Many of us awoke this morning to a disturbing Associated Press account of extreme barbarity coming out of Iraq:

Twenty beheaded bodies were discovered Thursday on the banks of the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad and a car bomb killed another 20 people in one of the capital's busy outdoor bus stations, police said.

The beheaded remains were found in the Sunni Muslim village of Um al-Abeed, near the city of Salman Pak, which lies 14 miles southeast of Baghdad.

The bodies all men aged 20 to 40 had their hands and legs bound, and some of the heads were found next to the bodies, two officers said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

Another version of the Associated Press story provided a bit more detail about the two anonymous Iraqi police officers who were the sources for the story.

Shockingly, they weren't there at all:

One of the police officers is based in Baghdad and the other in Kut, 100 miles southeast of the capital. The Baghdad officer said he learned of the discovery because Iraq's Interior Ministry, where he works, sent troops to the village to investigate. The Kut officer said he first heard the report through residents of the Salman Pak area.

I'm not Associated Press reporter Sinan Salheddin, nor am I Kim Gamel, AP's Baghdad news editor, but if I was investigating a story about a 20-corpse mass murder in—let's say, Manhattan—then I'd try to find a local police officer at the scene to interview about the case.

I wouldn't rely on a desk sergeant in Staten Island who merely heard reports of other officers being dispatched to check to see if there was such a crime, nor would I rely on a beat cop in Albany Fishkill who is only reporting rumors of what he heard from friends of relatives in Queens.

But the Associated Press didn't rely on the local police. Instead, they blatantly presented hearsay as the truth, and as a result, ran a story about a brutal massacre that currently appears to have never taken place.

Shortly after reading the AP's dubious "cousin in Kut" sourcing, I contacted several sources of my own, and which led to the following being released to me via email this evening from Multi-National Forces-Iraq:

We've been working on this query here at the Multi-National Forces Iraq Press Desk throughout the day and have been unable to confirm any of these reports of the 20 bodies at Salman Pak. After communicating with the Iraqi police and searching the area with some of our helicopters, we've been unable to find any evidence that proves the initial "report".

You were also very observant and correct to notice that these initial statements were from areas nowhere near the claimed location of the discovery which also leads us to question the validity of this report.

Until we turn up any clear evidence, we've concluded that this is an unsubstantiated claim but we'll let you know if we hear anything otherwise in the next 24 hours.

The email was signed by LCDR K.C. Marshall, U.S. Navy.

For the second time in less than year, the Associated Press seems to have run a story of a horrific massacre involving 20 or more people, using police officers not assigned to the area as their primary sources. For the second time in less than a year, it appears that there is no physical evidence that so much as a single person has died.

This time, if 20 heads cannot be recovered near Salman Pak, perhaps an equal number should roll at the Associated Press.

6/29 Update: In addition to MNF-I in researching the AP claim, I contacted Ron Holbrook, assigned to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior Transition Team Public Affairs Office (the MOI runs the Iraqi Police).

This morning, he states via email:

I can not confirm anything at this time.

While more ambiguous than LCDR Marshall's statement, I take this to mean that the Iraqi Police have been unable to confirm the existence of any decapitated bodies in Um-al Abeed.

It is very much starting to look like the Associated Press has falsely reported yet another non-existent massacre, using a sourcing methodology that reports unconfirmed hearsay from anonymous off-site sources as facts.

If this story is conclusively debunked, (meaning no bodies are found), the Associated Press will owe it to their readers and the news agencies they provide with information a full accounting of why they continue to fail to verify claims before presenting them as news.

Further Update: Via email, Eason Jordan, formerly of CNN, notes that both Reuters and Voices of Iraq have also made this same claim as the Associated Press.

I can't find the Reuters account (if you do, please drop it in the comments), but the VOI account seems to use the same sort of anonymous police sources as does the AP.

