Who's Killing Who?

Michael Gordon of the New York Times kind of embarrassed himself today by uncritically writing up a press release suggesting that Iranians, through a Hezbollah proxy, are responsible for various acts of violence in Iraq. There's a flip-side variant to this as well, where stateside journalists write up "Americans kill X insurgents" stories without wondering whether or not those dead insurgents are, you know, actually insurgents.

The U.S. military is investigating the killings of 17 people in a U.S. helicopter attack north of Baghdad a week ago, after residents of the area complained that the victims were not fighters from the group al-Qaeda in Iraq, as the military originally claimed, but members of a village guard force and ordinary citizens [...]

Garver said townspeople claim "the individuals were not al-Qaeda, but members of the community." He said additional details were not available, pending completion of the investigation.

In between those excerpts are a full account of the attack, directly from a military press release. Another more egregious example of this is in Afghanistan, where possibly 80 civilians died as a result of air strikes, which as we know are growing, in a clumsy and stupid effort to stop an insurgency from 30,000 feet.

Air strikes in the British-controlled Helmand province of Afghanistan may have killed civilians, coalition troops said yesterday as local people claimed that between 50 and 80 people, many of them women and children, had died. In the latest of a series of attacks causing significant civilian casualties in recent weeks, more than 200 were killed by coalition troops in Afghanistan in June, far more than are believed to have been killed by Taliban militants.

The bombardment, which witnesses said lasted up to three hours, in the Gereshk district late on Friday followed an attempted ambush by the Taliban on a joint US-Afghan military convoy. According to Mohammad Hussein, the provincial police chief, the militants fled into a nearby village for cover. Planes then targeted the village of Hyderabad. Mohammad Khan, a resident of the village, said seven members of his family, including his brother and five of his brother's children, were killed.

'I brought three of my wounded relatives to Gereshk hospital for treatment,' he told the Associated Press news agency by phone. The villagers were yesterday burying a 'lot of dead bodies', Khan said.

While the media spends a tremendous amount of time on incompetent would-be terrorists who didn't kill anybody, they don't initially question official figures from the front, even as the military has time and again throughout history proven a willingness to lie and cover-up reality in battle. The era of "embedded journalists" has brought reporters simultaneously closer to and further away from the front lines than ever before, giving them the adrenaline-fueled thrill of being in battle (and sometimes suffering the consequences) while being shielded from what is really happening (or being unable to express it because editors thousands of miles away aren't letting the stories pass). Covering a war has never been easy and is always filled with disinformation. This is especially true with an Administration so concerned with official secrecy.