New subject: More anti-US bias in Current Events

26 Oct 2004

Ed Poor wrote:

...
 Today, the main page's current event box had this
for its lead story:

   Nearly 380 tons of explosives are missing from
an Iraqi site
  meant for Saddam Hussein's dismantled nuclear program but never
  secured by the U.S. military. 
It took me less than 5 minutes of googling to find the opposite POV:

   An NBC News crew embedded with troops moved in
to secure the
 Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the
  liberation of Iraq. According to NBC News, the HMX and RDX
  explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived. 
So it is not accurate to assert that the explosives were "never
secured", as the US Democratic Party and its liberal media allies
complained. 
It took me less than 5 minutes of Googling to find a number of 
distortions in what Ed wrote:

* According to a Fox News (hardly a "liberal media ally" of the 
Democratic Party), Al Qaqaa "was placed under U.S. military control 
but repeatedly has been looted, raising troubling questions about 
whether the missing explosives have fallen into the hands of 
insurgents battling coalition forces." Ed is therefore inserting his 
own bias when he states that Democrats and the liberal media are 
exclusively responsible for making the the claim that the explosives 
were never secured. And if the weapons facility has "repeatedly been 
looted," this suggests that the security measures put in place after 
American troops arrived were not adequate.

* CNN and other media have quoted Mohammed Abbas, Iraq's director of 
planning, as saying much the same thing. He stated that the material 
disappeared sometime after Saddam's regime fell in April 2003, which 
he attributed to "the theft and looting of the governmental 
installations due to lack of security." Mohammed Abbas is not a 
Democrat or a member of the "liberal media" either. He is a member of 
the provisional government installed by the U.S. under the leadership 
of George W. Bush.

* Finally, it is rather bizarre to give this thread a title of "More 
anti-US bias." Even if Ed were right instead of wrong about this 
story all being cooked up by Democrats and their liberal media 
lackeys, there's still no evidence of "anti-US bias." Ed seems to 
have forgotten that the U.S. Democratic party is based in the United 
States and that its members are U.S. citizens. Even if this story 
were driven by anti-BUSH bias, that's not the same thing as bias 
against the UNITED STATES.

References to the stories cited above are as follows:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,136466,00.html

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/26/iraq.explosives/

--Sheldon Rampton

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