Further MNF-I Update: LCDR Marshall again:

Sir, we still have no further information that would substantiate the
initial "reports". I believe that there's going to be a statement in
the next day that will emphasize this; I will send it to you when it's
released.

You heard the man: an official denial may be released as early as tomorrow.

Things are not looking good for the Associated Press, who has now twice allowed shoddy reporting methodology and incredibly poor sourcing to damage the credibilty of the Associated Press and those news organizations that rely upon the AP to deliver timely, accurate information.

In related news, CY commenter Dusty Rafferty has found the Reuters article noted by Eason Jordan. You can read it here. It appears Reuters has also fallen for the same, or similar, anonymous police sources. Should we be calling for Rueters to explain how they allowed themselves to fall for the same apparently false story?

You bet.

/7/06/07 Update: Ever able to miss the overall point, an observant liberal snarks via email that the distance from Albany to New York City is 130+ miles, and so my analogy is geographically inaccurate--as if a cop in Fishkill, NY would be any more knowledgeable about an event in NYC than the cop in Albany would. Whatever. I'm sure you all understand the analogy just so much more now that it is geographically precise. Right?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:01 PM | Comments (27) | Add Comment
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I guess guys from a country that killed 12 million in ethnic cleansing campaigns and the occasional beastly human "medical experiments" in World War II would be experts on the subject, right?

A German newsmagazine reported Sunday that two of its journalists embedded with troops from the North Carolina-based 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan witnessed Afghan and American soldiers involved in abusing prisoners.

The weekly Focus reported that, while on patrol with troops this month southwest of Kabul, reporter Wolfgang Bauer and photographer Karsten Schoene witnessed an incident they said amounted to torture.

And what, precisely, did they see that amounted to torture?

When the suspect refused to talk, the magazine said, the platoon leader tied one end of a rope to the suspect's foot and the other end to a vehicle, then threatened to drag the man unless he told the truth.

Focus reported that the platoon leader then had an American soldier start the motor. The magazine printed a picture of what it said was the prisoner tied to the vehicle, with a soldier standing nearby.

After idling for two minutes, the vehicle's motor was shut off. The man was not dragged, the magazine reported, and the suspect was set free.

In other words, there was no torture, and it appears the suspect was set free without a scratch on him. But, as the world media continues to lower the bar on what amounts to torture to include empty threats as torture, this journalist sees evidence of a "fake execution."

Funny, how tying a rope around a guy's foot is now equated with drilling kneecaps, amputating limbs, beheadings, and gouging out eyes, which incidentally, is not uncommon at all among Islamic extremists.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:04 AM | Comments (45) | Add Comment
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Michael Yon has a new post up, Operation Arrowhead Ripper: Day One. The military is allowing him full access to the battlefield and to the TOC headquarters. Civilian casualties are occurring, as the terrorists are using civilians as human shields when they engage our forces. The number of civilian casualties is as yet unknown.

Yon notes that only Michael Gordon of the NY Times is with him, making them the only two members of the media in the battle. CNN, TIME, Reuters, etc are apparently working their way to the battlefield now, making me wonder just who and how they're getting their stories to date.

I'm not going to steal all of Mike's thunder; go to his site to catch up on the rest of his account, and remember he is reader supported.

I will say this: I've been reading him since his embed with the "Deuce-Four" Stryker Brigade and have been corresponding regularly with him for most of a year, and I've rarely seen him so confident of an on-going operation. If he's correct—and he's rarely wrong, even when being right is unpopular—then al Qaeda in Baquba is living on borrowed time.

According to a press release from MNF-I PAO yesterday, "41 insurgents have been killed, five weapons caches have been discovered, 25 improvised explosive devices have been destroyed and five booby-trapped houses have been discovered and destroyed."

Other operations are underway as part of an overall operation called Phantom Thunder, but some are not getting as much media attention as Arrowhead Ripper is beginning to attract, so you may not be aware of them.

