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Friday 16 May 2008

PROPAGANDA FROM THE FRONT LINE….

"Girl of 8 used as 'suicide' bomber". That’s the headline which screamed out at me from the front page of London’s Metro freesheet on the Tube yesterday morning. I felt sick to my stomach, unable to digest this latest barbarity allegedly perpetrated by fellow members of my faith. Here is how the Metro reported the story in its first three paragraphs:

“Militants strapped explosives to a young girl and used her to blow up an army checkpoint in Iraq yesterday.

“They detonated the device by remote control as the child, thought to be as young as eight, walked towards a group of soldiers.

“The girl and an army captain were killed in the blast which also injured up to seven other soldiers."


Simple and straightforward, right? Wrong. Five short paragraphs later, in the same article, a revelation:

“The Americans called it a 'suicide' attack and put the number of injured at seven. Later, they gave the age of the girl as between 16 and 18.”

So, let me get this straight. The Metro claims in its banner headline and at the start of its front-page lead story that a girl 8 has been used by those nasty evil terrorists in Iraq to kill and maim Iraqi soldiers. The article says she is ‘thought to be as young as eight’. Thought to? Thought to by whom? Because later in the same article, American officials give the age of the girl as being between 16 and 18. Can British journalism get any lazier, shoddier or more bizarre? I mean, if you’re going to lie about a ‘fact’ in your story (the age of a suicide bomber), it would probably be best not to reveal that your lying by undermining your own central ‘fact’ later in the same piece. Then agan, the article’s author was probably hoping that commuters making their way to work on a busy morning probably wouldn’t read beyond the headline and the opening paragraphs.

But it wasn’t just the Metro that went with the headline-grabbing claim of an ‘8-year-old suicide bomber’. So too did the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Daily Mail and the rest. The Telegraph tried to have it both ways:

“It was reported that the girl was as young as eight. Neither the US or the Iraqi army could confirm this.”

If neither the US nor Iraqi troops could confirm an age of 8, then who “reported” that the “girl was as young as eight”. It’s a sly journalistic trick: confidently state something that you know to be potentially untrue, and then, in the very next breath, caveat it in order to cover your ass.

Of course, it’s not the first time, in the fog of Iraq’s bloody war, that false information has been peddled by journalists and/or occupying coalition forces. In its coverage of the alleged ‘8-year-old suicide bomber’, the Daily Mail reported this morning that,

“In February, Iraqi insurgents used two women with Downs Syndrome as human bombs in a blast that killed 99 people in Baghdad.”

Other reports made similar references to the infamous ‘Downs Syndrome bombers’, despite the fact that this story has been thoroughly debunked and disproved by, among others, the Independent’s award-winning Iraq correspondent Patrick Cockburn:

"More often, the lies have been small, designed to make a propaganda point for a day even if they are exposed as untrue a few weeks later. One example of this to shows in detail how propaganda distorts day-to-day reporting in Iraq, but, if the propagandist knows his job, is very difficult to disprove.

"On 1 February this year, two suicide bombers, said to be female, blew themselves up in two pet markets in predominantly Shia areas of Baghdad, al Ghazil and al-Jadida, and killed 99 people. Iraqi government officials immediately said the bombers had the chromosonal disorder Down's syndrome, which they could tell this from looking at the severed heads of the bombers. Sadly, horrific bombings in Iraq are so common that they no longer generate much media interest abroad. It was the Down's syndrome angle which made the story front-page news. It showed al-Qa'ida in Iraq was even more inhumanly evil than one had supposed (if that were possible) and it meant, so Iraqi officials said, that al-Qa'ida was running out of volunteers.

"The Times splashed on it under the headline, "Down's syndrome bombers kill 91". The story stated firmly that "explosives strapped to two women with Down's syndrome were detonated by remote control in crowded pet markets". Other papers, including The Independent, felt the story had a highly suspicious smell to it. How much could really be told about the mental condition of a woman from a human head shattered by a powerful bomb? Reliable eyewitnesses in suicide bombings are difficult to find because anybody standing close to the bomber is likely to be dead or in hospital.

"The US military later supported the Iraqi claim that the bombers had Down's syndrome. On 10 February, they arrested Dr Sahi Aboub, the acting director of the al Rashad mental hospital in east Baghdad, alleging that he had provided mental patients for use by al-Qa'ida. The Iraqi Interior Ministry started rounding up beggars and mentally disturbed people on the grounds that they might be potential bombers.

"But on 21 February, an American military spokes-man said there was no evidence the bombers had Down's. Adel Mohsin, a senior official at the Health Ministry in Baghdad, poured scorn on the idea that Dr Aboub could have done business with the Sunni fanatics of al-Qa'ida because he was a Shia and had only been in the job a few weeks."

Tragically, despite the Americans now admitting that there is no evidence that the bombers had Down’s syndrome, despite Iraqi officials acknowledging a link between Dr Aboub and Al Qaida to be improbable and unlikely, the doctor remains in prison, as do dozens of mentally disturbed beggars.

This is the power – and the disastrous and depressing consequences – of the propaganda that we are being fed by ‘reporters’ (stenographers?) from the front line of the conflict in Iraq. Next time I pick up the Metro and see a similar story to this morning’s rubbish, about ‘child suicide-bombers’ and ‘8-year-old killers’, I’ll remind myself that all it tells me is how screwed Iraq and its people are, how little progress is being made there and how little are media tells us. To quote, once more, the peerless Patrick Cockburn,

“…it is all too clear that al-Qa'ida is not running out of suicide bombers. But it is pieces of propaganda such as this small example, often swallowed hole by the media and a thousand times repeated, which cumulatively mask the terrible reality of Iraq.”

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