Thursday, April 28, 2005
"The WaPo" rewrites history
First, it was "The New York Times" rewriting history, now "The Washington Post"'s Susan B. Glasser joins the revisionist brigade in her article discussing the recent terrorism report from the US National Counterterrorism Centre:
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"Terrorist incidents in Iraq also dramatically increased, from 22 attacks to 198, or nine times the previous year's total -- a sensitive subset of the tally, given the Bush administration's assertion that the situation there had stabilized significantly after the U.S. handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government last summer."Actually, there have been some recent claims from the US military in Iraq that the security situation has improved after the January 2005 election. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't recall the Bush Administration making assertions about the improving security situation following the June 28, 2004 handover of authority from Bremmer to Allawi. The second half of last year has, after all, seen the bloody assaults against Al Sadr in Najaf and against the jihadis and neo-Baathists in Fallujah. So quite the opposite, actually - I recall stories such as this, from mid-September 2004:
"President Bush warned on Saturday that deadly guerrilla violence in Iraq and Afghanistan could worsen in the coming weeks as the two countries move toward national elections."In late September, Cheney was saying pretty much the same thing:
"The level of violence will be high during this period of time [in the run-up to the election] because they're desperate. They know the window's closing."And in December:
"The US president, George Bush, admitted today he expected violence in Iraq to continue in the run-up to the country's elections next month, with no halt to the killing of 'hundreds of innocent' citizens."So much for fair and balanced reporting. I don't expect a correction though.
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