Posted on 03/25/2003 12:25:38 PM PST by DWPittelli
I know we all have reason to be skeptical of Debka, but this is interesting if true:
Away from the main arena, a small yet illuminating scene played out just across the Iraqi border Monday morning. Syria complained that a stray American missile had struck a bus killing five civilians and injuring ten.
According to DEBKAfiles military sources, the only true fact in this terse account was that the bus was Syrian. The missile was no stray. It was deliberately fired from an F-15 fighter-bomber at a bus carrying armed Palestinian volunteers to join up with Iraqi forces, in order to make sure this was the last such Palestinian group of volunteers for Iraq. That F-15 made a piece of history; it carried out the first American air attack on a combatant Palestinian group. More will certainly be heard of this episode.
Has anyone heard any details on this story (perhaps from the Arab press) which might confirm or refute?
12 years ago when we were actually destroying bridges in Iraq, that spin would have been believable, too.
Hey, anybody notice that the Iraqis have a lot of "ex-military" fighting in civilian clothes?!
The missile was right on target--the bridge. The bus was on the bridge. How a bus happened to be moving across a CLOSED border is still a mystery.
Yes, we hope it is true, and if it is, they never knew what hit em.
DEBKA proports to be a news source. FreeRepublic is a discussion forum. You questions is idiotic.
TOUCHE!!!!!
I've got a "place" for 'em..!
I vow to be more mindful in the future.
Go to www.debka.com to see what it is. Basically, a pro-Israel site on terrorism and war fomented by muslims. Given how many outrageous claims they make -- some of which are even true -- their record of also being wrong a lot doesn't change the fact that they're worth reading.
I think the idea is that the plane blew up a bridge, and either the bus had really bad luck at appearing at the last minute, or the pilot was ordered to go for a two-fer.
I usually trust Debra, the woman in the cube next to me, more than I do Debka.
But if they're series, this is hugh.
Debka is the name of an Israeli folk dance. The site comes from Israel, and seems to run the leavings of Israeli intelligence. Some of their items are stuff that was new yesterday, and hence, though true, is no longer vital, and so gets passed on to Debka. Some of it is stuff that an intelligence officer said, "Why are you putting this crap on my desk? Give it to Debka!" There is also a steady tone of marginally anti-American doomsaying. In the big picture, Debka supports the United States, thought 9/11 was terrorism, etc., etc. But in virtually every specific case, it takes the view that Americans are dumb cattle who don't know what they're doing. I assume this attitude is compounded from 1) the desire for sensationalist copy 2) Israeli arrogance--more common before the intafadas than now, but still sometimes surfacing: only we understand the region, only we know how to fight, and so forth and so on.
dep
FR itself is neither accurate nor inaccurate. Almost every story has a verifiable source, and the readers will accept or reject that source based on reputation or their own, unique, prejudices. This is what people are doing with DEBKA. For good reason, IMHO.
Now, if somebody posts that they have seen something personally or a vanity post, you have to view that with a good deal of skepticism. But if you know the poster to be a reasonable person, you can glean some useful information. I tell you, when breaking news happens, I turn on CNN as background noise and head straight for FR!
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