Ron, re "truthout.org"...the link you posted WRP from... Thought I'd find a bit about the Editor, Marc Ash.
Here's another site, from the opposite side of the fence, and her perspective.... It is important for all of us to know who is behind each opinion and site on the Internet....what their "win" is, to only have a one-sided conversation. When one roots around truthout, one finds that it is indeed one sided.
We all should search all aspects of a question, and every source we can find. As we all know, even CNN and the NYT can make mistakes. BIG ones!
The Iraqis Will Eventually Judge America
By Its Deeds, Not Media Misinformation
By
Mary Mostert
CLICK HERE
Toogood Reports [Weekender, April 6, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: toogoodreports.com
At this writing, the American troops are about six miles from Baghdad and so far 78 Americans have been killed in action. Most of the 78 were not killed by enemy fire, but were killed in helicopter collisions, vehicle crashes and two were killed by an American Muslim in their midst.
Iraq is a country about the size of California, with 22 million people, one third less than California´s 33 million people. While almost every news source in the world, especially those opposed to the American action in Iraq, has a detailed list of the American military casualties in Iraq, even Americans are generally unaware that this is a smaller number of people than who die routinely, with no national publicity, in California in "peace" time. The latest statistics for California indicate there were 2,265 annual homicide deaths, making homicide the 10th leading cause of death in the State, and there were 8,814 annual deaths from accidents, one-third of which were vehicle accidents. That averages out at approximately 11,000 such deaths a year, or about 30 a day in peaceful California.
In twelve days of fighting, during which most of the World Media told its audiences about every death in great detail while concluding the battle plan was failing or stalled, the vehicle and killed in action deaths averaged 6.5 a day, about one-fourth the rate of similar deaths going on in California at the same time. This would indicate that it has been a lot safer for a Californian to be fighting the so called "fierce" Iraqi Republican Guard the past couple of weeks than it was to commute to work in Los Angeles during the same period.
Of course, we don´t have the death count for the Iraqis who died in the same twelve-day period. We know that there are fewer Saddam palaces, government buildings, tanks and missiles than there used to be. The Iraqis themselves have so far put the "civilian" death toll at 300 and that includes the Fedayeen Saddam, the SS-like troops that behead women who wave at American troops.
One of the daily unsolicited e-mails I get is from a propaganda group that calls itself "Truthout" and which is, believe it or not, headquartered in Los Angeles, California. On March 16th, as the war was about to start, its chief propagandist, Marc Ash, wrote:
"What George W. Bush and Tony Blair are planning is the greatest act of human slaughter since Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge orchestrated the Cambodian genocide in the mid 1970s. That act killing some 1.5 to 2 million largely defenseless and quite peaceful Cambodians.
"Civilian Iraq is utterly defenseless and totally unprepared for the carnage that is about to be visited upon them. It is murder plain and simple, murder on an unimaginable scale."
Marc Ash didn´t bother to mention the Iraqis and Iranians killed in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war started by Saddam´s invasion and seizure of Iranian oil fields in 1980. According to The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) estimated casualties of the 8 year war between these two Muslim nations at "more than one and a half million war and war-related casualties." The casualties between these two Muslim nations would be the equivalent to losing 5.6 million for a population the size of the United States.
Ash has been a prime spokesman for those defending Saddam Hussein´s regime. While Ash never objected to Saddam Hussein blatant and admitted goal of controlling the world´s major oil supplies by seizing the oil wells of Iran and Kuwait, and planning to seize Saudi Arabian oil wells, he claims that President George W. Bush is merely after Iraqi oil. He wrote in January,
"Oil, money, power beyond comprehension. Plans for an Iraqi ‘Regime Change´ are not at all – as the administration would have us believe – a result of the attacks of September 11th. In fact, plans for an Iraqi regime change, at the behest of Mr. Bush were scripted into the GOP's published platform statement for 2000.
"Why? There are heavy connections between the Bush Administration and US oil corporations. The interests of those oil giants are the cornerstone of this Administration's policy. Control of Iraqi oil fields would be worth incalculable profits the very corporations whose former executives permeate the ranks of the Bush Administration. Oil is the Bush family business – politics is the shield that protects it."
This has become the worldwide propaganda barrage of the 21st century, believed even by confused and illogical Americans. If President Bush, and his father, actually were intent upon seizing Middle Eastern oil, or closer to home, Venezuelan oil, there really isn´t anyone that could stop us from doing so. After all, we spent a lot of money, effort and some blood in 1991 to force Saddam to get out of Kuwait. He got out, setting 900 oil wells on fire.
American oil experts put out the fires – and we gave them back to the Kuwaitis. We didn´t keep them. Those who actually believe Marc Ash´s and A.N.S.W.E.R. propaganda, while totally ignoring the facts – that it is Saddam Hussein, not George W. Bush, who has invaded two countries to seize oil wells – believe it because that is what they want to believe. It not only flies in the face of facts, but also is simply totally illogical.
Brigadier General Vincent Brooks of Central Command in Qatar said yesterday,
"We certainly are in close proximity to Baghdad. There is increasing evidence that the regime cannot control its forces or the Iraqi population in most of the country."
He also announced the Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, a Shiite leader who had been under house arrest in Iraq, had issued a fatwa urging Iraqis not to interfere with coalition troops and to remain calm.
While this weekend may well determine whether or not American forces face an unpleasant surprise from Saddam´s force, it doesn´t look like there is much of a cohesive force left to pull it off. It is beginning to look as if the Iraqis, like the Afghans, are just sick of 20 years of fighting and may well reserve judgment of this group of strangers until they see what happens next, as the Shiite leader suggests.
In this war, as in others, such as in Japan, Germany, South Korea, Vietnam and Kuwait, in the end we will be judged by our deeds after the war, not by what the people in those countries were told about Americans by their media. The anti-war left and the Arab media has spent a lot of time and money convincing the Arab public that America is evil – but the Kuwaitis can compare a Bush Presidential effort to free them with the Saddam effort to enslave them – and they are staunch friends of America today.
I predict the same thing will happen in Iraq after the Saddam regime falls.
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