New York Post
September 15, 2004
Terror's Pals In The Press
By Ralph Peters
Journalists across the world are horrified. A U.S. helicopter gunship killed an al-Arabiya producer in Baghdad. And the international solidarity between scribblers immediately kicked into gear, outraged at American brutality. Not a single journalist asked the fundamental question: How is it that "reporters" from al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya are on the scene immediately when U.S. troops are ambushed or when a massive car bomb explodes?
It doesn't take a new CIA director to figure it out. Arab journalists are not only in contact with terrorists, they're in collusion with them. Time and again, we see dramatic video and photographs from the terrorists' angle, killers with rocket-propelled grenades on their shoulders and blackened U.S. military vehicles. Iraq's a big country, the size of California. Baghdad's a big city, a blue-ribbon victim of urban sprawl. It's simply impossible to believe that the handful of Arab TV journalists on the scene are so brilliant that they instinctively know where the action's going down. Our journalists need to drop the feigned naiveté. Reporters who cut deals with terrorists for gory footage, who know a terror bombing's on the way and say nothing or who accompany thugs as they ambush U.S. soldiers, are not neutral observers.
As this column has consistently maintained, al-Jazeera, especially, is not a news organization. It's an anti-American propaganda bureau. Does anyone imagine that al Qaeda and other terror groups - the head-choppers for Allah - send their tapes to al-Jazeera because the postage is cheaper? We are at war. Not only with terrorists, but with their supporters. That al-Arabiya producer joined forces with killers who ambushed a Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. He wasn't a journalist. He was a terrorist. Whether he carried a camera or a gun.
Our gunship didn't target him. It fired at the disabled Bradley so looters couldn't make off with weapons, ammunition or communications gear. Self-defense. The looters and terrorists clambering over the vehicle were fair game. So was their sidekick from al-Arabiya.
OF COURSE, we can't even get our media house in order here at home. It's been a loathsome week for American journalism. CBS won't name its source for those "incriminating" documents about President Bush's National Guard service. That would violate its high journalistic principles (although lying about our president does not).
Instead, we get poor old Dan Rather, the crazy uncle of network news, insisting that those documents could have been typed on an early-1970s super typewriter, that there might have been just the right outrageously expensive machine in that fly-specked National Guard office - and that an officer who had never used it before would use it for note-taking. Let me share some reality with Uncle Dan. I served in our active-duty military five years after those documents purportedly were written. I was in Army intelligence. And only the big boss's secretary had an electric typewriter - one too primitive to create those documents. I worked on a manual machine made in East Germany (swear to God). In 1977. In a front-line division. The National Guard got the junk we didn't want.
CBS lied. The sad thing is that they just might be able to stonewall America. That's network news, folks. Defend forgeries. Defend "journalists" who support terror. Let our soldiers die. Let the American people rot. And trash our president in wartime.
No wonder al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya get away, literally, with murder.
Email from a co-worker...MUD
Red Hot Chili Peppers' "My Friends"
My friends are so depressed
I feel the question
Of your loneliness
Confide..., 'cause I'll be on your side
You know I will, you know I will
X Girlfriend called me up
Alone and desperate
On the prison phone
They want... to give her 7 years
For being sad
CHORUS:
I love all of you
Hurt by the cold
So hard and lonely too
When you don't know yourself
My friends are so distressed
And standing on
The brink of emptiness
No words... I know of to express
This emptiness
CHORUS
I love all of you
Hurt by the cold
So hard and lonely too
When you don't know yourself
Imagine me taught by tragedy
Release is peace
I heard a little girl
And what she said
Was something beautiful
To give... your love
No matter what
CHORUS
I love all of you
Hurt by the cold
So hard and lonely too
When you don't know yourself
Pre...MUD