July 24, 2003

washingtonpost.com: Troops Didn't Know Brothers Were in Villa

It was 10 a.m. when the four Humvees pulled up outside the handsome villa on Shalalat Street and disgorged a party of U.S. soldiers. Over a bullhorn, they told the occupants to come out with their hands up.

What followed was a firefight from the ground and air that reduced the comfortable villa to a smoking hulk. And only then did the troops find out how high the stakes had been: Their targets, they discovered, were Saddam Hussein's sons Odai and Qusai, second in power only to their father.

The raid was a "turning point" in the campaign against Iraq's deposed regime, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said Wednesday in Baghdad. President Bush said it would help convince Iraqis that Saddam's regime is over for good.

But soldiers who participated in the raid said they didn't know what they were getting into when they headed out to the wealthy al-Falah neighborhood in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday morning.

The night before, an unidentified Iraqi had tipped off the Americans that Odai and Qusai were in the house, Sanchez said afterward. But all Sgt. George Granter knew on that blistering hot Tuesday morning was that intelligence was reporting the house was occupied by Baath Party members.

"They heard high guys, but they didn't know how high," said Granter, of Merrillville, Ind., an engineer with the 326 Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division who took part in the battle.
[The Screaming Eagles show their stuff once again!--Jen]

The action that played out on the wide boulevard lined with villas, shops and a mosque began like countless others across occupied Iraq: with orders in Arabic to surrender.

"The intent is always to ask the people to come out voluntarily," said Col. Joe Anderson, commander of the 101st's 2nd Brigade.

The owner of the house, Sheik Nawaf al-Zaydan Muhhamad, walked out with his son Shalan, their hands on their heads, and were whisked away by troops, neighbors said Wednesday.

The other occupants were less cooperative. So after 10 minutes troops tried to enter the building. From the fortified middle floor of the three-floor building came Kalashnikov fire, raking the troops and wounding four of them. The Americans fell back to regroup and reinforcements were summoned.

Soldiers fanned out in the neighborhood and evacuated families from surrounding houses, said Maj. Greg Ebeling of the 101st's 926 Engineer Group.

By 10:45, reinforcements had arrived, and the Americans began firing machine guns, grenades and rockets, Sanchez said. The area was surrounded so "there was no rush," the general said.

Witnesses said beige and maroon tiles popped from the garish facade, and dust flew from the concrete columns. Still, gunfire rattled back from the mansion.

Just before noon, two Kiowa helicopters skimmed in over the rooftops, and rockets streaked into the villa. More and more troops poured into the neighborhood, witnesses said, until about 200 were surrounding the house.

It was their fire from the ground that proved decisive: .50-caliber machine guns, grenade launchers, then TOW missiles that blew out windows, cratered walls and killed Saddam's sons and a bodyguard, Sanchez said.

At 1:21 p.m. soldiers stormed the wrecked mansion. They rushed up the stairs and shot the final holdout, apparently Qusai's teenage son Mustafa.

On the floor where Saddam's sons had chosen to make their last stand lay clothes, bloodstained bedding, a Pepsi can and a box of Mars Bars.
[Both products of "evil" globalization from the Anglo-sphere!--J.T.]

"It began as gunfire and then it became a battle," said Nasser Hazim, who lives around the corner from the villa.

The person who tipped the Americans off to the hide-out is in protective custody, his identity a secret, U.S. authorities said.

Neighbors, however, suspect the tipster was Muhhamad, the house owner, who obeyed the surrender call. They said his wife and four daughters left the house several hours before the raid.
[...]Muhhamad's ties to Saddam cut two ways - making him rich, but causing him personal grief. Saddam threw Muhhamad's elder brother in jail, reportedly over a tribal disagreement, but released him 18 months into a 17-year sentence.

As the bodies of Odai, 39, and Qusai, 37, were taken to Baghdad International Airport to be flown out of the country, several hundred people gathered outside the razor wire surrounding their still-smoking hide-out Wednesday, chanting pro-Saddam slogans.

