Tasty quickies

– March 18 was the 9th anniversary of the Israeli massacre at Qana. The Israeli army shelled and killed over 100 people sheltering in the headquarters compound of the Fijian batallion of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon. A subsequent UN report, which the US under President Bill Clinton tried to bury, painted the damning picture that Israel tried to deny.

– The LA Times reports on the dark side of the “War on Terror.” German citizen Khaled el-Masri claims he was “kidnapped in Macedonia, beaten by masked men, blindfolded, injected with drugs and flown to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned and interrogated by U.S. intelligence agents. He said he was finally dumped in the mountains of Albania.” Masri has no reported links to terrorism of any kind.

Riverbend reports from Baghdad of the tactics of the Iraqi officials and spokespeople in the recent case of the alleged Sunni kidnappings of numerous men, women and children in Medain. It now appears that this story was based on vague rumours (though reported in the West without caveats and later corrected by AP, though little disseminated.) The real reason behind the story, Riverbend says, may have been to mask an assault by the American military and Iraqi national guard on a town not controlled by the “Coalition”. Accent on “may”. Simply put, if a story is rumour, journalists should write this clearly in their reports.

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