Operation Commando Eagle has been launched as joint U.S Army-Iraqi Army air-ground assault targeting al Qaeda cells southwest of Baghdad. Twenty-nine suspects have been detained, and multiple weapons caches were reported captured.

According to the MNF-I PAO release:

Troops of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 2nd BCT, detained three men when their truck was found to contain documents requesting rockets as well as a spool of copper wire, commonly used to build improvised explosive devices.

I'm going to try to track down who that document was requesting rockets from, as while it could be nothing conclusive, it could be quite interesting if a source of the rockets could be identified.

Southeast of Baghdad, Operation Marne Torch is joint U.S. Army-Iraqi Army operation clearing the Arab Jabour area. More than sixty suspects have been detained, and 17 boats used to ferry explosives across the Tigris River have been destroyed, as have 17 weapons caches.

No Agenda Here

It in the past 48 hours, more than 40 al Qaeda terrorists (including a Libyan) have been killed, more than 100 have been captured in these and other on-going operations, and tons of munitions have been captured or destroyed in weapons caches.

What does CNN focus on? You already know the answer:

Fourteen U.S. troops have been killed in attacks over the past two days in Iraq -- 12 soldiers and two Marines -- according to the U.S. military.

In the deadliest attack, a roadside bomb struck a military vehicle on Thursday in northeastern Baghdad, killing five U.S. soldiers, three Iraqi civilians and an Iraqi interpreter.

A U.S. soldier and two civilians were wounded.

Also Thursday, a rocket-propelled grenade struck a U.S. military vehicle in northern Baghdad, killing a soldier and wounding three others.

On Wednesday, a roadside bomb killed two U.S. Task Force Marne troops and wounded four others southwest of Baghdad.

A similar attack in western Baghdad on Wednesday killed four U.S. soldiers and wounded a fifth.

In addition, two Marines were killed in combat operations in Iraq's Anbar province on Wednesday.

There was zero--ZERO mention of the successes of the operations above mentioned by CNN. If you read this, their featured story on the war for today, you'd be left to understand that American and Iraqi forces, as well as Iraqi civilians, are suffering significant casualties, and al Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents, and Shia militiamen got away with barely a scratch for the carnage they created. The CNN account reported a grand total of one dead terrorist, and he was a suicide bomber.

Propaganda is as much about what you chose not to print, as much as it is about the angle from which you pursue what do decide to print. Not that many years ago, CNN took a vow of silence not to report the torture being committed by Saddam Hussein's brutal regime in order to maintain a Baghdad office.

I'm beginning to wonder exactly what CNN gains now by refusing to tell all of the truth of this current Iraqi war.

Nah. Couldn't be.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 10:27 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment
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Operation Arrowhead Thunder? Who knew?

Soldiers conducting Operation Arrowhead Thunder also have uncovered more than 1,000 roadside bombs around the provincial capital, Baqubah, where the offensive is being conducted, Iraqi security officials said.

I'm sure that the Times' crack reporters and editorial staff will soon provide us with an exclusive interview with General Perseus himself.

(h/t Hot Air's new headline thingy)

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Last week I published Burning the Smoking Gun, which rebuffed/debunked a claim made by Thomas Harding in a February 12, 2007 U.K. Daily Telegraph article, which made the claim that "more than 100" HS50 .50-caliber long-range precision sniper rifles purchased by the Iranian government from the Austrian company Steyr-Mannlicher were captured in Iraq by U.S. forces.

I confirmed via U.S. Army LTC Christopher C. Garver, Director of the Combined Press Information Center for Multinational Corps-Iraq that no such rifles had ever been documented as being recovered by American forces.