"This is terrorism! They are killers!" screamed Saad Badr, a 50-year-old taxi driver who was pressed so close to the razor wire that his left toe was bleeding.
[These pro-Saddam Iraqis sound like the Dimocrats here! LOL--Jen]
"Americans are unbelievers, and Saddam Hussein is a Muslim. This makes me even more angry at the Americans," said 14-year-old Mohammed Qassem, to a chorus of agreement from the crowd.

As psychological [Is the WaPo using a technical term here or their own editorializing one, which would be soooo *unlike* them?--Jen] operations specialists combed the gutted house, Army engineers examined neighboring houses that suffered damage in the raid, and promised over loudspeakers to repair them.
[...]
"This makes me feel great," Granter said as he gazed at the destruction. But already, he was looking ahead to the biggest prize of all.

"Saddam, he's the big one," he said. "If we can get him, we can go home."

News of this made me feel great,too!
These were the deaths in combat of "enemy combatants" by Coalition forces, not the "political assassination" of heads of state.
[I was in the second grade in Dallas, TX when President Kennedy was assassinated: I know the difference.]
I don't know much about Qusay, except that he was being groomed to be Saddam's successor for all that that implies, but I know Uday was totally crazy and not in a good way.
The stories of the horrible torture, maiming, rapes and horrific murders of innocent Iraqis that he performed personally are too numerous to cite.
We'll probably never know how many suffered at his hands, but we can know with their earthly end that the Iraqi people and the free world won't be dealing with the terror of living in a world with these psychos in it anymore!
Thank you, Screaming Eagles!
I'm so glad we had no fatalities from this raid and hope the wounded soldiers recover quickly.
And we're grateful for the Iraqi who turned "the boys" in, whoever they are-you're an Iraqi patriot and a lover of Liberty (as well as being $30 million richer).
And for those who would shed tears over 14-year-old Mustafa, yes, it's sad that he had to be killed, but his dad could have sent him out when they were offered the chance to surrender and chances are very good that he was "unsalvageable" as a human being after being raised in the one of the world's most dysfunctional families...
How many 14-year-old "Palestinian", gun-toting "militants" have we heard about that the IDF has had to take out?
And Uday didn't scruple about murdering children, some far younger than his nephew.
Such is war.
But the "legacy" of Saddam thereby comes to a very final end, as indeed it should.

CNN.com
Warning: These photos are of dead scumbags who met their end in a rather messy manner, BUT...they're still prettier than the remains of the countless Iraqis they put in the shredder and the acid baths.
The publishing of these morgue photos of Uday and Qusay is worth it if 2 kinds of people see them: #1 are the Iraqis, so that they will know that these murderers are gone and won't be coming back to torture, maim and kill them and #2 is Saddam.
It's over, Hussein.
Come out with your hands up or meet the same fate.

July 22, 2003

Results - News Release Generator

July 22, 2003
Release Number: 03-07-68
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
STATEMENT REGARDING OPERATION IN MOSUL, IRAQ
Statement from US Central Command:
On Tuesday, July 22, forces associated with the 101st Airborne Division and Special Operations Forces conducted an operation against suspected regime figures at a residence in Mosul, Iraq. The site is currently being exploited. Four Iraqis were killed in the operation. We have confirmed that two of the dead were Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay.

And to think only a year ago, Uday shot a man dead just for being late to a meeting...
"Those who live by the sword, die by the sword."
Let the rejoicing begin throughout Iraq!
These killers are no more.
(And Saddam's got nothing left to live for, now that he has no fine sons left to pass his "kingdom" unto.)

Armstrong Crashes, Then Crushes His Rivals
I'm routing for Texas's own Lance Armstrong to make those Froggies and other assorted EUro-weasels eat his dust for the 5th straight time!
Lance is the greatest!

Yahoo caption: Pfc. Jessica Lynch receives the Purple Heart from Lt. Gen. James B. Peake, U.S. Army surgeon general, during a ceremony at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, July 21, 2003. Lynch also received the Bronze Star and the Prisoner of War Medal. Lynch was captured during combat in Iraq and was rescued by U.S. Special Forces in April and has been in a military hospital ever since.

In Lynch Country, a Puzzled Kind of Pride
[Only the hate-America-first WaPo could come up with such a screwy title!--Jen]

This small mountain town is bearing witness to the magic and machinery of celebritypatriotism and hometown pride.

