now sitting in their hangers fully-fueled under heavy guard, wings heavy with the weight of the most terrible weapons known to man, as Dolphin-class submarines and their American counterparts patrol the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean with their own cataclysmic payloads.

It is fully consistent with the Hojjatieh sect's philosophy to try to "wipe Israel off the map" in hopes of triggering the expected result, and fully within Israel's sovereign rights to respond with all due mortal force to a nation seeking its annihilation. The Hojjatieh seek an end to their world to bring forth Muhammad ibn Hasan, and that they may be able to burn Israel to the ground in the process of bringing forth their Hidden Imam only makes the attraction of Apocalypse stronger.

Do the Hojjatieh seek to end the world on their terms? If is is indeed their plan, I pray that they now reconsider.

The three major religions that arose in the Middle East and propagated around this world all believe in a Creator, One that created All. If these major world religions are correct, then God alone is all powerful, and only God alone can chose the time and place of the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega. By attempting to force God's hand, to attempt to control the End Times, the Hojjatieh are creating a great sin on a scale never before imagined, spanning across all nations, all believers, and faiths. The Hojjatieh seem primed to seek to create the greatest blasphemy of all.

As a Christian believer in a just and powerful God, I feel certain that while millions if not tens of millions could die if the Ahmadinejad and the other Hojjatieh have their way, that their deaths and the deaths of their unsuspecting victims (growing more unsuspecting every day) will only bring an end to lives, not a beginning of paradise.

Man cannot force or control the hand of God. A Pharaoh once tried, and the firstborn of all of Egypt died as a result. If Ahmadinejad's attempt to play God is realized, then the firstborn of the Middle East will only be a fraction of the overall toll.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:22 AM | Comments (22) | Add Comment
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Via CNN:

Photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image of six World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred Iwo Jima, died Sunday. He was 94.

Rosenthal died of natural causes at an assisted living facility in the San Francisco suburb of Novato, said his daughter, Anne Rosenthal.

"He was a good and honest man, he had real integrity," Anne Rosenthal said.

His photo, taken for The Associated Press on Feb. 23, 1945, became the model for the Iwo Jima Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The memorial, dedicated in 1954 and known officially as the Marine Corps War Memorial, commemorates the Marines who died taking the Pacific island in World War II.

Update: The insipid nature of the anti-war left rears its misshapen head once more, as the malecontents at Sadly No! and their friends at Salon.com's Daou Report see my mention of Joe Rosenthal's passing as a chance to attack both myself and for some odd reason, Rosenthal. To using the passing of an iconic American photographer to attack a relatively obscure blogger betrays a pettiness I personally find repulsive and a bit unsettling, but sadly, par for the course. My response to Sadly No! in the comments of that site are as follows:

So the great “Sadly No!” catch of hypocrisy is what, exactly?

Some have postulated over the years that Joe Rosenthal somehow staged the second flag raising on Iwo Jima, yet not one human soul have ever been able to provide the first shred of proof that the allegations they raised were true, as even your own cited sources concur.

This is in stark contrast to copious evidence that some (I never said nor implied all, as you scurrilously and inaccurately charge) media photographers in Lebanon staged photos, and individual photos by several others were left suspect. No less an authority on photojournalism than David Perlmutter, a man who quite literally “wrote the book” on photojournalism, has come out strongly condemning the actions of these photographers and the media organizations that they represent in Editor & Publisher.

I've only played a small role in exposing some of the photojournalist fraud coming from Lebanon, but I am proud of the work I've done, as is Perlmutter, and at least one major combat photojournalist (a Pulitzer nominee, I may add) who has stated to me privately in e-mail that he is impressed with my ability to catch some of the things I've noticed in staged and biased photojournalism coming from Lebanon.

That you would try to make a comparison between the unproven and mostly discredited charges against Rosenthal that even your own sources cannot support, and the very real and proven charges that have been levied against some Lebanese war photographers, shows a sloppiness in thinking here that quite frankly, I've come to expect.

Not surprisingly, none of the commentors there has a substantive rebuttal.