30 minutes ago, Reinhild Wohltan, acting on behalf of Dr. Viktor Bauer PR GmbH, sent along a press release regarding my story. Below is the press release, as copied into a GIF format from the original PDF:

Steyr-Mannlicher once again denies the rumor published as fact in the Daily Telegraph article, and notes that were these rifles to be used for anthing other than "legitimate and important law enforcement purposes," that Steyr's agreement with the Iranian government would be breached, and intones that if the Iranian-purchased HS50 rifles were captured for "non-legitimate use"--i.e., sniping at Coalition forces within Iraq--that they would "offer support to clarify matters," which I would interpret to mean as offer to compare the serial numbers of any rifles recovered to serial numbers of those purchased by Iran.

The Daily Telegraph has not updated their original article to note that their charges are unsupported, and there is no intention that they will.

SO much for those multiple layers of fact checkers and professional media accountability.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:29 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Formerly a staple of reports in the Associated Press and other news organizations, the credibility of the Iraqi group known as the Association of Muslims Scholars (also known as the Muslim Scholars Association) seems to have fallen on hard times.

The al-Qaeda-aligned group's credibility may have begun to diminish when it claimed that 18 people died in an inferno at the al-Muhaimin mosque in Hurriyah, Baghdad, as part of a highly-disputed series of AP stories claiming that up to 24 people died and four mosques were "burned and blew up" on November 24, 2006. A photo taken the next day from inside the mosque rebutted that claim.

The Associated Press again used the Association of Muslim Scholars as a source for a dubious account on April 10, 2007, as the AMS made the following inflammatory charge:

The Muslim Scholars Association, a Sunni group, issued a statement quoting witnesses as saying Tuesday's battle began after Iraqi troops entered a mosque and executed two young men in front of other worshippers. Ground forces used tear gas on civilians, it said.

These charges were never substantiated.

I asked at the time, "Why does the Associated Press continue to use an organization with an obvious political agenda, ties to al Qaeda, and a documented history of providing false information as a source?"

Apparently, someone at the major media organizations had similar misgivings about the credibility of the Association of Muslim Scholars at roughly that time, or shortly thereafter.

A Google News search for "Association of Muslim Scholars" and a search for "Muslim Scholars Association show that no prominent news organizations have used the AMS as a source for over a month, even as links from lesser news sources (primarily blogs) show that the organization are still issuing press releases.

Apparently, it only took four years of publishing the propaganda of the AMS as news for the professional media to finally realize they were being had.

How encouraging.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:21 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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On February 12, Thomas Harding, Defense Correspondent of the U.K. Daily Telegraph, published what many regarded as evidence of the literal "smoking gun" proving Iranian government involvement in Iraq:

Austrian sniper rifles that were exported to Iran have been discovered in the hands of Iraqi terrorists, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

More than 100 of the.50 calibre weapons, capable of penetrating body armour, have been discovered by American troops during raids.

The guns were part of a shipment of 800 rifles that the Austrian company, Steyr-Mannlicher, exported legally to Iran last year.

The sale was condemned in Washington and London because officials were worried that the weapons would be used by insurgents against British and American troops.

Within 45 days of the first HS50 Steyr Mannlicher rifles arriving in Iran, an American officer in an armoured vehicle was shot dead by an Iraqi insurgent using the weapon.

Over the last six months American forces have found small caches of the £10,000 rifles but in the last 24 hours a raid in Baghdad brought the total to more than 100, US defence sources reported.

The find is the latest in a series of discoveries that indicate that Teheran is providing support to Iraq's Shia insurgents.

Other Iranian ordnance, such as explosively-formed penetrators designed to slice through armored vehicles and Iranian-manufactured mortar and artillery shells had previously been captured in Iraq, though with little solid evidence implicating the Iranian government.

Capturing more than 100 of the 800 Austrian rifles shipped to the Iranian government—over twelve percent of their entire purchase—would be the most direct evidence yet of the Iranian government supplying Iraqi insurgents with weapons to kill coalition forces.

But the U.S. military says not so much as a single Steyr-Mannlicher HS50 .50-caliber sniper rifle has ever been documented as having been captured from Sunni insurgents or Shia militias in Iraq.