The homecoming Tuesday of former POW Jessica Lynch has inspired fanfare worthy of a visiting head of state. A floodlit stage and media tent have been erected with seating for hundreds. Flag-bedecked T-shirts announcing "Welcome Home Jessica" are on sale for $5, and a CD featuring a song about her -- "She was just nineteen, became America's queen" -- is available for $10. Every few miles along the main road, traffic slows for orange-vested road crews filling potholes, plucking trash from the weeds and trimming shrubbery.

"The level of preparation is consistent with a presidential appearance," said Joe Carey, director of communications for West Virginia Gov. Robert E. Wise Jr. (D) and a former Clinton advance man.

Lynch's celebrity status is undisputed here, even if the details and significance of the war story that launched her fame are not.

The town, draped in flags and yellow ribbons, is unmistakably proud. Many here have taken the recent CBS proposal to develop a Beverly Hillbillies reality TV show as an insult to their heritage [CBS has also been doing some belated apologizing for trying to "woo" Jessica with cash offers to make a made-for-TV movie about her story.--J.T.], and are pleased that tiny Wirt County (pop. 6,000) can take credit for something more dignified.

But even among the most ardent supporters of "Jessi," as she is known in town, there is an unsettling sense that the phenomenon of her celebrity, through no fault of hers, has rapidly outgrown what is known of her capture and rescue.

"Every war needs a hero," reflected James Roberts, 77, the third-generation owner of the 117-year-old general store here. "Rickenbacker . . . Kennedy . . . she's the hero in this war. The facts don't particularly matter."

Muddied by conflicting media accounts, some in this newspaper [How about almost all of them in this rag and if not them, then their evil twin the NYSlimes?--Jen], and Lynch's inability to remember much of her ordeal, her story has been dismissed by some skeptical pundits as a work of Pentagon propaganda even as it has triggered a national fascination with the 20-year-old private first class. She has not yet spoken in public.

"We are great Jessi people -- this whole county is Jessica people -- and we don't like anyone to say anything bad about her," said Ray Watson, 79, a member of the county's Board of Education, a former high school principal and something of an elder statesman in town.

He says that those trying to take the luster away from her story, or minimize her sacrifice, should "go to hell."
[Amen, Mr. Watson! And giving their track record on this and so much else, they almost certainly will! ]

But as satellite trucks rolled into town, and as camera crews looking for local comment converged on startled shoppers at the nearby grocery store, he marveled at the deep appeal her story has had for many strangers.

"Let's face it -- she's the number one hero in the war, and to a degree I understand the fame. But it's so explosive," Watson said. "I saw a woman at the dentist's office, tears in her eyes, crying about it. She didn't even know Jessica."

Even the Lynch family has sought to play down her sacrifice, aware that it could have been worse. Others died and received a fraction of the accolades.

"The family is quite cognizant that she is coming home and that other members of her unit are not," said family spokesman Randy Coleman. "She doesn't consider herself any kind of hero. She was just doing her job, and bad stuff happened."

Lynch was captured by Iraqis after her unit was ambushed near Nasiriyah on March 23. She was rescued a week later from an Iraqi hospital in a U.S. commando mission. Word of that operation and the elation it provoked came after a string of disheartening news stories about the U.S. war effort. Lynch quickly became a focus of global media attention.

After the rescue, U.S. officials, speaking anonymously and relying on unconfirmed intelligence reports, told The Washington Post that Lynch had fought fiercely when her convoy was attacked. The supply clerk fired until she ran out of ammunition, and she was shot and stabbed, they said. Lynch "was fighting to the death," one official was quoted as saying.

Military officials familiar with an Army investigation of the matter said later that Lynch was neither shot nor stabbed, and that she had tried to fire her weapon but it jammed. Officials said she sustained major injuries after the Humvee she was riding in crashed into another Army vehicle in the attack. Two U.S. officials with knowledge of the investigation have said that Lynch was mistreated by her captors but would not elaborate.Lynch has been recovering in seclusion at Walter Reed Army Medical Center from broken limbs and a spinal injury. Her door at Walter Reed has been guarded by military police, amplifying the curiosity leading to Tuesday's appearance. At Walter Reed today, Lynch was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Prisoner of War medals.

