Why are such significant stories covered so poorly. When our troops are accused the story is trumpeted on the front page; when they are acquitted, hardly a peep. The same is true for the incredible story of the mass of yellow cake; why is hardly anyone aware of this?

from American Thinker
Memory and the Left
by J.R. Dunn

excerpts

For one example, we can look to Haditha. A Marine unit was ambushed, responding as trained against their attackers, who were hiding behind helpless civilians, among them women and children, as many as two dozen of whom were killed. Insurgent war at its most ugly, tragic and unavoidable. The blame, to any rational observer, clearly lay with the Al Queda thugs who insisted on using innocents as a shield.

But rationality is sometimes too much to ask. Haditha was trumpeted as an American war crime, the moment that encapsulated the entire war as an atrocity. The media played it as the My Lai of Iraq, while political opportunists, chief among them John Murtha (whose domain begins only a half mile from where I sit), attacked the Marines as “cold-blooded killers”. The “Haditha massacre” was given front-page play for weeks, the name effectively becoming shorthand for American efforts in Iraq.

But today, after the prosecution has fallen apart, after seven of the eight men accused have been held blameless and no real case remains against the eighth, the name of Haditha is difficult to find in mass media. Even after ranking USMC officers were found to have interfered in the case (imagine if this had occurred in any other legal proceeding!), and after several of the cleared Marines announced a lawsuit against Murtha, a sitting congressman, Haditha remains, at best, a back-page story. It has been fed into the grinder, and has become one of those things we’re not supposed to think about any more.

The same is true of Iraqi yellowcake, which Joe Wilson, ambassador extraordinaire, and his valiant spy bride demonstrated to the world did not, and could not exist. Yet last weekend 550 tons of the stuff — a pile large enough that even a diplomat couldn’t miss it — was transferred from Iraq to the U.S. with less coverage than this year’s soybean harvest. Saddam Hussein’s bomb program, one of the greatest threats to world peace of our time, ended without so much as an echo.

The same weekend saw final victory in Iraq draw nearer with the almost complete pacification of the city of Mosul. Mosul was the last urban redoubt of Al-Queda in Iraq. Their ejection from the city has deprived them of a base of operations and turned them into a force of scattered guerilla bands. Stamping out these final remnants may be a drawn-out process, but the Jihadis are no longer a threat to Iraq as a nation. What a change from 2006! Yet what have we heard about it?

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