November 28, 2006

Sameer N. Yacoub: AP's Terrorist Supporter or Lazy Green Zone Reporter?

UPDATE: The AP responds. If the story turns out to be legit, then this means the Iraqi government is more srewed up than even I imagined (and I have quite a vivid imagination). That, or we have some real live propagandists on our hands.
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If you haven't been keeping up with the ongoing saga of bad reporting from Iraq, you should be. Look, things are not going well in a lot of areas in Iraq. But some of these false reports are inflaming violence and are, in fact, a form of blood lible equivalent to the old lies about Jews killing Christian children.

The purpose of allegations of attrocities committed by the US is to justify and inflame violence against us. Is AP reporter Sameer N. Yacoub purposely trying to get US troops killed by repeating accusations that the US opened fire on 11 unnarmed civilians when, in fact, no US troops were even in the area? I don't know.

Dan Riehl finds evidence that Yacoub was a longtime schill of the Hussein regime. He also finds evidence that Yacoub may have contacts within Sunni terror circles. On top of that, Flopping Aces first took note when the AP began to cite as authoritative sources people who were not actually working for the Iraqi agencies that they claimed to be working for.

Taken together, a case might be made that Yacoub and other AP reporters are closet Baathists, Sunni Islamicists, or simply anti-Shia/ anti-American. That they are part of the concerted propaganda war and media jihad declared by terrorists. See for instance our recent post on The Jihad Media Battalion or Greyhawk's great expose on the Global Islamic Media Front if you weren't aware that the terrorists actually admit that there is a propaganda war going on.

However, there is another explanation. This one does not require that Sameer N. Yacoub and others at the AP as part of the jihad, only that they are lazy and perhaps are inclined towards believing the worst about those they see as the 'bad guys'. (In this case the Shia and the US).

For instance, look closely at the report from Sameer N. Yacoub that Dan Riehl digs up. How does Yacoub know what is going on in Fallujah?

Associated Press Television News pictures showed one man beating a charred corpse with a metal pole...

APTN showed the charred remains of three slain men.

As we've said so many time here, the vast majority of reports from Iraq are from the Green Zone. Remember, when Bill from INDC asked CENTCOM how many embedded reporters there were in Iraq the answer was NINE. Nine embedded reporters in a country the size of Iraq.

Not only does this leave the news Baghdad centered, but it also means that Western reporters must gather news by watching local TV, relying on local stringers which may have an agenda in the war (in war, who doesn't have an agenda?), or who may be using their cellphone as a substitute for face-to-face interviews.

The latter method, cellphone interviews with contacts inside the Iraqi police, seems to be how the 'facts' were gathered for the fraudulent story about 6 Sunni being burned to death. As Curt from Flopping Aces revealed, the person cited in the story actually doesn't work for the the Iraqi police. Gateway Pundit finds that neither does another popular AP source. More here.

I'm guessing that the AP reporters never bothered to interview the man in person. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that "Capt. Jamil Hussein" was the one that called the AP. That no one ever bothered to go down to the 'police station' outside of the Green Zone where Hussein 'worked'.

Knowing what we know about how terrorists deliberately lie in order to inflame public opinion against the US, and knowing what we know about Green Zone reporting, then it quite understandable why world opinion is such that many believe that the US military is the moral equivalent of the terrorists we fight.

How low will the terrorists go in their propaganda campaign? Recall that Patterico had debunked a story about a bombing of civilians in Ramadi. In that story, Sunni terrorists and their sympathizers had simply made an event up. Not only had the US not bombed civilians, they hadn't actually bombed any one.

But the facts do not matter to the insurgents. A recent video from the Army of Ansar al Sunnah shown US targets being hit in retribution for the Ramadi bombing.

See if you follow me here. Terrorists lie about an attrocity which never actually happened. Then the same terrorists produce a propaganda video in which there is retaliation for the very same attrocity which they made up in the first place!

However, outside a few bloggers who know better than to believe what the AP and other MSM news outlets print, the rest of the world is left with the impression that the US and the insurgents are basically engaged in the same type of warfare. We kill civilians, they kill civilians. It's all bad.

Worse, Arabs, Muslims, and even Iraqis get the same messages on an almost daily basis. They are left with the impression that the US is no different than the Sunni terrorists or the Shia death squads.

The inevetable consequence of this propaganda is the recruitment of more jihadis to fight. Terrorists are not irrational people. They believe they are the good guys. And as long as the media is quite willing to reify their worldview, then we can never win.

This is not to suggest that things are going well in Iraq. They aren't. It is only to suggest that one of the reasons things are not going well is because the US, from the beginning, never learned how to play the propaganda game. We allowed the MSM to become the tool of our enemies. And by doing so the insurgency has only grown to the point that it is at now.

Don't forget to take Michelle Malkin's poll: Who is the biggest terrorist propaganda tool?