In an exclusive to Confederate Yankee, U.S. Army Christopher C. Garver, Director of the Combined Press Information Center for Multinational Corps-Iraq, stated that no such rifles have ever been confirmed recovered by American military forces in Iraq.

"Ever since that article, we have queried our units to see if anyone can find any evidence of those Steyr-Mannlicher sniper rifles," said Garver.

"To date, we have not found one unit that has any knowledge of that find.

"I can't tell you that this didn't happen -- the possibility that the cache of rifles was destroyed before being completely documented does exist, though the chance of that happening is small -- but we have been able to find no evidence of it."

Independent embedded combat journalist Michael Yon, who has perhaps spent more time in Iraq than any member of the western media, also discounts the likelihood of the Daily Telegraph story as being consistent with his experience in Iraq.

Yon, a former Green Beret weapons specialist, wrote, "I've been on many raids and seen literally tons of munitions captured. RPGs, small arms and machineguns of many sorts, hand grenades of many sorts, surface to air missiles, artillery and mortar rounds by the thousands if not tens of thousands between places like Baquba and Mosul (the largest weapons ASP I have seen was in Baqubah at FOB Gabe), but I have never seen a .50 caliber sniper rifle in Iraq that did not belong to Americans."

Michael Fumento, another independent journalist who has spent time embedded with Coaltion forces in Iraq and NATO forces in Afghanistan, likewise stated, "I heard nothing about the use of .50 cal enemy sniper rifles."

For it's part, Steyr-Mannlicher, the Austrian company that sold the HS50 rifles to the Iranian government and was embargoed by the U.S. and British government as a direct result, posted a press release in March disputing the Daily Telegraph story.

Dozens of media outlets and blogs (including this one) had reported the Daily Telegraph story as proof of Iranian government involvement in Iraq. To date, there is no indication that the Daily Telegraph has issued a retraction for their apparently false claims.

(Author's note: A special thanks to Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of the Washington Examiner and blogger at Tapscott's Copy Desk, and U.S. Army Col. Steven A. Boylan, PAO for MNF-I Commanding General David Petraeus, for their assistance in researching this story.)

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 11:08 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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So says John W. Mashek, retired Beltway journalist of four decades and U.S. News and World Report blogger. I'm sure he was completely objective in his reporting, and didn't develop any strong opinions until he began blogging.

And yet as horrible as the Veep is, Cheney's approval numbers are twice that of Harry Reid.

How disconcerting.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 09:53 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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Don't worry; there is zero chance of escalation.

Via The Australian:

A Member of the Palestinian Fatah movement was thrown off the roof of an 18-storey building today amid renewed clashes between rival factions across Gaza, as Israel vowed to continue its strikes.

Mohammed Suwerki was kidnapped near the seafront in Gaza moments before he was flung to his death from the roof of a building by fighters loyal to the Islamist Hamas movement, which has been locked for months in a power struggle with President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement.

It's now a "power struggle."

I've got to hand it to the media. Apparently tired of 13 months of saying that the Palestinian groups are engaged in "factional fighting," the media has come up with a new and interesting way of avoiding the fact that Hamas and Fatah are engaged in a civil war.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:26 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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... have blown it yet again. From AFP's lede this morning (my bold):

One Palestinian was killed on Thursday as deadly clashes between rival Fatah and Hamas gunmen erupted for the first time in the Gaza Strip since the latest truce came into effect nearly three weeks ago.

Really?

I guess this nearly three-hour assault by an estimated 50-100 Hamas gunmen on Fatah's "key Presidential Guard position" just two days ago doesn't count:

Hamas and Fatah forces fought a major gun battle on Tuesday in the Gaza Strip near the Karni commercial crossing, the most serious flare-up in factional fighting in two weeks.

An officer with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Presidential Guard said a "large number" of Hamas fighters attacked a key Presidential Guard position near the crossing, wounding at least one guard member.

