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If our first reaction to hearing a bad story is to disclaim and discard the testimonies of those present, whatīs the point of having a media in the first place? Are WE, who werenīt there, supposed to know more than those who were?
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Well, we are seeing conflicting stories, so we're all excused for just about everything, and all bets are off as usual. The US chief of operations claim they saw no wedding, no wedding guests or suitable presents and certainly no dead children. Besides, they had enough intel to justify an attack.
On the other hand, we're having articles that do not mention anything about a safe house, or at least a staging point, which there certainly are given enough evidence to suggest, but only the wedding and the following carnage. And the doctor of the small village counts the dead, and some reporter get the names of ten children who died in the incident(WP).
It occurs to me that both stories cannot be true at the same time. So it's apparently a question of how much you trust the sources, and after that(as an excercise), a question of whether bombing a wedding tent, it's guests and half the village is excusable if the intel suggests it was a gathering of foreign fighters there and they found genuine terrorist equipment(tm) nearby. For some reason, it seems, it's excusable for a staggering amount of americans on this board if there were - no children - found among the dead.
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No newspaper writes such an article without having someone on the spot themselfs. And when they donīt, they always remember to point out from where and whom they got it from
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Sure. I trust that is done usually myself. But I don't buy the "core of the story" theory, specially not when there are very few sources that see different things. It's just too easy for someone to "pick up" on the story and bring some details with them before they write theirs. In addition I got a somewhat mild attack of paranoia yesterday when Washingtonpost wrote "but reporters say..." when serving an opposing claim to the dismissives of mr. Kimmit of US Operations. That just didn't scan at all. I really wonder why they did that. Why didn't someone mention what source the 40 people dead claim came from, for instance. It's just too many strange things about it all. But then I do still have mild paranoia since yesterday. And I would not normally claim every reporter in Iraq is conspiring against us.
In any case, a headline like "American forces successfully take out covert foreign fighter reqruitment centre, staging point and disperse local drug cartel at the same time - local PD says 'pleased to assist american friends'" seems a bit off, though.