Update 2:

Via email, from David D. Perlmutter, by permission:

The overwhelming evidence, including the testimony of everyone present at the flag-raisings--both of them--was that the photograph that has become the famous icon was NOT staged. In brief, what happened was that Rosenthal took a series of still pictures of both flag-raisings. At the same time, a movie cameraman recorded the full event. The second flag-raising occurred because the first flag was too small to be seen by Marines and other military personnel throughout the island and at sea. Joe Rosenthal did not ask anyone to raise a flag, did not pose anyone raising a flag, and the second flag would have been raised in same way even if there had been no photographers present. In other words, it was 100 percent NOT a staged photo. The complication occurred because at that time photographers rarely developed their own film in the field. Rosenthal put the role in a can and sent it off for developing. Subsequently, the picture of the second flag-raising, the shot that we now recognize as the great icon, became a sensation. Rosenthal, caught up in the battle, knew nothing about his own success. Weeks later, when told that one of his photographs had become celebrated, he assumed that the questioner referred to another photograph in which the military personnel posed around the flag and talked about it as one he helped set up. Unfortunately, even though the error was corrected very quickly, it has become a data virus in the history of photojournalism. I will add that it is also a very hurtful error, both to the men who raised the flag--some of whom were killed in the battle in the days to follow--and to a sensitive and decent photojournalist. As an added note, as any working Photog can tell you, the photo violates some basic schoolbook rules of photojournalism, so, for example, he would have gotten more faces in “staged” image.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 06:10 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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...people listen.

I guess that answers this.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:29 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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David D. Perlmutter in Editor and Publisher:

The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism. In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks on the people who take news pictures and on the basic premise that nonfiction news photo- and videography is possible.

I'm not sure, however, if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both.

As they say, read the whole thing.

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As the Islamic Armegeddon apparently approaches just four days hence,
I thought I'd take this opportunity to mention all the thinks I'm going to miss as a result.

Car Swarms
Sadly, this uniquely Palestinian cultural curiosity is about to expire, along with those who practice it. I never quite understood the odd fascination with retrieving bits of flesh from martyrs "liberated" of their earthly chains courtesy of the Israeli Air Force, but it was an interesting custom to view all the same. I'll have to find another pointless expression of impotent rage to fill this void in my life. Is Randi Rhodes still on the air?

"Differently-Abled" Suicide Bombers
Say what you will about their people skills and willingness to accept those of other beliefs, the various terrorist groups in the Middle East have always believed in diversity, even allowing the mentally infirm and gullible a direct shot at paradise.

If only we cared enough to extend equal opportunities across all strata and mental levels of our society, perhaps we could be as great a culture. Then again, Cynthia McKinney was elected twice, so perhaps we're doing better in this regard than I originally thought.

Sand
The price is certainly going to go up. Of course, glass will become much more economical, so it might balance out.

Arab Media
I'll be honest: they've provided me a lot of material in past weeks, and I'm going to miss their fine original craftsmanship, which was openly appreciated in our own media outlets as well. Bill Keller is going to have to find a new mentor, but no doubt he'll land on his feet on a nice marble floor. So long, Qana Chameleons, and thanks for all the Fisk.

Hummus
No, not really.

You may look at this admittedly short list and ask, "hey, what about all the things in the "Great Satan" and the "Little Satan" that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadabbracadabrajad has promised to destroy as he brings forth the holy cleansing fire of the Hidden Imam?"

And I'll look back at you with a smile on may face and say those four sweet, magic words, "North Korea-designed missiles."

I'll see you on the 23rd.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:09 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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The Lebanese Interior Minstry is outraged over a video showing Lebanese soldiers offering tea to Israeli soldiers during the invasion of Marjeyoun on August 10. The Interior Ministry is ordering the base commander, Gen. Adnan Daoud, to be placed under arrest.

Here is an account of what transpired via CNN:

There have been conflicting accounts of what happened at Marjeyoun.

In the video, two Israeli tanks roll up to the gate of the Marjeyoun garrison, where a white surrender flag flutters outside the barracks.

Inside, Lebanese soldiers hold trays with glasses of tea, which they offer to the Israelis. The encounter appears merely social.