About 2 p.m. Tuesday, she is scheduled to arrive by Black Hawk helicopter at the local park where the stage, lights and media tent have been assembled. She is expected to reach the platform either by wheelchair or with the aid of a walker, and then make a statement of about 2 1/2 minutes. She will not take questions.

"She has days when she's in a lot of pain, and she has other days when she can endure better," Coleman said.

She is then expected to be driven from Elizabeth, the county seat, to the family home in adjoining Palestine with her family -- and out of sight of reporters.

All along that country road, winding around hills and past hayfields, she will see signs of support and shows of religious devotion, such as "Amazing Grace -- Jessi is rescued!"
[...]
The outpouring has been national in scope, too.

One of two cells at the Wirt County jail is filled with hundreds of items -- quilts, pillowcases, angels made of World Trade Center rubble, even a pair of thong underwear -- sent by people swept up by her story, officials said.

Out of fear that she could be a terrorist target, sheriff's office personnel have had the duty of opening the packages.

"We've got at least 4,000 thank-you cards to send out," said Debbie Hennen, county assessor.

Lynch, who since her rescue has received offers of college scholarships and automobiles, will find one of the most generous displays of spontaneous volunteerism at the family house.

Locals initially aimed only to add a wheelchair-accessible bedroom and bathroom, but they wound up expanding the two-bedroom, one-bath house into a four-bedroom, two-bath home.

The effort was made possible by volunteer labor and donated materials, along with $60,000 in contributions, volunteers said.

"I think everyone in the country wanted to do something for the young people in Iraq -- it wasn't just Jessi," said Lewis Peck, a sergeant in the Wirt County Sheriff's Office who took two months off to help. [This man means our troops, doncha know!--Jen]

The house remodeling for Jessi "was a tool to thank them all."

Like others, Peck wasn't exactly sure what propelled the national fascination with Jessi.

"Was it because Jessi is a blond-haired child type? -- I can't say for sure," he said. "I think it gave the country something to hold onto. Jessi is somebody that people can easily take into their hearts -- and they have."

That includes me! Wish I could be there.
Praise the Lord that Jessi is alive and finally coming home to be with her people!
I wish the other members of the 507th that were involved in that ambush in Iraq were coming home alive, too--like PFC Lori Piestewa, Jessi's friend and fellow soldier, who was mortally injured in the same crash as Jessi.
Of the dozen or more GIs who were attacked that day when they got lost on the way to resupply the 3rd ID, Jessi is one of the few who survived.
No matter how much the WaPo tries to detract from the truth (or how much they say that the Pentagon "sexed up" Jessi's story), the fact remains that Jessi was badly hurt when she was doing her duty to her country in the U.S. army.
Was she in harm's way? BIG TIME.
Until her rescue, she was at the mercy of her Saddamite captors who were using the Nasiriyah hospital for an operational HQ.
I hope someday that she can remember what happened to her during her forced confinement in that Iraqi place, so that her mind can heal as well as her body.
Maybe she'll be able to share the rest of the story with us then.
While I was struck by how many of the Iraqis there tried to help her--the doctors, nurses, other patients and visitors like the Iraqi lawyer who walked miles to get American help-- seemed to have gone the extra mile to alleviate Jessica's suffering--she was helpless at the hands of the Enemy, both as a POW and as a seriously injured patient, right up until a few hours before Special Forces rescued her and when the Baathists had fortuitously left.
Never forget that her comrades-in-arms who were caught in that ambush were paraded both dead and alive on Al-Jazeera ( Mercifully, we got the live soldiers out, also, like Shoshana Johnson!)
But we should never let it be forgotten that Saddam's boys toyed with and abused the corpses of 5 or more American soldiers on camera, more than one of whom was found to have been executed, although there was a firefight even if Jessi's gun had jammed.
[In fact, it was discovered that almost all of the 507th had troubling firing their weapons due to the accumulation of sand in the works. Remember that sandstorm that happened right about this time?]
Jessi's going to get the Victory Parade all of our troops should get who are serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom--She showed America what strength and courage our fighting men and now women! are capable of under the worst circumstances.
And she began to show Iraqis the compassion, caring and good works they are capable of when they aren't worried anymore about Saddam killing them all the time!
Jessi, enjoy your day, keep continuing to get well and welcome home, soldier!
You may even revive the use of the word "heroine" to describe a female hero!
We love you!

