Terror's Pals In The Press

[Team Sergeant]

Makes you wonder about the American journalists, how far would they go for a story....


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.

[Roguish Lawyer]

Awesome! I like that guy.

[lrd]

Originally Posted by Roguish Lawyer

Awesome! I like that guy.

He's on a roll.

-----------------------------------------------------------

DEAD SOLDIERS

BY RALPH PETERS

September 23, 2004 -- IMAGINE if, in the presidential election of 1944, the candidate opposing FDR had in sisted that we were losing the Second World War and that, if elected, he would begin to withdraw American troops from Europe and the Pacific.

We would have called it treason. And we would have been right.

In WWII, broadcasts from Tokyo Rose in Japan and from Axis Sally in Germany warned our troops that their lives were being squandered in vain, that they were dying for big business and "the Jew" Roosevelt.

Today, we have a presidential candidate, the conscienceless Sen. John Kerry, doing the work of the enemy propagandists of yesteryear.

Is there nothing Kerry won't say to win the election? Is there no position he won't change? Doesn't he care anything for the sacrifices of our troops in Iraq?

And if he does care about our soldiers and Marines, why is he broadcasting remarks that insist — against all hard evidence — that the terrorists are winning?

Has he seen the situation with his own eyes? I'll gladly tell him how to get there. I'll even be his guide. And he can smell what remains of Saddam's mass graves — with new ones still being discovered. He can taste the joy of freedom among the Kurds. He can see the bustling commerce throughout the country — despite the violence that alone makes headlines.

Above all, he could see the magnificent performance of our troops, their dedication and professionalism. And their humanity, their goodness.

But Kerry doesn't want to see those things. He's reverting to form. Just as he lied about our troops three decades ago, encouraging our enemies of the day and worsening the suffering of our POWs in North Vietnam, today he's pandering to a new enemy.

Imagine the encouragement the terrorists, insurgents and global extremists draw from Kerry's declarations of defeat, from his insistence that our efforts in Iraq and in the War on Terror have failed.

As he always does, Kerry slips in qualifiers. Of course, Iraq's important. And he'll fight terror, too. It's just that the Bush administration doesn't know how to do anything. A Kerry presidency would let us withdraw our troops, collect more allies, succeed where others have "failed" and win the hearts and minds of the whole, wide world.

Earlier this week, Kerry made a much-ballyhooed speech offering four generalizations about how he would fix Iraq. But there was no detail, not a single nut or a lonely bolt. And the current administration is already doing most of what Kerry suggested.

As for involving the French and Germans, the truth is that they'd do more harm than good. These are the corrupt cynics who made billions from the U.N. Oil-for-Food program while the Iraqi people suffered. The French kiss up to every dictator willing to wink in their direction. The German military barely exists — it's just an employment agency for uniformed bureaucrats — and the French military's sole competence lies in slaughtering unarmed black Africans.

As for the United Nations, any day now we'll see a huge banner hanging from its Manhattan headquarters: Dictators For Kerry.

Even if I detested everything about President Bush, I'd vote for him just to rub it in the faces of the Germans, the French and all of the tyrants rooting for the Iraqi people to slip back into despotism. We Americans choose our own presidents, and we don't take orders from Europeans or from any of Kerry's other Swiss boarding-school pals.

I think it's great that Kerry speaks fluent French. I wish he'd go to France where he could speak it all the time.

In an election year, our engagement in Iraq is a legitimate topic for sober debate. But Kerry isn't serious. All he does is to declare defeat. He certainly doesn't want to be al Qaeda's candidate, but he's made himself into their man through his irresponsibility.

If Kerry were insisting, without caveats, that we're going to stay the course and win, while backing up his criticisms with convincing details of how he would improve our efforts, that would be fine. But his mad claims of disaster and his inability to maintain a firm position unquestionably give aid and comfort to the enemy.

The terrorists and their allies already intended to increase the level of violence in Iraq before November. But Kerry's pandering has encouraged them to pull out all the stops. I wish it were otherwise, that our election process had more integrity, but the truth is that every roadside blast and car bomb in Iraq is meant to support John Kerry.

Meanwhile, Kerry has assembled the most despicable cast of has-beens and failed officials in campaign history. He's represented by the likes of Jamie Rubin — a Clintonite who so loved America that he moved to London, returning to our shores only to tell real Americans how we need to vote.

Putting Rubin on the talk-show circuit demonstrates how badly the Democratic elite is out of touch with the country it claims to represent. With his permanent sneer and his condescending snicker, Rubin represents nearly all that working Americans — and our troops — despise about today's Dems.