However, it is possible that unpleasant parts of the video were deleted during editing.

This is in opposition to accounts of what happened when Israeli soldiers arrived according to several Arab media outlets.

Arab-language network Al-Jazeera has quoted Hezbollah as saying "violent battles" took place with their militants, and Arab news networks Al-Manar and Al-Arabiya reported at least two Israeli tanks were destroyed in the fighting.

Apparently, the new Arab media definition of "destroyed" has been expanded to cover the spilling of milk and sugar on army vehicles. That, or they are lying, and who would expect that from professional media organizations?

While I certainly wouldn't want American soldiers extending this amount of hospitality to foreign invaders, I can't say I blame the Lebanese. They are, after all, only following our example.

The Administration has taken the "tea and cookies" route in dealing with the invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern border for years, so perhaps this model behavior explains this exchange between the Israeli and Lebanese commanders on the scene, as captured on the video:

At one point in the video, Daoud and an Israeli soldier have the following exchange, as translated by CNN's Octavia Nasr:

Daoud: "Don't we need to tell our bosses?"

Israeli soldier: "Tell whoever you want."

Daoud: "We need to brief them on what happened."

Israeli soldier: "We briefed (U.S. President) Bush. You brief whoever you want."

Daoud: "We need to brief Bush too."

While translating democracy to Arab culture continues to be problematic of the President, at least it appears his overly friendly "southern hospitality" is finding admirers around the world.

That, or Lebanese soldiers with small arms don't feel like getting themselves killed for nothing. And after all Hezbollah has done for Lebanon...

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As you know by now, a liberal Detroit judge has ruled against the NSA's terrorist communications intercept program initiated by President Bush. If you fan out across the blogosphere, everyone has an opinion on the ruling.

I'm not really up to it, so I'll go with the professionals, starting with the Volokh Conspiracy Eugene Volokh:

...the judge's opinion in today's NSA eavesdropping case seems not just ill-reasoned, but rhetorically ill-conceived. A careful, thoughtful, detailed, studiously calm and impartial-seeming opinion might have swung some higher court judges (and indirectly some Justices, if it comes to that). A seemingly angry, almost partisan-sounding opinion ("[The orders] violate the Separation of Powers ordained by the very Constitution of which this President is a creature," emphasis added, thanks to a caller for pointing this out) is unlikely to sway the other judges — especially when the opinion is rich in generalities, platitudes ("There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution"), and "obviously"'s, and poor in detailed discussion of some of the government's strongest arguments.

Dale Carpenter:

I am one of those who believes that the NSA program is not authorized by the AUMF, that it violates FISA, that FISA is a constitutional exercise of congressional power, and that therefore the NSA program is both illegal and unconstitutional. I have written so here. But I am less sure this is an issue courts should review, and even less sure that this case is one they should review.

So while the much sexier questions of executive power, the First Amendment, and the Fourth Amendment, will no doubt occupy many of us over the coming months (as they already have), I'd be willing to bet that at either the appellate court or the Supreme Court the suit will be dismissed for lack of standing.

Orin Kerr:

I've just read through the Fourth Amendment part of Judge Taylor's opinion on the NSA domestic wiretapping opinion, and, well, um, it's kind of hard to know what to make of it. There really isn't any analysis; rather, it's just a few pages of general ruminations about the Fourth Amendment (much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect) followed by the statement in passing that the program is "obviously" in violation of the Fourth Amendment...

It's hardly obvious that the program — or some aspect of it — violates the Fourth Amendment; that's the issue before the court, and my sense is that we really don't know enough to answer it without knowing the facts...

I can come up with explanations for why a district court judge inclined to rule against the program would put out an opinion that isn't quite ready for prime time. For example, Senator Specter's bill would take these issues away from the district court, so the choice might be to speak now or never. But at least based on the court's Fourth Amendment analysis, I suspect this opinion is important more for its political impact and its triggering of appellate review than for any analysis in the opinion itself.

Mark Levin hits many of the same points. The consensus among these legal scholars is that the judge made a very weak ruling, and seem to indicate that it will probably get tossed at a September 7 appellate court hearing.