"We love our country!"--ooh, the Lefty media's gonna hate that!

July 20, 2003

BBC has put self-regard ahead of the truth

Peter Mandelson deplores the poisonous and destructive relationship that has developed between politicians and the media

There is nothing so unjust and so unseemly as the media in Britain turning itself from judge and jury into splenetic lynch mob in order to pursue some hapless prey. I say this with some feeling following my own forced departure from the Government. Until you are at the centre of a frenzy of this kind yourself, with everyone falling over themselves to pass judgment before little attempt is made to establish the facts, you cannot imagine what it is like.

Kangaroo courts are not designed to get at the truth. Nor, it seems, necessarily are attention-seeking select committees of the House of Commons. If any good comes of what happened to Dr Kelly - a man of fantastic public spiritedness - it should lie in some timely reflection on the way people are treated when they wittingly or unwittingly stray into the public glare. But we also need to make this tragedy into a point of change in the poisonous and destructive relationship that has developed between politicians and the media. This relationship has never been worse and it cannot be allowed to continue like this. Politicians, in the main, have become defensive, suspicious and evasive in their dealings with the media. Journalists are now more aggressive, cynical and personal than ever before. Everyone is competing to get one over on the other, often with little regard for the truth. The casualty is the public's right to know who is doing what and why in their name and what it means for them.

Reading this, some in the media will be reaching for their keyboards in order to repudiate any attempt to defend the Government and the practices of its principal communications manager, Alastair Campbell. His bullish and untiring advocacy of the Government and its policies may not be to everyone's taste. Those who dislike his approach most are the Government's political opponents because he is the most professional and effective member of Labour's praetorian guard. But he is entitled to fair and honest treatment, not least because, in my view, it was the BBC's obsession with him that led more than anything to the breakdown in relations between the Government and Britain's principal public service broadcaster, with the result we have seen.

Campbell is no angel and is capable of making his own mistakes, as I have reason to know. But the BBC's fixation with him and its desire to 'defeat' him at all costs led it into two serious and damaging misjudgments. The first was its overreaction when Campbell accused the corporation of lying in its false allegation that he had 'sexed up' the September Iraq arms dossier.

You can get something wrong without necessarily lying about it, and his language, understandable in the circumstances, was none the less too strong. The BBC backed itself into a corner and chose to turn a resolvable disagreement into a pitched battle about its honour and independence as broadcasters, irrespective of its confidence in the story. Long before this stage was reached, the facts having been established, with the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and the head of MI6 prepared to back up Campbell, the BBC should have acknowledged the truth. The whole affair could have been laid to rest as inconspicuously as it blew up. Instead, the issue was driven hard, day after day, across almost every outlet, leaving the targets of the BBC's agenda with no alternative but to fight back.

The BBC's pretext for not letting up led it to make its second mistake. The BBC insisted that a general, negative verdict could be imposed on Campbell's role, even if the particular observation may not be right. This general verdict was that as he had been heavily involved throughout in the preparation of the public dossier - doing what is, after all, his job - he must have had an unreasonable influence over it, leading to exaggeration, to say the least, of some of its contents. In other words, the general justifies the particular in respect of the charge against Campbell.

But while this sort of presumption or inspired guesswork is par for the course in much of the press, it does not qualify as journalism fit for airing by the BBC. Yet, even now, if you challenge BBC executives on this, they insist in their defence that you do not have smoke without fire, even though the smoke was created by their own correspondent. In their view, if you put a 'spin doctor' anywhere near a factual report, you are entitled to assume that the contents will be dodgy, regardless of who testifies to the contrary.

That is simply not good enough. It has led the director-general and the chairman of the governors to stake their reputations on a story that has turned out to be untrue, punted by a journalist who many inside the corporation regard as controversial, whatever they say about him in public.