Or is AFP keying on the distinction "deadly," implying that if no one dies, then the violence doesn't count?

Perhaps the new AFP standard is "no body/no battle."

Somehow, I don't think that is quite accurate.

Update: Is "No Blood, no Foul" the new media standard for reporting combat? Or is it an old standard I'm just noticing?

Reuters is only slightly better than AFP in their reporting of the most recent outbreak of violence in the Gaza Civil War:

Rival Hamas and Fatah forces clashed in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing at least one person and injuring 12 others, in the worst flare-up of factional fighting in almost three weeks.

Like AFP, Reuters doesn't seem to consider Tuesday's three-hour battle worth noting as a serious fight. They seem to be of the opinion that the number of casualties that can be noted determines the seriousness of the conflict.

While casualties can be used to a certain extent to determine the severity of a battle, it should hardly be the only criteria, and is completely devoid of any tactical or strategic gains made by one side or the other. As it currently stands, we don't know if either side gained a strategic or tactical advantage in either of these two engagements, because neither news organization is providing that depth of coverage.

By their apparent casualty-only standard, the D-Day invasion of Normandy (where Allied forces suffered an estimated 10,000 casualties, including 2,500 dead, and the Germans suffered between 4,000-9,000 casualties), was far less important than the battle of Iwo Jima, where American forces suffered 27,909 casualties (including 8,226 combat-related deaths) and the Japanese lost more than 20,000 killed.

I don't think any sane person would dare make that argument.

Both battles were extremely costly and important for different reasons, and yet, the apparent criteria in use by these media organizations would make Iwo Jima the far more important battle based on casualty figures alone.

Casualty figures are an important indication of the scale of a battle or conflict, but they are only one indicator... unless someone is willing to argue that the inconclusive Battle of Spotsylvania Court House in May of 1864 where Lee inflicted nearly over 18,000 casualties and nearly 3,000 dead on Grant's Army will be judged as historically important to Americans as the first several years of the Iraq War.

I'm not willing to buy that flawed line of reasoning.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:05 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Combat journalist J.D. Johannes has decided he doesn't have what it takes to be a New York Times journalist.

Welcome to the club.

I leaned up against the humvee and cried in the parking lot of Fallujah Surgical.

I knew right then I was not cut out for this type of work.

It was even worse a few weeks later on a rainy night in Baghdad...

On Memorial Day a column ran in the NY Times (Not to see the Fallen is no Favor) about the rules for photographing an injured Soldier or Marine.

The author whined about how he had to seek permission from the wounded before using the photo.

The editors obviously thought this column was perfect for Memorial Day.

I disagree. The times I have been around injured Marines I pitched in to help. I ran to get the stretcher. The only photos I have taken of an injured person were of a Soldier treating an Iraqi man for shrapnel wounds. You see the soldier doing his job, but not the face of the Iraqi man.

If I were to be wounded while embeded with Soldiers, Seabees or Marines they would provide medical attention and likely risk their lives to protect me and save my life.

I feel I should reciprocate because these young men and a few women I roll with outside the wire would not stand around snapping photos of me while I bled out--they would do what they do best Save Lives.

I think I might be able to relate.

While I've never seen combat, I've been an inadvertent first responder to an accident while a nominal member of the media. I was working at the university newspaper when a student crossing the street in front of me was hit broadside as she attempted to cross against the light. She cartwheeled through the air and hit the asphalt face first in front of the concrete divider beside me.

I jumped out of my car, and started trying to provide first aid as well as I could, reassuring the injured student as best I could as I directing others to call 911 and check on the condition of the driver. It never occurred to me to try to snap pictures or start composing a story as this student lay on the ground, bleeding from her mouth. The only thought in my head was to do what I could to help a shocked, scared, and injured fellow human being.

If basic humanity has to come second to the job, perhaps I don't have what it takes to be a professional journalist, either.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:01 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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