My gut reaction? The ACLU venue-shopped to get a judge that fit their needs, and won a short-term political victory. In the long run, it won't affect the operations of the NSA program all that much, if at all.

I just can't get too excited or irate over a case that seems assured to die a quick death.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:38 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Look at any of the casualty figures coming out of Lebanon in the world's major media organizations, and you'll see something very close to this:

The Lebanese death toll, meanwhile, rose to 842 when rescue workers pulled 32 bodies from the rubble in the southern town of Srifa, target of some of Israel's heaviest bombardment in the 34-day conflict. The figure was assembled from reports by security and police officials, doctors and civil defense workers, morgue attendants as well as the military.

The Israeli toll was 157, including 118 soldiers, according to its military and government.

What is missing from this death toll (which CBS News has now quietly removed from this web report) are the casualties sustained by Hezbollah.

Many people would presumably be interested in knowing the toll the war has had on Hezbollah, as Hezbollah's actions did indeed trigger this latest war. But a recalcitrant media has steadfastly refused to provide these figures.

The Israel Defense Forces, as a standard practice, makes an effort to photograph and document each Hezbollah fighter confirmed killed, and also estimates the number of unconfirmed/unclaimed Hezbollah casualties from air strikes and artillery fire. Certainly, a media that has spent a considerable amount of their time and resources ferreting out and reporting America's secret national security programs could easily access unclassified information, some of which has been published on the IDF's own web site. Even a cursory analysis of the world's media reporting out of Lebanon reveals that in photographs, on video and radio broadcasts, and in print, Hezbollah casualties are almost never reported. So why does the media choose to underreport Hezbollah's casualties?

The answer may at least partially lie in stories of Lebanese casualties that the world media does choose to report. Story after story, photo after photo, dead and distraught Lebanese civilians clog the mediastream, building a false, grim montage of a war in which primarily Israeli soldiers and Lebanese civilians die.

This is not the whole truth of this war, but a partial truth developed through complacency and an apparent willful disregard to report the facts on the ground. Instead of seeking and publishing the entire truth, newsrooms have decided that they will publish the stories and images framed by foreign, mostly Arab Muslim reporters, even though their own cultural interests in these events are a clear and undeniable conflict of interest precluding even a pretense of unbiased reporting.

This is beyond bias, it is a reckless and willful disregard for reporting the whole truth in favor of reporting "news" that is easier to sell in a larger world media market. The casualty statistics are there, but the media sticks to the narrative they have helped create because while honest reporting is a goal, the business of the media business is business.

If it "bleeds it leads," but only if what leads sells advertising. News consumers around the world consume the news that more closely matches their perceptions of how reality should be, and stories critical of Hezbollah, stories that show their failures and deaths, don't sell in world population featuring 1.3 billion Muslims that hope for Israel's demise, or at the very best are indifferent to their fate. It is anti-Semitism by cashflow, a pocketbook jihad that buys the media's silence.

This morning I received a comment from an IDF sergeant, stating in part:

It's not classified, but I dought[sic] you'll ever see these figures in the MSM. According to our statistics we (the IDF) have scored OVER 600 CONFIRMED enemy kills (photgrphed [sic], documented, claimed and added to the killboard, I personally scored 2 kills to add to my record) and another 800-1200 unconfirmed/unclaimed kills (this estimation includes kills form airstrikes/artillary shelling). The Hizb'Allah losses aren't counted, on the most part, against the official number of Lebanease[sic] casualties.

Hezbollah has suffered 500-600+ confirmed fatalities, and estimates are that another 800-1200 are dead; perhaps half of Hezbollah's armed forces, and yet the media chooses to ignore these readily accessed figures in favor of a more marketable Lebanese civilian body count.

The media chooses to underreport Hezbollah's casualties because it is bad for business, while it unashamedly pimps civilian corpses for profit. That is just one of the ugly realities of this war that isn't considered "all the news that's fit to print."

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:00 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Patterico has directly confirmed that Democratic Rep. John Murtha just flat out lied about when he was briefed about Haditha.

It appears that the DNC's retreat specialist is in trouble.

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