In 1944, the Democrats had FDR. In 2004, they've got the stretch-limo version of Mike Dukakis.

There was a wartime election in 1864, too. The Democratic Party's candidate, former Gen. George McClellan, ran on a platform that declared President Abraham Lincoln's policy a failure. The price of McClellan's rhetoric was a prolonged war and tens of thousands of dead Americans.

In 1864, the citizens of the North were steadfast. They rejected the Democratic Party's warnings of defeat and saved the Union. In 2004, the American people, North and South, East and West, need to reject the cynical lies of John F. Kerry and vote to support our troops and save Iraq.

Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/op...ists/19598.htm

[Airbornelawyer]

Originally Posted by lrd

He's on a roll.

Two things, one minor and one disgraceful:

1.

In WWII, broadcasts from Tokyo Rose in Japan and from Axis Sally in Germany warned our troops that their lives were being squandered in vain, that they were dying for big business and "the Jew" Roosevelt.

The woman commonly known as "Tokyo Rose" was pardoned of her treason conviction when it was learned that the Allied POWs running the English-language radio broadcasts for Japanese intelligence were deliberately sabotaging the broadcasts. They wrote scripts that would fool Japanese agents but would sound ridiculous to native English speakers (I wonder if the Iraqi who wrote the scripts for the first Gulf War propaganda broadcasts, telling GIs their wives were at home sleeping with Bart Simpson, was doing the same thing).

2.

... the French military's sole competence lies in slaughtering unarmed black Africans.

Kerry hated his government's policy and chose to express this hatred by slandering American soldiers as war criminals. Peters, like most past and present soldiers, finds this disgusting. Yet he chooses to do the exact same thing regarding French soldiers.

To add irony to this insult, if there is one constituency in France which is disgusted by the anti-Americanism encouraged by the French government, media and elite society, and which actually wants to join the US-led coalition, it is the French armed forces. And apropos of the war criminals charges, after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, a French television station interviewed General Bentegeat, the chief of staff of the French armed forces. The reporter, as was typical of both the French and American media at the time, wanted to tarnish the US military and by extension US policy in Iraq. Gen. Bentegeat defended the US Army, noting that it was not US Army policy, that the Army itself that started the investigation, that this involved a small number of soldiers that did not represent the entire US Army, for which he had great respect, and that French soldiers had abused prisoners in places like Algeria, too.

I remember seeing another version of Peters' slander with regard to the Spanish, when some people called the Spanish soldiers leaving Iraq "cowards," as if the soldiers had any choice in the matter.

[lrd]

Originally Posted by Airbornelawyer

Two things, one minor and one disgraceful:

1.

The woman commonly known as "Tokyo Rose" was pardoned of her treason conviction when it was learned that the Allied POWs running the English-language radio broadcasts for Japanese intelligence were deliberately sabotaging the broadcasts. They wrote scripts that would fool Japanese agents but would sound ridiculous to native English speakers (I wonder if the Iraqi who wrote the scripts for the first Gulf War propaganda broadcasts, telling GIs their wives were at home sleeping with Bart Simpson, was doing the same thing).

2.

Kerry hated his government's policy and chose to express this hatred by slandering American soldiers as war criminals. Peters, like most past and present soldiers, finds this disgusting. Yet he chooses to do the exact same thing regarding French soldiers.

To add irony to this insult, if there is one constituency in France which is disgusted by the anti-Americanism encouraged by the French government, media and elite society, and which actually wants to join the US-led coalition, it is the French armed forces. And apropos of the war criminals charges, after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, a French television station interviewed General Bentegeat, the chief of staff of the French armed forces. The reporter, as was typical of both the French and American media at the time, wanted to tarnish the US military and by extension US policy in Iraq. Gen. Bentegeat defended the US Army, noting that it was not US Army policy, that the Army itself that started the investigation, that this involved a small number of soldiers that did not represent the entire US Army, for which he had great respect, and that French soldiers had abused prisoners in places like Algeria, too.

I remember seeing another version of Peters' slander with regard to the Spanish, when some people called the Spanish soldiers leaving Iraq "cowards," as if the soldiers had any choice in the matter.

Taking your points in reverse order:

2. Point granted. All I know about the French military comes from friends and family members who have worked with them in the past. They have expressed the desire to never have to do so again. I consider this their personal opinion based on past experience rather than slander, but I have no personal experience so freely grant you this point.

1. I know that Iva Toguri was pardoned, but wasn't she charged with treason because she claimed to be the character Tokyo Rose? We know now that she was helping POWs who were being forced to broadcast propaganda, but did her character raise or lower the moral of the troops listening?