HT: BizzyBlog via email.This is a truly horrible story, but one that absolutely must be told. Michael Yon reports:
I told the Iraqi commander, Captain Baker, that it was important that Americans see this; he took me around the graves and showed more than I wanted to see. He said the people had been murdered by al Qaeda. I made video of him speaking, and of the horrible scene. The heat and stench were crushingly oppressive and broken only by the sounds of shovels as Iraqi soldiers kept digging.This truly is terrorism. No bumper sticker committed this atrocity. It is as real as it gets. The pictures are absolutely haunting.
Over at Protein Wisdom, Dan Collins makes this point:
Michael Yon has just posted a report of an entire farming village liquidated by al-Qaeda “fighters” in anticipation of the arrival of American forces. I think that it will be instructive to compare the number of column inches devoted to this with those devoted to Haditha.In his email, Tom from BizzyBlog says, "If this gets no Old Media coverage, doesn't it show AQ that it can get away with any manner of atrocity without being exposed for what they are to the American people and the world? By ignoring this, as Old Media likely will, aren't they enabling massacres like this?"
It shows more than that, Tom. If American media fails to cover this with the same amount of gusto that they have pursued Haditha and Abu Ghraib, they will be demonstrating their preference for whom they wish to win this conflict. The press has to tell the story that evil really does exist in this world. Imagine if the story of the Holocaust was never told because the media was only interested in reporting Allied atrocities. Yes, by failing to treat this war objectively, the media does indeed enable massacres such as this one and history will judge the coverage of this war very harshly.
It is no wonder that support for the war has fallen in this country, our media is obsessed with portraying every effort as a failure regardless of the conditions on the ground. Objectivity has gone out of style in the American media in favor of agenda journalism content to do whatever is necessary to teach America a lesson regardless of the consequences not only for our country but for the world as well.
If it were not for the likes of Michael Yon, these stories would never be told in real time. This is real citizen journalism at its best and it is really putting Big Media in the difficult position of exposing their hand... Real atrocities such as this one are stories that the American people need to be hearing about. That Big Media prefers to give you the American casualty count instead demonstrates their level of patriotism and (more importantly to them) integrity.
Ultimately, there are no shades of gray in war. There are good guys and there are bad guys. Evil must be confronted. God bless the men and women in uniform who do so. If only the press were half as competent and honest...