The fact is that the journalist in question, Andrew Gilligan, persuaded his managers that his one source was a senior intelligence official and few now believe this to be true. Dr Kelly was a scientist, not a spook, and when he told MPs, in his gratuitously bruising encounter with them, that he was not the BBC's source he should have been properly understood to mean that he was not the source for what Gilligan said about Campbell. Gilligan should have been big enough to admit that he did not have another source for his central claim and that he had stretched what he had been told to suit his own prejudices. Some good must come out of this shocking and avoidable state of affairs. The lesson for the Government - especially an apparently omnipotent one like this - is to be seen to bend over backwards in treating the media with scrupulous truthfulness and the BBC in particular with respect.

For the BBC, at the heart of this dispute is an issue of governance, not independence. Amour-propre should never be put ahead of the truth. The BBC is not a publicly funded lobby group, and someone in the BBC's management chain should have stepped in earlier and quietly to end the editorialising over Iraq.

As for the public, they are entitled to expect better from both sides. The viciousness that characterises the relationship between the media and politicians is turning people off politics and corroding our democracy. Everything in Britain is conducted in an overly adversarial way, from our courts to our Parliament, our industrial relations and our select committees. It is good theatre, but does it produce good outcomes? In this case, patently not.

This should be a cautionary tale for all of we "Yanks" as we are facing the same sort of situation between the [Liberal] media and the Bush Administration here in America as Blair's Britain is with the BBC.
If you substitute the name "Bush" for that of "Campbell" in the piece above, it totally works for our own mess.
Mercifully, we don't have the added problem of the media being owned by the government and being paid for by the people as is the case with the BBC.
Mr. Mandelson has gotten this exactly right and while he places blame for the Kelly suicide on both the the Blair government and the Beeb, it's clear that the BBC bears the lion's share.
Note that Mr. Kelly took his own life not on the evening of testifying in front of a Parliamentary committee (obviously comparable to a Senate hearing here), which many Brits are calling "brutal, grilling and horrific," but on the evening of the day that his Beeb contact Gilligan testified in front of the same panel and "changed his story."
IOW, it became clear between Kelly's and Gilligan's statements, that although Mr. Kelly was Gilligan's lone source for Gilligan's claim that the British government had "sexed up" their Iraqi WMD dossier by claiming that Iraqi missiles could reach Western Europe in "45 minutes," Mr. Kelly had told him nothing like that--it was pure invention.
Mr. Kelly apparently killed himself out of despair, either that he had been used by the Beeb, or if he was a true Leftist, that his attempt to keep Britain out of the Iraq war and/or to depose the Blair government by discreditation had failed.
In that President Bush is now embroiled with our media over equally invented lies about his statements regarding Saddam's WMD program in his January SOTU speech, we can only hope and pray that noone commits suicide over it here.
The NYTimes has been discredited of late because of another guy named Blair (and then there were others...).
The anti-Bush, anti-America bias is blatant at the WaPo.
CNN admitted that it lied and dissembled on all stories from Saddam's Iraq because they would have been thrown out if they hadn't.
And MSNBC had to fire Peter Arnett mid-war for supporting the Enemy.
ABC News just got some American GIs busted to permanent private for griping and whining on camera about their tours of duty in Iraq:
in fact, ABC and its reporters have been caught running down Bush and America so many times that Cannuck-born Peter Jennings is having to become an American citizen to "prove" he's really patriotic.
What else is there left to say, except "Don't believe everything you read in the paper or hear on TV."?
In fact, I suggest not believing any of it, until you've fact-checked their *sses!
We all used to laugh about that old saw, "It must be true. I read it on the Internet."
Well, if you're judicious and discerning in your web travels, this is becoming more true than you may know!
Thank God for the World Wide Web!
In the meantime, are the BBC, the NYSlimes, the Washington Post, et. al learning the difference between reporting the news and creating it out of Leftist political motivations?
I live in hope.
And before this story drones on for another monotonous week, can we all get it straight that Bush and Blair didn't lie about Saddam's WMD???
Thank you!

BTW, these Dimocrat clowns (most of whom are running as Donk candidates for Prez) who are all having a fuster-cluck over this 16-word sentence of Bush's were privy to most of the same intell as President Bush and many of them voted for the war back last fall, months before the SOTU!
And, of course, they believed the same statements about Saddam's WMD were true when their boy Klintoon made them in 1998.
But nobody seems to notice. Pity!